09/10 Links Pt2: We are still failing the moral test of 9/11; How ‘Made in Israel’ is powering European security; Error-Riddled Harvard Law School Report Demonizes Israel as ‘Inhumane’

From Ian:

How ‘Made in Israel’ is powering European security

On the last day of August, a group of Greek military officials arrived in Tel Aviv, led by Major General Ioannis Bouras, to sign what would become one of the largest defense export deals in both countries’ histories.

The €3 billion agreement — called Achilles Shield — will provide a suite of Israeli tech to protect Greece against a wide range of threats, including missiles, aircraft and drones.

The deal is the latest installment in a growing relationship between European governments and the Israeli defense sector. As the continent races to rearm, it has largely relied on the United States for guns, tanks and aircraft. For many of the less-visible systems now at the center of modern security — sensors, interceptors, surveillance technology — governments are increasingly turning to Israel.

That dependence is deepening even as Europe’s political relationship with Israel grows more strained. The wars in Gaza and Lebanon have fueled tensions between the European Union and Israel, even as the bloc’s governments have become increasingly dependent on the country for critical systems — but those disputes have done little to slow cooperation between Israel’s defense sector and individual countries.

“Looking right now on our relations with the EU, yes, there are challenges,” said Avi Nir-Feldklein, Israel’s ambassador to the bloc. “But when you look at what we’re doing on the bilateral level with EU member states, the constructive, practical cooperation is intensive and flourishing.”

Israel’s advantage begins with its military. Young engineers serve in elite intelligence and cyber units, where they work on real-world security threats. After leaving the Israel Defense Forces, many join defense companies or launch security start-ups. The result is a conveyor belt between the battlefield and commercial product development. Multicopter drones hang on display at the Elbit exhibition stand at the 2026 ILA Berlin Air Show on June 11, 2026. | Sean Gallup/Getty Images

Israel’s top three defense companies — Israel Aerospace Industries, Rafael Advanced Defense Systems and Elbit Systems — are either state-owned or maintain deep institutional links to the Israeli defense establishment, with senior military figures embedded in their governance structures.

“Israel is an excellent example of how defense or private companies are so well integrated,” said Kaupo Rosin, the head of Estonia’s foreign intelligence service. “And that makes them very capable.”

Israel’s broader security sector has also become a magnet for investment: Its firms attract nearly a quarter of global cyber investment, according to the Israel Innovation Authority 2025 High-Tech Report, with Google’s $32 billion purchase of Israeli start-up Wiz this year underscoring the sector’s attractiveness.

Hiba Tareef, spokesperson for Israel’s Mission to the EU and NATO, said the appeal lay in the close integration of government, academia and the private sector — and in technology shaped by real-world operations.

“By leveraging our real-time operational experience, we enable our partners to shift from a reactive to a proactive posture, significantly bolstering our collective resilience and defense,” she said. Deepening dependence

A complete picture of Israel’s role in European defense is difficult to establish. Many contracts are undisclosed on national-security grounds, and some Israeli companies operate through European subsidiaries. But dozens of entries in the European tender database reviewed by POLITICO show Israeli firms becoming go-to suppliers for military communications, surveillance and electronic warfare.

Many of the public contracts — including the €3 billion Greek deal — were awarded directly to Israeli firms without opening the work to competing bids as is preferred by EU law, according to the tender notices.

European procurement rules treat competition as the default, even in defense and security. Direct awards are allowed only in narrow circumstances — for instance, in cases of genuine technical exclusivity or narrowly defined national-security concerns.

London bookshop that sold Mein Kampf stocks book calling Jews ‘evil’ and promoting Protocols conspiracy

The central London bookshop at the centre of controversy last month after selling copies of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf has now also been found to be selling a book that accuses Jews of possessing “evil qualities” and reproduces excerpts from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the JC can reveal.

Aafaq Bookstore in Westminster has been found to be selling copies of So That We Do Not Forget: Jewish Crimes - Zionist Resentment, an Arabic-language book dedicated to “every martyr whose blood was shed on the land of Palestine, Jerusalem, and Al Aqsa”.

The book’s first chapter describes Jews as a “people who committed great sins and possess evil qualities, thus deserving the wrath of [God]. God Almighty has mentioned their characteristics and actions in the Holy Quran, and how He punished them, yet they did not learn a lesson. Therefore, we must know their history so that we may be wary of them… God’s victory for the believers over the Jews is inevitable.”

The latest discovery comes just weeks after the bookshop, which is close to West Central London Synagogue, was found to be selling Arabic-language copies of Mein Kampf, with Nazi Germany’s dictator depicted performing a Nazi salute on the front cover.

The store subsequently removed the book from its shelves, saying its presence “should not be interpreted as an endorsement of its content or ideology”. It added that the bookshop rejects “Nazi ideology, antisemitism, racism and all forms of hatred”.

The Community Security Trust (CST) said the latest find merits an investigation by police and Westminster Council.

The book describes “Jewish Zionism” as the “embodiment of the worst characteristics and morals of the Jews, reflected in policies and protocols that demonstrate the evil and deviation that Jews believe toward [non-Jews], with audacity and extreme arrogance, using control of money and economic, and military power.”

It continues: “Today, we are in urgent need of studying the history of the Jews and Zionism, and the history of what happened in Palestine, and what confrontations we have experienced with the Zionist entity in Palestine, in order to rebuild awareness among the nation regarding hidden conspiracies and ongoing measures aimed at implementing the project of establishing a Jewish Zionist state from the Nile to the Euphrates.”

The reference to the Nile and the Euphrates reflects a conspiracy theory that the Zionist movement seeks to establish a single state stretching from Egypt’s Nile to the Euphrates, which runs through Iraq, Syria and Turkey.

The book calls for increased vigilance “across the generations” in confronting Zionism.

It says “Zionist hatreds” is directed “on the colonisation of Palestine, [through] the theft of the land from its owners, the killing, displacement, and extermination of its people to replace it with an expansionist, borderless Jewish Zionist state”.

The book also presents the notorious antisemitic forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion as fact. Produced in the Russian Empire in the early 20th century, the fabricated text was created to propagate the false claim that Jews were conspiring to achieve world domination by controlling governments, economies and society.

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09/10 Links Pt1: The ethnic cleansers of Whitehall; Shame on Ed Miliband, appeaser of Islamists; Europe Joins the Boycott Israel Crowd; Natasha Hausdorff: The Israeli settlements lie

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: The ethnic cleansers of Whitehall

The madness that has engulfed so much of the West since the Oct. 7, 2023 pogrom in Israel has now consumed Britain.

Anxious to reset government policy to turn public outrage at politicians into adoration of the Labour Party, the United Kingdom’s rookie prime minister, Andy Burnham, decided to reset relations with the State of Israel by sending them into the deep freeze.

Declaring that an economic boycott of the Israeli “settlements” would enable Britain to “stand up for its values,” Burnham has instead defined the values of the Labour Party as the promotion of lies, defamation and Jew-hate.

Announcing the boycott to a chilling chorus of cheering members of parliament, the foreign secretary, Ed Miliband, proceeded to misstate international law, defame Israeli Jews living in the disputed “West Bank” territories of Judea and Samaria as committing “rampant settler terrorism” and “ethnic cleansing,” and libel Israel as causing the “totally avoidable humanitarian catastrophe” in the Gaza Strip.

This was a tissue of wicked falsehoods and distortions. Neither the Israeli settlements nor the “occupation” are illegal under international law, whatever the kangaroo court run by the systemically anti-Israel United Nations may say.

It was obviously an outrageous inversion of reality to blame Israel for Gaza’s humanitarian catastrophe rather than Hamas, which used civilians as cannon fodder while Israel went to unprecedented lengths to supply them with aid that Hamas then stole.

As for “settler violence,” this is the latest libel to delegitimize Israel as a prelude to its destruction. There is a problem of unprovoked Jewish violence against Arabs in the “West Bank” territories of Judea and Samaria, but this is committed by at most a few hundred delinquent and nihilistic youths who hate both Arabs and the State of Israel.

They are a tiny minority of the half million Jews living in these areas, the vast majority of whom are law-abiding, upstanding people.

Far from being “settler terrorists,” as Miliband claimed, they’re under constant attack by local Arabs. Rocks are thrown at Israelis in their cars; Jewish farmers are having their fields torched and their flocks stolen; Jewish shepherds are finding their goats have been poisoned to death.

In the past few days, a Jewish “settler” was stabbed on a farm and seriously wounded. Over the years, dozens of Israelis in these areas have been murdered.

None of this is reported in Britain. The government’s response to this institutionalized terrorism against Jewish residents of Judea and Samaria is to trash their good name and then subject them all to collective punishment.

The charge that they are perpetrating ethnic cleansing of the Arabs is grotesque. In fact, it’s the Burnham government that’s demanding the ethnic cleansing of every Jew from their own land to create a fantasy state of Palestine that wouldn’t have a single Jew in it.

These sanctions will do no significant damage to Israel’s economy. But they’re certainly not “just symbolic,” as Britain told the Trump administration to head off any possible blowback.

Allister Heath: Shame on Ed Miliband, appeaser of Islamists

Britain's Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband's decision to sanction Israel, the Middle East's only true democracy, the West's praetorian guard against jihad, all to win votes from Islamist sympathizers at next month's by-election, will go down in infamy.

Miliband is engaging in grotesque victim-blaming. He is making British Jews feel even less safe as they head into Rosh Hashanah. As we commemorate the 25th anniversary of 9/11, he is confirming that Britain's answer to Islamism is appeasement. Our Foreign Secretary has sent a clear message to our enemies, to those who seek to destroy our way of life: violence works, threats work, relentless propaganda and blood libels work, delegitimization works, the weaponizing and perversion of international law works.

The double-standards are monstrous: Labour continued to court Qatar this week, a dictatorship that hosts Hamas. Britain remains friends with Turkey, a NATO member which, in addition to occupying northern Cyprus, has seized vast amounts of northern Syria, shifting people into these occupied territories and turning the local Kurds into a minority. Why do so few care about these settlements? Is it because no Jews are involved?

