From Ian:
Melanie Phillips:
The Jewish fifth columnists
This movement has made a fetish of these Jewish fifth columnists. They include politicians like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.); talking heads like journalist Peter Beinart; political operatives like former Obama administration foreign-policy adviser Ben Rhodes and J Street founder Jeremy Ben-Ami; left-wing activist groups like IfNotNow and Jewish Voice for Peace; nongovernmental organization stalwarts like Human Rights Watch’s former executive director Kenneth Roth; and others.
Kerstein calls such people, who enjoy high social, economic, cultural or political status, “Jews of Privilege.” Such Jews, he writes, have always strongly disliked and often hated Zionism, feared its potential impact on their chances of assimilation and the preservation of their privilege, and have felt little or no solidarity with other Jews.
Kerstein gratifyingly skewers such people. He quotes journalist Ezra Klein sanitizing the Muslim fanatic Mamdani as being “thoroughly if banally liberal.”
Klein, writes Kerstein, has endorsed the ultimate conviction of the “Jews of Privilege” that only minority status is moral, only powerlessness is redemption, and that multi-ethnic democracy guarantees the safety of Diaspora Jewry.
But, of course, the past three years in Klein’s Western multi-ethnic nirvana have been a nightmare for Diaspora Jews. As Kerstein witheringly writes, the “Jews of Privilege” are facing demographic collapse while the Jews of Zionism are burgeoning in a state that has proved itself “remarkably resilient and successful.”
Kerstein’s account is all the more powerful because he himself originally shared these anti-Zionist views. Although he didn’t come from a privileged background, he was alienated from his Jewish identity and, as a teenager, believed that Israel had no right to exist. Much of his book is an account of how his personal voyage of the soul led him to move to Israel, discover the complexity of the Middle East—and find himself as a Jew.
Indeed, the nature of Jewishness is perhaps the most significant and least understood element in anti-Zionism. Anti-Zionist Jews want to detach Zionism from Judaism to uphold what they refer to as “Jewish values.”
What they’re actually doing is swinging a wrecking ball at those values.
For Judaism consists of a fusion of three elements: the religion, the people and the land. Judaism holds that the Jewish people were given a divine mission to establish a particular society in “Zion,” the land of Israel.
While Jews don’t need to prove their Jewishness through religious observance, living in Israel or even just supporting it, detaching the land from Judaism is to dismember it. Anti-Zionism is an attack on Judaism itself.
Anti-Zionist Jews want to reframe Jewish values—the most particularist set of principles on earth—as universalist. This inevitably privileges the values and interests of non-Jews over those of the Jews.
This is because, writes Kerstein, anti-Zionist Jews have decided that it’s impossible for the “vast and kind” non-Jewish world to be wrong and the Jews to be right. And the outcome of that attitude is the belief that Israel must be dismantled and the Palestinian Arabs granted domination over everyone else.
Kerstein has performed a vital service in holding such people to account. Jewish community leaders refuse to do so because they are terrified of disunity and of washing dirty linen in public.
Undesirable though that is, there’s worse. We are living through an unprecedented cultural emergency for Jews and for the West in which they live.
While it’s vital not to lose focus on the battle against those who are out to destroy the Jewish people, it’s suicidally reckless to turn a blind eye to those Jews who, in their abysmal ignorance and pathological confusion or worse over their Jewish identity, are assisting them in their infernal aim.
Inside NAZA’s Activist Network and Its Calls to “End Zionism”
NAZA, the documentary film that won Venice’s Special Jury Prize in September, grew from a reporting network whose editors and writers have publicly advocated ending Zionism and rejecting Israel’s nature as a Jewish state, according to a new Jewish Onliner investigation.
The documentary portrays Israeli military operations in Gaza as a system of “calculated mass killing.” Produced by The Guardian and JW Films, it draws on reporting published by +972 Magazine, Local Call and The Guardian between 2023 and 2025. These institutional connections place the film within an openly activist media network, parts of which pursue political goals extending far beyond the documentary’s stated focus on Israel’s military conduct in Gaza.
A Local Call Editor Explicitly Demanded an End to Zionism
One of the clearest statements came from Orly Noy, an editor at Local Call, the Hebrew-language publication whose reporting helped underpin NAZA. In a September 2025 essay published by +972, Noy wrote:
“Zionism, in all its forms, cannot be cleansed of the stain of this crime. It must be brought to an end.”
She demanded a process of “denazification” across Israeli society and rejected the country’s combined Jewish and democratic identity. Her position explicitly targeted Zionism itself, not simply the government in power.
The Guardian Published Calls for the “End of Zionism”
In an August 5, 2011 column, David Hearst, then a Guardian foreign editorial writer, envisioned “The end of Zionism, no less.”
An April 24, 2024 essay by Guardian US columnist Naomi Klein called Zionism a “false idol” and declared: “So tonight we say: it ends here.”
In July 2024, the newspaper published Ahmed Moor’s essay calling for the “end of Zionism.”
The newspaper’s involvement in NAZA went beyond commentary: it produced the film, drawing on reporting by The Guardian, +972 and Local Call.
David Harsanyi:
America owes Mahmoud Khalil nothing
Pro-terrorist activist Mahmoud Khalil was asked by CNN the other day if he would condemn Hamas. He, of course, would not, calling the question “silly” and “disingenuous.” It is not “black and white,” he whined.
Even if you oppose Israel’s reaction to the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre, the answer is still black and white for any person with a conscience. Certainly, it should be for any person who wants to become a naturalized citizen of the United States. After all, Hamas is designated by the State Department as a terrorist organization for, among other things, murdering Americans.
Stay informed.Stay ahead.
But the fact that Khalil can’t condemn Hamas — and anyone paying attention understands that he supports the terrorist army — not only tells us that he deserves to be deported but also that it’s imperative we deport him.
During the 1960s and 1970s, immigration officials grilled newcomers to the U.S. and elsewhere about their affiliations with communist parties. Why would we import people who want to destroy our system? Newcomers were, and still are, compelled to disavow associations with illiberal movements, violent groups, and ideologies. They were also required to promise not to engage in any subversive or revolutionary activity.
Well, Khalil’s entire job as an “activist” is to engage in subversive or revolutionary activity.
Khalil is an Algerian, incidentally, not a Palestinian, though he is a champion of Palestinianism, one of the most nihilistic, bigoted, violent, anti-Western ideologies of the age. There’s no anti-American or Marxist protest or riot anywhere in the world these days where Palestinian flags are not prominent.
The French, of course, don’t need much impetus to riot. But protests that began over a lack of school funding a few weeks ago have now escalated into increasingly destructive and violent riots across France, clearly fueled in part by Marxist pro-Palestinian elements. The red-green alliance between Islamists and communists isn’t new — it’s just more popular than ever. France has over 5 million Muslims.
What you see happening on the streets of Paris is exactly what Khalil hopes to see in the U.S. We saw as much when he was the lead “negotiator” for Columbia University Apartheid Divest, which rioted at the school in 2025. The group’s goal is to fight for the “total eradication of Western civilization,” “global intifada,” and the “armed resistance” of Hamas. That doesn’t sound very American.
Khalil’s friend, Mohsen Mahdawi, another leader of CUAD fighting against deportation, reportedly has a propensity to make Hamas-like statements, such as “I like to kill Jews,” “soon, very soon, we will annihilate the Jews,” and that “servants of the Jews or the Americans” will have their heads “cut off.” Would we give citizenship to a foreigner who said, “I like to kill blacks” or “I like to kill Christians”? I hope not.
Khalil is being deported for lying on his application, though he was initially picked up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers for threatening U.S. foreign policy. These deportations should not be treated as a matter of botched paperwork but as a matter of national security.
From Ian:
Andrew Roberts:
I documented the crimes of October 7. Too many still believe the lies of Hamas
As the Red Army closed in on Auschwitz, the Nazis blew up the crematoria to hide the atrocities they had committed. On Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas did the opposite. Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar ordered his fighters to film their killing and broadcast it to spread terror. With GoPro cameras strapped to their chests, they filmed themselves gleefully slaughtering, burning, and raping Israeli citizens, young and old, and uploaded the footage in real time.
In three decades writing about war, I have rarely encountered an atrocity documented in such detail. The 7 October Parliamentary Commission Report which I chaired, and the evidence that underpins it, runs to more than 300 pages. Yet the same organization that broadcast its own atrocities in real time began denying the specifics within hours. Hamas leader Khalil al-Hayya told the BBC that Hamas never targeted women and children, and called footage of terrified families Israel's invention.
These same men now lead Hamas's negotiations, and their assurances sit at the heart of the diplomatic process. A movement instructed to showcase mass murder, not conceal it, cannot expect its word to be trusted - least of all on disarmament. Disarmament cannot depend on assurances. It must be verified: inspectors must have access to every depot and tunnel, a timetable must be published, and each missed checkpoint must trigger consequences, not renewed negotiation.
