From Ian:
Omer Bartov is whitewashing Israel’s enemies
‘When someone says to you that he wants to kill you – believe him.’ Israeli novelist Roni Gelbfish was quoting her grandmother, a Holocaust survivor, during a radio interview shortly after Hamas’s pogrom on 7 October 2023. Most people would empathise with Gelbfish’s grandmother in the aftermath of the atrocities of that terrible day. Hamas had once again shown, in the most horrific way imaginable, that it should be believed when it says it wants to slaughter Jews.
But if Omer Bartov feels any empathy with Gelbfish’s grandmother, he hides it well. In his new book, Israel: What Went Wrong, the American-Israeli professor at Brown University cites the quote as an example of Shoatiyut, which he translates from Hebrew as ‘Holocaustism’. This is the tendency, he argues, to interpret and exaggerate the threats facing Israel through the prism of the Holocaust and anti-Semitism more broadly.
Although Bartov offers a cursory criticism of the Hamas pogrom, he is really interested in condemning the Israeli reaction. He claims that framing 7 October as a Nazi-like attack on Jews is little more than an attempt to justify what he calls the ‘genocidal’ assault on Gaza.
Bartov’s argument is of a piece with that of Israel’s enemies in the Middle East and beyond. They view the Jewish State as evil incarnate, a prime representative of a malign West. They claim that Israel cynically weaponises the Holocaust and the charge of anti-Semitism to deflect what they call ‘legitimate criticism’ of its actions – in this case, the ‘genocide’ in Gaza.
To make this argument, Israel’s enemies deny and downplay the very real anti-Semitic threats it faces, from the assorted Islamist groups like Hamas, hell-bent on its destruction, to their nation-state supporters, Iran, Pakistan, Qatar and Turkey. By minimising and erasing these formidable threats, Israel can be portrayed as a singularly malevolent nation, killing for killing’s sake. Anyone who has followed the conflict in Gaza and the broader Middle East – and not just on the Qatar-funded Al-Jazeera but also on the BBC and Sky – should be familiar with this portrayal. Israel appears to be fighting a war for no good reason, rather than what it’s actually doing – defending itself against an all too real, annihilationist threat.
In What Went Wrong, Bartov lends credibility to this anti-Israel case, from the denial of the anti-Semitic threat to the accusation of genocide. After all, he’s a professor of Holocaust studies at an Ivy League university and he served as a company commander in an Israel Defence Forces (IDF) combat unit in the 1970s. His credentials have turned him into a valued guest on anti-Israel media. He’s written articles for the Guardian and the New York Times and has appeared on the virulent anti-Israel podcasts of Owen Jones and Mehdi Hasan.
But What Went Wrong is no dispassionate academic analysis. It is the work of a professor-activist who, at the very least, is willing to omit key facts to make his case.
UNESCO joins Palestinians in rewriting Jewish history in Judea and Samaria
Three shocking examples pertain to the Temple Mount, Joshua’s Altar on Mount Ebal, and Solomon’s Pools.
In 1999, the PA-led Wakf conducted vast, illegal construction projects on the Temple Mount and beneath it, willfully destroying centuries of Jewish archaeological treasures.
The Wakf unceremoniously dumped 400 trucks full of archaeologically rich soil into the Kidron Valley. Thousands of artifacts from the Temple periods have since been found through careful sifting of the debris by Israeli archaeologists.
On Mount Ebal near Nablus, a large archaeological site identified by the late Prof. Adam Zartal as the altar of Joshua has been imperiled.
The PA drew up plans to pave over the site with roads and 24 high-rise housing units, and in 2001, Palestinian contractors ground part of the ancient stone fencing at the site to make gravel for roads.
Recently, Israel halted renewed Palestinian attempts to vandalize the spot, and has approved the establishment of a yeshiva and a settlement nearby that will also protect the archaeological site.
Another infuriating episode relates to the incredible aqueduct identified as King Solomon’s magnificent water system for Jerusalem. This runs from Hebron through Bethlehem to Jerusalem, including what is today termed Solomon’s Pools southwest of Bethlehem.
This marvel of ancient engineering, 40 km. long, is described in detail in the Bible, and the description matches the archaeological findings precisely.
The pools and aqueducts survived 2,000 years of summers, winters, and many invaders and predators – until the arrival of the PA.
In 2022, the PA dug an enormous 1,500 dunam quarry pit at Beit Fajar right through a section of the aqueduct. The quarrying caused irreversible damage to the aqueducts, with some 100 meters of tunnel and approximately 2,000 meters of the aqueduct on either side of the tunnel reduced to rubble.
Only recently has the government of Israel (finally!) stepped in to prevent further damage to the relics and to develop the site for organized biblical tourism.
The Israeli cabinet has just approved NIS 113 million in government funding for protection and development of 70 Judea and Samaria heritage sites.
Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu advanced this budget allocation.
While insufficient given the scale of the challenge, this funding signals a shift in policy. Enforcement has increased, site development and public access have begun, and after decades of neglect and looting, long-buried historical treasures are being uncovered.
The discoveries are significant, with the potential to reshape global scholarship on entire historical periods of importance to world heritage.
Some examples: at Hyrcania, near the Jerusalem-Dead Sea highway, a fortress marking the fall of the Hasmonean Kingdom is being revealed as a “mini-Masada,” complete with siege systems, underground chambers, inscriptions, and ritual baths.
At the Alexandrian fortress on Mount Sartaba, mentioned in the mishna in connection with signal fires that inspired today’s Independence Day torch-lighting ceremony, excavations are producing dramatic new findings too.
Every such archaeological excavation is a victory over Palestinian denialism and UNESCO’s ISIS-like efforts at Jewish erasure.
She lost everything after supporting Israel: 'To be a good Arab and a good Muslim, part of it is to hate the Jews'
Within just five hours, Dalia Ziada managed to leave Egypt, abandoning her entire life and everyone she knew. In that brief span of time, she packed what she could, received help from friends in Israel and the US, and fled the country where she had been born, raised and educated, and where she had built a career and become a prominent public figure. It happened just two weeks after the Oct. 7 massacre.
Until the final moment, she refused to believe she would have to flee. Ziada was already well acquainted with incitement campaigns, abuse and online threats. As an activist for liberal democracy, a fierce opponent of the Muslim Brotherhood and an outspoken supporter of Israel's right to exist, she had paid a public price for years. This time, however, another threshold had been crossed.
"It came to the point that they were using a verse from the Quran to justify my killing," she says. "A local group in my family's neighborhood went to my family's house looking for me. Thank God I was not there that night." At the same time, she says, lawyers affiliated with the Egyptian government began pursuing legal action against her on serious charges. "These two combined made me feel trapped," she says. "I could have ended up in jail waiting to be executed on treason accusations, or being immediately killed by some Salafists. And then the government would come out and say, 'Oh, we're sorry,' and that's it. It was a matter of life or death."
The trigger for all this, she says, was her public declaration that Hamas was a terrorist organization and that Israel, like any other country, had the right to defend itself. But that was only the beginning.
Ziada, 44, was born and raised in Egypt in a Muslim family. Her father, who died when she was 19, was drawn to Sufism, a more spiritual and moderate tradition within Islam. She describes him as a liberal, open-minded man who deeply influenced her worldview. After his death, in a conservative society where her mother was left alone with two teenage daughters, Ziada began wearing the hijab. She emphasizes that this was not a purely religious decision, but a response to social pressure and her mother's need to protect her and her sister. Over the years, the head covering became part of her identity, as well as the focus of an unresolved internal crisis.
She studied international relations at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University in Massachusetts and devoted her career to researching Middle East geopolitics, advancing democracy and working for regional peace. For her, "peace" was never limited to an agreement between Israel and the Arab world.
"By peace, I'm speaking not only about Arab-Israeli peace, but peace between all the factions of the Middle East," she says. "You have Muslims, Jews, Druze, Christians. You have people from different religious and ethnic backgrounds, the Kurds and others, who have spent, I would say, thousands of years fighting with each other. My hope and my fight, and still my fight, is to get to a point where they understand that we are all human, regardless of where we belong. At the end of the day, we all want to live good lives. We all want to live in peace."
From that standpoint, she says, she had always supported Israel's right to exist. "This is unfortunately not very common among people with my background, Muslims, Arabs, Egyptians and so on," she says. "This caused me a lot of problems and a lot of trouble in the past, but it did not get to the point that it really threatened my life."
At the same time, she was waging an ideological campaign against the Muslim Brotherhood. In her view, the organization is not merely a political rival, but the bearer of an ideology that rejects the very principle of human equality. "The ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood removes this concept that all of us are human and equal," she says. "It tries to divide the world into Muslims, who are good and superior to everyone else, and non-Muslims, who should be submissive to Muslims. This is exactly the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood, which is something I totally rejected as a Muslim myself."
Then came Oct. 7.
According to Ziada, she was one of only three people in all of Egypt who dared to say publicly that Hamas was a terrorist organization. The claim illustrates the extent of the isolation she felt. "We are speaking about the most populous country in the Middle East," she says. "We are over 110 million people now, maybe more. It is really dangerous to think that this massive population could be radicalized."
What shocked her was not only the terrorists' actions, but the response on the Arab street. "We saw how horrible it was, how brutal Hamas and its followers were toward Israelis, including innocent people who were literally in their pajamas in their own homes," she says. "Unfortunately, people in Egypt and in so many Arab countries were celebrating what happened as a victory."
She stresses that these were not merely members of the Muslim Brotherhood, Salafists or extremist activists. "They were mainstream Egyptians, people who look like me," she says. "So I had to speak up. I had to tell them exactly what happened on that day. It is not acceptable to celebrate such brutality. Then they turned against me."
From Ian:
David Collier:
The Synagogue Standing With a Terrorist Supporter
A synagogue holds a fundraiser. No big deal, right?
A synagogue holds a fundraiser for someone with a history of supporting Islamic terrorists? That’s a red flag.