Britain recognizes and effusively supports a Palestinian "state" that fuels hate, operates a pay-for-slay rewards for terror scheme, and bars Jews from buying land (Arabs who sell face a death sentence). Yet it is imperfect but freedom-loving Israel that is being turned into a pariah. Britain's sanctions are being welcomed as a first step towards ultimate victory by the anti-Zionist and boycott movements seeking the destruction of Israel and its replacement by an Arab-dominated state.

Miliband assumes the barrier to peace is Israeli intransigence, while in fact it has always been Palestinian rejectionism: its elites have always chosen war over accepting a Jewish polity and a two-state solution. They define the Palestinian project as thwarting the Jewish one, rather than working towards coexistence. They have rejected every single partition plan since the Peel Commission's in 1937; Israel has accepted many.

Amb. Alan Baker: Britain's Misguided and Ill-Informed Betrayal of Israel

How far does the British government intend to go to damage Britain's traditional interests and its relationship with Israel in order to placate and appease a group of extreme politicians and an increasingly powerful lobby of Islamist influencers intent on taking Britain's government and its policies hostage?

Ed Miliband's rehashing of the "two-state solution" cliche displays amazing ignorance for a foreign secretary. Anyone familiar with the Middle East is fully aware that the term "two-state solution" has never been agreed to in the agreements between the Palestinians and Israel. It was never part of the 1993-5 Oslo Accords between Israel and the Palestinians.

To the contrary, the parties agreed that the permanent status of the territories would be determined only by agreement between them in permanent status negotiations. There was certainly no intention that any third party, whether this be the UN, the EU, or even the British government, would prejudge and predetermine the outcome of the negotiations and dictate a political outcome.

Milliband's reference to Israel's tender for construction in the 12-sq.-km. E1 area between Jerusalem and the town of Ma'ale Adumim as an "unacceptable and destructive act" appears to ignore that this tiny piece of land is located in what was agreed between the Palestinians and Israel in the Oslo Accords to be Area C of the West Bank territory, under Israel's complete jurisdiction and control.

According to the Accords, Israel has the right and prerogative to conduct planning, zoning and construction in this area, in the same manner in which the Palestinians, pursuant to the Accords, are entitled to do in the Areas A and B, under their own control and jurisdiction.

Stephen Daisley: Britain's Turn Against Israel Is No Accident

With the British government preparing sanctions against Israel, this is a victory for the pro-Palestinian lobby and their anti-Zionist worldview. The context is a highly effective (and handsomely funded) campaign since Oct. 7 to demonize Israel so thoroughly in the minds of Western populations that many formerly sympathetic to the Jewish state would turned skeptical, if not hostile.

Much of it is the result of a propaganda war funded by Qatar and Iran, Islamic states suspiciously eager to separate Western nations from a country known for its advanced defense technology, unparalleled intelligence, and expertise in identifying and breaking up Islamist terror cells. Ask yourself why Islamic regimes are so keen for you to feel frustration towards Israel.

While the UK government's Palestine pivot is largely motivated by domestic concerns, the campaign to bring it about was orchestrated overseas with the aim of driving a wedge between Israel and the West. Amplify genuine civilian suffering in Gaza, mix in a whole lot of falsehoods, distortions and propaganda, and Britons across the board would soon shed whatever sympathy they felt for Israel after Oct. 7.

Palestine is simply not a big issue for the bulk of British voters. But there was a demographic with insatiable appetites for a diet of Jewish perfidy in Muslim lands, as the results of the 2024 election showed. Labour reckons that Muslim voters would be reassured by the sight of the party distancing itself from the Jewish boogeyman.

It appreciates that taking up a pitchfork against Israel could well exacerbate hostility and violence towards visibly Jewish Britons, their businesses and their places of worship, but it figures it can always bung in an extra few quid to the fund that gives Jewish children self-defense training for their walk to and from school, because Jewish children in Britain need to be trained in self-defense just to go to school.

All this is terrible. Terrible for Britain's trade with a nation that produces cutting-edge technology and life-extending medicines. Terrible for Britain's Jews who will have to watch over their shoulders even more than usual when they go to pray, pick up their children from school, or walk around in Jewish-populated areas. Terrible for any and all Britons who preferred it when the focus of British politics was Britain and elections won based on factors other than ethno-religious kinship.

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09/09 Links Pt2: The Genocide Claim in Gaza Has Collapsed. Hamas Supplied the Evidence; New exhibit explores what Britain knew about the Holocaust

From Ian:

The Genocide Claim in Gaza Has Collapsed. Hamas Supplied the Evidence.

This distinction is critical. Civilian deaths alone do not establish genocide, which requires specific intent to destroy a protected group, in whole or in part, as such. When attacks presented as evidence of deliberate civilian targeting are later shown to have killed identified combatants, the inference of genocidal intent is directly undermined. As the evidence accumulates, the claim that these strikes demonstrate a systematic policy of targeting Palestinians because they are Palestinians becomes unsustainable.

Perhaps the most important implication is methodological. Many investigators reached conclusions without knowing who was actually killed. They declared particular strikes war crimes, or even evidence of genocide, without knowing that Hamas commanders had been present. That missing information is critical to assessing whether the IDF was targeting civilians or legitimate military objectives, and whether the attacks complied with the laws of war.

The starkest example is Amnesty International’s “genocide report,” which highlighted 15 airstrikes as evidence that Israel intentionally targeted civilians. Amnesty reported finding no military targets and identified all the victims as civilians. Yet subsequent Hamas and PIJ publications have revealed combatants, mostly commander-level, killed in five of those strikes (thus far). These discoveries demolish Amnesty’s analysis of those incidents: its central factual premise, that no military targets were present, was false. They also expose a fundamental flaw in the report’s broader methodology, which treated the absence of publicly identified combatants as evidence that none existed. When the factual foundation of an investigation collapses, its conclusions cannot simply be left standing. Amnesty’s genocide analysis must be withdrawn in light of the evidence it failed to uncover.

Ironically, organizations that spent nearly two years dismissing Israeli claims are being contradicted by Hamas itself. The evidence reshaping the historical record is no longer coming primarily from Israel. It comes from the Gaza military organizations that fought the war and are now publicly commemorating and lauding their own dead.

The genocide allegation has always depended heavily on the claim that Israel systematically targeted Palestinian civilians in Gaza because they were Palestinians. With approximately 2,500 identified Hamas and PIJ operatives now linking more than 600 allegedly civilian only incidents to acknowledged military personnel, the factual foundation of that narrative has been fundamentally undermined. The claim that these incidents demonstrate a systematic policy of destroying Palestinians as such is no longer sustainable.

In the end, the most consequential witnesses against the genocide allegation may not be Israel or its defenders. They may be Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad themselves.

New book ‘In the War Room’ offers candid look at Netanyahu’s wartime decisionmaking

As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu heads toward what could be one of the most consequential elections of his career next month, a new book is offering an unusually candid look at the decision-making that will define how history — and Israeli voters — judge him.

In the War Room: The Inside Story of Israel’s Fight Against Hamas and the Iranian Axis, by Jerusalem Post military correspondent Yonah Jeremy Bob and Wall Street Journal editorial writer Elliot Kaufman, draws on two years of interviews with Israel’s political, military and intelligence leadership to reconstruct the internal battles that shaped the war — battles that often pitted Netanyahu against his own defense establishment.

Both Bob and Kaufman criticize some of Netanyahu’s choices, from the delayed ground invasion of Gaza to the “unforced error” of the 2025 aid blockade, though each credits him with historic gains against Hezbollah, Iran and Syria.

The authors sat down with Jewish Insider on Tuesday, the book’s publication day, to talk about what their reporting reveals about Netanyahu’s wartime leadership, and what it might mean for how he’s remembered at the ballot box.

Jewish Insider: In your view, what is the most impactful revelation in your book that has not previously been reported on?

Yonah Jeremy Bob: This is the first book that’s an inside story about the war. There are a lot of books about Oct. 7. There hasn’t been a book that’s covered the full war from the inside. We really got deeply into the beepers and walkie talkies [Israeli operation against Hezbollah] of September 2024. There had been coverage of these issues but in terms of the depth, IDF sources, Mossad sources in Israel, in the U.S., we tell the story — there was actually a debate, should they go first with the beepers or should they go first with the walkie talkies? The things that we learned were stunning: what could have been done differently, how they accomplished it.

Elliot Kaufman: I would point to just how much it took to convince Prime Minister Netanyahu to launch a ground invasion of Gaza at all. You’d think after Oct. 7, of course, Israeli troops are going to roll into Gaza, but in fact Netanyahu was very hesitant, worrying — with good reason, by the way — that Israeli troops could be walking into a death trap. More than that, he had certain Israeli generals telling him, “Don’t do it, the IDF isn’t ready.” He had all the top American generals, sent by President [Joe] Biden, telling him the same thing. He really had to gain confidence in the plan. We tell that story, which I think most people, the way they think about it, would rush right over. But it did take Israel 20 days from the Oct. 7 attack until Oct. 27 to be able to invade Gaza.

Secret 1993 Peres-Hussein meeting helped pave way for Israel-Jordan peace, revealed documents show

Newly revealed documents from a secret November 1993 meeting between then-foreign minister Shimon Peres and Jordan's King Hussein show how the two leaders helped lay some of the early groundwork for the Israel-Jordan peace treaty, the Peres Center for Peace and Innovation revealed on Tuesday, marking the 10th anniversary of Peres's death.

The documents were released on the day of the state memorial ceremony for Peres and the naming of the Jerusalem International Convention Center in his honor. They include excerpts from the minutes of the meeting, which was held at the king's palace in Amman under strict secrecy.

According to the records, Peres's appearance was even altered to prevent identification.

The Peres Center now describes the exchange as a kind of "testament for peace" by two leaders who sought to change the region. During the meeting, Hussein spoke candidly about the urgency he felt and his desire to use the time he believed he had left to advance an agreement.

"Perhaps I have only a year or two left; I will put everything on the line," the king said.

According to the documents, the Jordanian royal palace received a message on October 26, 1993, saying that King Hussein wished to meet with then-foreign minister Shimon Peres. According to the record, Hussein viewed Peres as a creative thinker and was willing to hold a secret meeting as part of the preliminary contacts that ultimately led to the peace agreement signed in 1994.