Hamas leaders have vowed to repeat Oct. 7 "again and again" until Israel is destroyed. Those are not the words of a movement reconciled to peace, but of one waiting for its next opportunity. Peace does not require trusting Hamas; it requires ensuring Hamas no longer has the means to break it.
Bret Stephens:
When Criticism of Israel Goes Off the Rails
Zealous criticism of Israel goes off the rails when it somehow imagines, or pretends, that blame for the crises in the Holy Land falls on one side alone and that Israel's security challenges are either a product of its imagination or payback for its own policies.
Israel came into existence with its enemies avowing its extermination, and nearly eight decades later those intentions remain unchanged.
The experience of Israelis in this century is that every time they have vacated territory, whether in southern Lebanon in 2000 or Gaza in 2005, they have gained neither international grace nor physical security.
Instead, their retreats created staging grounds for the kind of horror that so many Israelis experienced firsthand on and after Oct. 7 - horrors that many of the world's so-called humanitarians and justice-seekers chose to celebrate, downplay or flat-out deny.
Constant critics of Israel might try to remember that Israelis aren't simply hallucinating their own peril.
Weaponizing the charge of genocide fuels an increasingly dangerous antisemitism
Genocide, the intentional annihilation of a group of people, is the gravest of crimes. As malicious actors weaponize the term and endanger Jews everywhere, meticulous use of the charge is more essential than ever.
We are honored to serve as the current and former chairs of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, an institution memorializing history’s most well-documented genocide: Nazi Germany and its collaborators’ attempt to systematically murder every Jewish man, woman and child in Europe. They almost succeeded. Two-thirds of European Jews – 6 million – were killed. The global Jewish population has yet to recover, with fewer Jews alive today than in 1939, when World War II began.
Holocaust survivors fervently hoped antisemitism would wither when Germany was defeated and its crimes exposed. Yet, they knew from centuries of persecutions long before the Nazis, this ancient hatred is impossible to eradicate. Even so, after World War II, antisemitism became socially unacceptable. The shocking reactions from many quarters to Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel, three years ago, show this is no longer the case.
On that day, Hamas terrorists invaded Israel intending to murder as many Jewish people as possible, bringing about the deadliest day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust. As Israel defends itself, we reiterate our wholehearted conviction that Israel has not committed genocide, reflecting the United States government’s consistent and prevailing view.
Rescuers and police escort elderly woman and others after synagogue terror attack in Manchester.
At the same time, we cannot forget the terrible tragedy many innocent Gazans have experienced as a result of the war. The loss of tens of thousands, including many children, is horrific.
As we mourn so many innocent lives lost, we cannot ignore that Hamas puts civilians in harm’s way as a central part of its strategy to demonize Israel. Despite this deadly strategy, Israel has made efforts to warn civilians when to evacuate, provide food and relief, and facilitate vaccine distribution.
Israel, like any country, is not exempt from criticism. And yet, whether out of ignorance or malice, people from all walks of life, often with little knowledge or legal expertise, including in the specific definition of genocide, continually wield the term. Others weaponize it to delegitimize the world’s only Jewish state. Regardless of their intention, the impact is a terrifying eruption of antisemitism and a more dangerous world for Jewish people everywhere.
Furthermore, state actors like Iran, Qatar, China and Russia spread antisemitic and anti-Israel conspiracy theories and Holocaust denial to stir hatred of Jews and sow chaos in democracies. They are succeeding. Antisemitism is no longer lurking at society’s fringes. It is marching openly through its institutions. Violent antisemitism is at levels not seen since the Holocaust. From Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue to Bondi Beach in Australia, to Manchester, England, and far too many other places, Jews are under deadly attack. And every day, Jews face relentless harassment and threats on streets, campuses and online.
Talk about "Genocide" Should Start with Israel's Murdered Mothers and Children
When I heard that students were planning a pro-Palestinian march through London on the third anniversary of the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, I thought how grotesquely insensitive is it possible to be? What is wrong with people?
You want genocide? Young women at the Nova peace festival, half-naked, strung up from trees the better to defile them. Twin baby boys, their mother slaughtered in the kitchen, their father riddled with bullets; the orphaned babies used as bait for 14 hours, little Guy and Roi, 10 months old, left to scream so they would lure neighbors to rescue them and those brave souls were then picked off by the terrorists lying in wait. Killing parents in front of their sobbing children, then setting the house on fire so those children are burnt alive.
Here we are, three years on from one of the darkest days in history, and it's Jews - not Islamists - who are either fleeing the UK or living in fear. Their children attend heavily fortified schools and worship in high-security synagogues.
I am not Jewish, but I believe the Jews deserve and need a homeland. I hate their enemies because they are our enemies. So that makes me a Zionist. If you have any sense of what history teaches us, you should be a Zionist too. No more "Yes, buts." Today, Oct. 7, of all days, let us stand with our Jewish brothers and sisters.
From Ian:
Clifford D. May:
Who still fights the war on terror?
Addressing Congress nine days after Sept. 11, President George W. Bush declared: “Our war on terror begins with al-Qaeda, but it does not end there.” He added: “It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated.”
A dozen years later, President Barack Obama announced that what had become known as the global war on terror “like all wars, must end. That’s what history advises.”
History doesn’t actually advise, though it can reveal patterns—and Obama drew the wrong one. Wars against an enemy driven by an ideology of conquest rarely end until that enemy is decisively defeated or abandons its demands.
Since 2001, some Islamist terrorist organizations have been diminished by the United States and its partners. But not one has surrendered. Nor have any forsworn what they call the jihad—the holy war that began in the seventh century and for more than a millennium drove the expansion of vast empires.
As for the Islamic Republic of Iran—long described by the U.S. State Department as the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism—it, too, is committed to jihad. Only three years ago, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the late supreme leader, said plainly that “Death to America!” should be understood as “not just a slogan; it is a policy.”
His challenge was to develop the capabilities necessary to implement that policy. If you understand that, you grasp why U.S. President Donald Trump, unlike his predecessors, decided to take concrete steps to end Tehran’s nuclear-weapons development.
The U.S. military and the Treasury Department have been depriving Iran’s rulers of the oil revenue they need to rebuild a missile arsenal that would shield their nuclear-weapons program, support their foreign terrorist proxies and utilize the Strait of Hormuz to hold the global economy hostage.
Meanwhile, more good news: Within a few days of one another, three attempted terrorist attacks—one in the Middle East, one in Europe and one in the United States—were foiled.
Jonathan Tobin:
In Michigan, the issue is erasing Jewish interests, not the Jewish vote
Sen. Elissa Slotkin’s (D-Mich.) decision to campaign on behalf of Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic candidate for Senate in her state, was, she says, a function of a desire to help someone who would be on what she calls “Team Fight” rather than “Team Flight.” By that, she meant someone who would battle President Donald Trump alongside her in the U.S. Senate, rather than seek compromises with the Republican administration like her more moderate colleague Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.).
In taking this stand, she has fallen in line with the rest of her party in backing El-Sayed. But in framing the question as one of “fight” or “flight,” she was deliberately avoiding the historic implications of her choice. One more Democrat in the Senate could give her party control of both houses of Congress, and make it easier for them to impeach and try Trump, regardless of the partisan nature of such a procedure.
Given that even under those circumstances, a conviction and his ouster from office would likely be impossible, the stakes won’t involve the future of the republic as much as handing Democrats the sinecures and power that come from being in the majority.
But electing an open antisemite like El-Sayed would be truly momentous not just for the Jewish community, of which Slotkin is a member, but for its implications for the future of her party and the nation. From that perspective, characterizing the decision as one of “fight” or “flight” is actually quite apt. But the truth is that what she and a host of other Jewish Democrats, including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, are doing is engaging in “flight” rather than fighting to hold the line against antisemitism inside her party at a time when it is surging around the globe.
‘No such thing as Jewish voters?’
What made her decision to join forces with El-Sayed particularly interesting was revealed during a joint interview with him on the MS NOW cable-TV channel.
In it, Slotkin didn’t just play the loyal Democratic soldier swallowing the indignity of endorsing a man who seeks to drive the overwhelming majority of American Jews out of the public square. In doing so, she is supporting someone who embodies the illiberal red-green alliance of leftists and Islamists that is taking control of liberal parties around the world.
When asked about the fact that most Michigan Jews, including the majority who are loyal Democrats and politically liberal, simply won’t go along with electing an antisemite, Slotkin’s reply was succinct.
She said, “There’s no such thing as the Jewish voters, just like there’s no such thing as the Muslim voters or the black voters. People have their own views, and the things that they prioritize are going to drive their vote.”
In a sense, she’s right. Citizens vote as individuals and not as part of groups. And, indeed, most American Jews have not voted in lockstep on issues like Israel, even if the majority of them are supporters of the Jewish state. That is especially true of Jewish Democrats, who have always placed Israel’s security below many domestic concerns, whether it was health-care costs or legalized abortion. It’s something that has particularly frustrated Trump, whose pro-Israel policies and efforts to fight antisemitism in education have not been rewarded by most Jewish voters.
