07/06 Links: Can tribal leaders in Hebron bring peace with Israel?; 15 hostages break silence on sexual violence on Oct. 7; “Death to America” Doesn’t Have Another Side

From Ian:

Netanyahu departs for DC: ‘Chance to change face of Middle East even more’

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu departed Ben-Gurion International Airport aboard “Wing of Zion” on Sunday evening for his third in-person meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump in the wake of “Operation Rising Lion” and amid talk of a possible hostages-for-ceasefire deal.

“In my conversation with President Trump, I will first of all thank him for his very strong support for Israel. We have never had such a friend in the White House,” Netanyahu told the press just before his flight.

“Our joint efforts have brought about a tremendous victory over our common enemy—Iran,” he said.

Israel feared for years whether it could stand up to Iran, and in the end, all branches of the IDF performed brilliantly, the prime minister said.

The success (intelligence assessments say that Iran’s nuclear weapons program has been knocked back several years) brings an obligation “first and foremost, to preserve the achievement—to remain vigilant against Iran’s attempts to renew its pursuit of nuclear weapons aimed at our destruction,” he said.

There’s also an opportunity “to expand the circle of peace far beyond what we ever imagined before,” he added, speaking of the Abraham Accords, the 2020 normalization agreements between Israel and four Arab states.

“We have already transformed the face of the Middle East beyond recognition, and we now have the opportunity and the ability to change it even further and bring a great future to the State of Israel, the people of Israel, and the entire [region],” Netanyahu said.

The prime minister also said that Israel will not let the Gaza Strip again pose a threat and that means “the elimination of Hamas’s military and governing capabilities. Hamas will not remain there.”

“I am committed to all three missions: the release and return of all our hostages—both living and fallen—the elimination of Hamas’s capabilities, and ensuring that Gaza no longer poses a threat to Israel,” he said.

15 hostages break silence on sexual violence on Oct. 7

Fresh testimony from survivors and witnesses demonstrates that Hamas terrorists systematically employed sexual violence during their Oct. 7, 2023, assault on Israel, according to a comprehensive investigation that documents previously unreported accounts of rape and sexual abuse.

The upcoming Dinah Project report presents evidence from 15 returned hostages who experienced sexual violence in captivity, with only one having spoken publicly before now, the U.K. newspaper The Sunday Times revealed.

The investigation, conducted by Israeli gender and legal experts with partial funding from the British government, found that sexual violence was “widespread and systematic” during the onslaught that killed approximately 1,200 people.

According to the Sunday Times, the report establishes that rape and gang rape occurred in at least six locations, though most victims were “permanently silenced”—either murdered during the assaults or left too traumatized to speak.

The Dinah Project will be published on Tuesday in Jerusalem, representing the most comprehensive documentation of sexual violence during the Oct. 7 attack, the newspaper reported.

The report draws from first-hand testimony of 15 returned Gaza hostages, a survivor of attempted rape at the Supernova music festival and interviews with 17 people who witnessed or heard the attacks, along with therapists treating traumatized survivors.

The project aims “to counter denial, misinformation and global silence” regarding what researchers describe as “one of the most under-reported dimensions of the attacks.”

The report states its mission is “to set the historical record straight: Hamas used sexual violence as a tactical weapon of war.

“Clear patterns emerged in how the sexual violence was perpetrated,” the report documents, “including victims found partially or fully naked with their hands tied, often to trees or poles; evidence of gang rapes followed by execution; and genital mutilation.”

The documented attacks occurred at the Supernova music festival, Route 232, the Nahal Oz military base, and three kibbutzim: Re’im, Nir Oz and Kfar Aza. Sexual abuse extended beyond the initial assault locations, the report reveals.

“Sexual violence continued in captivity, with many returnees reporting forced nudity, physical and verbal sexual harassment, sexual assaults and threats of forced marriage,” the investigation adds.

Netanyahu said to receive report on medical conditions of all living hostages

Just before Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu departed for Washington on Sunday to meet with US President Donald Trump, he was reportedly presented information about the medical condition of each of the 20 remaining living hostages, which is said to serve as the basis of who will be chosen to be freed during the hostage-ceasefire deal that is seen to be nearing agreement.

The medical information given to Netanyahu and some senior ministers and aides will be used in discussions, both internal and with mediators, about which hostages’ releases will be prioritized, Channel 12 reported on Sunday.

According to the report, senior cabinet ministers said after the information was presented that “we will have difficulty prioritizing [the hostages],” because “they are all humanitarian [cases].”

The outline of the deal, as it currently stands, would see about half of the living hostages and about half of the dead hostages held by terror groups in Gaza returned to Israel over 60 days, in five separate releases.

Eight living hostages would be freed on the first day and two released on the 50th day, according to an Arab diplomat from one of the mediating countries. Five slain hostages would be returned on the seventh day, five more on the 30th day and eight more on the 60th day. That would leave 22 hostages still held in Gaza, 10 of them believed by Israeli authorities to be alive.

The deal has yet to be finalized, and there has been no definitive statement on whether Israel or Hamas would be the one to determine which 10 of the 20 living hostages would be freed under its terms, and according to which criteria.

As part of the outlet’s report, Channel 12 shared excerpts from the medical files of each living hostage, to highlight the difficulty in deciding between them based on medical priority.

Dear Tucker Carlson: “Death to America” Doesn’t Have Another Side

Tucker Carlson has just announced his latest interview—this time with the President of the Islamic Republic of Iran. If his recent sit-down with Qatar’s Prime Minister is any indication, don’t expect hard questions about the thousands tortured, hanged, raped, or butchered by the regime. Don’t expect mention of the morality police, the murdered protesters, the jailed journalists, or the terror exported across half the globe. Expect instead softballs and sympathy, all under the worn-out pretense of “hearing the other side.”

Carlson’s interview with the Qatari PM, it turns out, wasn’t just a puff piece. According to FARA (Foreign Agents Registration Act) filings, it was part of a paid, coordinated PR campaign to rehabilitate Qatar’s image in the West. The entire sit-down was Qatari state propaganda, masquerading as journalism—a slick rebranding of a regime that funds Hamas, hosts the Taliban, and suppresses free speech within its own borders.