The meeting did not emerge in a vacuum. It followed years of secret contacts and ties between Israel and King Hussein, including Peres's attempt to advance an agreement with Jordan under the 1987 London Agreement.

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09/09 Links Pt1: The UK government has swallowed the Great Lie of Israelophobia; What if the Palestinians Don’t Want Two States, Mr. Miliband?; IAEA board refers Iran to UN SC for nuclear ‘non-compliance,’ a first in 2 decades

From Ian:

Brendan O'Neill: The UK government has swallowed the Great Lie of Israelophobia

If it wasn’t for Israel, if it wasn’t for that monstrous, marauding state, there’d be peace in the Middle East. This is the Great Lie of Israelophobia. It’s the truthless, venomous current powering the global loathing for the Jewish State. You hear it on the street, on campuses, in mosques: that peace demands the muzzling, if not the outright destruction, of the bloodthirsty Jewish nation. Yesterday, staggeringly, we heard a version of this lie from the foreign secretary of the United Kingdom.

For me, this was the most striking thing about Ed Miliband’s statement to parliament: his propagation of the falsehood that the Jewish State is the prime barrier to a two-state solution and something like peace. With its war in Gaza, which Miliband said was unjustified in its barbarity, and its green-lighting of yet more settlements in the West Bank / Judea and Samaria, Israel has nuked the possibility of peace, he said. It has created ‘a set of facts on the ground’ that have made ‘the two-state solution unviable’. MPs giddily murmured their approval.

Contrast this with how he spoke about Hamas. He condemned Hamas, of course. All politicians engage in a spot of anti-Hamas throat-clearing before piling on the real monster of the Middle East: Israel. Hamas is a ‘terrorist’ outfit, he said. It caused Israel and Jews great ‘trauma’ with its attacks of 7 October 2023. The violence of that day was ‘vile’. And it must now ‘decommission its weapons’.

Spot the difference? Hamas is a pain in the arse, but Israel is the true menace to future peace. Hamas causes trauma, but Israel creates ‘facts on the ground’ that make peace and equality all but impossible. Hamas, in this twisted telling, becomes a bit-part player, albeit a ‘vile’ one, in a horror story authored by a murderous, expansionist Jewish State that is well and truly off its leash. And that’s why, said Miliband, we are rolling out a stringent package of sanctions against the Israeli settlements: to tame Israel’s ‘expansionist’ lunacy that creates ‘facts’ which torch all hopes of peace.

What Miliband said wasn’t only untrue – it was the public execution of truth. He didn’t only spread misinformation – he also inverted reality itself, depicting the seekers of peace as the destroyers of peace, and the Islamofascists who truly jeopardise our civilisation as mere causers of trauma. Like the keffiyeh mob, only in more moderate language, he infantilised Hamas and monstered Israel, presenting the former as a pest but the latter as a threat to all that is decent. It is one of the most misleading speeches a modern politician has given.

The very war that Miliband so stingingly condemned – the Israel-Hamas War – was born not from Israel’s hatred of peace but from Hamas’s. It is well established that Hamas’s carnival of Nazi-like violence on 7 October was designed to destroy not only Jewish life but also the Abraham Accords. These are the accords initiated by Donald Trump and signed in Washington, DC, in September 2020, with the aim of bringing about ‘normalisation’ between Arab states and Israel. The UAE and Bahrain recognised Israel for the first time. Sudan and Morocco followed. Then something extraordinary was reported: Saudi Arabia was considering signing up, too.

It would have been a region-changing development. More than that: a global quake. But it infuriated Hamas’s masters in Tehran, the theocratic freaks devoted to the fascistic annihilation of the Jewish homeland. Internal Hamas documents confirm that the October pogrom was in part designed to ‘thwart the Saudi kingdom’s process of normalisation’. Other documents gloat that Hamas’s savagery during the Second Intifada – when a thousand Jews were shot, stabbed and burnt to death – had helped to stall the Arab Peace Initiative, which Iran also hated.

To Britain: Peace requires recognizing Jewish rights, not destroying them

If Jews do not have the right to live, then ipso facto, Palestinian Arabs have the right to kill them, and it is not murder to do so.

If Jews do not have the right to their holy or archaeological sites such as the Cave of the Patriarchs or Joshua’s Altar, than ipso facto, Palestinian Arabs have the right to destroy those sites.

Declaring all Israeli and Jewish presence over the “green line" illegal extends to Jerusalem as well. It means that, despite Miliband's protestations, it is illegal for Jews to live in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City, giving the Jordanian ethnic cleansing of the ancient Jewish community the British stamp of approval. It makes it illegal for Jews to pray at the Western Wall, where they have prayed for millennia.

All Ed Miliband has accomplished is to lend support to those who seek to erase the right of Jews to live anywhere. Once it is illegal for Jews to live in Judea and Jerusalem, it is not much of a stretch to say that it is illegal for Jews to live in Tel Aviv and Haifa. After all, to the typical anti-Zionist, all Jews are “settlers" no matter where they live, and the mandate applied to Gush Etzion no less than it did to Tel Aviv. Should the attempt to ethnically cleanse Judea and Samaria of Jews once again succeed - an ethnic cleansing the British government seems to support enthusiastically - then the next step will be to attempt to ethnically cleanse of all of Israel. This is exactly what happened after Gaza was ethnically cleansed of Jews in 2005 - Hamas attempted to ethnically cleanse all of southern Israel on October 7. And the nukhba terrorists called the Israeli Gaza Envelope communities "settlements" and their victims "settlers."

And once the precedent of it being illegal for Jews to live is established, that precedent will be applied by “anti-Zionists" to Jews around the world. If Jews can be barred from living in Jerusalem and praying at the Western Wall, then the obvious next step is making it illegal for Jews to live in London or New York or to pray in synagogues. Many are already trying to create this reality by targeting Jews at their synagogues and their schools in the British capital, the same people Miliband is pandering to. When Jews merely living where someone doesn’t want them is justification for sanctions, boycotts, and murder, it is a short jump to violence against Jews in the “enlightened" West.

Mahmoud Abbas has less reason to make peace now than he did yesterday. He has just seen over a dozen governments endorse his intransigence, his pay for slay program, and his laws imposing the death penalty for selling property to Jews. Why should he moderate, why should he acknowledge that Jews have any rights whatsoever, when his extremism, genocidal hatred, and demand for ethnic cleansing meets with such international approval?

If peace - real peace, not ethnic cleansing of Jews followed by a repeat of October 7 - is the goal, then the British government and its co-conspirators need to start acknowledging Jewish rights instead of destroying them. They should insist that Jews be allowed to live in Abbas' dream Palestinian State instead of endorsing the demand that the state be completely Judenrein. They should demand the end of pay for slay, the repeal of the racist law imposing execution for selling land to Jews, and the acknowledgement of the rights of Jews. Only when the other side starts acknowledging and treating Jews as human beings with rights can there be any hope of peace.

Jonathan Sacerdoti: What if the Palestinians Don’t Want Two States, Mr. Miliband?

If a Palestinian state is ever to exist, there is exactly one design for it that survives contact with the evidence, and it was set out by the man Miliband treats as the villain of the piece. In his Bar-Ilan speech of 2009, Benjamin Netanyahu publicly accepted a demilitarized Palestinian state, on terms he summarized simply: all the powers to govern themselves, none of the powers to threaten Israel. No army. No control of airspace. No military alliances with Israel’s adversaries. An Israeli presence along the Jordan Valley as a security buffer. Palestinian refugees resettled in a future Palestine rather than inside Israel. And a binding, unambiguous recognition of Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people.

Each one of those conditions exists because its absence has already been tested to destruction. Borders and airspace left unsupervised produce smuggled rockets — not a prediction but Gaza’s history, many times over. A right of return exercised into Israel rather than into Palestine does not produce two states; it dissolves one, which is rather the point of proposing it. And recognition of Israel as a Jewish state is demanded precisely because 90 years of refusal have demonstrated that the quarrel was never really about where the line goes. Self-government yes; sovereign war-making no.

Anyone who finds those terms intolerable is not arguing for a Palestinian state. They are arguing for a rematch. And a people who will consent to exist only if they are also permitted to threaten the existence of their neighbor have not made the case for a state; they have made the case against one. A country whose animating purpose is the unmaking of another country is not a nation waiting to be born. It is a war with a flag — and not worth one more drop of blood, or one more decade of diplomacy, to deliver.

So let us put the uncomfortable proposition plainly. Statehood, everywhere else on earth, is something a people demonstrates a capacity for: the ability to govern, to hold elections, to keep agreements, to refrain from massacring their neighbors. Here alone, in the Palestinian territories, it is treated as an entitlement that no amount of conduct can forfeit and no amount of conduct is required to earn. Ninety years of refusals, three wars of annihilation, two intifadas, the largest slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust — and the British position is not merely unchanged but hardened, with the sanctions falling on the people who were invaded.

Keir Starmer, remember, already recognized the ‘State of Palestine,’ waving it into existence with the flourish of a man opening a garden center. There are, then, already two states for Britain’s Labour Party. What did Britain receive in exchange? Nothing was asked for and nothing was given. No disarmament, no election, no end to pay-for-slay. Recognition was handed over as a reward for Oct. 7 and produced precisely the improvement you would expect. Miliband’s answer to that failure is a larger version of it.

A policy which has failed continuously since 1937 is not made viable by British anger. A solution requiring the enthusiastic participation of a party which has refused it at every opportunity is not a solution at all. It is a wish, dressed as a plan, enforced against the only participant who ever said yes. In reality, there is no two-state solution to this problem because there is no solution at all to a problem which nobody will even have the courage to describe accurately. People who want solutions should stick to crossword puzzles.

You can’t navigate in a new world with an old map. Miliband chose his metaphor better than he knew. A North Star is a fine thing to steer by, but something by definition you never reach. It gives you your latitude and never your longitude. It is invisible from half the planet. And it disappears altogether under cloud.

Sailors understood these limits, which is why they built chronometers, then radio beacons, then satellites, and stopped betting the ship on a single point of light. Only in the Foreign Office is a man still on deck at midnight, rejecting the progress of modern developments and staring up into the overcast, insisting the star is there somewhere and that this amounts to knowing where he is.