The synagogue leadership shuts down discussion of the terrorist supporter in advance of the fundraiser?
That’s gatekeeping on a suicidal level.
The Mohsen Mahdawi Video
Ever since the U.S. administration arrested Mohsen Mahdawi in April 2025, I have been investigating his background. Working alongside Vermont researcher Rachel Feldman, we uncovered evidence that much of the narrative Mahdawi had used to build support within progressive circles was misleading. He had portrayed terrorist relatives as innocent victims and, over many years, repeatedly glorified and honoured Palestinian terrorists.
What we lacked was a recent piece of evidence showing that these views were not confined to the past. Then, a few weeks ago, we found it.
In a video Mahdawi posted in December 2024, he spoke in Arabic to a restricted audience, making it unlikely that most of his American supporters would ever see – or understand – what he was saying.
In the video, Mahdawi describes himself as part of a unified “resistance” movement and his words identify him with the same terrorist movements responsible for the October 7 atrocities.
Taken together with our earlier findings, the video completed a consistent picture of support for violent Palestinian militancy stretching back more than fifteen years.
The evidence was no longer ambiguous. Those presenting Mahdawi as a peace activist now had to explain how that claim could be reconciled with his own words.
The Synagogue That Did
Just as news of the video began to spread, Mahdawi’s supporters were preparing a major fundraising event to finance his legal campaign against deportation:
I knew Mahdawi enjoyed a substantial support network and had become something of a cause célèbre for anti-Trump activists. But it had never occurred to me that a Jewish organisation would help raise money on his behalf. Mahdawi is a man who has repeatedly praised and honoured leaders of terrorist organisations committed to murdering Jews. I had assumed that, whatever the political divisions within the American Jewish community, that would remain a clear red line.
But I was wrong.
I learned that one of the principal organisers of the August 9 fundraising event was Beth Jacob, a synagogue in Montpelier, Vermont:
Worse still, Mahdawi had even been personally invited to the synagogue for a discussion to take place prior to the main fundraising event.
That a Jewish congregation would lend its name and credibility to a fundraiser for a man with Mahdawi’s record was something I found almost impossible to comprehend.
The Internal Division
There was some pushback.
Beth Jacob has a members’ email discussion list, and after some members saw our research – including the recently uncovered December 2024 video – they began questioning the synagogue’s support for both the pre-event discussion with Mahdawi and the fundraising event itself.
What followed should serve as a case study. It is not simply that parts of the diaspora Jewish community are willing to embrace people who support organisations committed to murdering Jews. It is that some within those communities act as gatekeepers, introducing conspiracy theories and extremist thinking into the discussion while attempting to silence those who challenge their narrative.
Israel’s New York consul cancels ‘NY Times’ subscription over ‘false blood libels’
Ofir Akunis, Israel’s consul general in New York, ordered the Israeli Consulate to cancel its subscription to The New York Times on Friday, accusing the newspaper of publishing “false blood libels” against the Jewish state.
“I have ordered the Israeli Consulate in New York to cancel its subscription to The New York Times, a newspaper that consistently demonizes and delegitimizes the Jewish State,” he stated.
The newspaper has faced heightened criticism from Jewish groups and Israeli officials in recent months over its coverage of the Jewish state.
In May, Times columnist Nicholas Kristof published an opinion piece on May 11 titled “The Silence that Meets the Rape of Palestinians,” in which he accused Israeli guards of sexually assaulting Palestinian prisoners. The column also included allegations that Israeli guards trained dogs to rape male prisoners.
Israel’s Foreign Ministry accused the newspaper of publishing “one of the worst blood libels ever to appear in the modern press,” adding that the column was part of what it described as a coordinated anti-Israel campaign.
Three days later, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar announced that Israel would initiate legal action against the Times over the column, calling its allegations “one of the most hideous and distorted lies ever published against the State of Israel.”
The controversy also prompted Jewish leaders to call for a boycott of the paper after a spokesman publicly rejected rumors that editors would retract Kristof’s column.
“The New York Times is a newspaper that consistently publishes false blood libels against the State of Israel, often based on ‘anonymous’ sources,” Akunis stated. “When citing named sources, the paper conveniently turns to anti-Israel activists, and even Hamas terrorists who seek Israel’s destruction, to reinforce the narrative they want to promote.”
His office did not clarify why the subscription was canceled this month as opposed to back in May, when the controversial Kristof op-ed was published.
From Ian:
Melanie Phillips:
The suicidal significance of the Michigan Democratic primary
Both Britain and America insist on viewing Islam as merely a religion and refuse to acknowledge that it is also a supersessionist global political project. Both countries have accordingly failed to realize that while Muslims may be a minority, their turnout at elections is enormous—vastly greater than that of non-Muslims—and that they vote as a bloc and overwhelmingly support radical Islamist candidates.
As a result, dozens of Muslim candidates across America have won seats as mayors, city council members and state legislators, and many support or are associated with extremists or terrorists.
Regarding only Islamist terrorism as a threat, Americans have failed to grasp how Islamists are also weaponizing civil society against them.
On Middle East Forum, Dexter van Zile points out that in Massachusetts, Beacon Hill lawmakers are trying to establish Muslims as a privileged class. A Senate bill would create a permanent, taxpayer-supported commission exclusively for “people who practice Islam,” grant it the power to recommend American Muslims for appointive government positions at every level, and charge it with studying and combating “Islamophobia”—all in blatant violation of the First and Fourteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution.
For years, Americans looked complacently and pityingly across the Atlantic at the progressive Islamization of Britain and Europe. Now this is galloping ahead in America, too. And after being some years behind Britain and Europe, America is allowing pieces to be put into place which, it’s no longer fanciful to imagine, could see an Islamist in the White House.
Tragically, while the Republican Party should be fighting these developments with all its might, it is itself a house divided. MAGA’s isolationist faction—led by podcaster Tucker Carlson and groyper Nick Fuentes—ignores the all-too-real conspiracy against America by the Muslim Brotherhood. Instead, it’s poisoning the minds of millions of impressionable young followers with the defamatory and paranoid falsehood that the conspirers against the American interest are the Jews.
And from Michigan’s defeated “moderate” Democratic candidate Stevens, who has now thrown her support behind El-Sayed, to U.S. Vice President JD Vance, who refuses to condemn his friend Carlson because he objects to “purity tests,” both main parties are adopting a “big tent” approach that protects the people they should be expelling as pariahs.
Across America and the West, hostility to Israel is now driving political life. Such people should beware. Israel’s cause is the West’s own cause; Israel’s existential enemies are the West’s existential enemies.
Those who want to tear down Israel, believing that the Jews are a bone they can throw to appease their mortal foes, are actually tearing down the West.
Jonathan Tobin:
A man of courage was needed. Instead, American Jews have Schumer
Yet the El-Sayed candidacy isn’t just another embarrassment for the country’s most prominent liberal Jew. Along with every other element of the current surge of vile bigotry that is changing the face of American politics in ways we are only beginning to understand, it is the kind of moral test that comes along once every generation or two.
It’s a moment when lifelong legislators are required to step up and respond to the challenges of history. And we know that most Democrats, including almost all of those who seek their party’s presidential nomination in 2028, are siding with the antisemites like El-Sayed—or staying silent.
Republicans have done better, but if they allow someone like Vice President JD Vance to succeed Trump, then they, too, will fail.
Fair or unfair, public figures are judged not so much on the sum of their lifework but on how they respond to those singular moments in time, whether it is the debate about slavery and the Civil War in the 19th century or the rise of the totalitarians in the 20th. We don’t know what will happen in the coming years, but it is becoming apparent that the explosive growth of antisemitism will, in one way or another, create yet another pivotal chapter in history. Many people will likely emerge from this struggle with their reputations either destroyed or enhanced.
At such a time, it is a pity that rather than a person of courage and character, American Jews are stuck with the likes of the feckless Schumer to represent them.
New York must heed the warning signs before we ask, 'How did this happen?'
History teaches that democracies rarely fail because warning signs are absent. They fail because too many people convince themselves that someone else will act.
As I write these words from Jerusalem, I find myself thinking of my parents. In many ways, I am grateful they are no longer here to witness what has become of the New York they loved.
I am a fourth-generation New Yorker on my father’s side, and like millions of American Jews, I grew up believing New York represented something extraordinary: a city where freedom, pluralism, and the rule of law protected everyone.
That belief shaped my life.
In 1980, while studying at Brooklyn College, I had the privilege of serving as a research assistant to Dr. Hillel Seidman, a Holocaust survivor, distinguished scholar, and journalist.
He was a prominent Orthodox journalist, author, historian, and activist for Agudath Israel, who later wrote critical analyses of international diplomacy and the United Nations (such as his 1982 book United Nations: Perfidy and Perversion).
He taught me that the UN was never merely a diplomatic institution. It was often the stage upon which tomorrow’s political realities first appeared.
Dr. Seidman followed the tenure of UN secretary-general Kurt Waldheim. He and prime minister Menachem Begin shared a deep friendship and commitment to Holocaust remembrance and to the principle that powerful public officials should never be beyond scrutiny.
Following Yasser Arafat’s 1974 address to the General Assembly, when Arafat famously appeared with both an olive branch and a gun, Dr. Seidman and Begin believed the greater danger was not the gun. It was the olive branch, because it carried legitimacy while concealing a more dangerous reality.
That conviction eventually led to the investigation into Waldheim’s wartime record. I was privileged to assist in portions of that research before the effort was later expanded by the World Jewish Congress, sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and others. The lesson has remained with me throughout my career.
No public official is above the law.
No public official is above scrutiny.
Today, history feels as though it is echoing.
From Ian:
The antisemites are converging—and Jews will not be fooled
The anguish of watching our children exposed to such hatred leaves no room for political disguises. It is genuine. The monstrosity of Nazi-style antisemitism—the classic racist variety—now dares to reveal itself openly because it has become part of a broader ecosystem in which movements with very different ideological origins converge on a common target.