The interview announced just days after the Iranian regime issued a new fatwa calling for the assassination of U.S. President Donald Trump. These aren’t symbolic gestures. Ask Salman Rushdie, who was stabbed on stage nearly 30 years after a fatwa was declared against him. These are not political statements. They are theological death warrants with no expiration date—waiting for a devout believer to carry them out.

Iranian officials chant Death to America and Death to Israel in Friday sermons broadcast nationwide. They openly refer to the U.S. as “the Great Satan.” They call for the destruction of Western civilization and the global spread of Islamic rule. Their proxies—Hezbollah, the Houthis, Hamas—carry that mission out in blood. Thousands of Americans have died at the hands of Iran and its network of armed proxies—from the 1983 Marine barracks bombing in Beirut to the killing of U.S. soldiers in Iraq by Iranian-supplied IEDs. Americans have been kidnapped, tortured, and murdered—all while Tehran denies involvement and smiles for the camera.

What part of this is America First? It's not contrarian truth-telling. It’s betrayal. It’s the normalization of enemies who would burn the Constitution, not quote it. The Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is very clear: "Death to America is not just a slogan. It is a policy."

Still, we are told to listen.

But to what, exactly?

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07/05 Links: Inside the ugly relationship between Islamism and the Left; Man charged over arson attack on Melbourne synagogue; Hamas grenade attack on GHF aid workers

From Ian:

Inside the ugly relationship between Islamism and the Left

Fifty years ago, much of the far-Left was inspired by the Soviet Union’s Middle East propaganda, a pro-Islamist stance in response to US and European support for Israel. That influenced Left-wing groups in the UK – such as the Communist Party of Great Britain and the Revolutionary Communist Group – who identified Arabs as oppressed, while Israel, then as now, was seen as an illegitimate “white” state. But the far-Left remains a politically insignificant force on its own. Part of the motivation for an alliance with Islamism is to harness the power of others for their own ends – which, of course, works both ways.

This is neatly illustrated in a 1994 article by Chris Harman of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) for International Socialism, “The Prophet and the Proletariat”, which advocated for a pragmatic working relationship between Islamists and revolutionary socialists. Harman is open about the areas of opposition between the two groups – over the role of women, for example – but concludes: “On some issues we will find ourselves on the same side as the Islamists against imperialism and the state… It should be true in countries like France or Britain... Where the Islamists are in opposition, our rule should be, ‘with the Islamists sometimes, with the state never’.”

In Britain, where Islamism only speaks for a fraction of the country’s Muslims, the Labour party remained a natural home for many Muslim voters up to Tony Blair’s premiership. “To put it crudely, community leaders were able to ‘deliver’ votes for Labour from within those communities in certain areas such as Birmingham or Bradford,” says Timothy Peace, a senior lecturer in politics and international relations at the University of Glasgow. “From the 1980s, Muslims themselves began to enter local councils, but the closeness with Labour continued up to the late 1990s.”

This began to break down thanks to the wars in Iraq (2003-2011) and Afghanistan (2001-2021). The establishment of the Stop The War Coalition (STWC) in 2001 was a milestone which provided Corbyn and other prominent Leftists with a forum to connect with groups such as the Muslim Association of Britain (MAB).

Last year, the then Communities Secretary, Michael Gove, alleged in Parliament that the MAB, together with Mend and Cage, which campaigns against counter-terror measures, “give rise to concern for their Islamist orientation and views”. All three groups rejected the label, with Mend’s chief executive Azhar Qayum saying his organisation was “not at all” extremist, Cage pledging to “explore all avenues, including legal” to challenge the “government’s deep dive into authoritarianism”, and the MAB accusing Gove of a “blatant effort to stifle dissenting voices”.

Britain’s action in Iraq and elsewhere gave overtly Islamist groups an opportunity to tap into the concept of the “Ummah” – the worldwide Islamic community. Shawcross’s review warned that key Islamist narratives included, “commanding that [their interpretation of] the Islamic faith is placed at the centre of an individual’s identity, and must govern all social and political decision-making”.

At the same time, a definition of Islamophobia proposed by some MPs and backed by bodies such as Mend and the MAB would prohibit anyone from “accusing Muslim citizens of being more loyal to the ‘Ummah’… than to the interests of their own nations”, raising concerns about potential limits on freedom of speech.

“The MAB were tied to political Islam and found inspiration from the Muslim Brotherhood, a powerful organisation in Arab countries,” says Peace. “The MAB were one of the key organisations in Stop the War, even though they were not very big at the time it began. The driving force were the Socialist Workers Party, and they managed to mobilise large numbers of Muslim protesters, and that overruled any ideological divisions between the two groups.”

The MAB has said it is “a British organisation operating entirely within the British Isles, with no presence elsewhere. It is not an affiliate of the Muslim Brotherhood nor a member”.

Britain’s new Islamo-Leftist alliance won’t last, but it might kill Labour first

In Muslim-majority democracies, the Left tends to be secular. The more religious parties, on top of being socially conservative, are the more prone to cut taxes and reduce regulations.

This should not surprise us, for Islam is the only great religion founded by a businessman – a businessman who used his last sermon to preach the sanctity of property. Jesus said some hard things about wealth, and it was not until the sixteenth century that Christians stopped holding up poverty as their ideal. But Islam never had any problem with the idea that money, honestly acquired and put to good use, was a blessing. The Prophet, after all, had established tax-free markets and rejected calls for prices to be regulated.

Across the Islamic wold, from Morocco to Malaysia, anti-Western feeling is stronger on the secular Left. But in Britain, Muslims were for a long time seen primarily, not as people who believed in the Oneness of God and the finality of the teachings of Mohammad, but as a non-white minority to be slotted into a victim role in an imagined hierarchy of oppression. That is why British Islamo-gauchism rests on anti-colonialism, and especially on the portrayal of Israel as the ultimate colonial oppressor.

George Galloway understood earlier than most how the balance was shifting. Having once won awards from Stonewall, he began to describe himself as “socially conservative”, made sceptical noises about the portrayal of gay relationships and came out against abortion and euthanasia, while at the same time growing a beard, boasting that he did not drink and littering his speech with Islamic expressions.

A challenger party that aims to get into double figures will, I suspect, lean more to Galloway’s approach than Corbyn’s. Which makes me wonder how many revolutionary socialists will go along with it.

