12/10 Links Pt2: The West is sleepwalking into a Jewish exodus; ‘One Ring’ of pro-Palestine propaganda shaping the war on Zionism; Columbia Report Details 'Disturbing' Anti-Semitism From Instructors at Ivy League School

From Ian:

‘After what happened to my generation, I hoped we’d moved past anti-Jewish racism’

Nine centenarian Holocaust survivors share stories from the past – and fears for the future – at the German embassy

If you had told a 13-year-old Alice Hubbers in 1938 – as she witnessed the wanton brutality of Kristallnacht – that she would one day be taking tea in the residence of Germany’s ambassador to London, she would have questioned your sanity.

Yet here she is, 87 years later, tucking into doughnuts and English scones beneath enormous chandeliers in Belgravia, celebrating the Jewish festival of Hanukkah.

Hubbers, now 100, was one of nine centenarians invited by the ambassador on Dec 8 to a unique gathering for some of the last Holocaust survivors. They have all led lives blighted by Nazi persecution, which saw the murder of many of their parents and wider family.

Susanne Baumann, the German ambassador to London, addressed her guests as “my dear centenarians”, telling them she wanted to take the chance to honour not only their longevity, but “to take this opportunity to thank you all from the bottom of my heart for your inspirational and generous commitment to sharing your moving personal accounts with us over the years and for your courage in reaching out to the younger generation in the UK and Germany, who are thankfully able to grow up in freedom and in safety”.

She also wanted to treat them to a celebration ahead of both Christmas and Hanukkah. “It might not be quite as exciting as a birthday message from the King,” she conceded, “but please allow me to officially congratulate you all again today.”

Marion Koppel, who is “101 and a half”, says: “I think it’s quite impressive, if I may say so.”

The West is sleepwalking into a Jewish exodus.

There is also a growing political calculation that Jews are demographically irrelevant, especially compared with Muslim voters, with the U.S. being the only partial exception. Islamists and Far-Left activists are larger and louder blocs, so leaders choose numbers over decency.

Given all this, it is unsurprising that Jews across the West are asking: Do we have a future here? Should we encourage our children to stay? Is Europe safe? Is North America safe? Is Australia safe? Is South Africa safe? Should we move assets abroad? Should we obtain an Israeli passport as insurance? These are not hypothetical questions. Jewish emigration from France, Belgium, Sweden, and the UK has already accelerated. The U.S. is behind Europe, but rising too.

The West will not lose its Jews in one dramatic moment. It will lose them through a slow drip of insult, a steady rise in fear, and a growing sense of no longer belonging. A key question is whether today’s Diaspora Jews will repeat the mistake of their forefathers and wait for catastrophe before acting. The tremors before the earthquake rumble louder each day.

If Western nations lose their Jewish communities, they will forfeit things they never realized Jews had given them: parts of their moral compass, their historical memory of totalitarianism, a large portion of their intellectual class, and history’s finest early-warning system of civilizational decline.

Throughout history, how a society treats its Jews predicts its future with unerring accuracy. Antisemitism is a symptom of broader decay that putrefies its way into a society’s core. Western civilization will not fall because its enemies are strong, but because it is abandoning the people who held the line when others looked away.

Jews will not turn on the West; they will quietly leave, taking with them their culture, innovation, generosity, reverence for law, belief in democracy, and their disproportionate contributions to science, medicine, the arts, finance, technology, journalism, literature, and public life.

They will leave because a civilization that will not defend its Jews will defend next to nothing. The West — much of it confused, cowardly, morally exhausted, and presently self-absorbed — may not even notice the loss until it is far too late.

Yisrael Medad: ‘One Ring’ of pro-Palestine propaganda shaping the war on Zionism

The results of an intriguing study on anti-Israel and anti-Zionist language usage were published on December 2. Veteran blogger Elder of Ziyon displayed a detailed table with results of a study that reviewed the terminology employed in academic papers going back from 2005 through 2024. His findings are that antisemitic and activist anti-Zionist language is used in thousands of academic papers, thus reinforcing a negative subjective narrative.

The phrases and terms used in these papers included “Jewish supremacism,” “Talmudic rituals,” “Israeli Occupation Forces,” Gaza as an “open air prison,” and “Judaization,” among others. Such language seeps from the academic world into mainstream media op-eds, and then back again. Students and university colleagues are regularized to express themselves by using the exclusionary language of castigation and of animosity regarding Jewish nationalism and Middle East politics.

What is at work here results not in detached independent scientific research, but rather, it eventually locks the public into an ideological entrenchment primed and positioned to disallow any refutation. Moreover, there is no possible defense by those targeted as “colonialists.” Even more dangerous, it is a rhetoric of volatility.

The articulation may seem to be lofty academic verbiage, but it is just a repeat of medieval theological cancellation as when Jews were forced to engage in demeaning, unfair disputations. Today’s anti-Zionist hordes – safe in their self-constructed castles of words that reinforce the visceral animosity they already have in place – always have the advantage.

Raef Zreik, an Israeli Arab who is a senior lecturer of Jurisprudence at Ono Academic College and a senior research fellow at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, wrote a 2023 article titled “Zionism and Political Theology.” It purports to “identify what is unique about the political theology of Zionism” and “explores what the consequences of this uniqueness might be.”

