08/02 Links: Gaza Illusions; The Children Hamas Chose to Weaponize; Deal said in the works to revive US-Iran MOU; Time for Israel to Go on a Narrative Offensive

From Ian:

Gaza Illusions

Hamas identifies more advantages than disadvantages in the Board of Peace agreement for Gaza and therefore welcomes it. The organization survived after three years of bitter war and remains the dominant force in Gaza. It does not assess that the arrangement threatens its status or its assets. In its understanding, it will be able to continue preserving its military and civilian power under the cosmetic cover of the technocratic government - adopting the Hizbullah model, meaning existing alongside a weak formal government.

Hamas emphasizes that the demand for disarmament relates only to heavy weapons, of which it has barely any left. The arrangement appears to be creating a trap for Israel, enabling Hamas to preserve its power, despite the promise that nothing would be advanced in the area unless Hamas was first disarmed.

Under the circumstances that have been created, vital interests in Gaza must be defined in the spirit of "prevention," first and foremost: preserving freedom of action against emerging threats in the area; designating a large area near the border where activity of any kind will be prohibited, all the more so the establishment of an enemy presence; preserving the right to veto foreign actors entering Gaza; and above all ensuring that the Philadelphi Corridor is not under Hamas control.

Did the PA's "Pay-for-Slay" Policy Facilitate the October 7 Massacre?

The Palestinian Authority established a comprehensive statutory framework governing financial benefits for terrorist prisoners and released terrorists. Over time, the remuneration system expanded beyond monthly salaries to include release grants, guaranteed employment within the PA apparatus, and continuing financial support where employment was unavailable. The legal framework progressively increased both the level of financial benefits and the institutional obligations imposed upon the PA toward terrorist prisoners and released terrorists.

The PA/PLO's remuneration policy was not merely a humanitarian welfare program or a series of isolated financial payments. Rather, it evolved into a comprehensive statutory and administrative framework that systematically rewarded terrorist imprisonment, guaranteed continuing financial support following release, and, in many cases, facilitated the reintegration of released terrorists into publicly-funded employment.

The policy substantially reduced the personal and economic consequences associated with terrorist activity and materially assisted a significant number of experienced terrorists who later resumed terrorist activity. Several ultimately rose to senior positions within Hamas or directly participated in planning, financing, directing, or executing the October 7 massacre.

Time for Israel to Go on a Narrative Offensive

Rewiring the narrative
Historically, the relative success in the turnabout on Israel and Zionism has been a long process. Even if we ignore Jewish anti-Zionism thinking, amongst Jews as well as non-Jews, or take into consideration general anti-Jewish sentiment whether racist or religiously-motivated, surely we are in a very different place as regards control of the narrative.

In a recent piece posted in the +972 Magazine, we learn that France’s Rima Hassan, European Parliament member representing the La France Insoumise party, wants to break four taboos in the French public debate on Palestine.

They are: recognizing Zionism as a colonial ideology; defending the right of return; discussing the legitimacy of armed struggle; and moving beyond the two-state paradigm.

That is not a simple alteration of a narrative but, as the chant that has been increasingly sounded at anti-Israel rallies is formulated, Zionism must be eliminated. We are back in the 1950s and 1960s with the “Throw them into the sea!” sloganeering.

Yet, because of the internal squabbling in Israel over policies, the fundamental truths of the Zionist narrative have been misplaced in our public diplomacy material, as well as the fierce willingness to engage in confronting the waves of lies and fabrications assertively. It appears the “in” thing is to appear at the Oxford Union in evening dress.

Rabbi Irving Greenberg, however, provides another problem. Appalled by Hasan Piker’s claim of how much better Hamas is than Israel, he writes in the LA Jewish Journal on July 16 that Piker’s political voice promotes a “toxic narrative … untethered from reality.”

Piker, he continued, is an example of how “Palestinians’ allies have led [the Palestinians] to the dark side of their national aspirations – destroying Israel rather than building their own potential state.”

Greenberg does not address that toxicity’s success. He does not ask if that negativity should be a cause to punish those exploiting such a message or if, and he is a rabbi, an ethical conclusion could be drawn that should advance the idea that an Arab Palestine state would be immoral.

There exists a major underestimation of the damage and danger the Palestine narrative dominance represents. And now that the pro-Palestine camp has reduced the rhetoric to a zero-sum situation, demanding our elimination and that our existence as a Jewish state must be denied, the hasbara (public diplomacy) approach of defense and explaining Israel’s actions needs to be refashioned.

Money is available. According to reports, since October 2023, upwards of $100 million has been allotted to hasbara efforts, most on social media platforms. I probably haven’t seen all the output, but I am confident little of it was framed in an attack mode.

We need to be past that stage of weak, explanatory public diplomacy. Attention must be shifted. The burden of proof and defense must be placed on the pro-Palestine side. Should a Palestinian national identity of less than 100 years be preferred over a 3,000-year Jewish national identity?

Were not the Arab Muslim conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries the real colonization process in the Middle East?

Who is truly engaged in an “ethnic cleansing” if not Palestinianism? Who initiated genocidal violence, beginning in 1920? Should not the side that violates agreements be punished? Should a constant rejection of diplomacy and willingness to compromise be tolerated?

It is time to make major changes in attitude and approach and to reassert Zionism’s narrative.

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08/01 Links: Hamas disarmament cannot wait for the IDF's withdrawal from Gaza; Trump cancels Iran attack, calls for immediate deal; Herzog accuses Mamdani of spreading 'blasphemy,' antisemitism

From Ian:

JPost Editorial: Hamas disarmament cannot wait for the IDF's withdrawal from Gaza

The latest Gaza proposal is better than the empty language that has surrounded much of the postwar discussion. It addresses Hamas’s weapons, the tunnels, the command structure, the future administration of Gaza, and the link between demilitarization and Israeli withdrawal.

That is important, but it is not enough. Israel cannot agree to a process in which withdrawal, reconstruction, or political recognition move forward on the assumption that Hamas will disarm later.

The issue is not whether disarmament appears in the document - it does - the issue is whether Hamas is required to carry it out before Israel gives up the leverage needed to make it happen.

Hamas has spent the period since October 7 using every negotiation to gain time, preserve control, and push the most difficult questions into the next phase. Deals have produced real achievements - above all the return of hostages - and that matters. But Hamas’s military power has remained largely untouched by diplomacy.

The negotiations show the same risk, with Hamas already presenting its obligations as conditional on Israeli steps that would come first in practice. It has repeatedly rejected disarmament, qualified it, or offered formulations that leave its weapons under a different name or authority.

The latest proposal may be more serious, but it still depends on sequencing. If Hamas is allowed to remain armed while a new Palestinian committee enters Gaza, while international bodies begin work, and while Israeli forces pull back, the result may be a civilian structure operating under the same threat that has shaped Gaza for years. Israeli withdrawal can not happen based on Hamas promises

The United States should be careful not to mistake a framework for implementation. Titles, ceremonies, international boards, and public declarations may help move negotiations forward, but they do not remove a single rocket, destroy a single tunnel, or prevent Hamas from rebuilding. Israel cannot base a withdrawal on what Hamas says it intends to do.

The standard must be physical and verifiable. Weapons need to be collected and placed beyond use, while production sites and tunnels need to be located and destroyed. Smuggling routes, command networks, and financing systems need to be dismantled. Inspectors must be able to enter sites without warning, and violations must stop the next stage automatically.

Food, medicine, water, shelter, and basic services should reach civilians regardless of Hamas’s conduct, and they should do so without strengthening Hamas’s control where possible.

Large-scale reconstruction is different. It brings money, building materials, jobs, contracts, and influence. If it begins while Hamas remains armed, it risks rebuilding the system that allowed the organization to embed itself in every part of life in Gaza. Reconstruction should expand first in areas that have been independently verified as demilitarized and where a civilian authority can operate without armed intimidation.

Orna and Ronen Neutra: Israel’s future is in jeopardy if it becomes a single-party cause

The late Sen. Lindsey Graham entered our lives during the darkest chapter our family had ever known. This week, as we traveled to Washington for his funeral, we came not only to honor one of Israel’s most steadfast friends, but to remember a leader who stood beside our family — and whose example offers an urgent lesson for Israel and its relationship with the United States.

We first met Graham shortly after Oct. 7, 2023, when we believed our American Israeli son, Capt. Omer Neutra, had been taken hostage by Hamas. We later learned that Omer had been murdered during the attack and that his body had been taken into Gaza.

From the earliest days of the war, Graham was among the strongest and most consistent voices in the Senate calling for the hostages to be brought home and standing firmly with Israel. He spoke with clarity about Iran’s central role in supporting Hamas and understood that Hamas could not remain in power if the region was ever to achieve lasting stability.

Within weeks of the attacks, he led a bipartisan Senate delegation to Saudi Arabia, Israel, and Egypt. He believed Hamas must not be allowed to destroy the historic possibility of normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia. He also recognized that building a regional coalition against Iran and its proxies was essential to creating a safer and more stable Middle East.

But the lesson Graham leaves behind is not only about foreign policy. It is about how meaningful change is achieved in a democracy.

When he believed in a cause, he fully embraced the democratic process required to advance it. He worked across party lines, sought consensus whenever possible, and used his voice, relationships, and influence to bring others with him.