Let me suggest an early test. In Apsana Begum’s Poplar and Limehouse constituency, 39 per cent of residents identify as Muslim and 24 per cent as Christian. If she is the next Labour MP to defect, it will tell us much about the likely orientation of the new party.

The Red-Green coalition, which came together in the hideous mésalliance known as Stop the War, might hold for a bit longer. But, in time, omnicause Lefties will be squeezed out – though not, one assumes, thrown off buildings like their Iranian colleagues.

The face of Britain is changing, and our parties are changing with it. Some Corbynites may live long enough to wonder, whether, in getting rid of something they disliked, they ended up enabling something worse.

‘Exasperated’ minister asked BBC why nobody was fired for airing Gaza documentary

Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy has said she asked the BBC why nobody has been fired for airing a Gaza documentary which featured the son of a Hamas official.

This comes ahead of a review looking into Gaza: How To Survive A Warzone, which is reportedly set to be published next week.

The programme first aired in February until it was pulled by the broadcaster after it emerged that its 13-year old narrator is the son of a Hamas official.

The review is being led by Peter Johnston, the director of editorial complaints and reviews which is independent of BBC News and reports directly to the director-general.

It is expected to determine whether any editorial guidelines were broken, and whether any disciplinary action is needed.

The BBC will also undertake a full audit of expenditure on the programme.

Speaking to The Times, Ms Nandy described feeling “exasperated” as she called for an “adequate explanation from the BBC about what has happened”.

“I have not had that from the chair or director-general yet,” she said.

She added: “I have been very clear that people must be held accountable for the decisions that were taken. I have asked the question to the board (of the BBC). Why has nobody been fired?

“What I want is an explanation as to why not. If it is a sackable offence then obviously that should happen.

“But if the BBC, which is independent, considers that it is not, I think what all parliamentarians want to know is why.”

On Alan Rusbridger: champion of an ethical press

It is no surprise that advocates for either side in the Middle East conflict try to influence the media; what is offensive is the idea promoted by Byrne and Rusbridger that pro-Israel propaganda is exceptionally nasty, illegitimate and based on falsity. Rusbridger’s contention is that pro-Palestinian propaganda, backed by an Arabia with a population 45 times larger than Israel, and by a Muslim bloc 200 times larger, and by the massed ranks of the academic Humanities, and by the political Left, and much of the Church, is innocent, truthful and reliable, albeit pushed by a weaker agent that is somehow incapable of organising or projecting its voice, and which the mainstream media is predetermined to resist.

Rusbridger’s message about shady pro-Israeli influence grows directly out of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and Henry Ford’s The International Jew, and Nazi propaganda, and the conspiracy literature of David Duke and others. It is a horrific example of the Left’s alliance with what would once have been regarded as the Left’s polar opposite. It might be capable of being explained but it is not obvious how it can be challenged. As Rusbridger says of the media he represents, “narratives are constructed and take root. And when someone comes along with a counter-narrative they are ignored. It would be unkind to call it groupthink but there is, at the very least, a lack of balance.”

There is a postscript to all of this. Having looked at Alan Rusbridger’s unedifying contribution to Prospect in its issue of two weeks ago, I have now received the following teaser for his triumphs in this week’s issue:
“As … Alan Rusbridger and his co-host Lionel Barber discuss on today’s episode of Media Confidential, there clearly was a procedural mishap [over the BBC’s coverage of Glastonbury]. Why wasn’t someone ready to press the mute button? But as Alan writes in his latest column, the furore over the incident is something of a “dead cat”—a story intended to distract from thornier questions. Such questions include: why did the BBC drop a documentary on doctors in Gaza, which aired last night on Channel Four? And did Robbie Gibb, the staunchly pro-Israel former Tory spin doctor who sits on the BBC’s editorial committee, have any say in it? Is his position tenable?”

I find this terribly disappointing. For no obvious reason, except perhaps that we attended the same Oxbridge college at the same time, I had always given Rusbridger the benefit of the doubt. Admittedly, The Guardian has slid off the scale in terms of the divisiveness of its editorial and political agenda, but I had allowed myself to feel that this had happened under him rather than because of him. I wanted to think, also, that whether or not I agreed with Leftist journalism, it was respectably constructed, evidence-based and factual, even if it used the tools of journalism to come to different conclusions from me, just as opposing lawyers might use the same tools of the law.

A closer look at Rusbridger’s writings now shows me how wrong I have been. Many of the characteristics I had associated with the gutter journalism of the rightwing press are evidenced here as well: slurs, innuendo, inconsistency, irrelevancy, false logic, guilt by association, name dropping, appeals to authority, reliance on endorsements, absence of argumentation, lack of necessary data, the invitation to take unsafe assertions on trust, and much else. I had not previously assumed that Rusbridger’s writing was cheap or that it stooped in this way; now I know. And as the scales fall away from my eyes, what I conclude is that it deserves to be studied by every media department in the country, because it’s a reversal of all the taught clichés about what distinguishes the fine journalism of the Left from the bought journalism of the Right. Very sad.

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

From Ian:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Andrew Fox: We’ve seen this before

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From Ian:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From Ian:

Gadi Taub: The Settler Violence Myth

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Melanie Phillips: The need to acknowledge Muslim antisemitism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To defeat antisemitism, we must first define it

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From Ian:

When Israeli civilians die, human rights norms disappear

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How the West Got the Israel-Iran War So Wrong

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

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

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

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

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

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07/02 Links Pt2: Karen Diamond: killed by ‘anti-Zionism’; When endorsement becomes complicity; Claire Shipman’s Political Faceplant; Australia cancels Kanye West’s visa

From Ian:

Brendan O'Neill: Karen Diamond: killed by ‘anti-Zionism’

Soliman is reported to have yelled ‘Free Palestine’ as he set the Jews and their allies on fire. He said his desire was nothing less than to ‘kill all Zionist people’. It would appear that in his mind, the great crime of those who gathered in Boulder was to sympathise with the Jewish State. He seemed to view their weekly vigil for the Jews still held by Hamas as a Zionist outrage. These elderly folk had exposed themselves as ‘Zionist people’ and thus they had it coming. They deserved death. They deserved to feel the fire of his furious moral judgement.