To some extent, that’s also true of other groups, like Muslims and African-Americans, though both of those constituencies have been more likely to treat issues relating to their community’s safety as a priority. By contrast, liberal Jews tend to treat universal concerns as more important than those that personally concern them. As writer Cynthia Ozick famously said, “Universalism is the ultimate Jewish parochialism.”
Tolerating antisemitism
But as Jews in Michigan and elsewhere have come to learn in the three years since the Oct. 7 Hamas-led Palestinian Arab terror attacks on Israeli communities incited an unprecedented increase in antisemitism, El-Sayed’s candidacy is not, strictly speaking, about voters’ views about the Jewish state. It’s about their willingness to tolerate the mainstreaming of Jew-hatred here in the United States.
So, when Slotkin seeks to deny that there is such a thing as “Jewish voters,” she’s signaling something very different from the fact that not all Jews cast votes solely on the basis of a candidate’s views on Israel. Along with other Democrats, both Jewish and non-Jewish, she is seeking to establish something far more important.
'Not yet out of danger': Israeli envoy to US shares update on son following terror attack
Israel ambassador to the US Yechiel Leiter, whose son Neria was seriously wounded during a car-ramming terrorist attack in September, said Wednesday that his son “has severe head injuries, but in recent days he has begun breathing on his own.”
“He remains unconscious,” Leiter added in a video recorded for the Evangelical Christian community’s memorial ceremony honoring the victims of October 7, held in Jerusalem.
In an additional statement shared by the ambassador, the family clarified that despite several encouraging signs, Neria remains in very serious condition and is not yet out of danger.
The Leiter family said Neria is receiving the best possible medical care in the intensive care unit at Shaare Zedek Medical Center in Jerusalem. The family thanked the medical staff and the public for their prayers and immense support and asked people to continue praying for the recovery of Neria Dov ben Chana.
Seriously wounded in terror attack
Neria Leiter, an IDF reservist and American citizen, was seriously wounded in a terrorist attack at the Bell checkpoint on Route 443.
He underwent several hours of brain surgery at Shaare Zedek Medical Center, where his family later received a visit from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, The Jerusalem Post previously reported.
The family also received numerous messages of support on X from Israeli leaders, including President Isaac Herzog, Defense Minister Israel Katz, and US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee.
From bedside of his son on life support from terror attack, Israeli envoy to US decries Mamdani’s ‘dangerous lies’
Yechiel Leiter, Israeli ambassador to the United States, was so put off by the statement that New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani released on the third anniversary of Oct. 7 that the envoy decried it from the hospital in Israel, where he is at the bedside of his son, who is on life support after a Palestinian terrorist hit him with a car.
“It’s actually hard to find a sentence in Mamdani’s post that isn’t a lie,” Leiter stated.
“Paying lip service to the victims of Oct. 7 just to spread blood libels about Israel might play nicely to the red-green/communist-Islamist alliance that he promotes in the United States, but those of us who know better see his perverted language for what it is,” the Israeli envoy stated. “This man is a defender of Palestinian terrorism, a promoter of antisemitism and an advocate of anti-Americanism.”
Even on the anniversary of the bloodiest day for Jews since the Holocaust, the anti-Israel mayor “can’t help but attack the Jewish state with absurd accusations and outright propaganda,” according to the Israeli envoy.
“The only attempted genocide in this conflict was perpetrated by the barbarians he supports, Hamas, who butchered, raped and murdered in the most horrific ways imaginable,” Leiter stated. “There is no genocide, ethnic cleansing or famine in Gaza. Hamas embeds itself among, behind and beneath the people of Gaza, knowing that the IDF will not, ever, intentionally target civilians. It robs its own people of the humanitarian aid that Israel has facilitated into Gaza since the war began.”
Leiter called the mayor, who campaigned on having the Israeli prime minister arrested, an ally of Hamas, a U.S.-designated terror organization since 1997.
“Hamas knows that its allies, including Zohran Mamdani, will regurgitate its lies, demonizing Israel and endangering Jews everywhere,” the Israeli envoy stated. “Israel and its allies will not be deterred from defending civilization against terrorist savagery. Those of us who envision a peaceful and prosperous Middle East will root out the evil that is Islamic terrorism and build a better future for all, Jew and Arab alike.”
From Ian:
How will we remember October 7?
Three years later and at times October 7 still feels like yesterday.
For the victims and their families time has stood still, stuck in the moment of the last hug, smile and time they heard the sound of their voices. For the survivors and for the first responders who answered the call for help that morning, time has not moved forward either. Trauma from the scenes of death and destruction still haunt their minds eye. But the calendar still says three years has past since that infamous day.
Across Israel and the Jewish world, we are still trying to make sense of what happened. Many conversations focus on how such a catastrophe could have befallen the Jewish state, defended by one of the strongest armies in the world. Others focus on how our enemies still seek our annihilation. Then there are the quieter conversations focused on stories of sacrifice, selflessness and survival that are intertwined with the horrors of the day.
Our Jewish tradition commands us to remember. It has been woven into our national consciousness. We remember slavery in Egypt. We mourn the destruction of the Temples. We recall attempted systematic extermination of our ancestors, both recent and ancient. But with each tragedy we cling to the hope that the suffering also paves way for moments of jubilee. The story of slavery is juxtaposed to the birth of the Nation of Israel. The desecration and destruction of both Holy Temples in Jerusalem has served as inspiration for millennia of prayer and hope of rebirth. Even the attempts to annihilate the Jewish people are interconnected to our return to our ancestral Homeland. It's like the age old Jewish joke, they came tried to destroy us, G-d saved us, let's eat.
So how will we remember October 7?
We do not have to look very far for an answer.
Even before Israel’s leadership fully grasped the magnitude of what was happening that morning, hundreds of United Hatzalah volunteers had already made a decision. They were going south.
There was no grand order telling them to go. For many, the decision was intensely personal. They heard the call for help and understood that people were in danger. They put on their orange vests, grabbed their medic bags and drove toward the gunfire.
By the end of that first day, more than 1,500 United Hatzalah volunteers were engaged in treating and evacuating the wounded.
Three years later, United Hatzalah founder and president Eli Beer retraced the steps taken by some of those volunteers. We returned to the Nova festival grounds and to communities along the Gaza border whose names were once familiar only to those who lived there, but are now etched into our national story.
At every stop, another story surfaced.
Gil Troy:
In Israel, even fear and grief can become courage, resilience and joy
The image of a plane plummeting toward certain doom, then soaring up thanks to gutsy Israelis and a courageous pilot, captures the whiplash emotions we all experienced this Sukkot. Or, as the comedienne Dana Perry Segal dryly put it, “in Israel, we just call this Wednesday.”
Many of us olim – immigrants to Israel – particularly appreciate Sukkot in our restored old-new homeland. The rabbis called it Z’man Simchateinu – our joyous season. But, in the Diaspora, it often feels like Z’man Schikateinu – our burnout moment. After skipping work or school for the High Holy Days, Sukkot – with four more down days – can be burdensome.
In Israel, with schools out, glorious weather, sukkahs popping up like mushrooms everywhere, it’s a delight. Last Wednesday, many Israelis were sitting in their sukkahs when they heard this breathtaking story about an attempted kamikaze suicide bombing with 174 passengers flying to Israel, including 27 children.
One friend rushed out of her Sukkah to get Psalms to pray for everyone’s safety. By the time she returned, she heard the news that dazzled the world.
Naturally, through tears of joy, prayers of thanksgiving, and happy high-fives, we Israelis wondered – again – “why do so many hate us,” “what kind of people would want to kill so many of us just flying home from vacation,” and “boy, that was too close a call.”
When courage rises in moments of terror
Our pride in the Israeli passengers who responded instantly – as well as the plucky pilot – commingled with despair that so many of our fellow citizens need that instinct to react, the grit to try, and the fighting skills required to subdue a knife-wielding co-pilot in seconds, then stabilize the plane.
And as we entered a searing week of October 7 commemorations, we linked those fighting instincts that saved the plane to the same instincts that kicked in for so many heroes who saved the country three years ago when Hamas barbarians invaded – often at the cost of their lives.
Fortunately, my wife and I had tickets that evening for the perfect event matching those mixed emotions: “Comedy for Koby.” This sold-out Jerusalem Theatre performance marked the 25th anniversary of the Koby Mandell Foundation.
The Foundation was founded by Rabbi Seth and Sherri Mandell in 2001, after Palestinian terrorists brutally murdered their beloved 13-year-old son Koby and his friend Yosef Ishran.
Seeing how emotionally isolated their other kids were, even at summer camps that lovingly embraced them, the Mandells launched this marvelous effort to help families suffering from these kinds of heartbreaking losses.
Since 2001, they have hugged, cried with, processed with, and laughed with 28,742 recovering family members from 9,500 families – with 11,233 siblings, parents, widows and widowers participating in 140 healing retreats, and 13,742 campers being bolstered at Camp Koby & Yosef.
Eliana Mandell Braner, Koby’s sister, now directing the foundation, noted that before October 7, they were helping 750 families; it’s now 2,500 families.