That was how he approached the effort to bring the hostages home.

He never told us what we wanted to hear simply to make us feel better. He told us what he believed. He never offered false hope, but he always made time for us, listened carefully, and treated our concerns with honesty and respect.

During one meeting with hostage families, he said something we have never forgotten: “I wish you were all my constituents.”

As our family’s journey unfolded, from fighting to bring Omer home, to learning the devastating truth of his murder, to finally bringing him home for burial, we tried to follow the same principle.

From the beginning, we made a conscious decision that the hostage crisis could never belong to only one political party.

On Oct. 15, 2023, Donald Trump called us as a former president and private citizen. We thanked him for reaching out, but we also shared what would become one of the guiding principles of our advocacy: The hostages had to remain a humanitarian cause, not a partisan one, especially during a presidential election. He immediately agreed, and we appreciated that he honored that principle throughout the months that followed.

We carried that commitment through every stage of our advocacy. We worked closely with the Biden administration and later with the Trump administration. We met with Republican and Democratic senators, members of Congress, governors, administration officials, and leaders from across the political spectrum.

We participated in the Republican National Convention while proudly supporting fellow hostage-family advocates Rachel Goldberg-Polin and Jon Polin when they addressed the Democratic National Convention.

Our message was the same in every room: bringing the hostages home was not a Republican cause or a Democratic cause. It was a human cause.

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07/31 Links Pt2: After 25 years, the Sbarro bombing and its aftermath still matter; Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, and the serpent: Why their lies work

From Ian:

Jonathan Tobin: After 25 years, the Sbarro bombing and its aftermath still matter

For the rest of the world, including most Jews, Aug. 9 is just another day on the calendar. It doesn’t have the resonance of 9/11 or Oct. 7. Unlike those dates that remain inextricably linked to horrifying terrorist attacks, what happened on Aug. 9, 2001 has faded into memory for most Jews.

Some remember the Palestinian Arab suicide bombing at the Sbarro pizzeria at the corner of King George Street and the Jaffa Road in Jerusalem, which took the lives of 16 people, including eight children and a pregnant woman, and wounded another 130 persons. It was one among many such atrocities committed by the Palestinians during the terrorist war of attrition waged by the Palestinians from 2001 to 2005, known as the Second Intifada. And even that terrible struggle, which took the lives of more than 1,000 Israelis and many more Palestinians, has been overshadowed by the unspeakable crimes committed on Oct. 7, 2023, and the ordeal of the war against Iran and its terrorist proxies ever since.

Other than the families of the murdered and injured, that day isn’t likely circled on many calendars.

A date to remember
So, perhaps it’s understandable that it might fade from our consciousness.

Indeed, many such dates fade from the collective memory of nations because of the passage of time. Dec. 7 was once a turning point in the lives of Americans, who could tell you where they were and what they were doing when they heard the news that the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor, dragging the United States into the Second World War. But those who have such memories of the events 85 years ago are now few and far between.

Increasingly, the same is true for Nov. 22, which was once indelibly linked to the trauma of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, but which now has little resonance for any but the conspiracy-theory buffs among the overwhelming majority of Americans who were not alive then.

But we should remember Aug. 9—and not just because this year is the 25th anniversary of that horrible incident. It stands as a reminder of the folly and hubris of those who dabble in the Middle East peace process. That is something that President Donald Trump ought to keep in mind when he issues broadly optimistic statements about peace in the Mideast.

Trump’s Board of Peace, which is responsible for the rebuilding of the Gaza Strip in the aftermath of the post-Oct. 7 war, has announced a new plan for implementing the disarmament of Hamas and the withdrawal of Israeli forces from the region. Israel’s moves would be contingent on the terrorists laying down their weapons and the president’s threats to Hamas if they don’t comply sound tough. But Trump’s breezy optimism about Hamas surrendering its armaments seems reminiscent of such predictions about the end of Palestinian terrorism the world has heard many times in the past, not least in the years before Aug. 9, 2001.

The Sbarro bombing was a shocking indicator of the barbarism of Israel’s erstwhile peace partners.

Nearly eight years earlier, most Israelis and the Jewish world had rejoiced in the signing of the Oslo Peace Accords on the White House Lawn by Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat under the optimistic patronage of President Bill Clinton. Only a year before the bombing, Israel’s then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak had journeyed to Camp David, where he and Clinton had followed up on Oslo by offering Arafat an independent state in Gaza, a share of Jerusalem, and almost all of Judea and Samaria. Arafat rejected the offer. By way of further response, he launched the wave of terror attacks that literally and figuratively blew up the peace process. Instead of trading land for peace, it exchanged land for terror.

Jonathan Tobin: Decoding the settler violence narrative for Americans

Debunking a false narrative
The truth about settler violence contradicts not merely the assertion of the CIS and those regurgitating it in America, like Stephens. Though the Times columnist and others have mocked Netanyahu’s claims that the problem is confined to approximately 150 “juvenile delinquents,” once you take a deep dive into the statistics about settler violence, you realize that he might not be entirely wrong about that claim.

As JNS has reported, the assertion that Jews living in Judea and Samaria have been regularly engaging in a crime rampage is based on reports that classify a great many things that no objective observer would call “Jewish terror.” A Kohelet Policy Forum report on the subject by Israeli legal scholars Eugene Kontorovich and Avraham Shalev details the facts that many of the alleged acts of settler violence consist mainly of Jews doing things like visiting the Temple Mount in Jerusalem or creating infrastructure in their communities.

More important is the fact that many of these alleged instances of Jewish terrorism represent incidents in which Jews have defended themselves against acts of Arab terror. They also include times when the IDF has conducted counter-terror operations.

The narrative about settler violence also ignores the context of life in the territories. Arab violence and terrorism aimed at Jews is a daily occurrence. It is so common that only the most violent incidents involving deaths at the hands of Palestinian terrorists are reported, even in the Israeli press. The hundreds of thousands of Jews living in communities in the heart of their ancient homeland face constant harassment and violence. Rock-throwing at vehicles—something that American prosecutors would have no qualm about classifying as attempted murder since it is done with the express intent to harm the occupants of the car—is a constant threat. As anyone who has taken the trouble to visit these “settlements” knows, Jewish towns and villages, as well as farms, must be guarded around the clock to protect their inhabitants.

The number of acts of Arab violence in the territories far outnumbers even most of the exaggerated claims of settler crimes.

That’s not to say that a tiny minority of the Jewish population of these communities has never crossed the line from active defense to acts of retaliation. And when they do, they are often arrested by Israeli intelligence units and subject to the full force of the law. But such incidents are a small percentage of overall actions that the United Nations or others call settler “violence.”

So, to argue as Stephens does, that Netanyahu is lying and that a nation that can order its forces to perform amazing acts of derring-do when fighting Iran, Hezbollah or Hamas could, if it wished, put a quick end to a major crime problem is not merely missing the point of what is actually happening in Judea and Samaria. It’s a false claim whose purpose is to bolster the idea that Netanyahu’s government is hopelessly compromised by the presence of parties, like those led by ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich. The assertion is that these controversial parties and leaders that support the Jews of Judea and Samaria have prevented the prime minister from doing his duty to uphold the law.

There are reasonable, even strong, arguments to make that someone like Ben-Gvir, who does and says things that are irresponsible and undermine Israel’s reputation, is a liability to Netanyahu. In private, the prime minister probably thinks that himself. Netanyahu would almost certainly prefer some of the center-left parties as coalition partners for Likud and will likely try to get them to join him if he gets the chance to form another government after the Oct. 27 election. But except for the national unity government that existed for a time after Oct. 7, they have refused to join Netanyahu due to personal feuds. That has ensured that Ben-Gvir, Smotrich and the ultra-Orthodox parties are the Likud’s only available partners.

Seen from this perspective, the entire discussion becomes easily understandable as a tactic to persuade people not to vote for Netanyahu or his allies.

Plenty of legitimate reasons exist for Israelis not to want Netanyahu to continue in office, including his lengthy tenure as prime minister and the fact that Oct. 7 happened on his watch. Yet it should be remembered that his most likely would-be successors were just as guilty as Netanyahu of subscribing to the “conceptzia” idea that Hamas could be bought off from attacking Israel as it did that Black Shabbat. That goes double for everyone in the military and intelligence establishment that sold Israelis this false doctrine. Indeed, the entire point of the CIS initiative is to replicate the pre-Oct. 7 situation in Gaza in Judea and Samaria, with the same tragic results its most likely consequence.

And that’s a reminder to those citing the CIS letter that blind faith in military and intelligence officials—many of whom, like Vilnai, have political motives—is almost always a mistake.

Coercing Israel
Once you strip away the skewed statistics, emotive rhetoric and virtue-signaling about disassociating from Jews who are “bad” settlers, the talk of settler violence is revealed as a political tactic aimed at toppling Netanyahu. The main reason why the Israeli opposition and its allies in the United States talk about the subject is to paint the Jewish population of the territories as a bunch of violent thugs, and in doing so, convince the electorate that they should be sacrificed in some chimerical “land for peace” agreement.

Yet since the Israeli left knows very well that the Israeli public will never vote for such a thing, they must resort, as they have for decades, to pleas for Washington to pressure Jerusalem to adopt policies the voters have rejected, as well as to efforts to delegitimize the prime minister and his allies.