Here’s the thing, the truly chilling thing: Soliman is not alone in viewing ‘Zionist people’ as the lowest form of human life. His suspected actions in Boulder may have been extreme, but his literally burning contempt for ‘Zionists’ is entirely mainstream. It chimes with the fanatical loathing for the ‘Zionist entity’ that seethes and courses in influencer circles. It echoes the zealous and myopic hatred for the Jewish nation that is rampant among the woke. He gave murderous expression to the key belief of polite society: that Zionism is the great cancer of our times and we all have a duty to cut it out.

Liberal commentators damn Zionists as ‘depraved monsters’. They brand the ‘Zionist entity’ a ‘uniquely murderous’ nation. They call for Zionism to be dismantled, destroyed, so that humankind might finally be free of its noxious, bloodletting ways. ‘Zionism is a cancer to this planet’, their placards say. ‘Death to Zionism’, they chant. ‘End Zionism’, said scrawled, makeshift banners on those deranged Zio-hating protests that swept Ivy League campuses last year.

Zionism must be excised from the Middle East – ‘from the river to the sea’ – and its army must be destroyed, they cry, violently if necessary. Indeed, how striking that in the same week we learn that an elderly lady perished upon the flames of a man’s frothing hatred for Zionism, the left in the UK are defending that sick chant that rang out at Glastonbury: ‘Death, death to the IDF.’ They won’t say the name Karen Diamond because they’re too busy saying the name Bob Vylan, the punk-rap duo that whipped up that anti-Zionist mania at Glasto. Just think about this: they ignore a Jew who fell victim to the fascistic loathing for Israel because they’re too busy engaging in such fascistic loathing themselves.

This is not about blaming anyone other than Soliman for what happened in Boulder four weeks ago. It’s about examining, with frankness, the consequences of the latest elite hysteria. When you call Zionism ‘evil’ and its supporters ‘monsters’, when you depict Zionism as the wickedest ideology of all time, you have no right whatsoever to feign alarm when Zionists – Jews – are subjected to violent retribution. You found them guilty of evil, so why should others not pass sentence on them?

A huge majority of the world’s Jews identify with Israel. They are Zionists. So when the influencer classes demonise Zionists, and rob them of their humanity, and damn their nation as a cesspit of sin, and chant for the death of their soldiers, and dream of the coming violent erasure of their homeland, they are hanging a target sign on the neck of Jews. They are inviting, wittingly or otherwise, racial hatred and even worse for the people most likely to be Zionists: the Jewish people. There’s no more avoiding it: the elite derangement of ‘anti-Zionism’ is fostering a mob loathing for our Jewish compatriots. And challenging it is the great anti-racist cause of our time.

How Anti-Zionism Became a Western Rite

The scapegoating of Jews in the West is part and parcel of a rebarbarized culture, one that endorses political violence. A recent Rutgers University poll found that “55 percent of all self-identifying ‘liberals’ believe killing is a justifiable means of pursuing their political goals”—and endows it with theological significance. If George Floyd’s death and subsequent canonization as a secular martyr justified the urban riots during which 2,000 police officers were injured, thousands of businesses and properties were looted and vandalized, and 17 people were killed, the sanctification of cold-blooded murder soon followed. After Luigi Mangione allegedly gunned down UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in 2024, images appeared of Mangione with a halo, in a green mantle with a red sacred heart, under the title “Saint Luigi, Patron Saint of Healthcare Access for All.”

These developments underscore the global convergence of militant political and religious movements. Islamists have learned to speak the language of social justice activists, while far-left radicals have learned to frame ideological struggle as a holy war. Human life holds little value for either of them. The journey from self-immolation for Palestine to so-called self-martyrdom bombings is a short stop or two on a train that long ago left the station of peaceful politics.

The ultimate aim of those who have married Islamism and Marxism, as Columbia University Apartheid Divest (a group of more than 100 anti-Israel organizations) admitted, is “the total eradication of Western civilization.” That would mean a world without political and economic liberty, freedom of speech and opinion, equal rights for women and minorities, technological advancement, philosophy, science, art, literature, music, and the blessings of the Jewish and Christian traditions.

The hatred of Israel and the Jews is at bottom a nihilistic loathing of the free and flourishing life that the West has secured for billions of people. Israel epitomizes not only the abundant fruits of Western civilization but also the conditions for their existence: strong borders, national pride, and free markets; thick social bonds and vigorous common purpose. These conditions are much maligned (particularly in the case of the Jewish state) because they impede any sort of political or religious globalization, be it of socialism, Islamism, or elite technocratic rule. While there’s no changing the minds of hard-core antisemites, Westerners who subject Israel and its people to withering criticism because they are inclined to support one or more of these causes would do well to ponder this biblical instruction: “Life and death I set before you, the blessing and the curse, and you shall choose life so that you may live, you and your seed” (Deuteronomy 30:19).

Gideon Falter: I am alive because my ancestors realised Jews were in danger. Britain is nearly there

The reason that I am alive today is that, for my ancestors, there was a moment that they realised that their country was falling apart and becoming unsafe for Jews. For me, that moment came as I saw the footage from Glastonbury.

As Chief Executive of Campaign Against Antisemitism, I have had a front row seat as this country that sheltered my grandparents during the Second World War has become increasingly unrecognisable through hatred and extremism.

But Glastonbury was a pivotal moment for me, when some kind of ancestral sense was activated.

Tens of thousands of young humanitarians at the country’s premier music festival were chanting for “death”, in scenes reminiscent of mass rallies in Tehran or Sanaa, beamed into the homes of millions by the national broadcaster.

None of this should have come as a surprise. Bob Vylan has apparently engaged in this kind of behaviour before, and Glastonbury was already taking place under a cloud of controversy that it had courted by inviting soon-to-be-proscribed-as-terrorists Palestine Action to address the crowds and Kneecap to headline.

The Prime Minister had warned that the Kneecapper on trial for allegedly supporting terrorists “shouldn’t” be allowed to play, and the BBC – which had to pull a documentary after it emerged that a senior Hamas member’s family had been paid for assistance in its production – said it “probably” would not broadcast Kneecap’s performance.