That convergence matters.
The various factions are not necessarily coordinating with one another. But they all benefit from the growing legitimacy afforded to hatred of Jews, Judaism, Israel and Zionism. Together, they reinforce an environment in which antisemitism flourishes.
Bulgaria illustrates how these forms of hatred increasingly overlap. Throughout the year—and especially since Oct. 7, 2023—the country has witnessed the public display of neo-Nazi symbols, swastikas and repeated attempts to revive the annual march honoring Hristo Lukov, the leader of Bulgaria’s pro-Nazi Legions.
At the same time, anti-Israel activism has targeted Jewish institutions. In 2025, “Free Palestine” graffiti was sprayed across the Sofia synagogue, covering photographs of those murdered during the Hamas-led massacre in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
On Oct. 9, 2025, Sofia’s Monument of Salvation, dedicated to those who opposed the deportation and persecution of Bulgaria’s Jews during World War II, was vandalized and covered in red paint. The city’s Holocaust memorial was desecrated as well.
These are only a few examples.
The attacks have come from both the right and the left, directed at the same targets: Jews.
This pattern is no longer confined to Bulgaria. Europe is increasingly afflicted by antisemitism from both extremes of the political spectrum. Across the Atlantic, the phenomenon is equally striking. A neo-Nazi such as Nick Fuentes and politicians such as Zohran Mamdani may come from vastly different ideological traditions, yet both participate in portraying “Zionism” as the embodiment of Jewish wrongdoing.
Who, then, still believes that one side merely offers “legitimate criticism of Israel” while the other alone represents antisemitic extremism?
The truly dangerous development is the convergence itself.
Vile are the Nazis. Vile, too, are the red-green antisemites. Vile are those who accuse Jews of orchestrating global conspiracies, and equally vile are those who portray the Jewish state as the source of the world’s evils. Different slogans, different histories—but increasingly the same target.
That convergence is poisoning Europe and spreading far beyond it.
It will eventually be exposed for what it is.
And Jewish children will not remain locked away in fear. They will walk out, calmly and confidently, toward life.
Jake Wallis Simons:
The enemy we welcomed
The uncomfortable truth is that by investing so heavily in centrist fundamentalism, the West has set itself up to fail. Amid the radical diversity that our leaders have imposed upon our societies and the consequent loss of shared cultural norms, newcomers with hostile and subversive attitudes are placed under no pressure to adapt. Civic respect has declined and crime rates have increased, making people in certain regions feel that they no longer recognise their country. The child rape scandal that erupted in 2024 in Britain shone a spotlight on the mainly Pakistani gangs who had been subjecting thousands of mostly white girls to the most depraved abuse for decades, while the authorities looked the other way for fear of being accused of ‘Islamophobia.’ In the first nine months of 2024, the most recent available data at the time of writing, almost fourteen per cent of grooming suspects were Pakistani, five times their share of the population. In March 2025, data from the Ministry of Justice revealed that foreigners, who comprise just 9.3 per cent of the population, had committed almost a quarter of sex crimes, as well as large proportions of violence, robbery, fraud and drug offences, between 2021 and 2023. Among the first victims of this social collapse have been the Jews. Rising antisemitism is a potent expression of the wholesale importation of other people’s bigotries to our shores.
The worst part is that this corrosion of our country served no useful purpose. For generations of politicians, loosening the borders was considered an easy solution to the economic conundrum of an aging, shrinking and workshy population. But the magic bullet has proved no solution at all, burdening the taxpayer, straining infrastructure and failing to boost productivity and growth. Meanwhile, the influx came with deep social problems. If it hadn’t been for the ideological myopia of the elites, this would have come as no surprise, given that newcomers from overseas added around seven million to the population of Britain — roughly equivalent to the number of residents of London — in the first two decades of this century, accounting for over four-fifths of total demographic expansion.
They remain unwilling to change course. Despite all the evidence of social and cultural strain, amid the political reluctance to find a better solution to our economic woes, the numbers continue to rise. Net migration into Britain hit a record high of almost a million in 2024; on current trends, it will grow to 72.5 million by 2032, entirely fuelled by a further five million migrants. According to the latest projection, by 2032, fourteen per cent of the population will have arrived in the preceding decade, almost all of them from Pakistan, India, Nigeria and China. At the same time, a quarter of Britain’s workforce is unemployed, with more than three million receiving sickness and disability benefits, a million more than before the Covid years. For a neutered and screen-addicted generation, the problem is only expected to get worse. A recent study revealed that Generation Z — those aged roughly between thirteen and twenty-eight — are giving up on work, with almost four in ten considering leaving their job to claim benefits, largely due to ‘mental health’ complaints. Economic inactivity was on course to rise further, it added, with 4.4 million workers, or a tenth of the workforce, ‘on the brink of leaving the labour market.’ So the demoralisation of Britain’s existing population and the surge in newcomers develop in tandem. None of this needed to happen. If both the numbers and attempts to undermine our values would have been kept in check, and measures taken to strengthen ordinary Britons to boost our economy and our confidence, the country would be a very much happier place today.
As the reaction to October 7 has shown, this betrayal of ourselves enabled the betrayal of the Jews. ‘We, like everyone else, depend upon a shared culture for our security, our prosperity and our freedom to be,’ Sir Roger Scruton wrote more than a decade ago. ‘We don’t require everyone to have the same faith, to lead the same kind of family life or to participate in the same festivals. But we have a shared civil culture, a shared language and a shared public sphere… We can welcome immigrants only if we welcome them into our culture, and not beside or against it.’ Antisemitism has always been present in British life but its latest expression is largely imported. Sadly, as politicians recklessly continue to usher large numbers of migrants into the country, Sir Roger’s sagacity has been lost on the wind.
Nicole Lampert:
From Chaplin To Boy George, Fighting Antisemitism Means Facing The Mob
In 1940, at the start of World War II, when America had not yet entered the conflict, it was Charlie Chaplin’s film “The Great Dictator,” which lampooned Hitler and the Nazis and spoke clearly of their dangerous antisemitism and the threat they posed to the world. The clown became the soothsayer, the voice of morality.
Until that point, Hollywood, even with its many Jewish studio heads, had been mainly too frightened to tackle this threat head-on. Just one major film, Warner Bros. “Confessions of a Nazi Spy,” which looked at a German-American Nazi spy ring, had come close.
And the reaction to that film had been immediate; theaters across the U.S. were picketed and vandalized. One cinema was even burned down. It was a warning to beware the anger of the mob. For Hollywood Jews, feeling their place in society so untethered, the message was clear—they needed to pipe down, keep schtum.
Which is why Chaplin’s self-financed and risky move—from a non-Jew who understood antisemitism—was so important. His film told the world he saw the problem. He saw it was wrong. And everyone else should see the danger, too.
Now it's Boy George's turn.
He first found fame in the 1980s with the band Culture Club. He wore makeup and long hair, and was a proud gay man in the AIDS era. Like many pop stars, he’s battled drug addiction. Unlike most of them, in 2008 he ended up in jail for the false imprisonment of a Norwegian escort.
So his career has seen many ups and downs, but last week he did something extraordinary. He wrote and released a reggae song on his social media accounts, “We Will Dance Again,” which has the key lyrics: "But if you’re ever confused/I stand with the Jews/I don’t feel brave/I just need to behave like a human."
It was possibly the most extraordinary thing a non-Jew has done for the Jewish people since the October 7 attack in 2023 created a new and deadly wave of antisemitism. Just as in the 1930s, too many celebrity Jews–apart from a brave few—have maintained a frightened silence and their gentile friends have echoed their anxious muteness. They know what will happen if they dare stand up against today’s antisemitic mob, a contrast to “pro-Palestine” celebrities who often seem to treat the war like a football match, dress up in kaffiyehs and applaud themselves.
No picture today because blogger sux
From Ian:
Victor Davis Hanson:
The Long View of Iran
One day, the United States seems ready to unleash a Curtis LeMay-style devastating bombing campaign of Iran. The next, it appears trapped in endless haggling with Iranian dissimulators.
Of the roughly 150 days since the first strike, about 90 have passed without major military operations.
Iran believes time is on its side. The Strait of Hormuz remains disrupted, gas prices are too high, and antiwar House Democrats seem poised to win the midterms and bring Trump’s war to a halt.
Trump, by contrast, believes Iran can talk all it wants while sanctions, embargoes, and military pressure steadily weaken the regime.
The war has become so politicized in an election year that several basic realities have gone largely unnoticed by the media.
First, the cycle of bombing, pausing, negotiating, and bombing again may seem endless. But the confusion obscures the continuing effects of the embargoes, sanctions, blockade, and financial isolation imposed on Iran. Together, they are costing the theocracy more than $400 million a day in lost revenue, money that it can ill afford to lose. By haggling, Iran believes it can run out the clock until the midterms, but it may be only prolonging its own miserable situation.
Second, so far the bombing has not descended into a ground war. There are no embedded reporters and few Western journalists in Iran. So the world knows little about the true extent of the damage to the Iranian regime and its military-industrial-nuclear complex.
Nor do we know the mood of the once-restive Iranian street. But whether or not there are future allied military attacks, tensions will only increase as Iran runs out of money and basic goods. Whatever the outcome of negotiations or further combat operations, the Iranian military and economy have already been wrecked and will take years to rebuild.
Third, however the war ends, Iran will remain at a terrible disadvantage for years in dealing with the neighbors it has so gratuitously attacked. The regime currently has no effective combat aircraft or air defenses—and no allies.
In contrast, the Gulf states can field more than 700 combat aircraft, including F-15s, F-16s, F/A-18s, Rafales, Mirages, and Tornados. Israel has another 300, including late-model F-35s, F-16s, and F-15s. U.S. bases in the Middle East are home to some 300 more, including F-22s, F-35s, F-18s, F-16s, and F-15s—not counting carrier-based aircraft.