Opening the evening, Sherri Mandell recalled how, after the horror, “the Jewish people became our Sukkah, the place where we could feel safe.”
Afterward, this inspirational powerhouse told me that in 2001, many Israelis were in denial about the trauma caused by Palestinian terrorism. They – and the massive extended family they’ve raised since – were trailblazers in developing what Rabbi Seth Mandell calls “a community of resilience.”
So there we were, 760 of us, mourning Koby and Yosef, empathizing with the saved-but-obviously-rattled passengers and crew, bracing for the grief waves already hitting us as we approached Simchat Torah and the third anniversary of October 7.
Then, in the spirit of Israel, capturing the whiplash many of us experienced when dancing around the Torahs last Friday night hours after visiting gravesites, came five magical, uplifting words: “Are we ready to laugh?”
Phyllis Chesler:
Thinking about Oct. 7 from Geula Cohen’s point of view
Israel needs heroes and has always had them in abundance. We still do.
Once, I was “chosen” by one of Israel’s heroes, none other than Geula Cohen, who took me on a tour of Judea and Samaria way back in 1980. I now think that a mutual friend might have told her that I was “one of hers.”
I doubt that I would have had the sheer physical courage and reckless daring to break out of jail—not once, but twice—as membership in the Jewish underground fighting organization Lechi in the 1940s demanded. Geula’s story as a member of Lechi, translated into English, is free and available online. Lechi fought the British, who were, at the time, murdering Jews and supporting Arabs in their murder of Jews in Mandatory Palestine. The British tortured, jailed and hanged members of the underground, even exiling them to Africa.
The Jewish underground exacted “measure for measure.” After they, too, tortured a British soldier to death, that practice among the British stopped, but the jailing and hanging did not.
Geula wrote, “For every murderous British law the Hebrew underground will enact an opposite and equally cruel law of its own. There will be quick justice and no mercy for all British criminals. The foreign regime has decided that prima facie evidence is no longer necessary in order to condemn a man to death. We have decided the same! The foreign regime has decided that membership in an enemy organization is punishable by death. We have decided the same!”
When the British put her on trial, here’s what she said in the courtroom: “The accused does not recognize the authority of the court. I am a Hebrew fighter of the Freedom Fighters of Israel … you are intruders subjugating our homeland. We have our own set of emergency regulations: Any British soldier in this land is our enemy, and there is only one sentence that can be given him—death.”
Yes, I know some might think this sounds just like a Palestinian terrorist, but Geula was opposed to real colonial oppression. The Arabs have fabricated a new narrative, based on the Big Lie, claiming they are fighting the Jews who “colonized” their country—even though the Arabs have never actually had a country called “Palestine.”
Geula was one of the two voices of the Jewish underground radio broadcasts. I learned that Lechi had an anthem: “Hayyelim Almonim” (“The Anonymous Soldiers”). However, Geula named each precious person, and she knew most, if not all, of them.
At the time, Britain was also turning back and shooting down the “illegal” ships that were trying to bring European Jews to Palestine during and after the Holocaust. Britain also refused visas to Jewish survivors. It was always a heartless colonial power.
According to Geula, British official “Lord Moyne in Cairo refused one million Jews. ‘What would I do with them?’ He ordered the sinking of Jewish refugee ships. Two members of Lechi assassinated him—and were hanged.”
From Ian:
Jpost Editorial:
Three years later, October 7 is still not in the past for Israelis
Life after October 7 is more about learning to live with what happened
For much of the country, then, the past three years have been less about moving on from October 7 than about living with its consequences – and with the questions it left behind.
But for many Israelis, October 7 is not simply something they have been living with. They are still living it.
For former hostages, freedom itself remains a daily reminder of what was taken from them. Emily Damari, abducted and wounded from her home in Kfar Aza, has spoken about how captivity changed her relationship with the most ordinary parts of life.
“Today, I open the fridge, and I say thank you,” Damari said. “I drink cold water, and I say thank you.”
Eli Sharabi spent 491 days in captivity after being taken from Kibbutz Be’eri. His wife, Lianne, and their daughters, Noiya and Yahel, were murdered on October 7. His brother Yossi was taken hostage and died in Gaza. After his release, Sharabi said he had learned in captivity “how precious every moment and every choice can be.”
“I choose life,” he said. “I choose to keep living fully, while carrying Lianne, Noiya, Yahel and Yossi with me in everything I do.”
For Hagar Brodutch, who was abducted with her three children and a neighbor’s daughter, returning to life has been a more complicated process than the word “freedom” might suggest. She has described the immense daily struggle, particularly for children, and recently began taking pastry-baking classes as a way to build something new.
“This is about much more than learning how to bake,” she said. “It is about finding a new path, creating something with my own hands, and slowly building a future.”
Then there are those for whom there can be no return to the life they had before October 7.
Michal Negri’s son, Maj. (res.) Roee Negri, 28, was killed fighting Hamas terrorists in Kibbutz Be’eri after spending the day rescuing civilians.
How can Israelis hold their government accountable after October 7?
In an interview with The Jerusalem Post, Negri said that three years had done little to diminish the questions raised that morning. Above all, she wants those responsible for the failures leading up to October 7 to be held accountable through a state commission of inquiry.
“Everyone that was in the government, in any position of management, has to take responsibility and be inquired into, so we will be sure that it will never happen again,” she said.
“How can you be sure that it will not happen again if you don’t inquire and ask questions?”
That question is larger than one bereaved mother.
Israel has changed dramatically since October 7, with the country’s political and defense establishments learning painful lessons about its enemies, its defenses and its own institutions. But lessons must be implemented, failures examined, decisions questioned – and responsibility determined.
Three years later, Israel still has no state commission of inquiry into the worst national disaster in its history.
That means October 7 remains unfinished business. For many Israelis, October 7 is not three years ago – it is both the past and the present.
Ahead of Israel’s national elections, Israelis must remember that our enemies aren’t within, but those seeking to destroy us. May the memory of those killed on October 7, 2023, and since, be blessed.
Three years since October 7: Why Zionism is more relevant than ever
ZIONISM DID not promise that Jews would not be attacked. It sought to ensure that when they were attacked, they would not be helpless.
This is perhaps the deepest expression of the meaning of Jewish sovereignty. When communities in Israel were attacked, there was no need to wait for the mercy of a foreign ruler, hope that another government would send forces to defend the Jews, or rely on the willingness of the international community to intervene.
The State of Israel, despite the terrible failure of that morning, was able to mobilize hundreds of thousands of soldiers and reservists, fight back, and defend its citizens. For centuries, that possibility was simply unavailable to the Jewish people.
Yet October 7 and the period that followed also raised another question concerning the status of Jews in the Western world. Many Jews, both in Israel and in the Diaspora, were shocked not only by the scale of the attack but also by the responses to it.
At some of the most prestigious universities in the West, the massacre was quickly translated into familiar ideological frameworks of “oppressors” and “oppressed,” “colonialists” and “indigenous peoples.” Instead of beginning with the facts and the moral responsibility of those who carried out the massacre, some rushed to interpret the events through theoretical frameworks in which the identities of victim and aggressor are almost predetermined.
The US congressional hearing in which the presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and MIT were required to answer questions concerning calls for the genocide of Jews on their campuses became, for many, a symbol of a deeper crisis. Institutions accustomed to speaking with great confidence about justice, equality, and the protection of minorities suddenly appeared hesitant precisely when Jews were the targets of threats.
For many Diaspora Jews, this was a deeply unsettling experience. Those who believed that their full integration into Western societies had made their Jewishness a secondary component of their identity discovered that, in the eyes of parts of the societies around them, Jewish identity still carries profound political and social significance.
Not because their American, British, or French identities are not genuine, but because Jewish history teaches that Jewish identity is not always something the individual alone can determine the significance of, in the eyes of those around them.
The international arena also exposed the limitations of relying on external institutions. Shortly after the massacres, resolutions were adopted at the United Nations calling for a ceasefire without including an explicit condemnation of Hamas. UN Secretary-General António Guterres stated that the Hamas attack “did not happen in a vacuum.”
Proceedings in international courts placed Israel at the center of some of the most serious accusations in international law, while organizations responsible for defending women’s rights struggled for a considerable period to give adequate expression to the evidence of sexual violence committed during the Hamas-led attacks.
THE CUMULATIVE picture recalls a truth that Zionism understood more than a century ago: the international community can be a partner, a friend, and an ally, but Israel cannot entrust its existential security to it. This was one of the fundamental principles of political Zionism, and since October 7 it has taken on renewed significance.
For generations, the Jewish people witnessed the rise and fall of kingdoms and empires, often without having any meaningful ability to influence the forces that determined their fate. They survived, and at times even prospered, but time and again it became clear how fragile their achievements could be when their security depended on the goodwill of others.
The State of Israel changed that equation. It does not guarantee that the Jewish people will not be attacked, that antisemitism will disappear, or that the world will always stand by their side. It gives them something more fundamental: the ability to act, defend themselves, and take responsibility for their future.