But none of this prevented Bob Vylan’s rant about having to “work for Zionists”, chants for “death” and the obliteration of the entire Jewish state “from the River to the Sea” from appearing on screens in living rooms across the country, courtesy of the supposedly genteel and tolerant BBC.

Now of course, everyone is taken aback. Glastonbury’s managing dynasty, fronted by Emily Eavis, is “appalled” that the acts they chose so carefully behaved in this manner. The BBC says that the whole thing was “utterly unacceptable” and Ofcom is “very concerned”. Just another set of rapped knuckles and feigned surprise, but this is far bigger than that.

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07/02 Links Pt1: Netanyahu: ‘There will be no more Hamas’; While Iran Speaks with Missiles, NGOs Blame Israel; Vote passes to proscribe Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation

From Ian:

Netanyahu: ‘There will be no more Hamas’

On a visit to the southern city of Ashkelon on Wednesday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared that the Hamas terror group would be eliminated from the Gaza Strip.

“There will be no more Hamas. It’s over. We will free all of our hostages, and we will eliminate Hamas down to its very foundations,” he said.

While noting that some may say the objectives sound contradictory—destroying Hamas and releasing the hostages—Netanyahu said they fit together.

The prime minister’s remarks focused mainly on the energy sector while he was visiting the Eilat Ashkelon Pipeline Company (EAPC) facilities. EAPC is an Israeli pipeline transporting oil from Eilat on the Red Sea to Ashkelon on the Mediterranean.

Netanyahu said Israel would connect the energy resources of Asia, the entire Middle East and the Arabian Peninsula.

“Expected revenues from gas in the coming decade will be almost 300 billion shekels [$89 billion],” he said.

“We are going to increase and strengthen Israel’s energy capability. We have a very considerable capability,” he said, noting that Israel is also building other energy installations.

“Our opportunities are enormous. We are not going to miss them or lose them,” he said. “There is a huge opportunity here, both to defeat our enemies and ensure our economic, national, international and energy future.”

While Iran Speaks with Missiles, NGOs Blame Israel

A new report from NGO Monitor shows how global NGOs, especially those funded by European governments to “uphold human rights and international law,” didn’t just stay quiet. They blamed the victim. Again. When Israel struck Iranian nuclear and military targets—targets linked to a regime that funds Hamas, Hezbollah, sponsors global terror, and openly threatens genocide—Western NGOs condemned it as “aggression.”

Let’s be clear: Iran is not just a state actor. It is a state sponsor of terror, a violator of international law, and the core funder of a global proxy war spanning Gaza, Judea and Samaria, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen, Latin America, Europe, the US, Canada and beyond. Chanting “Death to Israel” daily and building an nuclear bomb. But to read the NGO statements released in June 2025, you'd think Israel bombed Tehran for sport.

- Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International condemned Israel, while ignoring the Iranian regime’s violations of nuclear nonproliferation agreements and war crimes.

- AFSC, CODEPINK, and DAWN not only justified Iran’s missile attacks, but blamed U.S. support for Israel as the “real crime.”

- FIDH, Al-Shabaka, and the European Council on Foreign Relations reframed Iran’s aggression as a “response” and cast Israel as the regional aggressor—despite Iran’s repeated promises to erase it from the map.

- Masar Badil, a Palestinian revolutionary group aligned with the Iranian axis, outright called for the expulsion of U.S. military forces from the region—and endorsed total war against Israel.

- Some groups, like Zochrot and B’Tselem, accused Israel of “fabricating the war” as a “media distraction” from “genocide” in Gaza—a claim as cynical as it is detached from regional reality.

What They Said—And What They Didn’t
Across these statements, three trends dominate:
Israel as Perpetual Aggressor
Every act of self-defense is “genocide.” Every strike is “colonialism.” Every war, regardless of context, is framed as Israeli-instigated. No nuance, no complexity—just blame.

Iran as the Victim—or the Avenger
Despite launching missiles at civilian targets, Iran is portrayed as justified, restrained, even noble. Its role as a state sponsor of terrorism? Completely ignored.

The West as Enabler
The United States, Europe, and NATO countries are all lumped together as Israel’s willing accomplices. Their crime? Supporting an ally under attack.

But as always, what’s missing is always more revealing. Not one of these groups issued a condemnation of Iran’s attack. Not one acknowledged its own side’s violations. And almost none offered even token calls for de-escalation or dialogue. There is none. Because for these NGOs, “international law” is not a framework. It’s a club to beat only one country: Israel.

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07/01 Links Pt2: Why those Glasto chants felt so personal to British Jews; Virginia School Hit with Civil Rights Complaint over Environment 'Hostile to Jews'

From Ian:

Why those Glasto chants felt so personal to British Jews

I’m just a middle-aged mum, so it should be no shock that I’d never heard of Bob Vylan until the Glastonbury controversy. In all honesty, I don’t care about frontman Pascal Robinson-Foster’s views on Israel or Jews. He’s just another celeb with a microphone and a weird obsession with the world’s only Jewish state. It was the response of the audience that was far more disturbing. Thanks to the good ol’ Beeb’s livestreamed hate, you could hear a Glastonbury crowd only too happy to chant along. Given the middle-aged make-up of that crowd, there were likely many parents there, too, happily calling for the death of teenage IDF soldiers.

How do they square these chants with their no doubt virtuous self-image? What kinds of valuable moral lessons do they think they will be able to offer their offspring when they get their kicks wishing death on a whole nation, while they take selfies and drink overpriced cider in a field? v They will claim that they were just attacking Israel’s military, not the Israeli nation itself. But they’re not fooling anyone. Without the IDF there is no Israel. If you bray and cheer for the death of those standing between Israel and those who want to annihilate it, then we know what that means – you want Israel to cease to exist.

In its ‘diversity statement’, Glastonbury claims to stand against ‘discrimination of any sort’, and states that it was ‘established to celebrate music, culture and togetherness’. That was not what was being celebrated on Saturday. A performer and a large crowd were celebrating the death of Jews.

Those chill Glasto hippies, the ‘cool’ mums and dads and the keffiyeh set might want to think about another music festival that took place less than two years ago, on 7 October. That was the occasion for another group to celebrate the death of Jews, in the form of a real-life massacre. Hamas terrorists raped and killed their way through the Nova music festival, murdering 378 Israelis and taking 44 hostage.