In sum, the United States and its allies have some 1,300 late-model combat aircraft in the region. They should therefore be able to hit Iran hard for years to come if it resumes drone and missile attacks against its rivals.
Amb. Gordon Sondland:
America's aid to Israel isn't charity — it's a bargain for US security
Every few years, Americans ask the same question: Why do we send billions of dollars to Israel?
Given a national debt approaching $40 trillion and an annual defense budget of roughly $1 trillion, it is a fair question. Every dollar spent overseas deserves scrutiny. But the debate almost always focuses on one side of the ledger — what America gives Israel — while largely ignoring the other: what America receives in return.
That is the wrong way to evaluate any investment.
Before making my case, let me disclose my own perspective. I am a cultural Jew, but not a practicing one. I don’t keep kosher. I rarely attend synagogue. I raised a family that is half Jewish and half Christian. I have no financial interests in Israel. My support for Israel has never been based on religion or ethnicity. It rests on a far simpler question: Does this alliance make America stronger?
After serving as a U.S. ambassador and spending a lifetime in business, I believe the answer is unequivocally yes.
The United States has many indispensable allies. Britain provides extraordinary intelligence cooperation through the Five Eyes partnership. Japan anchors our strategy in the Indo-Pacific. South Korea deters aggression on the Korean Peninsula. Australia is an increasingly important military partner as China expands its reach. Poland has become one of NATO’s strongest front-line allies. Every one of those relationships advances American interests.
Yet Israel occupies a category almost by itself.
Few allies combine world-class intelligence, battlefield-tested military innovation, cutting-edge cyber capabilities, missile-defense development, entrepreneurial technology and democratic resilience while sitting at the crossroads of the world’s most volatile region. If Israel did not exist, the United States would spend decades — and likely hundreds of billions of dollars — trying to recreate the strategic advantages it provides.
Obstacles to Implementing the Hamas Disarmament Agreement
Despite the celebratory announcement of an agreement providing for the complete disarmament of Hamas and other armed groups in Gaza, deep gaps remain between the parties, compounded by flawed assumptions on the part of the mediators. Hamas does not view disarmament as a unilateral obligation. In addition, Hamas demands guarantees that it will be integrated into Gaza's governing mechanisms as a condition for relinquishing its weapons.
Israel insists on the full disarmament of Hamas and the demilitarization of Gaza (which includes removing the weapons and not leaving them in the Strip) as a precondition for withdrawal.
The International Stabilization Force faces significant recruitment difficulties, stemming from the refusal of states to deploy troops to areas where Hamas remains armed. The National Committee for the Administration of Gaza is reluctant to enter the Strip in the absence of an effective security mechanism to protect its members.
Hamas sources revealed that it formulated its hardline positions - foremost among them its refusal to disarm before a full Israeli withdrawal - in close coordination with mediators Turkey and Qatar. The mediators' strategic objective is to preserve Hamas as a legitimate political actor. They strongly oppose conditioning Gaza's reconstruction on Hamas's complete disarmament, while seeking to assume a leading role and secure a major share in reconstruction projects in the Strip.
Hamas's apparent willingness to show greater flexibility can reasonably be attributed to the IDF's sustained military pressure, including targeted killing operations and the expansion of Israel's hold over Gazan territory from 53% to 65%. In practice, however, this does not represent a substantive change, but rather a calculated strategy of delay and "tactical flexibility" whose sole purpose is to ensure Hamas's political and military survival.
Hamas has effectively exploited the diversion of regional attention toward Iran to rebuild its military and civilian systems: it has restored its chain of command, resumed weapons production and tunnel construction, and expanded its ranks to 30,000 armed operatives. These are not the actions of an organization preparing or intending to disarm.
There is serious concern that the mediators are playing a dangerous double game. Their apparent objective is to push the U.S. and the Board of Peace into a confrontation with Israel and to place responsibility on Israel for derailing the Trump plan because of its insistence that its withdrawal take place only after the complete disarmament of Hamas. It is even possible that Turkey and Qatar persuaded Hamas to accept the framework on the assumption that Israel would reject it.
No picture today because blogger sux
From Ian:
Dara Horn’s shocking new title hides a serious argument about fighting antisemitism
If you thought People Love Dead Jews — Dara Horn’s 2021 essay collection examining society’s reverence for remembering deceased Jews while failing to support the living ones — was an awkward book to read in public, just wait until you get your hands on Horn’s newest title: The Final Solution to the Jewish Question.
Horn, a celebrated novelist who has become the bard of contemporary antisemitism since Dead Jews was published five years ago, is in on the joke; she likes to say that both titles make great beach reads because no one will dare sit within several feet of you. (Her dad even made a custom People Love Dead Jews beach towel for her to test out the theory.)
But despite borrowing its title from the name of the Nazis’ infamous plan to rid Europe of its 11 million Jews during World War II, Horn’s latest book, which will be published on Sept. 1, is not a Nazi manifesto.
Instead, the title of Horn’s new book serves as an eye-catching, subversive dog whistle that is meant to pique the interest of antisemites — while also serving as a cheeky summary of Horn’s goal of actually trying to come up with a solution to the wave of antisemitism that has swept the world in recent years.
She just can’t believe that she is the one coming up with those solutions.
“I saw People Love Dead Jews as just a detour from my real work, which I see as writing novels,” Horn told Jewish Insider in an interview last week.
The genesis for Horn’s latest book came in the aftermath of Dead Jews. She spoke at public events often in 2021 and 2022, and she recalls becoming “the receptacle for everyone’s horror stories.” People would go up to Horn after she discussed the book and tell her about their own experiences of antisemitism. They often chalked up these incidents to jokes or misunderstandings or annoyances, such as a couple being ghosted by a longtime friend after the friend attended their son’s bar mitzvah or an actor turned down for roles in Hollywood because they looked “too Jewish.” But when taken together, they present a picture of a society that has learned to accept ambient anti-Jewish hate.
“This is going to sound really ridiculous,” Horn reflected on her previous book, “but I didn’t even really think it was a book about antisemitism. I saw it as a book about this weird historical phenomenon about the way we commemorate the past and how that affects the present.”
Many Horn acolytes felt that her thesis was borne out during the aftermath of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terror attacks in Israel, the deadliest day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust, as they watched sympathy for Jewish victims turn to anger at Israel’s military response and even praise for Hamas’ actions.
“I’m not happy to have been right about this,” she said.
25 years after suicide bomber killed Malki Roth at Sbarro in Jerusalem, her grieving parents feel alone, wonder when she’ll get justice
After a quarter century of seeking justice for their daughter Malka Chana “Malki” Roth, who was 15 when she was murdered in a suicide bombing at Sbarro in Jerusalem on Aug. 9, 2001, Arnold and Frimet Roth feel abandoned—by their American government and by many whom they expected to keep fighting with them.
“We’re alone in every meaningful sense, fighting powerful people who never, ever, at any stage, say what they actually mean or what they intend to do,” Arnold Roth told JNS. “Quite the opposite. They say things that are superficial and that are calculated to keep us in the dark and never lead to where we want to go.”
Ahlam Tamimi, a Hamas terrorist who lives freely in Jordan, brags openly on television about helping plan the pizzeria bombing, in which Judith Shoshana Greenbaum and Chana Nachenberg, both American citizens like Roth, and 13 other civilians were killed. Some 130 were injured in the attack.
In 2013, the United States charged Tamimi with participating in the attack. She is listed on the “Most Wanted” FBI terrorist list, and the U.S. State Department’s Rewards for Justice program has offered up to $5 million for information leading to her arrest.
Jordan, which has an extradition agreement with the United States dating back to 1995, has refused to comply in Tamimi’s case, and successive U.S. administrations seem to have been unable to enforce the treaty.
Jordan has said that handing Tamimi over would lead to riots in the streets, but those involved with the case have told JNS repeatedly that Jordan’s claim is a convenient excuse for Washington, which is loath to rock the U.S.-Jordan relationship.
Roth has visited Jordan several times and had business relations there before his daughter was murdered.
He told JNS that he can’t fathom how extraditing Tamimi would suddenly harm the U.S.-Jordan relationship, given already high levels of Jew-hatred in the Hashemite Kingdom and Israel’s measures to shore up its defense of the border with Jordan.
Stuck in a perpetual state of mourning for his daughter, Arnold Roth’s pain and quiet anger are palpable in his voice.
Nick Winton:
My father saved Jewish children because he refused to be a bystander – a lesson we urgently need today
Iwant to start with a letter.
It was written on May 4, 1939, on the headed notepaper of the British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia, Children's Section, Room 217, Bloomsbury House, London. The original is now held at Yad Vashem. My father wrote it a fortnight before his 30th birthday to drum up support for what became the Kindertransport – the operation that brought 669 children, most of them Jewish, to safety in Britain before the war began.
I have been reading it for years. It has never felt more urgent.
He opens by describing the public mood of his time: "Tales of violence and war, treaties made and broken, concentration camps and social ostracism have become so commonplace in the daily papers that the average person has completely lost his normal moral standard... They are content to consider themselves as individuals without responsibility for what is going on in the world today. They hope it will all come right in the end but, in the meantime, they can do nothing."
It feels shocking to read those words 87 years later and to realise the similarities with today.
My father then draws a distinction that has stayed with me ever since. He writes of the difference between passive goodness and active goodness. Passive goodness, resolving to do no wrong, is not enough. Active goodness, he writes, is "the giving of one's time and energy in the alleviation of pain and suffering. It entails going out, finding and helping those in suffering and danger and not merely leading an exemplary life..."
He wrote that passage while organising the rescue of children whose families were being stripped of their livelihoods, their homes, and their futures. He describes them in the letter: "doctors, teachers, journalists, civil servants, whose only crime has been their outspoken defence of democracy."
Read that sentence again. Those words were written in 1939. They could have been written this morning.
From Ian:
Gen. Keith Kellogg:
Trump should stop negotiating and win against Iran
The American way of war from the Revolutionary War to World War II was straightforward. We did not fight to negotiate; we fought to win.