Those whom American supporters of Israel look to as champions of their cause, like Stephens, should not have fallen for this tactic since it does as much harm to Israel’s reputation as it does to the government. That he and others like him have done so speaks volumes about their hostility to Netanyahu and Trump. Stephens’ readers deserved better from him.

Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, and the serpent: Why their lies work

A biblical strategy
"Your eyes will be opened,” said the Serpent to an undecided Eve in the very first time this tactic was used.

The same tool that Carlson and Owens use today.

"Did God really say you shall not eat from any tree of the garden?"

The same build-up that the Serpent used before any claim is made, the same that Carlson and Owens use now. A redirect of attention. Not telling Eve what to conclude explicitly, but certainly implicitly.

Then comes suggesting something is being hidden from Eve.

And finally, the feeling that you see something others don't. It's framed by the Serpent, and now by the woke-right as joining an unseen tier, being a part of the people who see behind the curtain that everyone else is staring at.

The content of what's revealed almost doesn't even matter.

What's seductive is the exclusivity of the seeing. Once you believe you're one of the few who's noticed something hidden, the claim defends itself, because doubting it would mean giving up the very thing that made you feel exceptional in the first place. Owens, Fuentes, antisemites across Twitter/X even use that term to describe themselves. “Noticers.”

These lies are compelling for the same reason they always have been.

What makes this worth writing about, for me, isn't the tactics themselves, however. It's that I've fallen for them. Not in some abstract, theoretical "everyone's susceptible" way. Specifically.

There have been moments where a claim, made by conspiracy theorists, about 9/11, Kennedy’s assassination, or the moon landing, or even the claims made by Carlson, Owens, or Fuentes themselves, landed on me not because I'd examined it, but because it was framed in a way that made the examining feel unnecessary. Where "obviously" did the work that evidence should have done, where I felt the rush of waking up to something instead of the slower, less flattering work of actually verifying it.

Most of life, most of reality takes time to understand, and you actually shouldn't have it all easily comprehensible in an instant.

Maybe the Israel-Palestine conflict can't be fully understood from a 30-second TikTok clip; maybe it does actually take time.

That's the uncomfortable part of taking this seriously. It's easy to nod along to a breakdown of manipulation tactics when you're picturing the people who fell for them.

It is way harder to sit with the fact that skepticism isn't a personality trait you either have or don't; it's a discipline you fail at, repeatedly, usually in the exact moments you feel most certain you're finally seeing clearly.

Aristotle once said that “the mark of an educated mind” is the ability to “entertain a thought without accepting it.”

I quite like that. In an age where we're flooded with every idea imaginable, regardless of how shaky, I think it's more important than ever to be able to hear something, feel its pull, and still ask whether it's actually true.

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07/31 Links Pt1: Why Isn’t Trump Finishing the Job in Iran?; Hamas ‘disarmament’ deal is more Trump fantasyland; Evyatar David recalls captivity, being forced to dig his grave

From Ian:

Why Isn’t Trump Finishing the Job in Iran?

In a completely unforeseen development, Lucy has once again yanked the football away from Charlie—sorry, President Donald Trump has once again backed away from his threats to annihilate Iran and opted for more diplomacy.

We were also shocked—shocked!—to learn one of the alleged reasons Trump decided to stop bombing Iran on Friday night: a shortage of key munitions. Indeed, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Axios, and CNN all ran stories over the weekend on the supposed “munitions” shortfall, reportedly raised by Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine during a meeting with the president last week.

“Any major operation against Iran will face challenges because the U.S. munitions stockpile has been significantly depleted by Washington’s ongoing defense of Israel and support for Ukraine,” the Post reported Caine as telling the president. “Intensifying the war could dangerously drain the Pentagon’s already diminished stockpile of Patriot antimissile interceptors and other air defense munitions in the Middle East,” was the Times’ gloss on the same meeting. CNN and the Journal corroborated the claims about Caine, with CNN adding that Vice President JD Vance also warned Trump against resumption of the war. In an “analysis” article posted on Monday, CNN’s senior political reporter, Aaron Blake, argued that the question of “munitions stockpiles” had become “pivotal” to U.S. planning. Blake linked to an April analysis from CNN, which argued that there was now a “near-term risk” of the United States “running out of ammunition” in a conflict with a near-peer adversary such as China.

So, is the United States just too short on ammo to continue fighting? Unsurprisingly, the answer is that there is a partial truth here—but one wrapped in a whole lot of BS and spin.

The first point to make is that much of the media coverage—presumably guided by figures such as Colby—is intentionally conflating “munitions” with “air defense munitions,” used to defend against drones and ballistic missiles. U.S. inventories are classified, but most media coverage refers to estimates from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, which, according to CNN, “closely align” with classified U.S. data. Here’s a table on “key munitions” stockpiles from CSIS’s estimates published in April, at the conclusion of the intensive wave of fighting:

Of these “key munitions,” the Tomahawks, JASSMs, and PrSMs are all high-end standoff (i.e., offensive) weapons, for which the United States has plentiful cheaper substitutes. The concern is specifically with high-end air defense munitions such as Patriots, THAADs, and SM-6s (used to defend ships from missiles and drones).

However, none of these shortages precludes further operations against Iran. In U.S. military doctrine, air defense is not intended to provide an indefinite shield against drone and missile strikes; given enough time, any sufficiently capable enemy can overwhelm air defenses—a problem known as “overmatch.” The purpose of air defenses is to protect U.S. and allied forces long enough to suppress and destroy the enemy’s launch capability. Indeed, this was precisely the point reportedly raised by CENTCOM chief Adm. Brad Cooper during the president’s recent war council. According to The Wall Street Journal, Cooper “believes the U.S. can cope with the limited stocks of Patriot and other air defense interceptors because stepped-up U.S. strikes, if they are approved by Trump, would blunt Iran’s ability to launch large numbers of missiles.”

What is true—and what we suspect was the basis of Caine’s reported warning—is that munitions shortages do somewhat raise the risk of combat operations. “The United States and Israel definitely still have the capacity to conduct operations, but they’re going to have to maybe accept a little bit more risk than they have in the past,” Colby Badhwar, an independent defense analyst and fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis, told The Scroll in an interview. “They’re going to have to get in a little closer using things like small-diameter bombs, JDAMs, and glide bombs. The United States still has a lot of munitions available, but they definitely will have to be a little bit more judicious, perhaps, in how they execute and plan operations.” Indeed, as the CSIS report quoted above notes, “the United States has enough missiles to continue fighting this war under any plausible scenario.”

Jake Wallis Simons: Hamas ‘disarmament’ deal is more Trump fantasyland

It’s all an obvious strategy to buy some time while embedding itself even more deeply amongst Gaza’s civilians. There’s even word for it: “Hudna”, or “truce”, which in Hamas parlance means “strategic pause”. Yet Trump is apparently so keen for progress that he’s willing to play along. Forgive me if I do a little sick.

To the detail, which as usual with Trump remains rather vague. The four-page plan, which reportedly has 15 points, sets out a phased disarmament for the jihadis – sorry, I’m struggling to keep a straight face here – mirrored by a reciprocal IDF withdrawal from its current positions behind the “Yellow Line” buffer zone.

Weapons are to be handed over to a transitional body before being removed from Gaza, the Strip is to be fully demilitarised and, in the words of The Donald: “The International Stabilization Force will work with a new Palestinian police force to take responsibility for Gaza being safe for its residents and its neighbours.”

The most obvious of many practical questions presents itself right away. Where is this “Palestinian police force” going to come from? The Palestinian Authority, which was routed by Hamas in a bloody coup in 2007, is shambolic, corrupt, inept and supportive of terror, if another flavour of terror to that perpetrated by Hamas. Disarming the group, as the IDF discovered, means risking the lives of a great many troops.

It means going house-to-house in unfamiliar territory, amid booby-traps, tunnel shafts, snipers and child soldiers, and forensically searching hundreds of thousands of properties for arms. Israeli troops were willing to risk their lives in Gaza, as they were defending their families. Would Palestinians really do the same?

Even if the creation of such a force was realistic, it would take up to a year to recruit, train, equip and deploy. During that time, Hamas would take advantage of the reduced pressure to prepare strategies of resistance of survival, such as burying caches of weapons in layers of obscurity underground.

Similarly, where is the supposed Palestinian technocratic government going to come from? There is nobody with any support on the street, and anyone shipped in by Washington and Jerusalem will immediately be seen as a traitor. Not a good place to start.

In the final analysis, the best way to see this development is as another Trumpian fantasy, to join his failed Gaza Riviera plan in the dustbin of history. In recent months, the president has wantonly squandered his credibility with unhinged rhetoric towards Iran. When you vow apocalyptic consequences without delivering them and announce historic peace agreements that collapse at the first breath of air, how are your enemies supposed to take you seriously? Answer: they don’t. Having seen the Iranians taking Trump for a fool, Hamas are doing the same.

NYPost Editorial: A few questions about the new hopeful Gaza peace plan

Fine, Hamas has said it’s agreed to lay down its arms as per that 15-point plan from President Donald Trump’s Board of Peace, but color us skeptical.

We absolutely hope it proves to be a genuine step toward bringing permanent peace to Gaza, but before we deem it a “historic agreement” as the prez announced, we need some questions answered.

For starters, who decides that Israel and Hamas and its allied terror groups have ceased “all military operations”?