No doubt Glasto’s Israel haters will claim their chanting was a political protest for a progressive cause. But it wasn’t. Whether they realise it or not, they were wishing death on the families and friends of their fellow Brits. Shame on each and every one of them.

David Collier: The NUJ is hostile to Jewish journalists

For several years I had a press card to provide a layer of security while covering hostile street protests. My recent experience with the National Union of Journalists shows how behind the scenes, British Jews are being ‘othered’ by hostile actors and excluded from society. This is a personal journey of abuse and discrimination.

The need to be protected
Those who have been following my work for a long time are aware that I frequently take to the streets to report on anti-Israel demonstrations taking place. This is an important part of what I do. Just to give one example – it was only because I was on the streets reporting from the al-Quds demonstration in 2017, that I captured footage of the IHRC’s Nazim Ali publicly blaming Zionists for the Grenfell disaster. This led to the Pharmaceutical Council’s fitness-to-practise hearings that were to find some of his statements antisemitic. If we are not there – antisemitic ideologies become free to develop and spread unchallenged.

Over the years my identity became known, and with publications such as Electronic Intifada targeting me in several articles, a risk factor entered the frame. Not only was I receiving threats online on a daily basis, but many of the key anti-Israel agitators on the streets knew who I was. At a protest outside SOAS, one of a group who had made online threats to ‘bash my head in with a baseball bat’, made ‘cut throat’ signs when he spotted me. This is the atmosphere I work in and it does not always stop with gestures. I have been physically assaulted on the street twice and my car has been vandalised outside of my home.

As a way of helping to protect myself it became important for me to carry a press card.

The National Union of Journalists
The National Union of Journalists (NUJ) is the most common press card issuer in the UK, issuing ‘more than half of the cards in circulation’. So back in about 2016 – I joined and received a press card. I was clearly a news gatherer who needed protection – and the NUJ supplied it.

The NUJ are quite clear about the dangers of being a journalist in the rising toxic atmosphere on our streets and has recently launched a new online reporting mechanism to help build up a picture of ‘the intimidation, threats and violence they (journalists) are facing simply for doing their jobs’.

But over time my research had evolved, and the need for me to cover anti-Israel demonstrations on the streets dwindled. As a result I let my last press card expire without renewal. The expiry date? October 2023.

The need for a new application
Everything changed following October 7.

As Jews across the world were still reeling from the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, 100,000s of people took to UK streets waving Palestinian flags. Amongst them were people calling for Jihad, holding up signs of support for Hezbollah, or defending the actions of Hamas.

I went back to the streets. But one evening, as the police tried to control a tense situation – they told me I needed to go and stand with the protestors – forcing me to stand alongside the anti-Israel activists who often threaten me. I did try to explain, but their position was clear. If I did not have a press card to produce, I could either join the protestors or leave. I chose to leave.

It was time for me to reapply. I had done it twice before, so did not give it much thought. I made the application in April 2024 expecting a swift turnaround. This time however, things were going to go very differently.

Hard Rock Singer Makes Bold Political Statement Following Controversial Festival Performance

Hard rock band Disturbed may be best known to some fans for their brooding version of the Simon & Garfunkel classic “The Sound of Silence,” but singer David Draiman is being anything but silent in response to some politically charged statements made from the stage over the weekend at the U.K.’s Glastonbury Festival.

Although he doesn’t mention the artist by name, Draiman is likely referring to rap punk duo Bob Vylan, which led the crowd in chants calling for “death” to the Israeli military during their set.

“ I just wanted to speak my mind a little bit about the events of this past weekend,” Draiman says in a video shared to Instagram. “No one should ever use any stage at any festival anywhere in the world to incite hatred and violence against anyone. I think it's disgusting. I think it's irresponsible and contrary to the whole reason people get together at these festivals to begin with.”

Draiman went on to question the motives of Bob Vylan.

“More importantly, just from a human perspective, what exactly do you really think you're going to achieve here? You know, death to the IDF. Every citizen of the state of Israel has to serve. Every citizen. So you're saying that the majority of world Jews should die, should be killed? That's what you're saying. Good luck with that. Iran saw how easy that wasn't so I'm not sure what you want, what you're trying to achieve other than virtue signaling and instant fame that this selling of Jew hatred has seen to gift everyone with these days.”

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07/01 Links Pt1: Trump claims Israel agreed to conditions for 60-day Gaza ceasefire; Trump Ends the Folly of De-escalation; The myth of Israel’s ‘killing fields’

From Ian:

Seth Frantzman: Israel: Now the Dominant Military Power in the Middle East?

Israel today sits astride the Middle East because of the air power of the Israel Air Force. Israel’s air defense systems are almost among the most integrated and capable in the world. In terms of ground forces, Israel may not appear to be as large as the Egyptian army on paper. However, the reality is that Egypt has not exerted significant power in the region for decades. It focuses more internally or on dealing with its chaotic neighbors, Libya and Sudan.

The Gulf countries together possess impressive armaments, and many of them have spent lavishly on their defense procurement in recent years. The UAE and Bahrain are peace partners with Israel. Saudi Arabia is expected to be a peace partner one day. This leaves the Jewish state with very few adversaries in the region.

In many ways, Israel’s success in building an impressive defense machine is due to the close partnership with the US and the collaboration between US and Israeli defense companies. Israel’s defense exports, for instance, continue to break new records.

The question for policymakers and Israel’s friends and allies is whether regional hegemony will be good for Israel. A more assertive Israel has still become bogged down in a long war in Gaza. Long wars against insurgents are not beneficial for powerful countries; they tend to erode the country’s strength. The US learned this in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. The Soviet Union learned this lesson in Afghanistan in the 1980s, and Napoleon learned it in Spain.

A new sense of regional power could also lead the country not to be as flexible regarding peace talks with Syria or Lebanon. It could lead to a decision to clamp down on the Palestinians rather than work toward two states and peace with Riyadh. This is the choice Israel will face as it feels the future is up for grabs. In addition, nature always abhors a vacuum. Other countries and their influences will pour into the Middle East.

For instance, Turkey is a NATO member and has often been among the harshest critics of Israel’s policies. Ankara is also very close with the Trump administration. Doha helped with the Iranian ceasefire and hosts Hamas. It will also want a say in what comes next in the region.