Americans traditionally support winners. There will be those who disagree about how to fight a war, but few can ever argue with winning. Unfortunately, today we are told negotiation is winning. It is not.
Our Founding Fathers put the awesome responsibility of commander in chief in the hands of our elected president in Article II, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution. They presupposed that whoever was elected by the people had the wisdom to act in the best interests of our nation. In today’s world, for better or worse, that is extended by inference to the president’s advisers as well. So, the fundamental question of winning is more relevant than ever before.
I, like many others, am asking: Do we still have the will to prosecute a war to a successful conclusion? This can be simply defined as the ability to bend an enemy to our will while making minimal to no concessions. In short, do we still have what it takes to commit to the American way of war?
By extension, do the president’s advisers, from the vice president down, subscribe to that as well?
Based on the latest developments regarding Iran, I am increasingly concerned about the answer to that question. It seems the American people are being told that negotiations to a satisfactory outcome for both sides are a win-win. That is wrong. If you believe the purpose of war is a means to negotiate, then you have already lost. You wage war to win. Period.
If I were advising a commander in chief in the current conditions, here is what I would recommend.
Bring the American people along in the decision process. History has shown that Americans will sacrifice when they are brought to understand the gravity of the situation. When Americans understand that we are fighting for tomorrow and not for today, they will rally. Americans always believe in an end state that improves the future for our children and grandchildren, namely, a world of increased safety and prosperity. The president needs to explain why the fight in Iran is that fight.
Second, you cannot prosecute a war like a business deal. War is too difficult to leave to chair-bound critics, people who lack an understanding of the principles of conflict or those who contemplate dollar signs rather than strategy. This is especially true of proactive military action, or a war of choice. This is also why this war must be won, not managed. Wars of choice carry a higher threshold. Choosing to go is different from being forced to go or acting in self-defense; this is why winning matters even more. Losing a war of choice erodes deterrence more rapidly and diminishes a nation’s ability to project power.
Next, critics will always object to war and the process of war. They need to be made irrelevant during the decision-making process. Iterative decision-making is important, and sharing diverse perspectives during the national security decision-making process is critical. However, once the decision to go is made, everyone needs to be fully committed and rowing in the same direction. Internal dissent leaked to the press after an operation has begun is dangerous and places the entire operation at risk.
I recall a comment from Colin Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, during the 1991 Persian Gulf War. When asked about the military strategy against the Iraqi army, he said, “Our strategy in going after this army is very, very simple. First, we’re going to cut it off, and then we’re going to kill it.”
I was serving in the Gulf at the time, on the ground with the 82nd Airborne Division, and his comment, as the principal military adviser to the president, gave those of us deployed forward the confidence in our military and our commander in chief that we would fight this war to a successful conclusion. We would win it.
Melanie Phillips:
My message to CENTCOM
Dear CENTCOM,
Your entire strategy is totally wrong from start to finish. Your aim is to wear down the regime until it agrees to your terms. This is a foundational error. Your aim should be instead regime change by destroying the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) that wields power in Iran.
I would say this to your Commander-in-Chief, but he hasn’t asked.
This is why America should change its strategy.
Understand that all negotiation with the regime is worse than pointless. Their agenda is non-negotiable. You cannot negotiate with fanatics who believe that producing an apocalypse will bring to earth the Shia messiah. They never, ever negotiate in good faith. They always lie. Negotiation to them is merely an opportunity to delay, to obfuscate and to exploit the weakness of America, which refracts everything through the Western belief in the overriding impulse of self-interest. This is laughable. The Iranian regime believes it has a divine command to destroy the west. America’s attachment to negotiation merely tells the regime it’s on course to achieve America’s defeat.
End the incoherent thinking. President Trump talks of forcing the regime to surrender. But he’s also pushing for a negotiated deal. Surrender is the outcome of defeat. A negotiated deal is the outcome of concessions on both sides. So which is it? It can’t be both.
Stop thinking that the regime has a pain threshold. Trump said last week: “We’ll be hitting them very hard, and you know, at some point, they’re going to say, ‘We just can’t take it anymore.’”
That point will never arrive. The regime can take infinite pain. It’s prepared to sacrifice the Iranian people and see the country’s infrastructure destroyed. As long as the regime survives in some form, it will think it’s won because it can always regroup and continue with its infernal agenda, however long it takes. Which it will do. Bombing even more stuff will therefore have only a limited effect.
Change your war aim to regime change — the only way to neutralise the unconscionable menace those fanatics represent for their people, the region and the world. That means empowering the heroic people of Iran to take their country back. That means in turn preventing the IRGC from being able to continue to jail and torture them, hang them and mow them down in the streets. That means destroying the IRGC.
How? Ask the Israelis.
Bid farewell to Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner. They are hopelessly compromised by their financial interests in the region. Their negotiations in both Gaza and Iran have been demonstrably farcical. Many lives have been needlessly lost as a result. They should be removed forthwith from all involvement in the war against Iran and its proxies.
Now persuade the President.
You’re welcome.
Pierre Rehov:
What the Gaza Roadmap Actually Says
Everything then turns on a question the announcement left unanswered: Has Hamas agreed to surrender the power and weaponry that have defined it for decades, or only to change the label on them?
[T]he same clause in the roadmap names the custodian: the new Palestinian NCAG [National Committee for the Administration of Gaza], and "no weapons shall be transferred or handed to Israel or non-Palestinian parties." What could possibly go wrong?
When the sequence ends, NCAG alone – the Palestinian one – will be permitted to hold and control arms in the Gaza Strip.
Hamas has spent nearly four decades converting truces into arsenals.
Israel withdrew every soldier and expelled every Jewish resident from the Gaza Strip in 2005, and what grew there since is an Iranian-sponsored war machine: rockets, a vast terrorist tunnel network, weapons factories wedged into crowded neighborhoods, and a school system that teaches children that terrorism is a career.
Billions of dollars of international aid arrived, earmarked for housing, clinics and employment. Instead, the funds were used to produce weaponry and build an underground military comprising at least 350 miles of terror tunnels with 5,700 entry shafts, and command centers in and under hospitals.
[W]hat Hamas has done just during this ceasefire: Israeli military intelligence estimates that Hamas has rehabilitated its forces to roughly 27,000 men under arms, while the movement continues paying monthly salaries to some 49,000 officials, running 13 municipalities and the ministries of economy, education, health and welfare, collecting taxes on commerce, and skimming the international aid funds. It still rules about 40 percent of the Gaza Strip, the part where most of the population lives.
The clans that fought against Hamas are excluded. Hamas itself is merely processed, "vetted," reassigned and kept on salary.
Verification rests on institutions that scarcely function.... Certifying the demilitarization of a territory holding 27,000 trained and heavily armed Hamas terrorists is not a mission for a company-sized pilot project.
Above that force sits a Gaza Executive Board on which Turkey and Qatar hold seats, two governments whose usefulness to Washington derives precisely from their access to Hamas. Qatar, Hamas's patron, has been invited to certify the disarmament of its client.
"Qatar is at the top of funding terrorism worldwide.... Even more than Iran," according to Udi Levy, a former senior official of Israel's Mossad spy agency who dealt with economic warfare against terrorist organizations.
Qatar most likely sees its sole mission in Gaza as making sure that Hamas remains armed and in power to further the agenda of the Muslim Brotherhood, of which, largely thanks to funding from Qatar, Hamas is the Palestinian branch.
From Ian:
The Weaponization of Human Rights
When It Becomes Jew-Hate
In July 2021, antisemitic incidents surged across Britain during that summer’s fighting in Gaza. Jews were harassed in the street. A convoy was filmed driving through London screaming threats of rape against Jewish women. And Kenneth Roth offered his unwanted analysis. “Antisemitism is always wrong,” he wrote, “and it long preceded the creation of Israel, but the surge in UK antisemitic incidents during the recent Gaza conflict gives the lie to those who pretend that the Israeli government’s conduct doesn’t affect antisemitism.”
In the very sentence in which he condemned antisemitism, he placed its cause not with the antisemites but with Israel, the world’s only Jewish state. He told Jews being attacked on the streets of London that the real reason lay in the conduct of a foreign government. Jonathan Greenblatt of the Anti-Defamation League called it “plainly false and offensive,” and he was right. Blaming Israel for violence against Jews, rather than the people committing that violence, is not human rights advocacy. It is the oldest move there is, wearing new clothes: whatever happens to the Jews, the Jews brought it on themselves.
This was not a slip. Under Roth, HRW branded Israel an “apartheid” state, reaching for the single most incendiary word available and fixing it to a country whose Arab citizens vote and sit as judges on its own supreme court. The word was not chosen because it was accurate. It was chosen because it was powerful. Like so much of what Roth did, it was a political act wearing the costume of a legal finding.
Which brings us back to Ceuta.
Roth left Human Rights Watch in 2022. He no longer has its budget or its name behind him. And that is precisely why the Ceuta tweet matters so much. For thirty years, his defenders insisted that HRW’s fixation on Israel was simply where the evidence led, that the volume of criticism reflected the volume of abuse, nothing more. The Ceuta tweet destroys that defense from the inside.
Here was a man, stripped of every institutional restraint, handed a story that had nothing whatsoever to do with Israel, and he manufactured an Israeli villain out of thin air, on a map he had not even read correctly. The conclusion came first. The evidence was to be invented afterward. That is not what following the evidence looks like. It is what an obsession looks like. And now we can see that the obsession was never really the organization’s. It was his.
This is one of the oldest features of Jew-hate, and I have spent years writing about it. It does not always arrive in a brown shirt. It adapts. It takes the language a society holds sacred and turns that language against us. Once it borrowed the language of the Church, and Jews were the killers of God. Today it has learned to borrow the language of human rights, and Jews are the killers of children and the enemies of justice. The costume changes. The accusation does not. And Kenneth Roth has been one of its most fluent translators.