Three years after October 7, this is perhaps the most important Zionist lesson: the principle that the Jewish people are no longer mere spectators in their own history. Responsibility for our fate rests, first and foremost, in our own hands.
Three years later, I still think about the stories the 'Post' did not tell on October 7
There are families who wrote to me after October 7 and never received an answer. Others heard back too late. They sent photographs, names, and stories of people they loved, hoping we would write about them in The Jerusalem Post. Some of those stories never appeared.
To those families, I am sorry.
I understood what they were asking. After a terrorist attack, part of our job is to call the families and write about the people who were killed. An article can stay with a family for years. Somebody searches a name and finds something about the person: what they did, who loved them, what their friends remember.
After October 7, the numbers kept going up. Hundreds, then more than a thousand. We did not even know who had been killed, who was missing, and who had been kidnapped. Meanwhile, we were covering a war and trying to explain to readers abroad what had happened.
I remember looking through casualty lists and wanting an article about each person. Families were sending messages, press releases were arriving, and we used what we could get to. Sometimes a relative reached a reporter who had time to make the calls. Sometimes a message was buried under hundreds of others.
More accounts of heroism, faith, and horror than we could handle
I don’t know how many more reporters we would have needed just to write those stories. We had more than we could handle, every day. That still bothers me, especially when I think about how much harder it may be to find those families’ stories years from now.
Take Tamar and Yonatan Kedem-Siman Tov and their children Arbel, Shahar and Omer, who were murdered in Nir Oz. Yonatan’s mother, Carol, was murdered there too. The kibbutz’s memorial page recalls that Yonatan, known as Johnny, made sure the field was watered before its kite festival to keep the dust down. I wish we had published more of those details about more people.
When we looked through testimonies for our October 7 cover, there were accounts of heroism, faith, and Hamas’s antisemitism. Others described Arab and Jewish Israelis helping each other. There were so many powerful stories. Naama’s hit us in the stomach. She was 17, from Kfar Aza, and she thought she was going to die. On her grandfather’s prescription, she wrote:
“Naama of a few hours from now, if you are reading this, you are alive.” 0710JDN01
She couldn’t find a pen, so she used eyeliner. We kept coming back to that: her grandfather’s prescription, whatever she had available to write with, and the thought that she might survive to read it. At 17, she had left a message for herself on the small chance that she would get through those hours.
It was also very visual. A prescription is familiar to readers almost anywhere. They can imagine that piece of paper in their own home, belonging to a parent or grandparent. These ordinary details helped explain what we wanted the cover to convey about the everyday people caught in the attack.
Testimonies, hope for a future
There was hope in her sentence, too. She allowed for a future, even one only a few hours away, and lived to describe what she had written. The illustration on our cover is based on that account, recorded by Edut 710.
We chose one testimony for the cover knowing how many others deserved that space. I hope readers who look up Naama’s account will stay with the archive and listen to someone else as well.
Edut 710 began as a volunteer initiative after the attack. Witnesses can tell their accounts at their own pace, including life before October 7 and what followed. Their consent governs publication and use. A detail that a reporter might have left out to meet a deadline can remain available to someone studying the account decades later.
From Ian:
Howard Jacobson:
The Big Lie
In truth, to aficionados of the new, revisionist colonial history of Israel, Jews haven’t been the good guys for a long time. If the genocide is the icing on the cake of lies, the cake itself is Zionism, that fragile hope for liberation, rescue, and reaffirmation that had lived long in the breasts of Jews over time and across the world and which, when realized, against all odds, seemed nothing short of a miracle.
That hope has since been ruthlessly and cynically disfigured by its enemies to the point where the very word itself hisses with sinister intent. Bad luck for Zionism that the word begins with a Z, a letter suggestive of the same unfathomable necromantic malice that medieval Jews brought to the killing of Gentile children.
It has, of course, taken more than a Z to make Zionism the hated thing it is today for millions of people who have, and want to have, no understanding of its meaning, its ambitions, its history. Of all attempts to vandalize an ideal—allowing that ideals have a way of maiming themselves over time—few can have been so dishonest or, sad to say, so successful. Dishonest, above all, because most of those who have made the discrediting of Zionism and Zionists their life’s work are historians who cannot fail to know how much more vexed and varied the story always was, how very different from one another in their ambitions and philosophy the first Zionists were. That historians sin against their own profession is a matter for them, their consciences, and the institutions they discredit.
The damage their persistent falsehoods and omissions do is less easily put aside. Paint Zionists as foreign invaders, and it’s plain sailing thereafter to remove them from civilized society, deplatform them, censor them, and at last silence them. Ignore the reality that the majority of Israelis trace at least some of their direct ancestry to the countries of the Middle East, including Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Yemen, Iraq, and Iran, where they lived for centuries and millennia and which are all now effectively Judenrein—while millions of Arabs today live as Israeli citizens with full legal and civil rights. The goal of this academic campaign is clearly not to combat genocide and ethnic cleansing, but rather to rid the world of Zionists, and to rid the world of supporters of Zionism, too. For what we are witnessing is a purge not only of the guilty, but also of those guilty by their shared history, guilty by hearsay, guilty—remembering the foetor judaicus—by virtue of foul smell.
And it isn’t as though the false reading of Zionism’s history requires expert skills to unearth. The settler-colonialist smear gives its own game away to anyone who has spent 10 minutes in the company of an academic postcolonialist and heard the hackneyed accusation drop from his lips as slogans such as “Enemies from within” and “Card-carrying communists” once littered the speeches of McCarthyites. But only ask how a people can colonize their own aboriginal homeland, or in the name of which European colonial power bruised refugees effected a takeover of someone else’s country, and you are an apologist for genocide.
I recently came across a passionate anti-Zionist recruiting Einstein and Stefan Zweig to his cause, as though Jews who were to the slightest degree equivocal about Zionism in its early days would surely think as any extremist thinks about it today. In fact, though Einstein had his doubts, he changed his mind as the world changed in front of his eyes and went so far, in letters to his family, as to declare himself, happily, a Zionist. As for Zweig’s early opposition from the safety of Vienna, one cannot imagine many hate-marchers sharing his love for the Diaspora Jew, buzzing brashly about the world, a citizen of everywhere. Zweig’s is a tragic story of a gifted Jew imagining himself proof against Jew-hating in whatever form, having to run from his bright, beloved Vienna, fleeing the Nazis who banned and burned his books, and ending up taking his life in Rio de Janeiro, an exile from everywhere, a victim of that fanciful Diaspora that kept many from embracing Zionism and some wishing at the last that they had better understood what Zionism was for.
It’s not in any spirit of I told you so that I write the above words. No Jew was obliged to embrace Zionism. And it can hardly be said to have solved for all Jews the problem of existence in a hostile world. But the witness of such Jews as Einstein and Zweig cannot be adduced as evidence of Zionism’s monolithic evil. What they show, rather, is that Zionism was never an undifferentiated mass of ill intent with only theft and conquest on its mind. It was an idea, a longing, a necessity to some, and a wild fancy to others, and it probably never struck two Jews or sympathetic non-Jews the same way. To argue otherwise is bad faith and twisted history and, like all political falsehoods, serves no purpose but to awaken an old abhorrence.
The great lie that all Jews, except for those who noisily forswear Jewishness, think and act as one Jew has fueled the pogroms and inquisitions of the past. We fancied we’d seen the last of it, but here it is again: a universally resonating slander that aims at nothing less than the wholesale vilification of a people, and the denial of their right to either live separately as a nation or live peacefully among other nations. They are hell-bent—the liars and defamers—on resurrecting the concept of genocide, but ask yourself why genocide is once again on their minds.
Brendan O'Neill:
Gaza: the most lied about war in history
The famine lie likewise teeters on a growing pile of facts. A survey from August this year found that Gaza had quite low levels of acute child malnutrition. Child malnutrition as measured by WHZ (weight for height) in children under five years of age was less bad in Gaza than it was in other parts of the world. It was 0.5 per cent in Gaza, which is roughly the same as Germany’s. In Iran it was 4.3 per cent. In Sudan, 16.3 per cent. But we don’t talk about Sudan. We don’t talk about the real famine that ravages Sudan, because it’s not the fault of Jews. Pretty much no one denies that Israel closed the borders of Gaza too harshly to aid in early 2025, banking, in Amit Segal’s words, that there was ‘enough food to prevent mass starvation’. But the idea that this was an act of forced starvation is ridiculous. Independent studies have found that, outside of that window of border closure, Israel’s vast importing of aid led to a situation where the mean energy available at certain periods of time was 3,163 calories per person, per day.
It’s actually quite simple. If you wanted to ‘genocide’ a people, would you send them tens of millions of meals and assist in the vaccination of a million of their children from polio? Israel did that in Gaza. It spearheaded the importing of millions of tonnes of food. It worked with the World Health Organisation to vaccinate more than a million Gazan kids. Not only is this ‘unlike’ what the Nazis did to the Jews – it’s the polar, stirring, complete opposite. The Nazis starved the Jews, and gassed them, and left them in ditches to die from hunger and disease, including polio. Israel, in contrast, helped to feed Gazans and inoculate them from disease. To call the Jewish State a Nazi entity is the great, terrible lie of our times. It is a libel without compare. It is utterly without foundation.