These are potential challenges for the Jewish state as it weighs its newfound power.

Trump Ends the Folly of De-escalation

Donald Trump’s decision to have American B-2s strike Iranian nuclear facilities wasn’t the beginning of a war. Rather, it was a continuation of what H.R. McMaster describes as a “‘twilight war’ that the Islamic Republic of Iran has waged against the United States, Israel, and its Arab neighbors” since it first took 52 Americans hostage in 1979. McMaster explains that, for too long, the U.S. strategy in this war has been marked by an obsession with de-escalation:
Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden tended to view each of [Iran’s] attacks in isolation, rather than episodes in a long-term campaign of aggression grounded in the Islamic Republic’s foundational anti-American and anti-Israeli ideology. Iranian leaders reinforced U.S. presidents’ reluctance to confront Iranian aggression with false narratives about “moderates” within the government who could counterbalance the hostility of the “revolutionaries” if only U.S. leaders would open the door to conciliation. But these so-called “moderates” were no such thing.

Trump’s decision to strike Iranian nuclear facilities earlier this month was incredibly consequential, degrading and delaying a hostile regime’s path to the most destructive weapon on earth, as well as the missiles designed to deliver it. Those strikes—and Israel’s campaign that preceded them—also decapitated leaders who had blood on their hands from Iran’s proxy wars.

But even more importantly, the Israeli and U.S. military operations directly against the Islamic Republic and its warmaking apparatus reminded officials in Tehran that they cannot antagonize their adversaries in the region with impunity—and reminded officials in Washington that Iran’s theocratic dictatorship cannot be conciliated. “De-escalation” was never a path to peace—it was an approach that perpetuated war on the Iranians’ terms.

Andrew Fox: The myth of Israel’s ‘killing fields’

The report is also suspicious by virtue of what it ignores. Gaza remains the scene of an asymmetrical urban war. It is also a war in which IDF soldiers are confronted by an enemy – Hamas – that is known to use civilians as fodder for its aims. Infamously, it uses hospitals and humanitarian centres as military bases. Yet the Haaretz report, like much of the Western media reporting, treats the IDF as if it is policing a football match in Manchester, rather than navigating the frontline of a war in which soldiers’ lives are constantly at risk.

As someone with firsthand experience of operating firearms and firing warning shots in high-pressure environments, I can tell you what ‘firing toward’ looks like. It is shooting in the air, or far short of a crowd, or well off to the side. It is done to send a warning, not to take a life. Put bluntly, it is crowd control by intimidation. It is not an ideal tactic, and it would not be used if there were better options available. It also has plenty of scope for tragic error. Could a soldier mess it up? Yes, and when this happens, it should be investigated – as the IDF is now doing. That is not the same thing as an order to ‘open fire on civilians’.

What we have here, then, appears to be another one-sided and simplistic report. It has erased all context and difficult but critical details. It is written as though Hamas – the terror group that murdered, raped and kidnapped 1,200 innocent citizens just 20 months ago – does not exist. Nothing, it seems, is allowed to interfere, or complicate, the established narrative that Israel is the source of all evil and suffering in Gaza.

Haaretz is not speaking truth to power. It’s using lazy journalism to land cheap blows against an army doing an incredibly difficult job. It appears to be misleading the public rather than trying to inform it.

Truth is always the first casualty of war. On this front, Israel appears to be facing yet another heavy defeat.

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06/30 Links Pt2: This is an anti-fascist; the Book That Saw October 7 Coming; How Palestine Became the Left’s Omnicause; Europe slams Israel, then buys its weapons

From Ian:

How Israel was turned into the fount of all evil

The conviction that Israel is evil, then, is sustained by several, prominent overlapping arguments: that it is perpetrating a holocaust, that Jews are the bearers of white privilege, and that Israel is no more than an expression of white colonial domination.

These arguments have been germinating in universities and other elite educational institutions for a while. Ideas such as white privilege and Israel being a colonial-settler state have long been taught under the rubric of critical race theory and post-colonial studies. So when students organise anti-Israel protests at universities, they are not ‘rebelling’, as they seem to imagine – they are conforming to what their professors have taught them.

What happens in the university clearly does not stay in the university. Over the past two decades or so, a cadre of graduates has joined our political and cultural elites. They have taken up roles in government, non-governmental organisations, the media and the broader culture industry. Many are all too happy to promote the idea of the Jewish State as exemplifying a malevolent spirit.

That Israel is evil has become the ‘right’ thing to think. Celebrities have been desperate to get in on the act, and proclaim their virtue in opposition to Israel. Superstar environmentalist Greta Thunberg is a prime example. Too old to continue posing as a schoolgirl campaigner against climate change, she can now be found on assorted anti-Israel protests and ventures, including this month’s so-called aid ship to Gaza. Last October she appeared at an anti-Israel rally in Milan, where she proclaimed: ‘If you, as a climate activist, don’t also fight for a free Palestine and an end to colonialism and oppression all over the world, then you should not be able to call yourself a climate activist.’ Obviously she wore a keffiyeh, an Arab headscarf, as an ostentatious symbol of her virtue.

It seems that hatred towards Israel has become a cornerstone of the woke elites’ worldview. No doubt they believe that it is the virtuous pose to strike. That they are on the right side of history. But they’re not. By casting the Jewish State as the epitome of evil, they are perpetuating racial animosity towards Jews in a 21st-century form.

Andrew Pessin: Zohran Mamdani and the Book That Saw October 7 Coming From a Mile Away

The Book That Saw October 7 Coming From a Mile Away: Richard Landes, Can “The Whole World” Be Wrong? Lethal Journalism, Antisemitism, and Global Jihad (Academic Studies Press, 2022) (November, 2023)

When it’s all over, when Israel is gone, the Jews are gone, the world as we thought we knew it is gone, this is the book people will read in order to understand what happened. Landes is a medieval historian, an expert on millennial apocalyptic movements, which gives him a unique perspective on current affairs. This book attempts to bring you into that perspective and, to the degree that it is successful, suddenly everything might look different to you, like the gestalt switch in perceiving the ambiguous image, the beautiful young woman suddenly yielding to the crone. Once seen, however, you can’t unsee it, and you will now see so many current events through its lens.

And it will terrify you.