We guarantee that some terrorists will keep shooting at Israel forces (and even more so, at any Gazans who defy them).

It seems a new International Verification Committee needs creating, but who’ll be on it, where will the staff come from, how long will it take to set up — and what happens when one side insists the IVC is wrong about the other side complying?

One enforcement arm is supposed to be the International Stabilization Force, but it’s meant to have a mere 5,000 troops — and so far only seems to actually have 200 or so even pledged by a few countries.

Also: What is the “Palestinian law” the plan mentions repeatedly?

There’s never been an actual Palestinian state to have any laws; are we talking about statutes created by the Palestinian Authority? By the rump government Hamas has run in Gaza? Something else?

And what judges are to interpret this “law”?

More generally, what parts of the Hamas-controlled government will transfer over to the new one under the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza, and again who does the vetting of these “civil servants” selected by various gangs of terrorists?

Above all, how can any “existing police structures” possibly be trusted?

The Israel-Lebanon agreement will be won or lost in the first 150 meters

Before anyone could determine whether the Lebanese Armed Forces could dismantle Hezbollah’s infrastructure, seize its weapons and establish state sovereignty in Southern Lebanon, the new pilot program designed to provide the Lebanese army with an opportunity to do so encountered its first test.

It did not involve missiles, tunnels or units of Hezbollah’s elite Radwan Force. It involved approximately 150 meters.

On July 21, the Lebanese army began deploying in the village of Zawtar al-Gharbiyeh after the Israeli military withdrew as part of the first stage of a U.S.-brokered framework. Lebanese teams began clearing unexploded ordnance. A neighboring village, Zawtar al-Sharqiyeh, remained inside the Israeli-held buffer zone.

The Israel Defense Forces said Lebanese soldiers and an engineering vehicle crossed barriers and advanced about 150 meters into the security zone near Zawtar al-Sharqiyeh, outside the agreed pilot area and without coordination. Israeli troops fired warning shots, and the Lebanese force withdrew without casualties.

The Lebanese army said its soldiers remained inside Zawtar al-Gharbiyeh and were operating through the prescribed coordination mechanism when Israeli troops opened fire nearby. It described the shooting as an act of aggression that endangered its soldiers and could obstruct the pilot program.

Perhaps this was a navigation error. Perhaps the maps were unclear. Perhaps the vehicle crossed the agreed line unintentionally. Perhaps the Lebanese account is correct. The facts should be investigated immediately through the established mechanism.

But this is not an argument about a 150-meter tactical dispute.

The strategic question is how Israel, Lebanon and the United States will resolve the first disputed incident. Will it be documented, investigated and corrected, or dismissed as a local misunderstanding too small to justify endangering a major diplomatic initiative?

Israel knows this trap well. Quite often, violations of agreements become precedents.

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07/30 Links Pt2: The tragic Israel wedge; The Islamists’ Long March; Israel is real, Unlike Palestine; Israel reports all-time high of $169 billion in 2025 exports

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: The tragic Israel wedge

Some liberal Jews still refuse to acknowledge this. The rise in Jew-hatred, they say, has been caused by the policies of Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and the extremist members of his coalition.

Many British Jews, under siege from the largest rise in Jew-hatred in the world last year, similarly blame Israel for their plight.

Seeking scapegoats to avoid the reality that’s staring them in the face, such myopic Jews ignore the steady rise in Jew-hatred that’s occurred over the past several decades in lockstep with the radicalization of the left and the increasing dominance of “Palestinian” propaganda.

The most agonized Jews, however, are those liberal progressives who had the ground on which they stand knocked away from underneath them by the atrocities of the Hamas-led onslaught against Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.

Unable to deny that their own side had sanitized and supported the Palestinian Arabs, who revealed themselves on that terrible day to be depraved and psychopathic savages, they still cling to many of the delusional lies and distortions of the progressive mindset that cast Israel as the villain of the region.

Now, however, they are being presented with a choice they can’t ignore. To be accepted as New Yorkers, Jews are being expected to denounce Israel and renounce Zionism.

Buchdahl got the point. She told Mamdani: “You continue to divide Jews into those whose politics you deem acceptable and Zionists whom you cast beyond the pale.”

America is now following down a very hard road trodden by British Jews for more than two decades.

Even while Israelis were being blown to kingdom come in the Second Intifada, the Israel Defense Forces were being called “Nazis” in Britain for trying to destroy the terrorist infrastructure in the “West Bank.” And British Jews were accordingly presented with an ultimatum: If you don’t denounce Israel, then you aren’t to be considered fully British.

Today, the Israel wedge is also being used to marginalize Jews in New York by splitting them off from mainstream society. But it’s also splitting progressive Jews down the middle. An anguished debate is now taking place among them about the relationship between Zionism and Judaism.

The Islamists’ Long March By Abe Greenwald

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What virtually no one expected was for Islamists to exploit American freedoms (and the Constitution’s qualifications clauses) simply to work their way up the political ladder. Many warned of “creeping Sharia” in those days, but none warned of creeping democracy. I don’t even think the Islamists themselves believed that was a plausible way forward in the first decade of this century.

Here’s what changed: We won the War on Terror.

Critics of that war used to say that you couldn’t wage war on a tactic. But that’s exactly what the U.S. did—and with great success. We rolled back terrorist plots, deposed terror-supporting regimes, killed jihadist leaders, and fortified our country in countless ways. For a quarter of a century, there hasn’t been another jihadist attack on America anywhere near the scale of 9/11. We deprived the Islamists of what had been their most effective weapon. But while the U.S. had successfully guarded the backdoor, they walked through the main entrance.

To paraphrase Clausewitz, terrorism is the continuation of politics by other means. But for radical Muslims targeting the U.S., it became a dead end. So they turned to politics properly understood. This required a multipronged approach including stepped-up foreign investment in American academia, coordination with international NGOs and well-funded activist networks, and a flood-the-zone social media blitz promoting anti-American and anti-Israel propaganda. Taken together, these created the favorable conditions for an Islamist presence in the American public square and a viable shot at electoral politics. The American left bought it all and was happy to throw down that ladder for the Islamists to climb. And so the effort commandeered multiple movements and institutions and yielded both electable candidates and their constituents.

Everything was in place by October 7, 2023. From that day to this one, the left’s operators would corral anti-Israel animus, put it in the service of one Islamist candidate after another, and charge the voting booths. Instead of waging deadly attacks on government buildings, Islamists are now seeking (and attaining) positions inside them.

Israel: The World's Heroic Scapegoat

Israel is continually falsely accused -- often by countries committing enormous war crimes -- of being a "settler-colonialist" nation, of practicing apartheid, and of genocide against Palestinians. It is excoriated in the United Nations, in European parliaments, by the international media, and by so-called human rights groups. None of the allegations against it are true. They cannot even be substantiated with facts or evidence. Not that this matters much to those determined to express their Jew-hate, even if under the guise of "social justice" or other fatuous constructs.

It was betrayed even before the start by Britain, which, at the 1921 Cairo Conference, divided the territory of the Mandate for Palestine in two: 22% for the Jews and 78% for the Hashemite kingdom of King Abdullah (now Jordan).

According to Jonathan Tobin, "[Vance] warned them that they had no recourse but to accept whatever Trump did..." It is a blessing that we have all had a chance to see who he is now, along with his disastrous Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding with Iran, rather than just before a possible run for president in 2028.

Israel is a sovereign nation, entitled to defend its borders and people without permission from anyone.

Yesterday, Trump met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Washington, DC. It will be interesting to see what these two undauntable leaders are cooking up.

In its short history, Israel has shown itself to be beyond heroic in defending civilization and the West. Netanyahu has duly earned the title "the Churchill of the Middle East." Israel's cowardly detractors, some of whom refused even to let the US use their airbases for strikes against Iran, whose ballistic missiles threaten them, should take the back seat they deserve and pipe down. It is time for the disparagement to stop.

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07/30 Links Pt1: Trump Can Still Win the Iran War; UN Is Actively Obstructing US Probe Into UNRWA links to Hamas; Hamas has agreed to disarm, Trump says

From Ian:

Trump Can Still Win the Iran War

The Revolutionary Guards, who now run Tehran very much as the SS did once Hitler died, have no plan other than to keep fighting, and a readiness to hang anyone who disagrees. This latest bout of warfare started with June's botched "Memorandum of Understanding," which was so loosely worded that it could be read as surrendering the Persian Gulf to Iran - as well as its direct opposite. It was also inevitable that the surviving Revolutionary Guard officers who now rule Iran would go for the maximum; all along they have boasted about their glorious victories, so they were hardly going to stand down and let America's Arab and Sunni friends ship out their oil, liquefied natural gas, and fertilizers undisturbed.

So they made an unprecedented and plainly illegal claim of sovereignty over the whole Gulf, together with a demand for transit fees. When Iran started attacking ships to assert its claim, the Trump administration imposed a total embargo on the Islamic Republic's oil exports.

Because Iran's usable foreign exchange reserves are very small, the oil export embargo had an immediate impact. It hampered Iran's ability to import rocket fuel, drone motors and other such urgent necessities from China. It also slowed its money transfers to Shi'a allies in Iraq, to Hizbullah in Lebanon, and to Yemen's Houthi militia. Meanwhile, in Iran the stop to oil exports has collapsed the rial. It now costs 1,900,000 rials to purchase one U.S. dollar in Tehran; a year ago it was 590,000 rials.