Other falsehoods are starting to tremble in the harsh light of inconvenient truth. Like the demented claim that Israel intentionally ‘murders’ journalists. In at least 53 cases, the BBC described as ‘journalists’ men who were later claimed as terrorists by Hamas and other anti-Semitic armies. The people that those Beeb fools wept over as ‘innocent reporters’ were in truth members of racist militias. Then there’s the broader civilian death toll. It’s hotly contested. Some say the death ratio, terrorist to civilian, is 1:4. Others, including Israel, say it’s better – more like 1:2. Here’s the thing, though: either of those would be seen as normal and in fact good in the sphere of modern warfare.
Those of us who challenge the ‘genocide’ and ‘famine’ narratives are accused of downplaying the horrors of Gaza. Not a bit of it. They say ‘war is hell’ for a reason. Gazans suffered enormously these past three years. The famine claim might be untrue, but they were not eating hearty meals or wandering around happily and freely. Too much innocent life was lost, as in all wars. Some of us loathe Hamas not only for its genocidal hatred of the Jewish nation but also for its inhuman willingness to sacrifice Palestinian life at the altar of its cosmic Jew-hate. The 7 October pogrom was most immediately a tragedy for the Jews, and then a tragedy for Gazans, who were treated as disposable bodies in Hamas’s apocalyptic war against the homeland of the Jewish people.
Yet the truth needs to come out. Gaza is the most lied about war in history. Nothing else comes close. The branding of a war as a ‘genocide’, and normal war suffering as ‘famine’, is a flagrant crime against truth. The branding of the Jews’ fightback against anti-Semitic barbarism as ‘genocidal mania’ is unforgivable. The left’s likening of the armies of the Jewish homeland to the armies of Nazi Germany, and the Jews’ war of resistance against Islamofascists to the Nazis’ vaporisation of the Jews, is a sickening act of moral inversion. It projects on to the Jews Europe’s own historic crimes of genocidal mania. Our present moment might celebrate such despicable Jew-baiting – posterity, I suspect, will not.
It’s three years since 7 October. Since the most savage assault on the Jewish people in the post-Nazi era. That so many ‘progressives’ in the West sided with the rapists and murderers of Jews still horrifies me. That they then demonised the Jewish fightback against that racist barbarism as itself racist, as itself barbarism, will surely be seen by future generations as the most dreadful betrayal of Jews in the early 21st century. Anti-Semitism always comes dressed in the rags of ‘virtue’. Today, too. Tear those rags off and you’ll see something ugly beyond belief – Jews being accused of genocide for resisting genocide.
United Pulls Hamas-Praising Pilot From Service After Report Of Reinstatement
United Airlines has removed from service a pilot who called Hamas terrorists behind the October 7 massacre “brave,” pending a review, The Daily Wire can first report.
Capt. Ibrahim R. Mossallam was first suspended with pay in November 2023, but Israel’s Channel 14 reported on Monday that United quietly allowed him to return to the cockpit just six months later. United told The Daily Wire on Tuesday that it has pulled the pilot from the skies.
“We have withheld this pilot from service pending an ongoing review,” an airline spokesman said.
The airline did not confirm whether Mossallam had resumed flying after it began investigating in late 2023. The Daily Wire asked United for clarification on the “ongoing review.”
In posts on October 7, 2023, Mossallam cheered as Hamas terrorists slaughtered Israelis, calling the attack “resistance” by people who had endured “occupation, oppression, humiliation, apartheid, and straight up murder.” He referred to the terrorists as “brave people” and blamed the “Zionist regime” for the massacre.
After the posts surfaced, Jewish organizations and Jewish communities in the United States called on United to fire the pilot. United initially removed Mossallam from service and investigated, but continued paying him. Channel 14 reported that higher-ups at United wanted to fire Mossallam but that his union intervened to protect him. Mossallam returned to the cockpit six months after his suspension, according to Channel 14.
In the years since, Mossallam has continued his anti-Israel rants on social media, including one which stated, “Their plan [Israel’s] was never to stop the theft of land. Were it not for the Palestinian resistance and the awakening of the world, all of Palestine would already have been taken.”
Mossallam is listed on the New York chapter for the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) board of directors.
The renewed scrutiny of United follows the September 30 attempted terrorist hijacking of Flydubai Flight FZ1073 from Dubai to Tel Aviv, in which the Omani co-pilot allegedly stabbed the captain and tried to crash the plane with 174 people on board. Israeli passengers and crew, after the pilot managed to open the door, got into the cockpit and subdued the co-pilot, and off-duty pilots traveling aboard landed the jet safely in Saudi Arabia.
Before the attempted hijacking, the Omani terrorist pilot had published antisemitic posts on social media, along with posts advocating for violence against women
From Ian:
‘An entire nation bows its head and mourns’: Israel marks memorial day for Oct. 7
Israeli President Isaac Herzog on Monday opened the national day of remembrance for Oct. 7, 2023, by lowering the Israeli flag at the President’s Residence in Jerusalem to half-mast at 6:29 a.m.—the exact minute the attack began.
He said that the flag-lowering was “a sign of remembrance and honor for the murdered and the fallen in the terror attack of Oct. 7 and the ‘Swords of Iron’ War,” adding in an X post that Israel remembers “the women, the men, the children, the infants, the elderly, the civilians and the soldiers who were murdered and fell in the terror attack and war.
“On this day, we also salute everyone who was wounded in body and soul and bear the wounds of Oct. 7 and the war—even in these days,” his statement concluded.
Flags at the Knesset were also lowered to half-staff at 6:29 a.m. in a ceremony attended by senior parliamentary leadership, who laid wreaths at the plaza’s monuments commemorating fallen soldiers and victims of hostile acts.
The National Remembrance Day for the October 7 Disaster and Swords of Iron War is observed annually on the Hebrew date of Tishrei 24 (shifting to the 25th if it falls on Shabbat), which corresponds this year to Monday, Oct. 5, marking three years since the 2023 attacks.
The day is dedicated to mourning those murdered in the massacres and slain during the Swords of Iron war, alongside honoring those injured in body and soul.
Later on Monday, Herzog addressed state memorial ceremonies on Mount Herzl honoring fallen soldiers and terror victims, and was set to host “Salon Otef” at the President’s Residence, focusing on the story of Omri and Lishay Miran. Miran was freed and reunited with his wife, Lishay Miran-Lavi, and their two daughters in October 2025 after enduring more than two years in Hamas captivity in the Gaza Strip.
Israel marks 1,318 slain security personnel since Oct. 7
Israel’s Defense Ministry said on Sunday that 1,318 members of Israel’s security forces have been added to the nation’s official roll of slain personnel since Oct. 7, 2023.
The total includes Israel Defense Forces soldiers, Israel Police officers, Israel Security Agency (Shin Bet) personnel, Israel Prison Service and Fire and Rescue Authority members, civilian security coordinators and members of civilian rapid-response squads.
More than 7,150 people have joined Israel’s bereaved-family community during that period, including 2,143 parents, 355 widows, 880 orphans and 3,772 siblings, according to the ministry.
Separately, the National Insurance Institute said 1,029 civilians have been killed in terrorist attacks since Oct. 7, 2023, excluding security personnel and members of local rapid-response squads. The civilian toll includes 668 men, 361 women, 88 foreign nationals, and 63 children under age 18.
The institute said it has been treating 87,286 additional victims of hostile acts since Oct. 7, including 24 amputees. Of 43,004 civilians who filed hostile-act disability claims, 40,542 have had a disability determined: 34,955 for psychological injury, 3,208 for physical injury and 2,379 for combined physical and psychological injuries. The remaining claims are still before medical committees.
Of the civilians killed, 778 were murdered on Oct. 7 itself, including 70 foreign nationals. Another 251 were killed during the subsequent war period, including 18 foreign nationals.
From Ian:
Howard Jacobson:
I am obsessed with the ignorance of the Jew-haters
I need a new hobby to take my mind off my obsession. The catch, of course, if you happen to have an obsessive personality, is that you become obsessed with your new hobby. In my teenage years, on my father’s advice, I played table tennis to take my mind off falling in love with every girl I met. I was quickly obsessed. I lived and would willingly have died for the game.
Even in my dreams I played table tennis, competing against faceless, impregnable opponents. Back the ball came no matter how hard I hit it, until I woke in the early dawn, defeated and exhausted. When I described my condition to my doctor, he advised me to find a new hobby. “What, like falling in love with every girl I meet?” I asked with a twisted laugh. He put a stethoscope to my chest. “That would certainly be more normal,” he said.
The obsession I need a hobby to take my mind off today is Jew-hating. Its omnipresence. Its implacability. Its inexplicable rage, as though it’s the Jew-hater rather than the Jew-hated who has reason to be aggrieved. Above all what obsesses me is the paradox of its uncouth ignorance appealing most to the educated.