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09/08 Links Pt2: Terrorism’s Western Welcome; UN Sought to ‘Cover-Up’ UNRWA Staff’s Role in Oct 7 Attack; Portuguese artists pull out of Jerry Seinfeld-headlined festival

From Ian:

Terrorism’s Western Welcome By Abe Greenwald

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A quarter-century ago, in September of 2001, the chief aim of jihadist terrorism in the West was to horrify free populations and intimidate their leaders into submitting to Islamist demands. Coercion was the blunt logic behind terrorism for decades, if not centuries. But over the past three years, jihadists have been furnished with a very different incentive to draw blood. Among a segment of the free world, terrorism no longer primarily horrifies but thrills and inspires. Acts of murderous violence, therefore, have also become a means of gaining support for jihad in certain enclaves in the West.

In America, terrorism now has the additional power to seduce. This is the single most dangerous development of the 21st century.

Terrorism has long been used as a rallying cry or recruitment tool in the Muslim world and in countries with no tradition of individual liberty or classical liberal thought. That it increasingly functions the same way in the West is the clearest sign that those traditions are in extremis among much of Gen Z and the entire activist class.

Within one day of Hamas’s October 7 massacre, organizations including National Students for Justice in Palestine, Black Lives Matter Chicago, Detroit IfNotNow, and others began not only rallying behind Hamas but incorporating the group’s imagery into their own promotional materials. They slapped the Hamas paraglider on their pamphlets, social media accounts, and protest posters. Supporters of jihad gathered at once in a slew of American cities, including New York, wrapped in keffiyehs and chanting genocidal slogans.

Were they horrified? Frightened? No, not this crowd. In the words of Cornell University associate professor Russell Rickford, October 7 “was exhilarating, it was energizing.” Naturally, this craze went on to overtake campus after campus, where terrorist slogans and imagery were as ubiquitous as tie-dyes at Woodstock.

“Globalize the intifada,” a blatant call to mass murder, became a staple of the public square.

Funding plummets for US nonprofit that funnels donations to anti-Israel groups

A US nonprofit that had served as a financial hub for leading anti-Israel activist groups has seen its funding plummet after a series of lawsuits and pressure from the federal government, according to tax filings posted last month.

The Westchester People’s Action Coalition Foundation, known as Wespac, is a low-profile, progressive nonprofit in Westchester County, north of New York City.

Wespac’s stated mission is to support “work toward peace, justice, and a sustainable environment.”

The group, founded in 1974, had served as a financial linchpin for some of the most prominent anti-Israel groups in the US, including National Students for Justice in Palestine, Within Our Lifetime and the Palestinian Youth Movement.

Wespac had handled donations to the groups through an arrangement called a fiscal sponsorship, in which a nonprofit collects donations on behalf of other groups that do not have nonprofit status themselves.

Its revenue had surged in recent years — from $139,901 in 2019-2020 to nearly $4 million in 2023-2024, including a spike after the start of the Gaza war, according to tax filings.

A majority of Wespac’s spending appeared to be for other groups. Its previous tax filing showed that its own expenses were $142,539, while reporting grants of over $1.7 million, including for “custodial responsibility for funds granted to various organizations.”

The group has only one paid employee who has a salary of $62,500.

Extremist anti-Israel activism after Hamas’s October 2023 invasion of Israel and the ensuing war in Gaza put a spotlight on Wespac’s involvement in the protest movement.

Motley crew of extremism
Groups affiliated with Wespac hailed the Hamas attack, hosted events that supported terror groups, and targeted cancer patients, museums, memorials, transportation hubs and holiday events.

Following disruptive protests by its affiliates, Wespac was sued in at least five courts across the US.

Republican members of Congress also put heavy pressure on Wespac, demanding investigations by the IRS and the New York attorney general’s office, alleging support for terrorism.

Federal law prohibits tax-exempt organizations from supporting terrorism.

Portuguese artists pull out of Jerry Seinfeld-headlined festival

Several Portuguese artists have dropped out of a comedy festival in Lisbon headlined by Jerry Seinfeld, citing their support for Palestinians and implying opposition to Seinfeld’s support for Israel.

At least six acts over recent days have canceled their appearances at the MEO Commedia a La Carte Fest, a new international comedy festival in the Portuguese capital. The event from Oct. 29 to Nov. 1 has advertised that it will host Seinfeld’s first live appearance in Portugal.

Though none of the artists who withdrew mentioned Seinfeld by name, some hinted at a boycott against his pro-Israel views. The Jewish comedian has become one of Hollywood’s most prominent advocates for Israel since October 2023.

Actress and comedian Inês Aires Pereira announced on Instagram on Saturday that “one of the names” featured at the festival “persistently defends ideas and acts that I consider indefensible,” adding, “We cannot relativize or normalize a genocide.”

The comedy duo Cebola Mol posted a graphic of themselves with a watermelon, widely recognized as a symbol of solidarity with Palestinians. “We will celebrate justice, freedom and joy with you on another occasion,” they said on Instagram.

The festival announced on Friday that performances by the groups Tributo Pop and Conjunto Cuca Monga were also canceled, but did not provide reasons. Two other acts, comedian Pedro Tochas and visual artist Vhils, shared their cancellations on Instagram without further details.

Seinfeld breaks decades of political avoidance
Seinfeld has aligned himself with Israel during its current conflict in Gaza, following decades of largely avoiding commenting on political issues. He visited Israel in December 2023 to meet with the families of hostages seized by Hamas on Oct. 7 of that year. Since then, he has attracted attention for a series of dismissive remarks toward pro-Palestinian advocates.

During an appearance last year at Duke University, Seinfeld compared pro-Palestinian activists with the Ku Klux Klan, saying, “The Klan is actually a little better here because they can come right out and say, ‘We don’t like Blacks, we don’t like Jews.’ OK, that’s honest.”

Representatives of Seinfeld and producers of the MEO Commedia a La Carte Fest did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

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09/08 Links Pt1: When Every Jew in the World Is a ‘Settler’; Miliband invoked his 60 relatives murdered in the Holocaust, then announced sanctions on Israel

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: When Every Jew in the World Is a ‘Settler’

Andy Burnham has decided to begin his term as prime minister by fundamentally reshaping Britain’s relationship with Israel. For the worse.

Burnham is trying to prevent any further exodus of anti-Zionist politicians from his ruling but floundering Labour Party. Keir Starmer, his predecessor, came into office on a massive electoral wave, which he promptly squandered. To get out of the hole Starmer left London in, Burnham has picked up a shovel and begun to dig: He is simply doubling down on Starmerism.

And the first order of business is to institute a boycott of Jewish towns and businesses in Judea and Samaria.

That’s going to cost Palestinians jobs, but the Gaza Left is unconcerned with actual living, breathing Palestinians. Burnham too, apparently.

Why is Burnham instituting discriminatory policies against Jews while making Palestinian lives harder? Because he has been convinced by the “settler violence” narrative.

Now, violence orchestrated by a few dozen extremist Jews has risen. But by the most recent annual statistics we have, that violence still does not reach the number of attacks originating in Judea and Samaria by Palestinians against Jews.

Still, violence moving in the wrong direction is a problem. And there are two ways that Israel’s allies have sought to address it. The first is the approach taken by President Trump. Along with Ambassador Mike Huckabee and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the administration’s team has real credibility with the Israeli prime minister and the segment of the Israeli population most affected by, and implicated in, disorder in Judea and Samaria.

The result: Recently Benjamin Netanyahu ordered the removal of several illegal settler outposts, and the IDF dismissed a soldier who prayed with settlers who besieged an Arab home, despite it being election season, a time when Benjamin Netanyahu is usually more hesitant to anger the right wing.

The Trump team won Israel’s trust and got some concessions.

The other strategy, the one pursued by Burnham, France, Canada, and other Western countries, was the opposite: reduce cooperation, reduce trust, and remove all possible diplomatic influence over the Israelis.

The results: Israel closed the British consulate in Jerusalem and removed Britons from West Bank Palestinian military training and from the Gaza postwar coordination team.

The removal of the consulate in Jerusalem is overdue. The UK uses it as a diplomatic post for Palestinians but keeps its Israeli embassy in Tel Aviv. The UK is now free to move its Palestinian consulate into the state of Palestine that it recognized.

The other result of all this will, of course, be increased anti-Semitism. If you want to understand why Jews are uncomfortable with the suddenly ubiquitous “settler violence” narrative, it’s not only because it paints all Jewish life beyond the armistice line as illegitimate.

Miliband invoked his 60 relatives murdered in the Holocaust, then announced sanctions on Israel

Miliband cites personal family history as he bans trade with West Bank

The tone of the speech shifted sharply as Miliband turned to Gaza and the West Bank.

He said he felt “a deep sense of shame” over Palestinian suffering during the past three years and described events in Gaza as a stain on the conscience of the international community.

In the West Bank, Miliband accused violent settlers of carrying out ethnic cleansing in some Palestinian communities and said the British government believed Israeli authorities had too often failed to prevent forced displacement. He formally declared that Britain considered Israel’s occupation of the West Bank unlawful.

Miliband announced that Britain would ban imports from Israeli settlements, prohibit advertising for settlement property in the UK and impose sanctions on companies and individuals involved in financing, construction, infrastructure and other activity supporting settlement expansion. The legislation is expected to take effect within six to nine months.

He stressed that the measures targeted settlements rather than Israel within the Green Line and said Britain would continue what he described as important trade with Israel. He also said he opposed the broader Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement.

Turning to Gaza, Miliband said there was growing evidence that war crimes may have been committed and backed international legal proceedings examining Israeli conduct. He stopped short of determining that genocide had occurred, saying Britain would await the conclusions of competent courts.

Full speech: Ed Miliband says entire occupation unlawful, slams ‘settler terrorists’ and Israeli government that indulges them

British foreign secretary stresses his own Jewish heritage as he expresses ‘shame’ over what has unfolded in Palestine, alleges ‘ethnic cleansing,’ bans dealings with settlements

Ed Miliband: The 'proud British Jew' who turned his back on Britain's Jews

British Jews can now expect an extra wave of antisemitic acts in the name of the illegal ethnic-cleansing occupation that Britain said Israel is, and it would be effectively in line with government policy.