The regime's paid inspirational orators spell out their victory plan: If the war is pursued vigorously enough, the Twelfth Imam (the Mahdi), who has remained hidden since the year 874, will return as the redeemer, to install Shi'a Islam as the world's only religion. They insist that Iran is on a path to certain victory.

In the latest round of fighting, Iranian missiles and drones have targeted Bahrain, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria and the UAE, but not Israel. The Revolutionary Guards could easily draw Israel in by launching missiles towards it, or ordering its Houthi auxiliaries to do so. They have chosen not to.

The reason is no mystery. The bombing capacity of the U.S. is far greater, but only the Israelis have demonstrated a consistent ability to find and kill Iran's top leaders - and a willingness to do so. In Washington's foreign affairs and intelligence bureaucracies, by contrast, there is a dogmatic opposition to attacks against political leaders. But when a leadership is willing to impose unlimited sacrifices on its own population, it is no use inflicting more hardship on that same population - and the leaders are the only valid targets.

American strategy continues to target the country's economy and infrastructure rather than the regime itself. But destroying bridges would only raise the cost of war; removing the Revolutionary Guard leadership could end it. It would immediately comfort the desperate, oppressed population, and might sooner or later bring to power new leaders less eager to enjoy the luxuries of Islamic martyrdom.

Trump's Iran Strategy

Wednesday's U.S. airstrikes on Iran following its missile attack on Jordan were confined to the Persian Gulf region, as Trump appears intent on avoiding a major escalation.

According to assessments by officials in Israel and other Middle Eastern countries, Trump does not want a broad confrontation before the U.S. midterm elections in early November.

The three months remaining would allow the U.S. to accelerate production of munitions, particularly interceptors, and make other preparations for a wider confrontation that is expected to resume later.

Washington has concluded that diplomatic efforts with Iran's new regime will not succeed or produce results, either with regard to reopening the Strait of Hormuz or preventing Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons.

The conclusion is that another significant military confrontation will be required, with Israel participating.

While the Pentagon and U.S. Central Command assess that airstrikes in their present form have exhausted their ability to pressure the Iranian regime and produce results, the maritime and economic blockade is viewed as effective and as a threat to the regime's ability to govern.

According to U.S. intelligence officials, Iran's military and Revolutionary Guards have been unable to pay salaries for several months because of the loss of oil revenue.

U.S. officials have concluded that intense military action would only allow the Iranian regime to divert public attention from domestic hardship. Their preferred course is to maintain and possibly expand the economic blockade.

Clifford D. May: How to Break Iran's Terrorist Regime

President Trump has stated repeatedly that Iran's rulers must never be permitted to obtain nuclear weapons. But he hasn't clearly explained why, so let me put it bluntly: They would use them. Iran's rulers are self-proclaimed Islamic revolutionaries and the world's leading sponsors of terrorism. For 47 years, they've vowed "Death to America!" If they were to obtain nuclear warheads and missiles that could deliver them to American cities, why would they refrain?

These are jihadis who, for decades, have been murdering their own people. Under a nuclear umbrella, Iran's rulers could subjugate their neighbors, attack American assets, and insist that all Americans retreat from the Middle East. Maybe they'd champion the "right" of American Muslims to live according to Sharia - Islamic law.

Before last year's Twelve-Day War and this year's Operation Epic Fury, Iran's rulers were making steady progress toward the development of nuclear weapons in subterranean fortresses while simultaneously amassing an enormous arsenal of missiles and drones. The regime's nuclear weapons program has been set back from just a few weeks to as much as three years. That's progress. But it's not mission accomplished.

Military experts I've consulted suggest this strategy: Maintain the blockade which denies the regime revenue, dries up supply lines and will soon force the regime's troops to battle pro bono. Continue airstrikes against military targets, especially weapons depots and factories.

Airports, government buildings, banks, and communications facilities used by Iran's military should be added to the target list, as should the military commanders and government officials responsible for the mass murders of innocent Iranians. None of the above requires "boots on the ground."

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07/29 Links Pt2: Why Jews Turn Against Their Own; Netanyahu didn’t lose the Democrats for Israel; Ben-Gurion Founded Israel. Then He Chose to Live in a desert Shack...

From Ian:

Ben M. Freeman: Why Jews Turn Against Their Own

Good Jews and Bad Jews
None of this would be so durable if it were not rewarded. The world that offers Jews the distorted mirror sorts us into “good Jews” and “bad Jews”. The good Jew keeps the palatable fragment, the ethics, the memory, the social conscience, and sheds the specificity the world finds indigestible: the nation, the land, the tribe, the refusal to disappear. In return they are applauded, platformed, held up as the enlightened kind of Jew. The bad Jew is the one who insists on the whole of themselves at once, and in the mirror held by others, wholeness itself becomes the offense. That applause is a powerful drug, and it is administered precisely to those Jews willing to police the rest of us.

Here is the part that is hardest, and most important, because it has two halves that have to be held together. Despite the damage they inflict, the Jews I have described are not just the villains of this story. In a real sense they are also its victims. Bartov, the young activists in Michigan, did not invent the hatred they carry. They inherited it from a world that has hated Jews for as long as there have been Jews, and many of them are, in the deepest sense, sincere. That sincerity is not evidence that they are right. It is evidence of how completely the distortion has done its work.

And yet. Understanding where a harm comes from is not the same as excusing it. A casualty can still cause damage, and a wound is not permission. We are all shaped by forces we did not choose, and we are still answerable for what we do with them. This is especially true of those who Deploy. There is a real difference between the Jew who quietly shrinks from their Jewishness and the Jew who stands on a platform and lends their Jewish name to the case against their own people. The first is mostly hurting themselves. The second is doing the work of our enemies, and no account of their pain erases the harm of that choice. To treat every Jew who acts against the community as a helpless product of history is its own quiet insult, because it strips them of the dignity of being moral agents. Compassion for the wound and accountability for the deed are not opposites.

A Broad Synagogue
This is why the Jewish world needs boundaries, and needs them now. We are, and should be, a broad synagogue. We argue, we disagree, we contain every kind of Jew, whether their connection is theological, cultural or national, left and right, and that endless internal argument is one of the oldest and most beautiful things about us. But a broad synagogue is still a synagogue, and a synagogue has walls. There is a difference between disagreement within the family and picking up the tools of the people who hate us and turning them on our own. Criticism of Israel, of our leaders, of our institutions, offered as a Jew who wants their people to flourish, belongs firmly inside those walls. Lending your Jewishness to a movement that denies your people should exist at all does not. Drawing that line is not a purity test. It is what every healthy community does. It decides what it is, and therefore what it is not. A people with no walls is not infinitely welcoming. It is simply undefended.

The way out, then, is not only condemnation nor limitless tolerance. It is clarity, and it begins by remembering whose hands are on the mirror. The reflections that have taught Jews to see ourselves as a mere religion, or as an awkwardly particular people who would be so much more welcome if we would only universalize ourselves out of existence, were not authored by us. They were authored by a non-Jewish world that has never had the right to define us, and never will. Only Jews get to decide what it means to be a Jew, which means we also get to decide, together, what we will carry into our own house and what we will leave at the door.

So when we next see Jews who seem to have turned against their own, we must resist the easy answer. What we are watching is not simple treachery, and it is not innocence either. It is the oldest hatred in the world, doing what it has always done, except this time from the inside, through people who are at once its casualties and, for what they choose to do with it, responsible. The task is not simply to condemn it, nor to excuse it, but to understand it. Only then can we begin to challenge it.

Dark Season: The Oldest Hatred Deepens and Spreads

Posters of Jewish children, women and the elderly kidnapped by Hamas and held, tortured and shackled in Hamas tunnels — posters that simply asked that those held hostage be remembered — were ripped down. Jewish kids on college campuses were threatened, blocked, berated, surrounded and chased. And university presidents called to testify before Congress were unwilling to declare that demands for the genocide of Jews violated their universities' policies.

But wait! This isn't anti-Semitism, some say. It's something else entirely: it's "anti-Zionism" or "anti-Israelism," but in any event, not anti-Semitism. This, says David Harris, the venerated former longtime head of the American Jewish Committee, is worse than nonsense. Harris, once described by Shimon Peres as "the foreign minister of the Jewish people," has published a new book, "Anti-Semitism: What Everyone Needs to Know," which meticulously shows that the attempt to call the miasma of hatred aimed at Jews something other than anti-Semitism is BS. It is, he demonstrates, right out of the tragic, immoral historical playbook.

Harris ticks off just some examples of what is daily fare for Jews: "Death threats against Jews, thwarted attempts to target Jewish schools, centers and synagogues, neo-Nazis marching and chanting 'Jews will not replace us', the numerous attacks on identifiable Jews, menacing statements by pro-Palestinian individuals or groups for Zionists to get off the subway, (or to) identify themselves at a restaurant, or (calls for) Jewish students to go back to Germany or Poland, or chants of "Gas the Jews." Harris' litany could have gone on much, much longer.