Or at least that’s its aim.

The book is too deep and wide-ranging to do it justice in a short review, so I will just a highlight a few points, noting only that Landes supports everything with extensive documentation and argument. In short, it aims to turn everything you think you understand about the Jews, Islam, and the West upside-down—because it exposes how "lethal [activist] journalism" inverts reality in the ways it portrays these issues and conflicts, which in turn informs the left-leaning, progressive mindset largely in charge of Western policy-making. In so doing the book argues that we have been profoundly and dangerously misled by the Western mainstream media, which turns out, in the end, to be working in service to a globalist Islamist movement that in fact seeks to destroy the West, including those same media.

So, can “the whole world be wrong”—about Islam and its relation to the West in general, and about the Arab-Israeli conflict in particular that is at the heart of this book (or as I prefer to call it, to highlight its complexity, the Israeli-Palestinian-Jewish-Arab-Muslim Conflict)?

Landes writes:
As a result of a confluence of intellectual trends (postmodernism, postcolonialism, anti-Orientalism …) the role of honor-shame motivations in key [Arab] decision-making in this conflict since the Oslo Accords has been systematically ignored. Indeed the entire ‘Peace Process’ was predicated on the rational, positive-sum assumption that, offered the right deal, the Palestinians will say yes. As a result, scholars and policy makers alike have ignored abundant evidence of a limbic captivity to honor concerns among Arab patriarchal elites ... (191-2)

Brendan O'Neill: This is an anti-fascist

The name we should remember from this weekend is not Bob Vylan. Or Pascal Robinson-Foster, to give the Israelophobic punk who caused such a stink at Glastonbury his real name. No, it’s Yisrael Natan Rosenfeld. For as Bob Vylan was whipping the smug mob of Glasto into a frenzy of violent loathing for the IDF, this young IDF soldier, himself a Brit, was laying down his life for the Jewish people. He was killed in Gaza on Sunday as he did battle with that army of anti-Semites, Hamas. Now that’s anti-fascism.

Natan – as he was known – was 20 years old. He was born in London and moved to Israel 11 years ago. He was a sergeant in the 601st Combat Engineering Battalion of the IDF. He was killed by an explosive device in northern Gaza. His sister’s boyfriend, also an IDF soldier, died in combat during Hamas’s pogrom of 7 October 2023. Natan’s father paid tribute to him this morning. He was fighting ‘for his parents, his family, his people’, he said. ‘I feel he has a place in history.’

This is the Briton we should be talking about – not the sozzled, moneyed brats of Glastonbury who got a sick thrill from chanting ‘Death, death to the IDF’, but this fresh-faced warrior against Islamofascism. Not that Bob Vylan faux-punk who hollered for the death of the Jewish State’s soldiers, but this soldier of the Jewish State, this British Jew just out of his teens, who ventured into enemy territory to fight the Islamists who butchered so many of his people. Not the fake anti-fascists of Britain’s wet, vain left, but this real anti-fascist who put his life on the line for the Jewish homeland.

That Natan died just hours after thousands of his one-time compatriots chanted ‘Death, death to the IDF’ is chilling in the extreme. One can only hope that in his final few hours he did not see any clips of these privileged, hateful Gentiles in the country of his birth dreaming of the death of Jews like him. How betrayed he would have felt. To look from Natan’s smiling face to the malicious gurning of that Glasto mob is to behold the Two Britains: one brave, optimistic and willing to fight for what it believes in, the other indolent, self-regarding and only able to derive meaning through its hatred of others.

Here’s what horrifies me. Two groups of people were thinking ‘Death to the IDF’ on Saturday – the keffiyeh classes at Glastonbury and the barbarous militants who planted the device that ended Natan’s precious life. Britain’s middle classes were saying out loud what that neo-fascist militia was thinking as it laid its deadly trap for the soldiers of the Jewish nation. There was a meeting of minds, a most sickening meeting of minds, between the fashionably Israelophobic of the West and the murderously Israelophobic of Hamas. ‘Death, death to the IDF’, roared affluent Britons; ‘Okay’, replied Hamas.

‘We have to be united’: Father’s plea at funeral for UK-born IDF soldier killed in Gaza

IDF soldier Sgt. Yisrael Natan Rosenfeld, 20, who was killed during fighting in northern Gaza, was laid to rest at the Ra’anana cemetery on Monday.

According to an initial IDF probe, Rosenfeld, who was known as Natan, a member of the 601st Combat Engineering Battalion, was killed by an explosive device during operations in the Kafr Jabalia area.

Thousands of people joined the funeral procession, holding Israeli flags and paying their respects to Rosenfeld before he was buried.

In a teary eulogy, Rosenfeld’s father, Avi, said: “It’s so hard to stand here, but I am proud of you. You’re a hero.”

“Natan said we have to stay together,” he said. “He said that he is fighting in Gaza because we have hostages that must return home,” he added.

Avi delivered a message of unity to the country, declaring that “it’s not the time to argue.”

“It’s not the time to have arguments in the Knesset or on the streets. Think of our soldiers: they fight every day, they give their lives every second. Be together, give them the respect, the support. We have to be together, united,” he said.

“We suffered the Holocaust, the 7th of October, all the families of the soldiers who have fallen, and all the hostages who are now dead or are still there; the suffering is beyond belief. Hashem, it’s enough! The people of Israel are good people. Hashem save us, because it’s only You,” Avi stated.

“As far as Sam and I are concerned, our boy is still with us,” he added.

In her eulogy, his mother, Samantha, said: “Natan, we hope you are the last sacrifice anyone should have to pay for the price of our land and our freedom. There is no religious, secular, or Haredi person in the army; we are all one people, with one heart. We need to come together and put aside our differences. You shall not die in vain.”

“I can’t actually quite believe that I’m standing here at your funeral. It’s really quite unbelievable in your 20 years, how much you’ve been able to achieve,” she said.

Athalia, his younger sister, said she was “so proud” when Rosenfeld joined the army.

“I always envied you for everything. You were happy and surrounded by my friends. Since you enlisted, I sent you messages every day telling you to take care of yourself. One day, I stopped because I realized you would be OK. I didn’t think it was possible that you wouldn’t be OK,” she said, adding she wished she could have done something to stop him from returning to his service.

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