Perhaps the most egregious element of Miliband's heroic announcement on Tuesday was the sheer oxymoronic hypocrisy at its nexus.

He declared the Israeli settlements across the Green Line to be illegal, despite the fact that successive peace efforts, from Oslo to Camp David and beyond, have envisaged a final agreement in which this area would remain under Israeli sovereignty.

He said the sanctions regime will target illegal settlements and settlement expansion, not Israel, without acknowledging that he has given further incentive for the demonization of the Jewish State on a very public stage.

A British Jew investing in property in a Jewish neighborhood of east Jerusalem may now face restrictions, yet Britain does not impose comparable restrictions on British citizens buying property in Turkish-occupied northern Cyprus.

Miliband argued that holding Jewish people responsible for the actions of the Israeli Government is antisemitism, while simultaneously penalizing them for the actions of a small number of settlers who commit violent acts in a country they may have never been to.

Sanctions will affect Jews in Britain
And why some may say the sanctions won't tangibly affect British Jews: they will.

British Jewish businesses that supply kosher wine to hundreds of families shouldn't have to worry about losing half of their inventory.

People who - rightly so - wish to make Aliyah due to rising antisemitism shouldn't have to fear attending a real estate event that advertises houses in Maale Adumim.

And the other implications: what about the those who obtained a degree at Ariel University; will it be invalid? Can Yeshivat Gush Etzion advertise to British Jewish schoolboys?

Can a Jewish artist in the Jewish quarter of the Old City have their work stocked in a UK store?

These are not questions that British Jews should have to ask their government on the eve of Rosh Hashanah.

In the words of the Chief Rabbi, it "is truly a dark day for British Jews."

Not especially because of the sanctions - the success of their implementation and enforcement is yet to be seen - but because the government did a Machiavellian display of canvassing Jewish opinion and seemingly taking on board their concerns, only to completely and flagrantly ignore them, and then some.

And, funnily enough, these measures may incentivize the very extremism they seek to target.

If, God forbid, another terrorist attack targets British Jews, the Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary will undoubtedly stand before the cameras, condemn antisemitism as 'un-British and an attack on British values,' and assure the Jewish community that Jews must never be held responsible for the actions of Israel.

They will be right.

But governments cannot simultaneously tell Jews that they are not responsible for Israel while adopting rhetoric that helps activists collapse the distinction between the two.

And Miliband cannot have it both ways: he cannot invoke his identity as a proud British Jew while fueling the very same fire that seeks Jewish destruction.

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09/07 Links Pt2: Col. Kemp: Political warfare against Israel, led by Russia and China; The 9/11 lesson America forgot; UK sanctions on Judea and Samaria will come at a cost

From Ian:

Col. Richard Kemp: Political warfare against Israel, led by Russia and China

No other ally comes anywhere near approaching the value that Israel provides to America and the West’s collective defense in intelligence or any of the other areas mentioned. Nor have any of them worked so assiduously to ensure American security interests are taken care of as well as their own. Alongside the indirect benefit accrued to U.S. allies from all of this, many of these countries gain substantial direct advantage. Germany, for example, is increasingly dependent on Israeli air-defense systems. At the beginning of September, its navy successfully test-fired Israel’s LORA ballistic missile from a frigate in the North Atlantic. The head of the German navy said the test “made naval history,” giving its warships a new long-range precision-strike capability.

Beyond America’s enemies’ determination to deny the West this remarkable advantage lies a separate but related motivation to put their crosshairs on Israel. Don’t make the mistake of thinking, as they wish you to think, that this is anything to do with Israeli “settlements,” “war crimes” or Palestinian rights. None of those are of any concern to China or Russia.

In any case, they know it’s all lies. Just as much as some of Israel’s supposed “critical friends” know it, yet nonetheless intentionally promote such calumnies to appease Israel-hating elements among their own electorates. Instead, the focus of these despots is on Israel, which decisively constrains their own ambitions in the Middle East. That goes back to the Cold War, especially the severe strategic damage inflicted on the USSR during Israel’s defensive campaigns.

But note how Israel’s actions have led to the hasty withdrawal of Russian forces from Syria since the fall of the longtime regime of Bashar Assad in December 2024. Israel has humiliated and seriously degraded Iran, a client of China, and easily neutralized Chinese and Russian air defenses, ballistic missiles and combat planes there. Similar harm has been done to air defenses in Syria, Iraq and Houthi-controlled Yemen.

The conflict exposed the limits of Chinese strategic influence in Iran, including its failed attempts to halt attacks on Gulf states and restore freedom of navigation in the Strait of Hormuz, even to the extent of being unable to secure transit for its own shipping. This has severe adverse consequences for China’s strategic aspirations in the region, not least to displace America as the Gulf’s security guarantor. Thus, Israel’s role in preventing Russian and Chinese strategic dominance in the region, both to its own benefit and America’s, has contributed markedly to the dictators’ determination to vitiate the Jewish state.

What should be at least as troubling to genuine American patriots as it is to Israelis is the growing diminution of support for Israel in the Democratic Party and the increasing divide among Republicans. To be fair, many of those who are guilty of opposing Israel are acting unwittingly, taken in by a political warfare machine that they do not comprehend. The pro-/anti-Zionist question is equally an acid test for America’s allies around the world. As in American politics, there is a direct and telling correlation between countries and international entities that genuinely support the Western democratic order, with America as its leader, and those that support Israel.

I would urge the U.S. president, now and in the future, to judge those countries and entities for their support or otherwise of America’s most important combat multiplier. And to judge particularly harshly those who actively work to harm Israel, including boycotting Israeli companies and sanctioning democratically elected politicians, which amounts to indirectly sabotaging U.S. security.

The 9/11 lesson America forgot

Now, Michigan Democrats have nominated Abdul El-Sayed for the U.S. Senate. El-Sayed opposes American aid to Israel, even for the purely defensive Iron Dome. Following the attack on a Michigan synagogue in which an assailant drove into the synagogue while more than 100 children were inside, El-Sayed invoked the attacker’s loss of relatives in Lebanon and said, “Hurt people hurt people.” He later apologized. But here again, can an apology erase the original words or their relevance to a candidate’s worldview?

Moreover, El-Sayed’s father-in-law and major financial supporter has held leadership positions in CAIR-Michigan and ISNA, organizations historically identified by federal prosecutors as connected to a U.S. Muslim Brotherhood network. That does not make El-Sayed a member of the Brotherhood, but nor does it make the association irrelevant.

The point is not that these politicians are Muslims. It is that ideas, rhetoric and associations once relegated to the political fringe are increasingly normalized and even rewarded within one of America’s two major political parties and among young Americans shaped by our universities, media and progressive culture. Progressives have taught the next generation an astonishing lesson: not to abhor 9/11, but to search for America’s culpability and, in an act of self-reproach and atonement, tolerate the very ideology that produced the attacks.

Europe is America’s bellwether. Britain has acknowledged that fear of appearing racist has inhibited authorities from confronting radical Islam, while France now openly confronts Islamist “separatism.” The warning is clear: Tolerance without assimilation creates segregation, and segregation breeds extremism.

So, we must recalibrate. We must say: religious freedom, absolutely; religious supremacy, never.

The West should welcome immigrants prepared to embrace liberal democracy and its constitutional culture while barring those hostile to its fundamental values. Constitutional law must always supersede religious law. Our universities, media and political leaders must stop pretending that scrutiny of Islamist ideology is synonymous with prejudice against Muslims. Tolerance cannot mean surrender, and diversity cannot require moral blindness.

Twenty-five years ago, terrorists showed America what fast jihad looks like. We hardened cockpits, transformed intelligence gathering and made another 9/11 extraordinarily difficult. But while becoming very good at looking for bombs, we lost the courage to scrutinize the ideology that produced them.

On Sept. 11, 2001, we promised nearly 3,000 murdered Americans that we would never forget. Twenty-five years later, we have forgotten; not who we lost but too much of what we were supposed to learn. Honoring our old promise requires us to remember, to recapture clarity and resolve, and to renew our commitment to defend the freedoms and values the terrorists attacked.

Twenty-five years after 9/11, did the Islamists or the US win the war on terror?

The GWOT globalised Islamism without winning the war. The conflict with Islamism is now internalised in Western societies.

As soon as it was decently possible, left-leading media amplified the Islamist narrative that Israel is a key source of the West’s woes.

The Muslim Brotherhood, the parent organisation of al-Qaeda, Hamas and ISIS, still operates in America and Europe.

Formally in Europe, and informally in blue-state America, free speech is restricted by Islamist intimidation and the complicity of governments that are frightened of being called “Islamophobic”.

You are still taking your shoes off at the airport. You are now lightly irradiated at security in case you have an explosive device in your body or under your burka. You still undergo “random” searches and swabs because targeting the likeliest suspects would be “profiling.”

There has been no second Islamist attack on American soil on the scale of 9/11. The nightmare scenario, a dirty bomb smuggled through the ports or driven across the Canadian or Mexican borders, has not happened.

This is not because of the “security kabuki” at domestic airports. America hardened its airports against the world after 9/11. The PATRIOT Act licenced a 24/7 domestic surveillance system.

The predicted wave of attacks on American Muslims never happened after 9/11. But Islamist terrorism became a constant presence in American life. Foiled plots barely make headlines anymore. Successful attacks are usually the work of single individuals or small cells.

Though 19 Arab nationals committed the 9/11 attacks, a New America report from 2021 found that “every jihadist who conducted a lethal attack inside the United States since 9/11 was a citizen or legal resident except one who was in the US as part of the US-Saudi military training partnership.”

Faisal Shahzad, who turned his SUV into a truck bomb and parked it in Times Square in 2010, was born in Pakistan and became an American citizen. The bomb failed to detonate.

Omar Mateen, who murdered 49 people at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida in 2016, was born in New York to Afghan immigrants.

Shamsud-Din Jabbar, the US Army veteran who killed 14 and injured dozens with a rented truck in New Orleans on New Year’s Day 2025, was raised Christian and converted to Islam.

As Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born preacher who became al-Qaeda’s leader in the Arabian peninsula, said in 2010, “Jihad is becoming as American as apple pie.”

From 2014 on, foreign money seeded a campus intifada against Israel and Jews.

The temporary concrete barriers that were placed around synagogues in New York City are still there.

Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic mayor of New York City, is a Muslim who rejects Israel’s existence as a Jewish state and promotes the lie that Israel committed “genocide” in Gaza.

The Democratic nominee for US Senate Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed, is a smooth-tongued “anti-Zionist” who campaigned with Hasan Piker, who said in 2019 that “America deserved 9/11”.

Like a stopped clock, the Republicans’ isolationist wing was validated both sooner and later. The rise of the “podcast Right” that blames Israel and the Jews for America’s failures is just the latest symptom of the blowback blame-game at home, and of America the stumbling giant abroad.

So tell me, who won the 9/11 wars?

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09/07 Links Pt1: A bit of rare honesty on Gaza from The New York Times; IAEA is completely blind on Iran nuke program; Iran’s grip on Hormuz was never as strong as it looked

From Ian:

Is 'Purity of Arms' holding the IDF back? Inside Israel’s battle over military ethics

You are a soldier, tasked with searching a house for a suspected terrorist and hidden weapons. The house is full of women, children, and an elderly, sick, bedridden man.

How do you proceed? Do you force the man out of bed immediately to complete a thorough search, or do you slow the search to treat him with kid gloves, possibly endangering your soldiers?

Judgment calls like these are everyday occurrences for 19-year-old soldiers – young men whose moral dilemmas only a year earlier involved not getting involved with their best friend’s girlfriend or resisting the urge to glance at the test paper of the nerd sitting in front of them.

But we send soldiers – not a cadre of lawyers – to the battlefield. How are these soldiers taught to make complex calls that could put them on the wrong end of an IED, or just as easily land them in military prison for taking an operation too far, according to the moral sensibilities of the most moral army in the world?

On August 9, according to Ynet, “The IDF raised the level of authorization required for certain strikes as high as the chief of staff, effectively requiring political approval in some cases. Commanders were also recently given explicit instructions to halt immediate-response fire, except in cases involving the removal of a direct threat.”

Per Hillel Biton Rosen, military and security correspondent for Channel 14, just days later Hamas operatives were identified crossing the Yellow Line ceasefire demarcation in Gaza, where they stole engineering equipment. Soldiers requested authorization to engage, but senior command denied the request.

The incursion was just one of more than 65 crossings, three times the number recorded the week before the rules of engagement changed.

A senior security official said: “Hamas is testing us, exactly as it did before Oct. 7. What happened last night could have ended with a soldier being abducted.”

Permission-to-open-fire orders clearly act as a deterrent and are necessary to maintain law and order.

Yet, the rules of engagement are fluid and always have been. They change with government policies and with diplomatic pressure from allies and enemies alike. Even while operating under the rules, there are days when the army is instructed by political echelons to hold its fire, even though the day before, it would have opened fire.

IDF soldiers are faced with numerous situations that require sensitivity and mindful awareness of civilian populations, but when an army is dealing with terror operatives, tunnels, and a malicious entity that disguises itself as civilian and totally controls its civilian population, it is hard for any soldier to know who in the scheme of things is who.

Israel's life-saving measures go beyond what international law requires
JOHN SPENCER – chairman of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point, and one of the most prominent Western experts on urban warfare – has been a leading voice on Israel’s conduct of operations in Gaza. His views are based on comparative historical analysis of urban battles.

In a March 2024 Newsweek op-ed, Spencer claimed: “Israel has done more and implemented more measures to prevent civilian harm than any military in the history of urban warfare.”

He said these measures go beyond what international law requires and beyond what the US and its partners did in comparable fights in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Mosul against ISIS.

Specific practices Spencer lauded:
• Mass evacuation warnings (days or weeks in advance in some cases)
• Phone calls, text messages, and recorded voice messages to specific buildings or neighborhoods
• “Roof-knocking” (firing a small, non-lethal munition onto a roof as a final warning)
• Distribution of maps showing safe routes and daily updates on humanitarian corridors
• Frequent tactical pauses and localized pauses during operations
• Extensive use of precision-guided munitions and formal targeting processes

He noted that no other military has systematically combined these actions at this scale while fighting an enemy deeply embedded in dense urban terrain with a vast tunnel network.

Which raises the question: Does that make the IDF highly moral or overly cautious?

NYPost Editorial: Finally: A bit of rare honesty on Gaza from The New York Times

What do you know? The New York Times just exposed its readers to some rare honesty about Gaza — running an 1,878-word plea from a native Gazan for Hamas to be “expelled.” Hear, hear.

Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, who grew up in Gaza, minces no words as he blasts the terror group for destroying what seemed to him as a boy to be “the foundations of a Palestinian state.”

The piece was one of the most unvarnished, revealing descriptions of Hamas’ evil the Gray Lady’s ever published.

From the start, he reports, Hamas behaved like “gangsters, brutalizing Palestinian women,” “torturing and killing” suspected opponents and launching “grisly suicide attacks against Israeli civilians.”

Its Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel “led to over two years of Israeli bombardment that killed tens of thousands of Gazans, including much of my family.”

Alkhatib insists the group get “no role in Gaza’s future” yet laments that supposed Palestinian supporters in the West still see Hamas’ members as “honorable resistance fighters.”

He cites a rally “organized and attended by people who became key supporters of Mayor Zohran Mamdani,” where the “resistance” and “Intifada” were cheered.

And calls out Hasan Piker, “who campaigned for Mayor Mamdani, the Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed and other Democrats,” for normalizing Hamas.

The failure by people like these to denounce Hamas “only helps perpetuate” Gaza’s “degradation.”

Even as recently as April, a poll found 40% or more of “Americans between 18 and 34 said they supported Hamas over Israel.”

Clearly, Gazan lives don’t “matter” to such people.

The horror of Hamas, of course, should be beyond obvious — we’ve flagged it for years.

Yet lefty outlets like the Times spill far more ink attacking Israel than Hamas.

Palestinian Writer Attacked for Refusing to Toe the Hamas Line in NYT Op-ed

Gaza-raised Palestinian-American writer Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib became the target of a wave of online attacks and false allegations after publishing a September 4 New York Times op-ed calling on Palestinians and their Western supporters to resist Hamas and reject armed “resistance” as a path forward for Gaza.

The attacks followed Alkhatib’s public rejection of Hamas and his call for Palestinians to pursue a future based on self-government, economic development and coexistence with Israel.

Alkhatib is founder and director of Realign for Palestine and a resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council.

In an op-ed for The New York Times, I argue that saving Gaza & its Palestinian people requires resisting Hamas, weaving in personal themes, addressing issues with the Left & "pro-Palestine" movement & proposing a vision for Gaza's future Transformation.

Backlash Over Breaking With Hamas
The response to Alkhatib’s op-ed quickly moved beyond arguments over Hamas and Gaza’s future into attacks on his motives, affiliations and personal character.

Some critics sought to portray Alkhatib as compromised, bought or secretly controlled by Israel rather than engaging with his call for Palestinians to reject Hamas.

The large pseudonymous X account @zei_squirrel made false allegations that Alkhatib was secretly gay, had been recorded sexually abusing boys and was being blackmailed by Mossad into serving as an Israeli “propaganda puppet.”

Historian and pro-Palestinian activist Zachary Foster launched a personal attack on Alkhatib while also disputing several of the essay’s claims. Foster called him the “darling of the American Jewish-Zionist establishment,” accused the piece of being “littered with lies” and concluded by describing Zionism as a form of “brain cancer.”

Mehdi Hasan told his more than two million X followers that some of the platform’s “worst,” “most dishonest” and “most fanatical pro-genocide” users were sharing Alkhatib’s article.

Alkhatib said the reaction had developed into a broader smear campaign, with fabricated posts and AI-generated material portraying him variously as Jewish, connected to Jeffrey Epstein, blackmailed by Mossad, secretly gay and paid by Israel.

Much of the material sought to explain away his opposition to Hamas by portraying him as secretly working for Israel or compromised in some other way.

UN agency accused of Hamas ties sees another European nation cut funding

Another European nation has stopped funding the U.N. agency that aids the Palestinians. Finland has followed the U.S. and Sweden in halting donations to the terror-tainted agency.

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), is presently being investigated for ties to the terrorist rulers of Gaza. Recently, organizations including the USAID Office of Inspector General (OIG) and NGO UN Watch have uncovered further evidence of what they allege is Hamas infiltration of UNRWA and its members’ participation in the Oct. 7, 2023 terror attacks in southern Israel.

Finland announced it would discontinue funding to the organization at the end of 2026. Finland’s Ministry for Foreign Affairs confirmed to Fox News Digital that the agreement with UNRWA would conclude at the end of 2026 but that "As of yet, no decision has been made on what are the international partners through which Finland’s support will be channeled next year to meet the acute needs in the region."

Finnish officials did not respond to Fox News Digital’s questions about what prompted the change to the country’s funding for UNRWA.

While other nations still continue to fund UNRWA, President Donald Trump fully banned funding to the organization in February 2025, and Sweden ended funding to UNRWA in December 2024. Sweden redirected aid to other U.N. bodies for its Gaza response.

The future of aid provision in Gaza matters for the Trump administration-backed Board of Peace as it seeks to shape a conflict-free future for the region.

An official affiliated with the Board of Peace reconstruction effort told Fox News Digital that "the international community’s concern about UNRWA in Gaza continues to rise and is supported by damning evidence. The Board of Peace has been clear: New Gaza will be both demilitarized and deradicalized, and we will only be working with trusted, credible delivery partners to achieve our goals. We anticipate responsibly replacing UNRWA with vetted partners who will deliver for the people of Gaza."

The USAID OIG is investigating about 1,500 members of UNRWA for terror participation, and has referred 108 UNRWA staff to the State Department to suggest they be suspended or excluded from further work with organizations in receipt of U.S. funds.