Some of the most virulent anti-Semites around believe that if they angrily deny that they're anti-Semites, they aren't ones. Harris reminds us of the formulation articulated by the great Soviet Jewish dissident Natan Sharansky, who remained in a Soviet gulag rather than renounce his faith. "The 3Ds — demonization, delegitimization and double standards," Sharansky wrote, "are the three main tools that anti-Semites employed against Jews throughout history." Presently, one of the principal tools is to label Israel, the victim of a genocidal invasion, guilty of genocide because its attempt to prevent the promised next attacks and to free the innocents taken and kept hostage killed a great many Gazans. These were deaths Hamas did everything it could to guarantee.

Then there's the demonization and the double standards deployed against AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which lobbies for the alliance between the two countries. It doesn't even rank among the top 100 lobbies in Washington. Still, it has become the most fashionable of bogeymen, the latest in a history of Jewish bogeymen supposedly responsible for some Jewish conspiracy or another. Never mind that those contributing to AIPAC are American citizens exercising their First Amendment rights. And never mind that Qatar, for example, a Muslim Brotherhood-linked emirate, plows billions of dollars of foreign cash into America to purchase influence. Those singling out AIPAC couldn't care less. AIPAC is "dark money." Qatari cash is perfectly OK money.

Anti-Semitism is often described as "the oldest hatred." It is certainly the most resilient. And these days, it is extraordinarily potent and widespread. Which makes this a very difficult season indeed.

2025 deadliest year for Jews outside Israel since Buenos Aires bombing, report says

Twenty people were murdered in antisemitic attacks in 2025, making it the deadliest year for anti-Jewish violence outside of Israel since the bombing of the AMIA Jewish Community Center in Buenos Aires on July 18, 1994, according to a new report.

The J7 Large Communities’ Task Force Against Antisemitism documented more than 23,000 antisemitic incidents in 2025 across Argentina, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States, which are home to more than 90% of Jews.

The number of antisemitic incidents across the seven countries was 136% higher than in 2022, according to the task force, which called antisemitism in these countries “our new normal.”

The 20 murders included 15 people killed at a Chanukah celebration on Bondi Beach in Sydney, two killed at the Heaton Park Synagogue in Manchester, two killed at the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C. and one killed in Boulder, Colo.

Although reported incidents declined by 33% in the United States in 2025, they remained 131% higher than in 2021, per the report.

Australia recorded the largest increase during that period at 270%, followed by Germany at 215% and France at 124%. Germany had nearly 70 incidents for every 1,000 Jewish residents, the highest per-capita rate among the seven countries and nearly 70 times the U.S. rate.

Anti-Zionism was identified as a central motivation in 48% of incidents in the United Kingdom, 45% in the United States and 23% in Germany.

The report found that in Ireland, the Jewish community of about 2,200 people reported 143 antisemitic incidents in six months. Ireland has no national strategy to combat antisemitism or dedicated security funding for its Jewish community, according to the report.

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07/29 Links Pt1: Trump’s angry words for Netanyahu reveal the strength of the US-Israel bond; Melanie Phillips: The "settler violence" libel

From Ian:

Gil Troy: Trump’s angry words for Netanyahu reveal the strength of the US-Israel bond

In his 1992 blockbuster, Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, John Gray popularized another relevant concept. People apply his “rubber band theory” to all kinds of situations. The metaphor certainly explains the US-Israel dynamic. When two people, or two nations, are so enmeshed, leaders may clash, snap, even pull away, hard, fast, far, without rupture. Ultimately, the structural foundations, shared values, and overlapping needs keep them, like a stretched rubber band, bouncing back quickly.

Clinton was deeply committed to the State of Israel’s survival – and the Oslo Peace Process. When he hosted a newly elected Prime Minister Netanyahu at the White House in July, 1996, the Americans, Israelis, and Palestinians had been working the Oslo process for almost three years. Doubting Yasser Arafat – for good reason – Netanyahu promised to be far more unyielding than he ultimately proved to be.

Still, starting in the president’s own Oval Office, Netanyahu lectured his host about the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict. After the meeting, Clinton fumed: “Who the f**k does he think he is? Who’s the f**king superpower here?”

Biden proudly called himself a lifelong “Zionist” and embraced Israel generously, diplomatically, and militarily after the Hamas-led massacres on October 7, 2023. Still, Biden and Netanyahu kept clashing over military strategy.

Wanting Israel to win, but worried that Israel would lose its good name, Biden became increasingly apoplectic. In July 2024, when Israel bombed Beirut, eliminating Fuad Shukur, a leading Hezbollah commander responsible for killing 12 Israeli-Druze children in Majdal Shams, Biden confronted Israel’s prime minister. “Bibi, what the f**k?” the president bellowed, according to Bob Woodward’s 2024 book, War. “You know the perception of Israel around the world increasingly is that you’re a rogue state, a rogue actor.”

Woodward reports Biden also vented to aides Clinton-style, calling Netanyahu “a bad f**king guy!” and a “f**king liar.” Although these assaults were more personal, the rubber band snapped back quickly. Biden didn’t abandon Israel or Bibi – despite growing pressure from other Democrats.

Trump's outburst was just a chapter in their relationship
IN THAT CONTEXT, Trump’s outburst, asking “What the f**k are you doing?” in June 2026, was just another chapter in a long, complex, ongoing story of a special relationship led by strong-minded leaders whose agendas will occasionally clash. Last month, Trump sought a diplomatic formula with Iran, while Netanyahu doubted Iran’s intentions.

Justifiably defending his country’s interests after Hezbollah renewed its attacks against Israel, Netanyahu approved strikes on Beirut and southern Lebanon. Trump, protecting the negotiations he still had faith in then, called Netanyahu “f**king crazy,” claiming Bibi had “no f**king judgment.”

Now, just weeks later, after hysterical cries of “rupture” on both sides of the Atlantic, and Iran’s Strait of Hormuz power play, Netanyahu and Trump seem to share a deep distrust of Iran’s leaders.

My latest e-book, The Essential Guide to the US-Israel Partnership: The 250th anniversary edition, brands Israel America’s rare DIY (Defend It Yourself) ally, and ROI (Return on Investment) ally, generating many technological, medical, cultural, diplomatic, and military dividends for the United States. But the book also traces how every president, including such “pro-Israel” stalwarts like Reagan, inevitably clashed at some point with their Israeli counterparts.

Today, with anti-Zionist obsessives like New York’s Mayor Zohran Mamdani demonizing Israel constantly, the occasional presidential F-bomb seems downright mild – and flattering. Similarly, with European diplomats claiming over the years: “All the current troubles in the world are because of that shitty little country, Israel,” or that the “f**king Israelis” should be “wiped off the face of the earth,” it’s clear how bonded America is with Israel and how most Americans are with Israelis.

Mark Twain understood the joy and power of a good tirade filled with expletives. In Pudd’nhead Wilson, he advised: “When angry, count [to] four; when very angry, swear.” That’s because, Twain explained elsewhere, “Under certain circumstances, urgent circumstances, desperate circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer.”

More elegantly, Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, who won the Nobel Peace Prize, taught: “The opposite of love is not hate; it’s indifference.”

It’s impossible to predict if Trump and Netanyahu embraced warmly or crossed swords yet again. But it is highly unlikely that their encounter lacked great drama or reflected a dismissive indifference.

David Horovitz: While Trump blusters, and Netanyahu spins, is Iran already on the brink of the bomb?

This is indeed a critical period — for Israel, the region, and the free world, in the fateful battle against a demonstrably ruthless, spectacularly dangerous regime bent on destroying this country, dominating the Middle East, and exporting its extremist Islamic ideology worldwide.

It is a critical period, too, for the two warily friendly leaders. One is facing an election three months from now which could see him ousted, or triumphally returned for yet another term in which he would aim to complete his grab for all of Israel’s levers of power. The other is indirectly facing an electorate a week later who could immensely complicate his final two years in office by removing his majority in one or both chambers of Congress — including placing all manner of obstacles to his pursuit of this war.

Both these men would like nothing more than for the regime in Iran to be definitively defeated ahead of their respective polling days. Netanyahu is almost certainly more optimistic than Trump that this could yet be achieved, but then again, that’s where his personal political interests lie. Come what may, Trump will still be president at the end of this year, and can afford to think long and hard about the timing of an intensified attack on the regime; Netanyahu may be finished if the Islamic Republic is intact on October 27.

The regime, as was obvious, is exploiting the lax and lousy terms of June’s memorandum of understanding, falsely touted by Trump as the answer to a region’s prayers for peace. It is maneuvering to solidify its hold on the Strait of Hormuz, reviving its military muscle, and predictably avoiding the slightest concessions on its rogue nuclear program, as the MOU’s vaguely envisaged 60 days of negotiations are frittered uselessly away.

But what really matters is that deep underground, at Pickaxe Mountain — where the International Atomic Energy Agency has never been given access, and where the US does not have cameras and does not know “exactly what is going on” — Iran just might have sufficient quantities of 60%-enriched uranium, and the centrifuges to enrich it to weapons grade within weeks or even days. If that is the case, it would still likely be several months from a deliverable bomb, but would have completed arguably the hardest and generally the most visible step on the road to nuclear weapons.

And then, whatever anybody says or wants to believe, the war against the Islamic Republic would be anything but over.

Israel should seize Lebanon’s best chance for peace in decades

Even so, Aoun has gone further than any Lebanese president in recent decades. He has opposed Hezbollah and Iranian interference, supported dialogue with Israel, and begun translating those positions into action.