Nor does it stay contained. Roth’s theory did not stay in his replies. Analysts documented how the Ceuta crisis was spun into a global antisemitic conspiracy within seventy-two hours, and Roth handed that conspiracy the credibility of a name that Princeton and Yale still invite to lecture on human rights. This is how it works. This is how Jew-hate is laundered: not by thugs in the street, but by respectable men with blue checkmarks and university affiliations, men who would be genuinely offended to be called antisemites even as they write the antisemites’ script for them.
What it Costs
The language of human rights is important. Real people in real dictatorships depend on it: the dissidents and the prisoners, the people in exactly the closed societies Robert Bernstein built his organization to defend. When words like “apartheid” and “genocide” are picked up and swung as weapons in a political fight, they are drained of their meaning, and the world’s genuine tyrants are handed a gift: the ability to wave away every accusation as just more politics. A movement that cries wolf at a democracy while the wolves run free everywhere else does not protect human rights. It discredits them.
And there is a cost closer to home. Every time a figure of Roth’s stature dresses up an old hatred in the language of justice, that hatred is given fresh permission. It is made respectable. Ordinary Jews, in London and Paris and on American campuses, are the ones who then live with the consequences, because the man with the human rights credentials has told the world that when Jews are targeted, Jews are somehow the authors of their own misfortune. That is not the protection of a vulnerable people. It is a license for their persecution.
Ultimately, that is Kenneth Roth’s legacy. Not one tweet about a Spanish enclave, but thirty years of proof that the most powerful institution in human rights could be turned into a weapon: for politics, for money, and above all for a fixation with the Jewish state that has outlived his own career. His defenders will call the Ceuta tweet an aberration. It is not. It is the clearest thing he has ever written. It is who he has always been, said plainly at last, and published while the dead were still being counted on a beach that had nothing to do with the Jews.
The Guardian is in the grip of an antisemitic ideology
The authors go on to argue that Truman, like his predecessors, caved to the powerful Israel lobby and betrayed the U.S. ‘national interest’—an ideal that Israel lobby conspiracists like Clifton and Lustik fancy themselves uniquely equipped to define, while framing Jews and other supporters of Israel as intrinsically ill-equipped to delineate.
Also true to character, the authors frame the lobby as the biggest obstacle to peace between Israel and the Palestinians, erasing decades of Palestinian terrorism and peace rejectionism. It’s also supremely dishonest for two ideologues both hostile to the right of Israel to continue existing as a Jewish state – within any borders – to feign passion for a negotiated solution to the conflict.
Indeed, a review of Clifton’s X timeline during the first few days after the Oct. 7 attacks clearly suggests not only that he had little if any sympathy for murdered, raped and tortured Jews, but that he sympathised with Hamas.
Elsewhere in the Guardian excerpt, the co-authors make use of their faux nationalist authority to take thinly veiled swipes at American Jews, questioning their loyalty and suggesting dual loyalty.
For instance, former US Mid-East peace negotiator Dennis Ross (who’s Jewish) is dismissed in the book as a peace obstructionist due to his record as a “a lobby insider.” This false accusation was first peddled in the widely ridiculed 2006 book on the Israel lobby by Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, the latter of whom later blurbed a book by Gilad Atzmon which was described by CST as one of the most antisemitic books in years.
Indeed, the only characters in the Israeli-Palestinian debate whose motivations and actions are questioned or examined are Jews and others involved in pro-Israel lobbying groups.
True to form, Clifton and Lustik are breezily unconcerned with the decisions, ideologies and loyalties of the diplomatic elite (aka, the peace processors) whose assumptions about the root cause of the conflict has continually been proven false, pro-Palestinian groups, and Arab and Muslim Americans – the latter of whom show a distressing level of support for Hamas.
Indeed, the Guardian’s effective endorsement of the authors’ mono-casual Jewish and Israel-focused explanation for the continuing Mid-East conflict, which has been echoed by the outlet’s own anti-AIPAC reporter Chris McGreal year after year, is a microcosm of their broader coverage of the region, which denies agency to the latter – no matter how destructive, malevolent and inimical to peace their decisions – while assigning all of the blame to the former.
Finally, there’s the authors’ decision to ignore the single most consequential event for anyone purportedly writing about Israeli-Palestinian peace today: Hamas’ barbaric massacre in southern Israel.
As the renowned historian Simon Sebag Montefiore, a supporter of the two-state solution whose new book, titled “The Cauldron: The Making of the Modern Middle East,” comes out in September, recently observed, the terror group’s decision to launch that attack “prevented any creation of a Palestinian state for the foreseeable future,” a timeframe he clarified as meaning “decades.”
Indeed, evidence abounds that Hamas’ only guiding passion is the annihilation of Israel, regardless of the cost to the two plus million Palestinians in Gaza.
The Palestinian-American peace activist Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib documented that Hamas itself acknowledged that, as far back as 2014, Gaza was offered billions of dollars (US) in development, which included an airport, a seaport, new industries, major cash infusions and self-rule. The condition for this path forward for Palestinians was Gaza’s disarmament and demilitarisation, a deal which would have given Hamas an off‑ramp: integrating its employees and former fighters into the civilian police, and shifting toward nation‑building instead of terrorism.
As Alkahatib, one of the Palestinian architects of the Gaza development plan, said, Hamas rejected the plan and, instead, “turned the territory into a fortress of violence, tunnels, rockets, smuggling, and radicalization,” which culminated in Oct. 7, “Gaza’s vast devastation, tens of thousands killed, and billions wasted,” a wanton act of destruction that Jewish lobbyists in Washington had absolutely nothing to do with.
The path forward for Gaza, Alkhatib concludes, requires introspection, accountability, responsibility, and an insistence on Palestinian agency – ideas for peace that the territory’s leadership, Western pro-Palestinian activists, anti-Israel media outlets and antisemitic lobbyologists are loath to consider.
The Demonization of Israel Ignores the Success of Israeli Arabs
Whatever the extremists of Hamas intended to achieve through their attack on Israel, their actions appear to have strengthened the country's core and brought out a collective national spirit that was tangible to me as I traveled through the country.
After attending a conference in Haifa, I was struck by the changing nature of Israeli Arab employment and the growing involvement of Arab citizens in key sectors of the Israeli economy. At the University of Haifa, I was particularly struck by the number of young Israeli Arab women studying on campus. I could hear Arabic being spoken all around me.
Consider Israel's healthcare system. One in four doctors in Israel is Arab. Just over one in four dentists is Arab, as is just over one in four nurses. Almost one in every two pharmacists in Israel is Arab. These are highly specialized professions requiring years of education, training and accreditation. Moreover, Israel has suffered thousands of casualties since the Oct. 7 attack and many of those injured were treated by Arab doctors and nurses.
The blanket term of "apartheid" in Israel against its Arab population simply does not stack up when compared to what happened in South Africa. There are social disparities - but Israeli Arabs are part and parcel of Israel's future. That is patently obvious to any social observer.
Israel's critics overlook the countless interactions that take place between Arab and Jewish citizens every day. They remind us that reality is far more complicated than the slogans through which Israel is so often discussed in Britain.
From Ian:
Gen. David Deptula:
Iran’s Most Powerful Weapon Is Time—Here’s How To Turn It Against Them
Destruction Is Not the Same as Leverage
American airpower can inflict devastating damage on Iran’s military establishment, but that does not constitute a strategy. To be productive, military effects must be connected to a defined political purpose.
If Iran believes it only needs to survive until the American political environment changes, then retaliatory strikes alone can be waited out. To be effective, the U.S. must convince Tehran that waiting will make its position progressively worse—not better.
This requires persistent military pressure against the regime’s ability to attack and regenerate. The United States should continue attacking the production, storage, command-and-control, and launch architecture supporting Iran’s missile, drone, and maritime operations. Electrical-power infrastructure that directly and effectively supports those military capabilities constitute a lawful military objective when targeted in accordance with the principles of distinction, proportionality, and feasible precautions, and provide a highly leveraged means of neutralizing them consistent with the law of armed conflict. Maritime restrictions should be sustained and enforced consistently, with clearly defined humanitarian provisions and consequences for violations.
Most importantly, military pressure must be integrated with a sustained economic campaign directed at the revenue streams that finance the regime and its military reconstruction.
Iran’s petroleum trade remains its central economic lifeline. Tehran depends on front companies, financial intermediaries, foreign refineries, ship-to-ship transfers, and a shadow fleet to disguise the origin and destination of its exports.
The Treasury and State Departments have already taken significant action against these networks. Recent Treasury measures target vessels, companies, financial intermediaries, and procurement networks supporting Iranian petroleum sales, missile production, and unmanned aircraft programs. Those actions provide a strong foundation for a campaign that connects economic pressure directly to military and diplomatic objectives.
Washington should continue systematically inhibiting the banks, insurers, port operators, brokers, refiners, and shipping networks that enable Iranian revenue. This forces foreign companies and governments to choose: access to the American financial system or assist in Iran’s sanctions-evasion economy. It must be clear you cannot do both.
Enforcement matters more than announcements. A sanctioned tanker that continues delivering oil represents unrealized leverage. Closing the gap between designation and enforcement is essential to maximizing pressure and strategic effect.
The Long Game Is the Path to a Durable Win
President Trump has long emphasized speed, deadlines, and measurable results. That approach can create valuable urgency and prevent bureaucratic drift. Iran, however, is attempting to turn that preference for rapid results to its advantage by arguing an agreement must be reached within a narrow political window.
The administration should resist and decouple the midterm election calendar from Iranian negotiations.
A 100-day benchmark can be a useful management and communications milestone, but it is insufficient for compelling a revolutionary regime to turn its back on decades spent absorbing sanctions, suppressing domestic opposition, and waging war through proxies and asymmetric means.
For President Trump to secure a durable victory, the United States must be prepared to play the long game. This does not mean accepting an endless war. It means establishing conditions under which Iran’s choices are steadily reduced while America’s are preserved.