A senior U.S. official briefed on USAID OIG’s ongoing investigation told Fox News Digital that the USAID OIG’s "independent findings are prompting several other countries to reassess the stale and conventional thinking that UNRWA is the best and only option to provide aid to civilians in Gaza." The official said that the USAID OIG’s "findings also will prevent Hamas and October 7 affiliated staff from circulating across future, more responsible, aid organizations operating in Gaza."

Hamas fighters secure an area before handing over an Israeli-American hostage, Keith Siegel, to a Red Cross team in Gaza City on Feb. 1, 2025, as part of the fourth hostage-prisoner exchange. Ranks of Hamas fighters formed up on Gaza's beachfront in a show of force against the dramatic backdrop of breaking waves. (SAEED JARAS/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty Images)

UN Watch’s Terror Network report claims that about 12% of UNRWA staff in Gaza are members of terror organizations, based on "cross-checking UNRWA employee rosters with Hamas records seized by the [Israel Defense Forces.]"

Executive director of UN Watch Hillel Neuer told Fox News Digital that "Finland’s principled decision to defund terror-infested UNRWA will not deprive Palestinians of aid, as it will be redirected through genuine humanitarian agencies such as the World Food Programme that are not systemically infiltrated by Hamas."

He said that "other democracies should follow" the examples of Finland, Sweden, and the U.S. "Contrary to what UNRWA supporters claim, the agency is not ‘indispensable’ — assistance can and must be delivered through responsible alternatives."

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09/06 Links: Israel prevented many terror threats against Jews abroad over past year; Hamas Has a Human Sacrifice Strategy; Is the UK’s new leadership serving Islam?; Hoax of an inquiry

From Ian:

Israel prevented many terror threats against Jews abroad over past year, NSC official tells 'Post'

Israeli security agencies have thwarted dozens of plots over the past year, while maintaining heightened vigilance ahead of the Jewish holiday season, a senior National Security Council official told The Jerusalem Post ahead of the High Holy Days.

Iran and Hezbollah are expanding efforts to carry out terrorist attacks against Israelis and Jews worldwide, with Israeli security officials identifying a growing number of plots and preparations,

Iran has devoted increasing resources to promoting terrorism globally, the official said, including through individuals and newly established mechanisms focused specifically on attacks against Israelis and Jews.

“There are many people who wake up in the morning and their entire mission is to promote attacks against Israelis and Jews around the world,” the official said.

The effort involves multiple parts of Iran’s security apparatus, including the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Quds Force and intelligence bodies, the official said. He stressed that the buildup of these capabilities was a long-term process that had intensified over time.

“Even if the rounds of fighting have ended, and we know their limitations, in the end the Iranian feeling is not good in the kinetic balance,” he said. “So they move to their ultimate arena” – efforts to carry out terrorist attacks and target Israelis at various levels.

No country wants terrorism
The official said Israeli strikes inside Iran during the recent fighting had also targeted elements involved in terrorism, including senior figures in Iran’s security establishment.

This, he said, had changed Israel’s operational environment.

“Unlike in the past, given the circumstances, it is possible to act inside Iran itself, particularly in Tehran,” he said, adding that Israel continued to counter Iranian terrorism worldwide, both independently and with foreign partners.

Israeli security agencies have thwarted dozens of terrorist plots over the past year, the official said. Cooperation with foreign governments had also proved critical, including with countries that do not necessarily maintain close political relations with Israel.

“No country wants terrorism on its territory,” he said.

“There is information, warning intelligence, preparations and alerts,” he said. “All these activities together are directed against all the mechanisms, all the organizations and all the countries.”

Israeli authorities had thwarted concrete, “hot” plots during the past year, including cases in which attacks were stopped at the highest levels of warning, the official said.

Some operations were disrupted within hours, while others took days or weeks to halt. Preventing an attack, he added, does not necessarily require striking the terrorist cell itself.

Hamas Has a Human Sacrifice Strategy

Maj. (ret.) John Spencer, chair of Urban Warfare Studies at West Point's Modern War Institute, said in a podcast on Saturday:
"Hamas has a very unique version of human sacrifice, as their goal is to actually get their people killed. They need civilian deaths to achieve their political goals." They say "they need the blood of their women, children, and elderly to achieve their goals. They said they not only want it, they need it to achieve this goal of theirs in the afterlife, martyrdom and everything. So it's a really sick political strategy."

"Even the Japanese, the Nazis, while they accepted civilian casualties, that wasn't their strategy to get their own population killed in order to achieve this political goal....It's [in Hamas's] public statements that anybody can reference that they have this human sacrifice strategy."

"There's 600 miles of tunnels in Gaza....There's 2.2 million people there. All of them could fit in their tunnels with ease and escape what's going on on the surface. But Hamas actually makes written and public statements saying these are not for the civilians and civilians are not allowed....If I go to Ukraine, where I've been many times, the civilians go into the subways to seek refuge from the bombings that are happening on the surface."

"I've seen mountains of evidence, literally fields of food and [Israeli] soldiers doing the opposite of genocide, but the world spreads it....Israel has implemented more of these civilian harm mitigation measures, trying to prevent civilians from getting hurt, like evacuations, phone calls, flyers, all of that, but also daily pauses to allow civilians to get out of harm's way, giving out maps, tracking civilians by their cell phones, not taking airstrikes. They've actually done more of these than any military has ever tried in war, but then are accused of targeting civilians when all of the evidence, real evidence, actually there's no cases of Israel targeting civilians."

"Egypt wouldn't allow the civilians out, which I've never seen in a war that I've ever studied, where one country could save thousands by just creating a humanitarian zone outside of the main combat area."

"Early in 2024, the IPC (one of the groups that would determine famine around the world) did this study of nutrition in Gaza and reported that it was nearing famine conditions because they had changed their own metrics of the number of deaths related to starvation that would equate to famine. And now that same organization provides the data showing that none of it was true. There weren't cases of death by malnutrition and starvation that would equate to the famine marker."

"Everybody thought there were just awful things [happening], despite the actual amount of food that was going in and the lack of deaths from malnutrition and starvation that were happening. Of course, now it's too late. A year later the actual data provided from Gaza [showed that] during the war [Gaza] had nutrition higher than other parts of the Middle East where there is no war. Everybody could have gone and seen the amount of food that was going in."

Dara Horn: Four days before 9/11, an ominous warning about Islamism’s growing influence emerged at the UN

The coming week will be heavy with 9/11 commemorations, which for many New Yorkers still feels like yesterday. But this week, I’ll also be remembering another event that also feels like yesterday: thousands chanting “Free, Free, Palestine!,” “Jew, Jew, Jew!,” and “Israel commits genocide!” No, I don’t mean Columbia University in 2024. I mean the UN World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance in Durban, South Africa in 2001.

This now-infamous UN event, 25 years ago this week, was ideologically hijacked by a group of autocratic nations called the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, which commandeered the proceedings to focus exclusively on Israel — thereby averting the world’s eyes from their own crimes. The Hitler-themed posters that blanketed the UN conference in Durban were funded by the family of Osama bin Laden.

The clown show began in early 2001, when Iran, hosting the Asia region’s pre-planning conference in Tehran, barred Israeli officials and Jewish groups from attending. At their blissfully Jew-free conference, delegates from authoritarian states drafted a UN declaration naming only one country — Israel — as a racist human-rights violator. The OIC included regimes whose ideas of tolerance ranged from legalizing child rape to gassing civilians with chemical weapons. These states were delighted to sign on. Later in Geneva, the OIC proposed language for the main UN declaration about Israel committing “genocide.” (The 2001 death toll from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was just under a third of that year’s homicide rate in Baltimore.)

The goal was clear to American delegate Tom Lantos, a congressman and Holocaust survivor. “If the OIC delegates could turn Israel into the new apartheid South Africa — the world’s sole racist regime — the broad agenda of the WCAR [World Conference against Racism] could be overthrown,” he later wrote.

Lantos saw that the OIC regimes’ plan was precisely to destroy the meaning of human rights. To UN human-rights commissioner Mary Robinson, Lantos argued that “allowing these same forces to appropriate terms like ‘ethnic cleansing,’ ‘genocide,’ and ’crimes against humanity’ to describe Israel’s behavior would forever debase their meaning.”

That is exactly what happened, except much worse.

In Durban, 20,000 protesters swarmed the conference venues, chanting “Free, free Palestine!” and carrying a banner reading “Hitler was Right.” Inside, delegates distributed copies of the century-old antisemitic screed “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” and cartoons of bloody-fanged Jews. Ubiquitous posters featured Hitler’s face over the text “What if I had won? There would be NO Israel.”

The wall-to-wall Jew-hate silenced dissent, literally. At one point, Jewish groups organized an emergency press conference to publicize the hatred. There, one delegate recalled, a “phalanx of Iranian women in black” rushed the podium to prevent them from speaking. By then, conference security advised Jewish delegates not to walk the few blocks to Durban’s Jewish community center; it was too dangerous.

When the NGO conference forum voted on its official Declaration and Action Plan, Jewish groups attempted to add language about antisemitic violence. With precious few exceptions, 3,600 NGOs all voted to delete it. After that, surrounded by jeering crowds, the Jewish delegates walked out — quickly, with bodyguards.

In the seventy-page Declaration voted and approved by those 3,600 NGOs, only one country on earth was named. Israel was the world’s only “racist nation,” a “colonial apartheid state” guilty of “genocide.” In a victory for regimes worldwide actually engaging in racist, colonial, apartheid, genocidal rule — and a defeat for millions suffering under their reign — no other countries were even mentioned. Al Qaeda, equally unworthy of mention, waited in the wings.

To its credit, the American delegation walked out of this clown show. “I have taken this decision with regret, because of the importance of the international fight against racism and the contribution the conference could have made to it,” US Secretary of State Colin Powell said as he announced the walkout, but “I am convinced that will not be possible.”

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09/05 Links: Academic Bias Shaped International Law’s Israel Consensus; Mamdani hands symbolic 9/11 pen to lawyer who represented al-Qaeda terrorist; David Draiman: Rock ‘n' Roll's disturbing hatred of Israel

From Ian:

Study: Academic Bias Shaped International Law’s Israel Consensus

On September 2, Israeli legal scholar Avraham Russell Shalev released a forthcoming paper arguing that the international legal consensus shaping many judgments about Israel has developed within an academic environment that Shalev argues systematically marginalizes Jewish and Zionist perspectives.