The Lebanese Armed Forces remain limited and far from fully effective, but under his leadership they are doing more than before to restore the state’s monopoly on armed force. This progress has been made possible primarily by Hezbollah’s weakness, but also by Aoun’s policy and direction.

Aoun’s caution should not be mistaken for reluctance. The devastation of the war has created an opportunity to loosen Hezbollah’s grip on Lebanon, and Aoun appears determined to guide the country through that transition.

Political necessity and Aoun’s own convictions now point in the same direction: ending Hezbollah’s domination. He understands the price Lebanon has paid for allowing an Iranian militia to operate on its soil. He also recognizes that significant sections of the public – particularly within the Christian community – are weary of Hezbollah and years of war.

That sentiment gives him room to pursue an alternative course. His challenge is to steer Lebanon forward while contending with an armed organization that still enjoys significant support among Lebanese Shi’ites.

None of this makes Aoun master of Lebanon. Hezbollah remains armed, politically entrenched, and capable of obstructing – or violently derailing – the process. Yet so far, Aoun has moved in the right direction.

Israel and and the US should act on this opportunity. Across the border is a Lebanese leader willing to take political risks in defense of his country’s interests – and to make that case publicly to his own people, in Arabic, rather than only before an American audience in Washington. Aoun’s course also aligns with Israel’s strategic interests: advancing peace with Lebanon and dismantling Hezbollah’s military power.

One of the understandable lessons Israelis drew from October 7 was to take their enemies’ declared intentions seriously. But strategic vigilance also requires recognizing when a different possibility begins to emerge.

The road to peace with Lebanon – and to Hezbollah’s disarmament – remains long, difficult, and uncertain. Yet for the first time in years, Israel may have a potential partner in Beirut.

Aoun is no Sadat, and Lebanon is not Egypt in the late 1970s. But history rarely repeats itself in identical form. With the right strategy, Aoun could become both a genuine partner for peace and an important force in restoring Lebanese sovereignty.

Israel and the United States should therefore combine incentives with pressure. Israel should undertake phased, verifiable withdrawals wherever the Lebanese Armed Forces establish effective control.

Washington should sustain military and economic assistance conditioned on measurable progress toward the state’s monopoly on arms.

Both countries should maintain pressure on Hezbollah while avoiding steps that publicly humiliate Aoun or allow his opponents to portray him as Israel’s instrument. In the Middle East, opportunities rarely remain open for long. Israel and the United States should seize this one before Hezbollah closes it.

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07/28 Links Pt2: Saving the West from the Evils of Hamas; A 'Respected' Medical Journal's War Against Doctors; Why is the left in denial about Islamist homophobia?

From Ian:

Fighting the New Antisemitism

Shaikh sees a need to “inoculate” students from elementary school age against falsehoods by teaching basic facts about the Jewish people and Israel. He and Michaelis visit high schools as guest speakers, and Shaikh has helped build “a trauma-informed, culturally educated” chatbot designed to screen for potential behavioral threats, such as whether an individual is an extremist risk and might need to be referred to Parents for Peace.

There are fundamentals to consider, too. As Michaelis understands it, teachers are allowed “to intentionally radicalize students,” and “teachers’ unions are rabidly antisemitic.” Schoep recognizes the left-wing emphasis on “oppression” as “the exact same rhetoric I once weaponized as a neo-Nazi leader and what fuels extreme far-right ideology.” The fixation on “whiteness, blackness, brownness” and “divisive terms like ‘white privilege’” only serves to “create racism” and “radicalize entire generations.” This worldview also turns adherents against Jews and Israel, while being divorced from the realities of Jewish identity, history, and diversity.

At the college level, Jeffery observes, undergraduates “taught to hate their own ancestors, history, culture and the overall idea of Western civilization” will also hate Jews and Israel, “because the Jewish people helped build the West.” Without serious change, “it’s not the external enemy the U.S. will be fighting 50 years from now” but “the internal one.”

Universities have spent the past several decades “teaching a frame in which the West is the permanent aggressor, and any non-Western grievance is sacred,” Burmawi says. “Holocaust skepticism and ‘Israel is genocidal’” follow from that. The solution is “teaching why the West produced human rights, individual dignity, limited government, the abolition of slavery, and . . . the Judeo-Christian root” of those ideas. “A generation that knows what built their freedom is far harder to recruit into burning it down.”

Lobell echoes these points: “People who hate Israel and the Jews typically hate America, too.” In her view, there’s a “silent majority” that recoils from radicalism, and politicians should remember that.

Noting that “you can’t fight what you can’t define,” Hafeez urges adopting the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism at the state and federal levels. Further, there must be a “bipartisan realization” in Washington “that those who come to America to live and study must accept our values of a diverse and pluralistic society” and leave Jew-hatred behind.

Al-Aqidi says public officials must resist “Islamist groups . . . insisting that every law or government statement addressing antisemitism also includes Islamophobia.” That “false equivalence . . . shifts attention away from anti-Jewish hatred” and allows political Islamists to “recast themselves as the primary victims.”

Burmawi makes the most compelling case for what’s needed to counter the growing danger of antisemitism and anti-Zionism:
The instinct I see in much of the American Jewish establishment, to fight this by pleading for tolerance, is a losing strategy. It misreads the enemy entirely. You cannot tolerance-seminar your way out of a theological conviction or a critical theory catechism. Reasonableness reads as weakness to people who’ve been taught your existence is the problem. . . . Stop apologizing, and stop asking for permission. The single most persuasive thing the Jewish community can do for other Americans is to model the confidence I call “re-Zionization.” Israel is, right now, the most compelling argument in the world that a nation can be unashamed of its own survival, can name its enemy, can refuse the endless-grievance trap, and still be moral. Most Americans, especially young ones, aren’t antisemitic, they’re demoralized. They’ve been taught that any civilization defending itself is “supremacist.” When they see Jews who won’t accept that framing, who say plainly “our existence is not up for debate,” it gives them permission to defend their own civilization too. Jeffery likewise urges the Jewish community to stop taking “a very apologetic view towards Israel. . . . If someone wants a Jewish person to condemn Israel to be socially accepted, then that’s wrong, and it must not only be rejected but also confronted.” Efforts to educate non-Jews about Israel’s centrality to “Jewish identity” must continue, along with increasing engagement with “non-Jewish allies, who are already battling the lion in its own den.”

Combating antisemitism and anti-Zionism in American society isn’t a favor to Jews. Such efforts are part and parcel of preserving Western civilization. The problems underlying the turn against American Jews and Israel are multifaceted, so there’s no single solution. But clearly, given the recent polling, a rethink is necessary. And the first step must be winning back younger generations of Americans.

Saving the West from the Evils of Hamas

New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani released an official video that repeated his false narrative that a "genocide" had been committed.

In Mamdani's world, it is Israel's Prime Minister Netanyahu that brought on devastation in Gaza, not Hamas.

Listening to Mamdani, you might think it was Netanyahu that started that war on Oct. 7. You might be led to believe that it was Netanyahu who savagely murdered 1,200 in Israel that day.

Or that it was Netanyahu who fired rockets at Israel, built tunnels with aid money, and used his own citizens as human shields in orchestrating the war against Israel.

Why do people continue to reject overwhelming evidence that Israel has been defending itself against brutal terrorists, when it appears clear and compelling?

One reason is psychological "cognitive dissonance" when facts conflict with deeply held beliefs. Protecting one's identity and staying aligned with one's family and community usually overwhelmingly trumps the truth.

We are in a perfect storm when it comes to the rejection of the truth.

For years we were fed with new ideological frameworks that include newly created concepts like "Islamophobia" but have left out antisemitism almost entirely, despite the fact that statistics show that the Jewish community is the most targeted group for racism and discrimination.

It's going to take generations to overcome the distortion and denial that has taken place since Oct. 7.

Gerald M. Steinberg: A 'Respected' Medical Journal's War Against Doctors

[T]he pro-Hamas lobby is circulating a mass petition calling for the expulsion of the Israeli Medical Association from the World Medical Association.

The petition – which blames the Israeli doctors for alleged bias and omits any mention of Hamas' war crimes – was amplified in June by once-respected UK medical journal The Lancet, clearly crossing the line between professional medical publication and blatant propaganda.

Far from providing medical evidence or reflecting professional ethics, the petition, as echoed by The Lancet, recycles political slogans and ancient blood libels, accusing Israel of "genocide" and the destruction of Gaza's health system. Of course, there is no mention of the overwhelming evidence of Hamas's systematic militarization of hospitals and other civilian medical facilities – all actual war crimes.

In promoting this campaign, The Lancet copied the accusations of fringe activist NGOs including the People's Health Movement (PHM), Doctors for Gaza (Artsen voor Gaza), and the "Health Advisory Council" of the so-called Jewish Voice for Peace. Even a cursory review makes clear that the petition touted by this ostensible medical journal is not remotely about medical ethics.

By parroting these NGOs and violating fundamental requirements for a scientific journal, The Lancet does not make even a minimal attempt to examine their credibility and embrace of terror.

Unsurprisingly, this isn't the first time journal editor Richard Horton has used The Lancet to publish anti-Israel propaganda. From 2001 to 2014, a majority of the publication's output regarding Israeli and Palestinian issues – 58.3% of its 264 items – took the form of political commentary rather than medical research.