The administration can reinforce its position by making clear that economic and military pressure will continue beyond the midterm elections. It should expand interceptor and counter-drone production on an emergency basis, build regional stockpiles, strengthen partner defenses, and shift the cost-exchange ratio in America’s favor. It should continue degrading Iran’s capacity to manufacture and employ offensive weapons while tightening enforcement against the regime’s oil, shipping, and financial networks.
The objective should not be destruction for its own sake or an agreement that trades substantial economic relief for temporary or unverifiable promises.
The objective should be to change Iran’s strategic calculation.
Iran must come to believe that each additional month of resistance will carry increasing cost, resulting in less revenue, fewer military options, greater isolation, diminished military capability, and a weaker negotiating position. At the same time, the United States should make clear that a verifiable agreement remains available if Iran abandons the behavior that created the crisis.
This combination—relentless pressure and a credible diplomatic solution—offers the best prospect for achieving the administration’s objectives.
The decisive question is not whether the Pentagon has a secret technological breakthrough waiting in the wings. It is whether the United States has the strategic patience, economic discipline, and political determination to ensure that Iran cannot simply outlast it.
If Washington demonstrates that determination, time will cease to be Iran’s most powerful weapon and become America’s. (h/t MtTB)
The Not-So-Special Relationship
Benjamin Netanyahu placed two bets on Israel’s alliance with the United States.
One bet was on Donald Trump. The two leaders’ past feuds and the American’s erratic temperament looked like minor points compared to Trump’s record as the president who recognized Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights and Jerusalem and ordered the airstrike that killed Iran’s terror chief, Qassem Soleimani.
From his first term, Trump broke with many of the dysfunctional norms that had governed U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East for decades. Washington’s bipartisan foreign policy establishment had approached the region’s conflicts as a management problem. Their goal was to lower the intensity of conflict by engineering a rough equilibrium that would prevent any party, including Israel, from getting too strong. Attempts to balance the interests of existential foes were supposed to produce stability. Instead, they ensured the periodic reeruption of war between actors like Israel and Hamas who proved unwilling to adopt the norms of Western bureaucrats.
Trump initially rejected this path by enforcing clearer lines between friends and enemies. His approach was to pick winners and take tributes, rather than to work through State Department offices and NGOs to build complex subdivisions of imperial administration.
Siding with Trump promised Israel not only greater external support, but a freer hand to pursue its own war aims after Oct. 7. In return, Netanyahu offered something that he believed Trump wanted: a powerful ally to project power in the Middle East on behalf of U.S. interests. If Netanyahu’s first bet paid off, Israel stood to be promoted from first among American client states to U.S.-backed regional hegemon in the Middle East.
The problem for Israel was not necessarily that Trump decided to end the war with the Iranian regime still in power. Rather, it was that he was bribing the Iranians by bartering with Israel’s vital security interests.
At the same time as he was drawing closer to Trump, Bibi placed a second bet to make Israel less dependent on Washington. In January, he vowed to wean Israel off U.S. military aid over the next decade (the aid Israel receives comes in the form of credits that it’s required to spend on U.S. weapons companies). Last December, Netanyahu told a graduating class of the Air Force Academy that he had approved an investment equal to $108 billion over the next decade to build up Israel’s domestic munitions industry. “I don’t know if a country can be completely independent but we will strive to ensure our arms are produced as much as possible in Israel,” he told the new pilots. His goal was “to build an independent arms industry for the State of Israel and reduce the dependency on any party, including allies.” When U.S. officials tried to dictate Israel’s war plans, for instance by demanding that the Israeli army not enter the Hamas stronghold of Rafah, Netanyahu proved that he was willing to defy Washington.
When Israel and the U.S. launched their joint war against Iran in February, it looked initially like both wagers were paying off. Israel was demonstrating its independent capabilities while acting in concert with the global superpower to defeat a common enemy. The American and Israeli militaries operated with an unprecedented level of cooperation. Pilots from the two countries flew side by side to strike precoordinated target packages. Intelligence-sharing, planning, and rehearsals took place in joint command centers.
But we know how this story ends. After enduring the devastation of their top leadership and military infrastructure, the Iranians brought the war to a halt by shutting down maritime traffic through the Strait of Hormuz. Fearing the costs of a prolonged closure and unwilling to risk the escalation necessary to reopen the strait by force, Trump offered the Iranians a deal. Effectively, the U.S. would pay Iran a ransom. In return Trump would extricate America from a broadly unpopular war before the midterm elections. By the terms of the deal, hundreds of billions of dollars would be released to Iran. The U.S. made other promises to restore Iran’s military capacity and deterrence, including a pledge to force Israel to call off its operations against Iran’s Lebanese terror proxy, Hezbollah. In return the Iranians would reopen the strait. At a later date, American and Iranian officials would reconvene to negotiate terms of a broader agreement.
Instead of neutralizing the Iranian threat and crowning Israel the dominant power in the Middle East, the first of Netanyahu’s gambles went bust. With Iran on the ropes, Trump’s deal revived the regime’s fortunes. The agreement was loose enough that its terms could easily be nullified or rewritten, but its immediate impact was a win for Tehran. For the Arab leaders who pay careful attention to even subtle power shifts in the region and had endured Iranian missile barrages during the war, the message was clear. American security guarantees were provisional at best. The Iranian regime, whose survival had been in question, was reestablishing its claim to be the region’s dominant actor.
Yet this outcome is less surprising than the furious allegations about Trump’s betrayal suggest. Trump, who once decried the weakness of bribing terror states, calculated that it was now in his interest to do so and simply reversed course, albeit with the implicit understanding that he might abruptly reverse again at some future date. There was a clear precedent for both his personal inconsistency and the substance of his policy. He was reverting to the standard U.S. approach to the region, which aims to manage conflicts within a concert of powers.
The problem for Israel was not necessarily that Trump decided to end the war with the Iranian regime still in power. Rather, it was that he was bribing the Iranians by bartering with Israel’s vital security interests—namely the freedom to aggressively deter Hezbollah.
The point was made clearly when Trump told a reporter at the Financial Times that Netanyahu “won’t have any choice” and would be forced to accept whatever deal Trump made because “I call all the shots.” In other comments, Trump accused the Israeli leader of nearly sinking the deal by carrying out counterattacks inside Lebanon. Bibi, whom Trump had once praised, was now attacked as a bloodthirsty warmonger; an obstacle to peace just as Democrats had always accused him of being.
Simply put: Bibi’s two wagers proved incompatible. Taken as far as it could go—to joint operations aimed at toppling the regime in Iran—the bet on Trump stopped short of Israel’s strategic goals. Moreover, it did so in its final act by threatening Israel’s freedom to act as a sovereign power in defense of vital interests on its own borders.
That leaves the bet on independence as Israel’s path moving forward.
Washington Post Claims Support for Israel Is Dangerous to America
On August 1, 2026, the Washington Post reported that Gen. Alexus Grynkewich, the head of U.S. European Command, had warned the Pentagon that he lacked enough naval forces to keep defending Israel against ballistic missiles.
He said that without another Aegis-equipped destroyer, he might eventually have to choose between defending Israel and defending the American "homeland."
This followed a May Post report titled "U.S. Bears Brunt of Israel's Missile Defense, Pentagon Assessments Show."
It said the U.S. had consumed a substantial share of its most advanced interceptors while defending Israel from Iran - more, he said, than Israel itself had expended.
Omitted from the report was that American missile-defense systems in and around Israel were not protecting only Israeli civilians and military installations.
They were also protecting American aircraft, crews, fuel, munitions, communications nodes, and support personnel operating from or through Israeli bases during the campaign against Iran.
The dozens of KC-46 and KC-135 refueling tankers at Ben-Gurion airport and Uvda and Ramon airbases, together with their crews and fuel infrastructure, enabled American combat aircraft to reach Iranian targets and return.
Any Iranian ballistic-missile attack on the Israeli airfields supporting those operations threatened American combat power directly. The U.S. was defending a joint military operation, including exposed U.S. assets.
From Ian:
Brendan O'Neill:
Ceuta and the dangerous insanity of anti-Zionism
From the left, the Palestinian-American writer Susan Abulhawa said the rushing of Ceuta was ‘completely engineered’ by Israel and its allies. Their dastardly aim? To ‘re-educate’ Spain and force it to ‘fall back in line with Western imperial objectives’. Rich-boy keffiyeh clown Hasan Piker echoed this drivel, titillating his Ivy League followers by saying Israel and America ‘got the Moroccan government to send, like, 40,000 people into Spanish administered territory’. It was ‘classic Israel’, he said: a ‘shameless’ effort to destabilise a critical nation.
That there is no proof whatsoever that someone in the Jewish State phoned up Morocco and said ‘Unleash the migrants’ matters not one jot to the Israel haters. Indeed, conspiracy theorists are positively allergic to facts. Badger them for proof that the Jews engineered the Ceuta crisis, or coolly explain to them how Building 7 fell on 9/11, and they’ll say you’ve been ‘got at’. Evidence itself is suspect in the loony bin of anti-West conspiracism. They just scream ‘Israel launched an Islamic invasion of Spain!’ – as Alex Jones did – and hope that the loudness of their claims will drown out the insanity of them.
In Spain itself, lefty influencer Ana Alcalde – also known as ‘Gaza Barbie’ after she sailed to Gaza on one of those dumb flotillas – said Ceuta was part of a ‘plan’ to ‘take down’ the government of Pedro Sánchez. Even a Spanish official – transport minister Óscar Puente Santiago – hinted that the long fingers of the Jewish State were wrapping round the neck of Spain. ‘Well, things are starting to get pretty clear’, he said in response to an Israeli official’s tweet about Spain’s ‘colonial enclaves’ in North Africa. His tweet was interpreted by many as support for ‘the growing conspiracy theory’ that Israel ‘helped orchestrate the large-scale migrant incursion’.