In his forthcoming paper From Blogs to Boycotts: Anti-Zionist Biases in Legal Academia, Shalev examines how international-law journals, conferences, professional networks and academic platforms help create the “expert consensus” later invoked by international institutions.

His central argument is not simply that individual scholars hold anti-Israel views. Rather, he argues that the infrastructure producing international-law expertise has developed institutional mechanisms that marginalize Jewish and Zionist perspectives, allowing a narrow ideological framework on Israel to become embedded as a dominant interpretation within parts of international legal discourse.

The paper examines controversies involving Opinio Juris, the Columbia Law Review, the Leiden Journal of International Law and what Shalev describes as informal “grey boycotts” against Israeli scholars.

The Battle Before the Courtroom
International legal campaigns involving Israel often rely on claims of expert consensus. Arguments about occupation, proportionality, self-defense, genocide and state responsibility frequently cite academic commentary and legal scholarship as evidence that a particular interpretation represents mainstream international law.

That influence is recognized within the international legal system itself. Article 38 of the Statute of the International Court of Justice identifies “the teachings of the most highly qualified publicists of the various nations” as a subsidiary means for determining legal rules.

Shalev argues that this creates an overlooked power center: the academic institutions that determine which scholars, arguments and interpretations receive legitimacy.

When certain perspectives are excluded from journals, conferences and professional networks, he argues, the resulting consensus can become self-reinforcing and influence the legal positions adopted by international bodies.

From October 7 to the Legal Narrative
A central focus of the paper is the reaction of parts of the international-law community following Hamas’ October 7 massacre.

Shalev examines international-law blogs such as Opinio Juris, arguing that some platforms have provided space for scholars whose responses to October 7 framed Hamas’ attack through anti-colonial theory while leaving Zionist perspectives underrepresented.

One example discussed by Shalev is an October 2023 Opinio Juris post by legal scholar Mohsen al-Attar responding to an interview with Professor Noura Erakat. The discussion situated October 7 within a broader anti-colonial framework and referenced Frantz Fanon’s argument that “decolonisation is always a violent phenomenon.”

The post also included an addendum published after October 7 that continued discussing the conflict through the lens of anti-colonial struggle. Critics argued that the framing risked treating Hamas’ attack primarily as an anti-colonial event rather than confronting Hamas’ deliberate targeting of civilians and the scale of the atrocities committed during the attack.

University of Haifa legal scholar Yahli Shereshevsky later criticized elements of the response within international-law circles, arguing that some reactions reflected a failure to fully acknowledge the nature of the October 7 attacks.

For Shalev, the episode represents a broader pattern: legal discourse surrounding Israel often begins from frameworks of colonialism, oppression and state violence while placing less emphasis on Israeli security concerns, Hamas terrorism and the legal obligations of non-state armed groups.

The Institutions Defining Acceptable Debate
Shalev also examines the controversy surrounding the publication of Rabea Eghbariah’s article Toward Nakba as a Legal Concept in the Columbia Law Review.

The article became controversial after the journal acknowledged that it had been commissioned and did not undergo the journal’s standard review process.

Shalev argues that the episode reflected a broader asymmetry: arguments challenging Israel’s legitimacy often gain access to prestigious academic platforms, while scholars defending Israel or contesting dominant narratives face greater professional barriers.

The paper also discusses cases involving Israeli scholars whose submissions were rejected or altered during publication processes, including Anne Herzberg and Tal Mimran.

Shalev also examines the controversy surrounding the Leiden Journal of International Law. He argues that the journal’s decision to add a disclaimer to an article by Israeli authors after criticism on social media reflected broader concerns about the treatment of Israeli scholars publishing on Israel-related issues.

The E1 debate is not just about West Bank settlement construction - it’s about security

Twenty-nine Democratic senators have demanded that Israel halt proposed construction in the E1 area between Jerusalem and Ma’aleh Adumim, an Israeli city of 40,000 people.

E1 has long been a lightning rod for advocates of Palestinian statehood, who argue that Israeli construction would sever the Ramallah-Bethlehem corridor and destroy the contiguity of a future Palestinian state. But any viable Palestinian state would likely require tunnels, bridges, or dedicated roads to connect separated areas. Moreover, E1 lies in Area C, where Israel retains planning and zoning authority under the Oslo framework, despite international opposition.

Still, I believe building in E1 now is ill-timed. Israel’s most important ally, the United States, is already grappling with growing anti-Israel sentiment and antisemitic intimidation from the Democratic Left and the conspiratorial Tucker Carlson Right. Israel gains little by creating another unnecessary political confrontation with Washington at this time.

But Washington is asking the wrong question about E1.

The Democratic senators wrote, “The United States must remain committed to a two-state solution that delivers lasting peace and security for both the Jewish, democratic State of Israel and for a future Palestinian state.… development in E1 would seriously jeopardize the prospects for a Palestinian state.”

Their call for Israel’s security and a Palestinian state deserves more scrutiny.

Obstacles toward Palestinian state
The obstacles to Palestinian statehood did not begin with E1. They began with the Arab rejection of two states in 1948 and their subsequent refusals for a state in 1967, 2000, 2001, and 2007-08, the last offered Palestinian sovereignty in Gaza and nearly all of the West Bank, with a Palestinian capital in east Jerusalem.

Underlying those failures is a question those American policymakers too often avoid: whether Palestinian society is prepared to accept a permanent Jewish state anywhere between “the river and the sea.”

After October 7, that question can no longer be treated as theoretical.

The real E1 debate should not be whether Israelis can build homes there. It should be whether Israel could ever safely relinquish security control of this strategically critical corridor.

Highway 1 runs east from Jerusalem, past Ma’aleh Adumim and E-1, toward the Jordan Valley. It is an essential artery connecting Israel’s major population centers on the coast with its eastern frontier, and provides a vital route for rapidly moving troops, weapons, and supplies toward Israel’s longest border with Jordan.

That matters because Jordan’s long-term stability cannot be taken for granted.

The Hashemite monarchy remains an important American and Israeli security partner, but Jordan is economically fragile and faces significant demographic and Islamist ideological pressures. American and Israeli strategists must contemplate the possibility that over the coming decade Jordan could face increased Sunni Islamist influence, Iranian destabilization efforts, or serious internal disorder.

If that happens, Israel’s eastern frontier could rapidly transform from one of its quietest borders into one of its most dangerous.

During visits with Israeli military personnel and intelligence officials, I saw firsthand the concern about weapons and narcotics smuggling across Israel’s eastern frontier. Weapons entering Judea and Samaria, the West Bank, can strengthen an already formidable Hamas and other armed groups’ presence, operating only miles from Israel’s major population centers.

Today, Israel is confronting increasing tensions inside the West Bank. Israeli security officials have warned repeatedly about the potential for significant escalation.

The Netanyahu government deserves criticism for failing to adequately restrain extremist Jewish violence. Those who attack Palestinians violate Israeli law and should be prosecuted. A future Israeli government should enforce the law aggressively.

But Jewish extremism is only one part of a much larger security problem. For decades, Palestinian Authority schools, official media, and religious institutions have promoted incitement and narratives that reject any Jewish sovereignty, while the PA’s notorious “pay for slay” system has financially rewarded terrorists and their families, incentivizing violence that makes territorial compromise increasingly dangerous.

This brings us back to E1.

There are actually two separate questions that Washington has mistakenly conflated.

The first is whether Israel should build in E1 today. I believe it should not. With an election approaching, beginning construction looks more like a political gesture to the Israeli Right than an urgent security requirement.

The second question is far more consequential: Should E1 ever come under Palestinian security control? From an Israeli security perspective, the answer is no, certainly not in the foreseeable future.

Toronto Film Festival to Feature Speaker Who Called Hezbollah Attacks “Legitimate Resistance”

The Muslim Public Affairs Council’s Hollywood Bureau is bringing its Muslim House cultural hub to the Toronto International Film Festival for the first time on September 13 and 15, with MPAC President Salam Al-Marayati scheduled to interview filmmaker Bassam Tariq inside TIFF Lightbox.

Al-Marayati’s appearance comes 25 years after he suggested, during a Los Angeles radio interview on September 11, 2001, that Israel should be investigated over that day’s terrorist attacks. “I think we should put the state of Israel on the suspect list,” he said on KCRW’s Which Way, L.A.? The Los Angeles Times later reported the remarks.

The episode was not his first national controversy involving terrorism. Two years earlier, his appointment to a federal commission examining terrorism was withdrawn amid objections over his previous statements concerning Hamas, Hezbollah and attacks against Israel.

The Hollywood Bureau and Muslim House operate under the Muslim Public Affairs Council Foundation, a federally recognized 501(c)(3) nonprofit whose charitable contributions are generally tax deductible. Muslim House does not appear to be a separate nonprofit entity. MPAC describes it as a program produced by the Hollywood Bureau. “Legitimate Resistance” and the Marine Barracks Bombing

In November 1999, Al-Marayati described Hezbollah attacks against Israeli soldiers in Lebanon as “legitimate resistance” during an appearance on PBS.

That year, an MPAC counterterrorism position paper addressed the 1983 bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, which killed 241 American servicemen. The paper said the bombing was “not in a strict sense, a terrorist operation,” instead characterizing it as a military attack against a noncivilian target. The language was later quoted in witness testimony before the 9/11 Commission.

Then-House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt had appointed Al-Marayati in June 1999 to the National Commission on Terrorism, a 10-member body tasked with reviewing U.S. counterterrorism policy.

Jewish organizations and members of Congress objected to the appointment, with critics accusing Al-Marayati of failing to unequivocally condemn Hamas and Hezbollah. Gephardt withdrew the appointment the following month amid the controversy.

MPAC’s framing of the Hamas-led October 7, 2023 attack also drew criticism.

In a statement issued as the attack unfolded, MPAC identified Israeli “occupation” as “the source of the problem.” It said Israeli policies had created a political vacuum that allowed Hamas and other groups to gain support and “justify their violent attacks.”

MPAC has since described Israel’s military campaign in Gaza as genocide. Its archived Palestine page states, “It is a genocide.”

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