The Lancet dismisses any mention of Hamas' responsibility for Gaza's medical plight as mere Israeli claims, despite extensive documentation.

Additionally, neither this medical journal nor the NGOs leading the petition have ever asked any other civilian medical associations to condemn their home states' military operations. The list includes Russia, China, Iran, Turkey, Sudan, and other actual violators of human rights and international law.

With Horton and The Lancet again at the forefront of a hate directed at Israeli doctors, and under the thin facade of scientific publishing, an effective response is necessary that will get the attention of the journal's Dutch publisher, Elsevier.

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07/28 Links Pt1: Eli Lake: Mr. President, Give Up on a Nuclear Deal with Iran; How global elites weaponize anti-Israel hostility to conceal misconduct and crime; It’s time to demythologize the mystique of Palestinianism

From Ian:

How global elites weaponize anti-Israel hostility to conceal misconduct and crime

The dismissal of International Criminal Court (ICC) Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan, a British-Pakistani lawyer, by the court’s member states marks a watershed moment, not just for international law, but for our understanding of how modern “lawfare” is weaponized as a personal shield.

For months, the global public was led to believe that Khan’s aggressive pursuit of arrest warrants against Israeli leadership was a principled stance on human rights. However, the timeline tells a far more cynical story.

The allegations of coercive sexual misconduct against Khan were formally reported internally to senior ICC officials and the court’s independent watchdog before he launched his lawfare campaign and sought arrest warrants against Israeli officials.

Confronted with an impending career-ending scandal, Khan played the ultimate survival card: he targeted the Jewish state.

By aggressively seeking arrest warrants for Israel’s prime minister and defense minister, Khan orchestrated a calculated diversion. This move was designed to align him with the Western political Left and their Islamist coalition allies, who command significant influence over mainstream media narratives.

The strategy was clear: leverage anti-Israel bias to frame any subsequent scrutiny of his personal behavior as a retaliatory, politically motivated attack. In the early stages, the tactic worked seamlessly. The mainstream media accommodated this narrative, focusing on institutional friction rather than the severe allegations of misconduct that have now led to his formal dismissal.

This playbook, using hostility towards Israel as an emergency exit from domestic or personal ruin, is becoming a disturbing trend among contemporary leaders. On May 27, 2026, the offices of Spain’s Socialist Party, led by Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, the EU’s anti-Israel-in-chief, were raided by the police.

This escalation follows the formal indictment of his wife on corruption and influence-peddling charges. There are other ongoing corruption charges against those close to Sánchez, including the recent indictment of Spain’s former Socialist prime minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero over corruption linked to Venezuela and oil schemes.

Sánchez’s relentless diplomatic assaults on Israel may be initially seen as aligned with his coalition’s Leftist ideology, or as a professed concern for the human rights of the oppressed.

However, more vicious attacks on Israel also serve a highly functional domestic purpose: convincing a progressive base that internal judicial scrutiny is merely a shadow campaign directed by Jerusalem.

In Persian culture, there is a precise term for this behavior: riya (ریا). Riya is the practice of flagrant hypocrisy, where one projects a false public image to conceal a darker reality. In Iran, modern history has taught citizens a painful truth: the louder a public figure performs ideological purity, the larger the crime they are attempting to hide.

Under the Islamic Republic, a mafia cartel operating under a religious guise, hyper-demonstrative piety is the standard armor for systemic financial and political corruption. The legendary Persian poet Hafez famously identified riya and deceit as the absolute pinnacle of societal moral decay.

Steps toward accountability
Today, Western elites are recycling this ancient vice. Antisemitism is a chronic human disease akin to latent tuberculosis. It exists asymptomatically across millions.

However, when activated by political opportunity, it breaks out into lethal destruction, from the horrors of the Holocaust to the atrocities of October 7. The contemporary Western Left and its Islamist allies have seamlessly repackaged this bias under the acceptable veneer of “anti-Zionism.”

Brian L. Cox & John Spencer: Arresting Netanyahu in America Would Be Illegal

This is what Mamdani left out. He will commit a criminal offense if he orders the prime minister to be arrested during a visit to New York City, as Netanyahu is expected to do in September to attend sessions at the UN General Assembly.

Here is why: New York law establishes that restraining another person is a class A misdemeanor punishable by up to 364 days in prison. It becomes a class E felony if the restraint exposes the person “to a risk of serious physical injury.”

The law defines “restrain” as restricting “a person's movements intentionally and unlawfully.” There is no question the act would be intentional. The Constitution makes the rest clear. It would be entirely unlawful.

The ICC may have issued a warrant, but it has no legal force in this country because America never ratified the Rome Statute. President Bill Clinton signed it, but the Bush administration withdrew the signature, and no president has ever submitted the treaty to the Senate. Without Senate approval, the Rome Statute has no legal standing in the United States.

There is no ambiguity. An ICC warrant cannot be enforced anywhere in this country. Attempting to act on it would be unlawful.

Although Mamdani only exercises governing authority within New York City, Ro Khanna’s call for President Trump to arrest Netanyahu extends beyond the confines of a single municipality. Regardless of the location, arresting the prime minister on the basis of ICC warrants would also constitute the intentional tort of false imprisonment.

The decisive element in a civil suit for false imprisonment under these circumstances would be that the defendant acted “without lawful authority.” Because ICC proceedings are not recognized by a country such as the United States that hasn’t ratified the Rome Statute, no governmental official has “lawful authority” to implement warrants issued by the international tribunal.

Any attempt to detain him would trigger federal jurisdiction. Israel and Netanyahu could take the offenders to federal court, and the financial and diplomatic fallout would be enormous.

Mamdani claims New York City is a “city of international law.” It is not. It cannot be. And no mayor can declare it otherwise.

The Big Apple is a metropolitan area in the State of New York, which is part of the United States of America. This means New York City is a city of constitutional law, just like every other municipality in the country.

And Ro Khanna asserts “America needs to cooperate with the ICC” because “it’s a matter of a rules-based international order.” This is false.

The “rules-based international order” is built on consent. While the United States agrees with most of the substance of the Rome Statute, this country has not acquiesced to the court’s jurisdiction by virtue of ratifying this multilateral treaty.

As such, arrest warrants issued by the ICC have no legal effect in America. This means arresting Benjamin Netanyahu would violate the rules-based international order as well as constitutional law that applies domestically across the United States.

Yisrael Medad: Going on a narrative offensive: It’s time to demythologize the mystique of Palestinianism

Rewiring the narrative
Historically, the relative success in the turnabout on Israel and Zionism has been a long process. Even if we ignore Jewish anti-Zionism thinking, amongst Jews as well as non-Jews, or take into consideration general anti-Jewish sentiment whether racist or religiously-motivated, surely we are in a very different place as regards control of the narrative.

In a recent piece posted in the +972 Magazine, we learn that France’s Rima Hassan, European Parliament member representing the La France Insoumise party, wants to break four taboos in the French public debate on Palestine.

They are: recognizing Zionism as a colonial ideology; defending the right of return; discussing the legitimacy of armed struggle; and moving beyond the two-state paradigm.

That is not a simple alteration of a narrative but, as the chant that has been increasingly sounded at anti-Israel rallies is formulated, Zionism must be eliminated. We are back in the 1950s and 1960s with the “Throw them into the sea!” sloganeering.

Yet, because of the internal squabbling in Israel over policies, the fundamental truths of the Zionist narrative have been misplaced in our public diplomacy material, as well as the fierce willingness to engage in confronting the waves of lies and fabrications assertively. It appears the “in” thing is to appear at the Oxford Union in evening dress.

Rabbi Irving Greenberg, however, provides another problem. Appalled by Hasan Piker’s claim of how much better Hamas is than Israel, he writes in the LA Jewish Journal on July 16 that Piker’s political voice promotes a “toxic narrative … untethered from reality.”

Piker, he continued, is an example of how “Palestinians’ allies have led [the Palestinians] to the dark side of their national aspirations – destroying Israel rather than building their own potential state.”

Greenberg does not address that toxicity’s success. He does not ask if that negativity should be a cause to punish those exploiting such a message or if, and he is a rabbi, an ethical conclusion could be drawn that should advance the idea that an Arab Palestine state would be immoral.

There exists a major underestimation of the damage and danger the Palestine narrative dominance represents. And now that the pro-Palestine camp has reduced the rhetoric to a zero-sum situation, demanding our elimination and that our existence as a Jewish state must be denied, the hasbara (public diplomacy) approach of defense and explaining Israel’s actions needs to be refashioned.

Money is available. According to reports, since October 2023, upwards of $100 million has been allotted to hasbara efforts, most on social media platforms. I probably haven’t seen all the output, but I am confident little of it was framed in an attack mode.

We need to be past that stage of weak, explanatory public diplomacy. Attention must be shifted. The burden of proof and defense must be placed on the pro-Palestine side. Should a Palestinian national identity of less than 100 years be preferred over a 3,000-year Jewish national identity?

Were not the Arab Muslim conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries the real colonization process in the Middle East?

Who is truly engaged in an “ethnic cleansing” if not Palestinianism? Who initiated genocidal violence, beginning in 1920? Should not the side that violates agreements be punished? Should a constant rejection of diplomacy and willingness to compromise be tolerated?

It is time to make major changes in attitude and approach and to reassert Zionism’s narrative.

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