This Jew-blaming that spread through the digital highways faster than the Moroccan men barged into Ceuta captures how unhinged and lethal anti-Zionism has become. It confirmed that it is the undisputed heir to classical Jew hatred. Jews were once accused of inflicting plague, poison and social mayhem on Europe. Now the Jewish nation is accused of inflicting ‘swarms’ of migrants on Europe. These conspiracy theories might be separated by centuries, but they share two striking things in common. First, a glaring lack of proof, the wilful sacrifice of reasoned thought at the altar of a neo-religious conviction that despicable ‘foreign’ elements are masterminding our moral downfall. And secondly, the Jews. It’s them again. The Jewish people brought plague to Europe, now the Jewish nation is bringing ‘plagues’ of foreigners. Different millennium, same vile racism.
The Ceuta conspiracy theory also shines a light on the double bigotry of the woke ideology. In the woke universe, a demented animus for the world’s only Jewish state sits comfortably alongside a cloying, patrician pity for Muslims. The Jews are seen as the sinister authors of every earthly wrong, and Muslims as the hapless victims of those wrongs. So in the Ceuta theory, we see the Jewish nation re-imagined as demonically powerful and we see the wholesale stripping of Moroccan Muslims of any agency whatsoever. They become mere tools, instructed on how to act by the wily Jewish State. The neo-racialists of the credentialled classes see the world as being inhabited by devils and children, the former requiring their performative fury, the latter their aristocratic sympathy. Muslims are dehumanised too under the rule of the hyper-racialists.
Anti-Zionism has become the suffocating religion of the cultural establishment. Every social ill – from war to broken borders to the rise of the far right – is giddily traced back to Israel. Not only does this hang yet more target signs around the necks of Jews, it also obscures the truth about Europe’s social problems. It is our own governments’ suicidal abandonment of the ideal of national sovereignty that has caused the migrant crisis, not the hand-rubbing plotting of the Jews of the Holy Land. Like their forebears in the pitchfork Middle Ages, anti-Zionists prefer to live in a house of lies than to confront the truth of their world, and themselves.
Motherland Blues
Yet the Ukraine war was already eroding the logic behind that restraint. By the summer of 2022, after failing to achieve a rapid victory and expending large quantities of precision-guided weaponry, Moscow had turned to Tehran for attack drones. Russian officials visited an Iranian airfield twice to inspect weapons-capable systems; deliveries followed, and Iranian-designed Shaheds soon became a central component of Russia’s attacks on Ukrainian cities and civilian infrastructure. Iran, one of the powers Russia had previously attempted to balance in Syria, was becoming an increasingly important supplier to the Russian war effort.
At roughly the same time, Moscow began withdrawing or repositioning some personnel and equipment from Syria to meet the demands of the Ukraine front. In August 2022, satellite imagery indicated that Russia had removed an S-300 air-defense battery from Syria and shipped it toward the Black Sea, apparently to reinforce defenses closer to the Ukrainian theater. Russia did not abandon its principal Syrian bases, but reports of withdrawals and repositioning suggested that Iran and Hezbollah were seeking to fill some of the resulting gaps. The contradiction was becoming difficult to ignore: Israel was preserving its accommodation with Moscow partly because Russia could restrain Iran in Syria, even as Russia’s battlefield failures made it more dependent on Iranian weapons and less capable of performing that restraining role.
The community most exposed by this ambiguity was not in Jerusalem. When the invasion began, Russia’s core Jewish community still numbered roughly 155,000 people, along with a much larger population estimated at around 600,000 eligible for Israeli citizenship under the Law of Return. Three days after the invasion, Boruch Gorin, a senior spokesman for Russia’s Chabad-affiliated Federation of Jewish Communities, wrote bluntly on Facebook, “Stop the war!” On March 2, Chief Rabbi Berel Lazar—nicknamed “Putin’s Rabbi,” given their close relationship—issued his own carefully worded appeal to “stop this madness to prevent future deaths.” Their statements were striking because Putin had spent two decades cultivating a tacit compact with Chabad: After 70 years in which the Soviet state had repressed religious life and sharply constrained Jewish practice, the Kremlin supported the rebuilding of Jewish institutions, while Chabad’s leaders generally avoided confronting the government.
By the summer of 2022, Moscow was pressuring the institutions connecting Russian Jews to Israel. Russia’s Justice Ministry asked a Moscow court to dissolve the Russian branch of the Jewish Agency, the organization responsible for facilitating aliyah. The case was formally framed around alleged violations of Russian privacy law, but it unfolded amid deteriorating relations with Israel and a growing exodus of Russian citizens. By July, nearly 20,000 immigrants had arrived in Israel from Russia since the invasion began, with similar numbers arriving from Ukraine. Then Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid initially warned that closing the agency would be “a grave event” with consequences for bilateral relations, then softened his language, emphasizing Israel’s readiness for dialogue while “maintaining the important relations between the countries.”
The same community Putin had long presented as evidence of his tolerance could now serve as leverage against Israel. In October, Alexei Pavlov, an assistant secretary of Russia’s Security Council, described Chabad as a supremacist cult in the state-owned newspaper Argumenty i Fakty. Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev subsequently apologized, saying the remarks were erroneous, and stressed that they did not represent the council’s official position. Even so, the episode alarmed Russian Jewish leaders: Former Moscow chief rabbi Pinchas Goldschmidt urged Jews who were able to leave Russia to do so, while Boruch Gorin warned that official antisemitism would mean “the end of a Jewish presence in Russia.”
Putin’s own rhetoric was shifting as well. At the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum in June 2023, he defended Russia’s absurd claim that it was fighting to “denazify” Ukraine by turning directly to Zelenskyy’s Jewish identity. “I have a lot of Jewish friends,” Putin said. “They say that Zelenskyy is not Jewish, that he is a disgrace to the Jewish people.” Putin, who had spent two decades presenting himself as a protector of Russian Jews and a guardian of Holocaust memory, was now claiming the authority to distinguish authentic Jews from shameful ones and conscripting Jewish suffering into the ideological justification for his war.
After Oct. 7, the deterioration became even harder to disguise. Moscow blamed the conflict’s eruption largely on the failure of American policy and intensified its criticism of Israel’s campaign in Gaza, while Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said the bombardment violated international law and risked producing a catastrophe lasting decades. Less than three weeks after the massacre, Russia hosted a Hamas delegation led by senior official Moussa Abu Marzouk in Moscow, prompting an angry Israeli protest that the Kremlin was sending “a message legitimizing terrorism against Israelis.”
Days later, an antisemitic mob stormed the airport in Russia’s Makhachkala, Dagestan, searching for rumored Jewish and Israeli passengers arriving on a flight from Tel Aviv. Hundreds of men overran the terminal and runway, inspecting vehicles and demanding to see passengers’ documents. Putin condemned the violence only indirectly, blaming Ukrainian agents acting on behalf of Western intelligence services, without presenting evidence, rather than confronting the antisemitism animating the riot. The Kremlin did not organize the mob, and Russian authorities later prosecuted participants; by July 2025, Russian courts had sentenced 135 people in connection with the riot. But the episode exposed how quickly official anti-Western and anti-Israeli narratives could merge with older hatreds inside Russia itself.
By then, well over 40,000 Russian citizens eligible under the Law of Return had immigrated to Israel. Those who remained belonged to a community Moscow and Jerusalem had spent two decades treating as a strategic asset: evidence of Putin’s professed tolerance, and an electoral and demographic constituency in Israel.
However, the rupture did not happen. Israel preserved its access to Russia, while Moscow stopped short of severing relations with Jerusalem. But beneath that continuity, the arrangement was decaying. Russia was becoming more dependent on Iran, less capable of regulating Syria, more willing to pressure Jewish institutions, and increasingly prepared to align itself diplomatically and rhetorically against Israel. The relationship survived Ukraine and Oct. 7. The strategic logic that had sustained it did not.
Engineering Hate
REVIEW: 'Unsafe At MIT: A Chronicle of a Campus War on the Jews' by Yossi Sheffi
Yossi Sheffi is the author of this intensely disturbing book about the experience of American and Israeli Jews on campus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the aftermath of the October 7 massacre. Sheffi holds an endowed chair in engineering systems at MIT and is a member of the faculty in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department, the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society, and the Operations Research Center. He is a leading expert in supply chain management and the author of nine books in his areas of professional expertise. He has been a member of the MIT faculty for almost 50 years.
Sheffi's 10th book is also the first of its kind. Sheffi commissioned an unnamed journalist to interview dozens of American and Israeli Jewish undergraduate and graduate students, postdocs, and faculty about their experience on campus following October 7. Based on those interviews, the text of the book consists largely of a chronological narrative of the 2023-24 school year recounting their experience.
As the introduction puts it, "This is the story of what it felt like to those whose lives and studies were turned upside down." Like Ken Kesey's fictional One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Unsafe at MIT takes us inside the asylum at MIT.
Sheffi's narrative demonstrates that the anti-Israel and antisemitic inmates ran the asylum. By contrast with One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest's Nurse Ratched, MIT president Sally Kornbluth proved herself to be a spineless weasel. Kornbluth's betrayal of the applicable rules governing student protest on campus is one of the book's most powerful motifs. Unlike her counterparts at Columbia and Harvard, Kornbluth nevertheless kept her job.
Sheffi himself is an Israeli immigrant to the United States. He was born in Mandatory Palestine. He emigrated to the United States from Jerusalem in 1975 to pursue his graduate studies at MIT. Many of the students and postdocs interviewed are Israelis with a background of service in the Israel Defense Forces. Sheffi does not make a point of it, but MIT appears to be unusual in this respect. The pain of these students permeates the book.
MIT is a magnet for those seeking the development of technical expertise that has made Israel a multidimensional powerhouse. October 7 hit these students hard. MIT provides a window onto the wave of hatred of Jews and the Jewish state that manifested itself on elite campuses following the massacre. It should be noted that the students whose experience forms the core of this story are mostly identified only by first names or pseudonymous first names.
Saturday, August 08, 2026