Not in the wild or in a zoo do Jew-haters find a home but on the campuses of our best universities, where they might be expected to have read a little history or know the meaning of simple words. Could it be that the ultimate aim of education is anti-Semitism? I serve the question into the darkness, but only a ball comes back, twice as hard as I hit it.
As in my table tennis years, the nights are the worst. The minute my eyes close the Jew haters appear, not marching – my bed is not big enough to accommodate any sort of demonstration – but sitting packed tight in lecture theatres, wearing black armbands and that closed expression favoured by people who never question themselves. “Shalom aleichem,” I begin. Peace be upon you. They don’t chant the customary “Aleichem shalom”, in return.
I begin by filling in the blanks in their knowledge. Tell them Jesus was a Jew and would certainly have been a Zionist had he been alive when the Jews were being killed in their tens of thousands in pogroms throughout eastern Europe. I tell them what a pogrom was.
I explain that Zionism was a movement of liberation and self-realization of the sort they support when it’s for Palestinians. Zionists didn’t turn up out of the blue in tanks firing Kalashnikovs. They came carrying shovels and works of philosophy. Some were idealists and dreamers, poets and utopists, others, no doubt, would have been opportunists.
There wasn’t just one kind of Zionist. An early supporter of Zionism, for example, was George Eliot. The name rings no bells, though in my dream at least, a sizeable proportion of the Jew-haters are reading English literature at university. Not the kind of English literature I studied. Not Keats and negative capability. More Edward Said and settler-colonialism.
“She wrote Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda,” I explain. The “she” throws them. Didn’t I say George Eliot? The possibility that this early proponent of Zionism might have been trans causes a brief perplexity. It would be a good idea for me to wake up at this moment. Count their confusion a victory. But my obsession forces me to continue throwing words and ideas into the unresponsive blackness.
I move on to genocide. The genocide, they invariably call it. The definite article is not accidental. We are talking about a genocide like no other. “This is not just genocide, this is IDF genocide.”
Seldom can that little word “the” have been sent on so deadly an errand. Not only does its definiteness brook no question as to the genocide’s existence, it reduces in significance and atrocity, indeed it replaces, any other genocide we might have heard about. Out you go, Jews. We have new, more deserving victims.
Gerald Posner:
The Genocide Case Against Hamas
What the International Institutions Omitted
The earlier sections make it possible to be specific about what each institution chose not to examine.
The International Association of Genocide Scholars’ August 2025 resolution found that Israel’s conduct in Gaza met the legal definition of genocide. It mentioned Hamas only twice, in subordinate clauses: once to say October 7 “itself constitutes international crimes,” and once to describe Israel’s actions as a “response.” It did not analyze the Hamas Covenant as evidence of intent, did not examine the killings of October 7 against Article II, and did not say which international crimes it had in mind. That silence is harder to explain than an oversight. In December 2023, the association had published its own peer-reviewed policy brief by the genocide scholar Sara Brown. She concluded that Hamas’s attacks on Israeli civilians were acts of genocidal violence and recommended that IAGS say so. The association ignored those recommendations, and its 2025 resolution went the other way. This was the most widely cited scholarly finding of genocide in the conflict, from the professional association of the people whose job is to apply the framework — and it had the counter-argument in its own publication series nearly two years before it wrote a resolution that skipped past it.
The UN Commission of Inquiry’s September 2025 report ran 72 pages. It examined statements by Israeli leaders — Gallant’s “human animals,” Netanyahu’s reference to Amalek, Herzog’s remarks about responsibility — and concluded that they were “direct evidence of genocidal intent.” It applied no comparable analysis to Article 7 of the Hamas Covenant, to Sinwar’s 2017 promise to discuss “when we will wipe out Israel,” to Deif’s order on the morning of October 7 to take up “a cleaver, an axe,” or to Ghazi Hamad’s pledge to repeat the attack “again and again.” Nor has the Commission since. Its June 2026 report, which found that Israel targeted Palestinian children as part of an ongoing genocide, revisits October 7 only to recap its own earlier findings: that Hamas committed war crimes and crimes against humanity against Israeli children, and according to its own count, that included dozens killed or “targeted for abduction.” It does not reconsider, with two additional years of evidence, whether that record meets the genocide standard it applies to Israel three paragraphs later.
The Commission’s defenders will say its September report was a legal analysis of Israel’s conduct in Gaza, and that its June 2024 report had already addressed October 7. Both are true. But the Commission’s mandate, set by the Human Rights Council in 2021, covers violations “in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and in Israel.” Nothing prevented it from asking the genocide question about October 7. When it examined October 7 in 2024, it found war crimes and stopped. When it examined Israel’s response, it asked the genocide question and answered yes. The choice of which question to ask was the Commission’s alone.
Amnesty International and B’Tselem both concluded that Israel is committing genocide. Amnesty’s own report on October 7 found extermination and cited “statements from Hamas leaders” as evidence the attack targeted civilians, then went no further. B’Tselem called October 7 war crimes and “likely also crimes against humanity.” Neither asked whether it was genocide.
What Explains the Failure of the International Institutions?
One reason is prevention. The Genocide Convention imposes a duty to prevent, and prevention looks forward. By the time most of these reports were written, October 7 was over, and the war in Gaza was continuing. An institution focused on stopping ongoing killing will naturally concentrate on the conduct still happening.
A second is forum. South Africa’s case at the ICJ put Israel’s conduct before a court, and no parallel ICJ case can exist against Hamas — the ICJ hears only disputes between states. Much of the institutional analysis followed that case.
Those explanations account for emphasis but do not account for absence. The prevention rationale cuts the other way: Hamas’s leaders publicly promised to repeat October 7. If prevention is the point, that promise is exactly the kind of statement the duty to prevent exists to take seriously.
I want to be precise about my claim. I am not saying that because these institutions failed to apply the framework to Hamas, their conclusions about Israel are wrong. I think they are wrong, and I explained why in detail in Genocide for Dummies, but that is a separate argument, and it stands or falls on its own evidence.
My claim here is narrower. An institution that applies the Genocide Convention to one party in a conflict and not to the other, when the evidence against the other is at least as strong on the element that matters most, has not shown that it is applying a standard. The burden is on those institutions to explain the difference. So far, none has.
The Falsifiable Standard
I ended Genocide for Dummies with a challenge: tell me what evidence would change my mind, and if you produce it, I will write the correction myself. It is only fair to end this piece the same way: applying the same standard I did to Israel, the case that October 7 was a genocidal act is much stronger than the case against Israel — and that it has never been examined by the institutions that were most eager to use the word.
Here is what would change my conclusion.
First, show me a military rationale. Hamas attacked army bases on October 7. Its defenders will argue those attacks were legitimate targets under the laws of war. Explain then why the same operation also sent terrorists into more than 20 residential communities, with written instructions to “kill as many people as possible” and to target a school and a youth center, if the object was military. Show me that the killing of infants and the elderly in their homes served any military purpose.
Second, show me that Hamas’s 1988 Covenant was only rhetoric. Hamas says its 2017 document replaced the charter’s call to kill Jews with a struggle against “the Zionist project.” If that is true, explain why the conduct on October 7 looked like the 1988 text and not the 2017 one. Explain why a terrorist called his parents to boast, “Your son killed Jews.”
Third, show me that Hamas’s leaders were misunderstood. Put Sinwar’s 2017 promise to discuss “when we will wipe out Israel,” his 2022 “roaring flood,” Deif’s call for cleavers and axes, and Hamad’s “again and again” in their full Arabic context and show me that they meant something other than what they said.
Fourth, show me that the killing of civilians was not the plan. Many people crossed the fence on October 7 — Hamas’s Nukhba forces, terrorists from Islamic Jihad and other groups, and Gazan civilians who followed them through the breaches. Human Rights Watch concluded that killing civilians was a “central aim of the planned attack,” not a plan gone awry. If the atrocities were the work of undisciplined followers rather than the organization, show me the evidence that Hamas’s command made any effort to stop them.
Fifth, on sexual violence, let the investigation finish. The UN Special Representative found that rape and gang rape occurred at multiple sites. The UN’s own investigation did not find that sexual violence was ordered but instead called for a full investigation. There are other investigations now underway. If they uncover credible evidence that the sexual assaults were not directed policy, then it should drop out of the genocide analysis, and I will say so.
That is the standard. It is the same one I set for the case against Israel. The only difference is that no one has yet been willing to apply it here. And until that happens, my conclusion stands: there is a solid case for genocide against Hamas in the October 7 attack.
Ben-Dror Yemini:
How Terror's Victims Became the Targets of Blame
The forces of darkness are aided by far too many of those considered enlightened. Osama bin Laden, Yahya Sinwar, Hassan Nasrallah and Ali Khamenei would have reason to be pleased.
Their work is being carried out not only by the terrorists who continue in their footsteps. It is also being done by a growing band of those who openly declare that their goal is to defeat the Free World.
This is not Israel's struggle alone. It should have been the struggle of the Free World and of the Muslim world in particular. That is because Muslims are the primary victims of jihad.
The Muslim Brotherhood, from which most jihadist movements emerged, is persecuted in most Arab countries, which understand the danger, while its influence in the West continues to grow.
Over the past quarter-century, 320,405 people have been murdered in Islamic terrorist attacks. Jihadist branches are spreading death in wars that have raged for years in Sudan, Somalia, and Libya. Shiite jihad is wreaking havoc in Iran, Yemen, Lebanon and among the Palestinians.
Most of these centers of violence have nothing to do with the U.S. or Israel.
According to Brown University's Costs of War research, 4.5 million people have been killed since 2001, most of them in Muslim countries.
Even if we accept Hamas's figures, the 75,000 killed in Gaza amounts to 1.6% of the total, and most of those killed are men of fighting age.
From Ian:
Douglas Murray:
Israel Is Winning
The attempted hijacking of a Flydubai plane en route from Dubai to Tel Aviv is a reminder that Israel and the West remain at war with Islamic radicals, and that it is a war we are winning. The online world is filled with shrill declarations that Israel has lost this war. But on the third anniversary of the Oct. 7 attacks, Israel and its allies have been winning the war on the ground even as they have lost the PR war around the world.
The PR war matters. But it matters less than the war itself. Better to win the ground war and lose the PR war than the other way around.
Piece by piece, the Israeli government took apart the Iranian axis. First, they took apart Hamas in Gaza, despite constant attempts to make them stop, which came not just from Europe but from President Joe Biden's White House. Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh was killed in Tehran in July 2024. Then, while Netanyahu was in New York speaking at the UN, Israel bombed the compound where the head of Hizbullah, Hassan Nasrallah, and almost all his remaining senior colleagues were gathered.
Two years into the war that Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar started, the Israeli air force took out the majority of the Iranian regime's air defenses, then came back and struck thousands of regime targets, opening the route for American B-2 bombers to attack the main Iranian nuclear sites. Then the Americans and the Israelis returned. They not only targeted the Iranian nuclear program again but also killed the supreme leader.
Everybody alongside and above Sinwar in the chain of command is now dead. Neither Hamas, Hizbullah, nor the Iranian regime has a noose ready to pull around Israel's neck anymore. A large share of the Israeli hostages were eventually returned alive. Three years ago, this set of victories would have seemed unthinkable.
What happened in the skies above Saudi Arabia on Wednesday stands as a metaphor for three years of war. The Israelis saw an existential threat, took matters into their own hands, and decided their own course. The rest of the West will have to decide whether it will follow the Israeli model or let its own future be dictated by terror and the hijacking of its entire society.
Israel’s Growing Allies on the Ground—and in the Sky
Israel is no stranger to diplomatic isolation, but the widespread condemnation it has received after Hamas's October 7 atrocities has been unusually strong and meritless. Last week, the dozens of delegates walking out on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's speech at the United Nations seemed to dramatize Israel's diplomatic plight. Bibi defied the well-heeled "moral cowards" of Turtle Bay and defended his policies against Iran and its terrorist minions. But even as many of Israel's friends applauded him at the rostrum, their eyes darted nervously to the swelling exodus in the aisles.
A different set of images portrayed a more important reality this week. When an Omani terrorist attempted to hijack an airplane bound for Israel from Dubai, an improvised multinational coalition sprang into action. This was largely the work of brave individuals, but it illustrates the larger forces affecting Israel's foreign policy. The Jewish state faces many enemies, but a growing number of countries are attracted to it because of Israel's battlefield prowess, technological skill, and shared values.
The terrorist aimed to kill Jews, but his first target was an Indian. The pilot, Captain Smit Machchhar, fought off his treacherous copilot long enough to open the cockpit door. Israeli passengers then rushed their would-be murderer, subdued him, pulled the Boeing 737 out of its fatal dive, and stabilized the stricken aviator. The plane landed safely in Saudi Arabia, where medics tended to the injured civilians until another plane brought them to Tel Aviv.
Much like Captain Machchhar and his passengers, Israel and India are becoming a dynamic duo. Although India still expresses plenty of sympathy for the residents of the West Bank and Gaza, the Jewish state's value is too obvious to miss for a country with hostile neighbors and severe terrorist threats. India is Israel's top destination for defense exports, and it has reciprocated with nearly 3,000 shipments of defense equipment and components since October 7. During Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit in February, he and Netanyahu announced a bevy of agreements on technological cooperation and that a free trade agreement is in the works. Together, they form one half of the I2U2, a quadrilateral that includes the United States and the United Arab Emirates.
Of course, the flight only occurred because of Israel's relationship with the UAE, which has deepened because of the immense damage Iran is inflicting across the Middle East. In fact, as the pinstriped diplomats stormed down the aisle at the U.N., the Emirati delegation remained.
Less symbolically but perhaps more importantly, the military leaders of several Arab countries reportedly met with U.S. and Israeli generals in Germany a few days before the walkout. No countries have formally joined the Abraham Accords this year, but the Saudis and even the Qataris attended this meeting. Iran's belligerence across the wider Middle East is forcing previously implacable foes to coordinate militarily with the Jewish state.
Like-minded friends in the Global South are rallying to Israel too. Argentina's Javier Milei excoriated "the alleged defenders of human rights" at the U.N. who "have systematically voted against Israel while remaining silent in the face of Islamic terrorism and the genocide of Christians in Africa."
Brendan O'Neill:
The Green Party is now an openly anti-Jewish party
‘Tell me what you accuse the Jews of [and] I’ll tell you what you are guilty of’, said the great Soviet writer Vasily Grossman. Today, that grim, eternal truth was starkly illustrated by the Green Party’s passing of a motion saying ‘Zionism is Racism’. To throw around the word ‘racism’ even as you single out Jewish sovereignty as uniquely demonic, to pose as an enemy of bigotry even as you dream of the erasure of the world’s only Jewish state, takes moral duplicity to sickening new heights. In their snivelling whisperings about ‘racism’, these scumbags reveal their own.
It was at their conference in Brighton that the Green Party of England and Wales voted in favour of the ‘Zionism is Racism’ screed. The motion expressly defines the Greens as an ‘anti-Zionist party’. It says Zionism is a species of racial hatred, and will henceforth be ‘treated as any other form of racism’. Most obnoxiously of all, it commits the Greens to campaigning for the scrubbing of the Jewish nation from the face of the Earth. It calls for ‘the establishment of a single democratic Palestinian State in all of historic Palestine, with Jerusalem as its capital’. So no more Jewish homeland. No more tiny patch of land, a poxy 263 by 71 miles, for the Jews to call their own. All of it would disappear. Imagine accusing others of being ‘genocidal’ even as you agitate for the total dismantling of the ancestral kingdom of the Jews.
Anyone who thinks this is ‘just about Israel’, that the Islamo-left’s demented hatred for the Jewish nation has no impact on the Jews of the West, needs to pay closer attention. One of the most chilling events in Brighton today was the enthusiastic voting down of an amendment that would have offered protection to Jewish Greens who attend Zionist synagogues. Designed to ‘safeguard Jewish membership’, the amendment warned against ‘indirect discrimination’ against ‘practising Jews’ on the basis of the ‘synagogues, community centres or denominational groups’ they are aligned with. It was smashed, defeated by 1,026 to 648 votes.
Think about this. Really think about it. A mainstream party, and a supposedly progressive one, has just voted against an amendment that would protect its own Jewish members from discrimination on the grounds of the religious institutions they attend. I cannot remember anything like this in my lifetime: a party effectively greenlighting the harassment of Jews who commit the ‘sin’ of attending synagogues that believe in the right of Jews to nationhood. It is stunning. It’s a moral crisis. Not since the BNP has a party so openly committed itself to hostility towards certain Jews.
The historic gravity of today’s events cannot be overstated. We now have a party in Britain wholly devoted to the moral annihilation of Jewish sovereignty. A party committed to the abolition of Israel. A party content to hang a target sign around the necks of its own Jewish members who continue to patronise institutions that believe in the continued existence of a Jewish State. If the Tories overnight devoted themselves to the removal from the Earth of the state of Pakistan, and the moral isolation of every pesky Pakistani in Britain who likes that nation, it would be leading the news. Every progressive would cry ‘racism’, and rightly so. Will they do likewise here? Don’t hold your breath – you’ll die.
I’ll say it, though. I’ll say that if Jewish nationhood makes you vomit, if the right to self-determination of the Jews keeps you awake at night, then you are a bigot. You might consider yourself woke and good, but your frothing animus for Jewish nationhood betrays the blackness of your soul. For that’s all Zionism is: the belief that the Jews, like every other people, have an inalienable right to build and flourish in the land of their forebears. That the same people who tilt their heads in bourgeois indulgence of every native claim to territory then puke into their matcha when the Jews say ‘What about us?’ tells you everything you need to know. It is impossible to explain these double standards without using the word ‘anti-Semitism’. Go on, try.
Friday, October 09, 2026