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12/10 Links Pt1: Hostage Noa Marciano was murdered by Gazan doctor, CAIR Accidentally Makes the Case for Zionism; Khaled Mashaal: Half of young Americans are active in Hamas 'resistance'

From Ian:

Lahav Harkov: The communities in central Israel that fear an Oct. 7 attack from the West Bank

Consider some of the most dangerous places to live in Israel. There are the kibbutzim and towns along the Gaza border, where Hamas massacred people in their homes on Oct. 7, 2023. There’s the northern border, which was mostly evacuated when the war began due to attacks from Lebanon. Perhaps one may think of Hebron, in the West Bank, where Israelis live in a neighborhood in a mostly Palestinian city whose mayor participated in a 1980 terror attack that killed six civilians.

Then there’s Bat Hefer, a small town of about 5,000 residents, with kibbutzim to its north and south, a few miles east of Netanya in central Israel.

The sleepy town, nestled between Highway 6, Israel’s major north-south artery, and the 1949 Armistice Line, known as the Green Line, is rated as more dangerous than the Gaza border area, according to Maj.-Gen. Rafi Milo, the head of the IDF’s Home Front Command.

In a recording leaked to Israel’s Channel 12 in June, Milo said: “If you ask me where the threat is much greater today, in Bat Hefer the threat is much greater than Yakhini,” a moshav where Hamas terrorists killed seven on Oct. 7.

The danger to Bat Hefer comes from its proximity to Tulkarem, a Palestinian city with a refugee camp from the 1948 War of Independence. Residents of Tulkarem have shot into Bat Hefer and adjacent towns. The IDF has attempted to stop attacks by razing dozens of homes in the refugee camp in recent months, in what a defense source called “the Gaza-fication of the West Bank.”

While the IDF has a constant and more intense presence in the West Bank than it did in Gaza before October 7, 2023, the threat is still present. On Tuesday, IDF soldiers found rockets in a village next to Tulkarem. For the past two years, many Israelis living near the Green Line — an area also called the seam line — have looked out of their windows at Palestinian villages in the distance and wondered how safe their neighborhoods really are. After the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attacks on the south, some began to worry that the same thing could happen to them in central Israel.

Ran Schneider lives in Sha’ar Efraim, a moshav near Bat Hefer that is an official entry point for goods to pass between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. He did his IDF reserve duty as a member of the moshav’s rapid response team, and told JI last year that they had long heard shooting from beyond the fence, but it increased after the Oct. 7 attack.

The community’s rapid-response team “was in uniform protecting the moshav. Our area of responsibility was inside the moshav. We would check everyone going in and out and give people a sense of security,” he said.

For many residents of the towns and cities near the Green Line and the separation barrier that runs along it, built in the wake of the Second Intifada to make it harder for terrorists to enter Israel, shootings are only part of the problem. In contrast with some of the more famous segments of the barrier, a high concrete wall often painted with graffiti and murals, much of the barrier is only a metal fence topped with barbed wire. It is a simple fence, lacking some of the high-tech features that the Gaza border fence had before Palestinians bulldozed it last year. In addition, Palestinians for years frequently cut through the fence to work illegally in Israel.

Unlike some central Israeli municipalities, there isn’t a buffer zone between Sha’ar Efraim and the next Palestinian town.

Nicole Lampert: 'The Special Status of the Palestinians Has Been Great for the Aid Business and Terrible for the People'

A Facebook post I wrote asking non-Jewish people whether they had fallen out with friends over the Israel-Gaza conflict led to an overwhelming amount of messages and, eventually, an article.

When that piece came out, I was inundated with yet more examples of horrible rows over this conflict 2000 miles away.

They were all fascinating. And sad. One was from Dr Emily Brearley, a development economist whose own mother had told her she was ‘on the wrong side of history’. She revealed that she used to wear a keffiyeh until she worked with UNRWA, the UN agency specifically for Palestinians. That experience, in many ways, made her see the aid business in a different way.

Dr Brearley has written a book on her reflections on the aid industry called Aid Inferno: How to Reduce Poverty, Combat Global Warming and Be a Good Person. She sent me a LinkedIn post she had written about UNRWA.

In a week when the aid agency is back in the news, with Israel providing evidence that it, and other charities, worked with Hamas, and a raid on its East Jerusalem office leading to condemnation from the UK government, it seemed like a good idea to (with her permission) publish her incredible revelations about what UNRWA is hiding.

THE STORY OF UNRWA by Dr Emily Brearley
This is an important case study because it has been lavished with all the tools, money and attention at the disposal of the development business: US$70 billion to date. The result has been absolute failure and perpetual chaos. I do not blame the Israelis or Palestinians; you can go to Tik-Tok for that. I blame us.

If there is one topic in the development business that is far outsized in terms of global interest, it is this one. Everyone has an opinion, and the strongest and most furious come especially from those who have never been to the region.

Seth Mandel: CAIR Accidentally Makes the Case for Zionism

If CAIR is admitting that Jordan is Palestine and that the original name of the West Bank is one that proves Jewish indigeneity, we can consider the conflict pretty much solved. It’s all over but the crying.

The truth is, “West Bank” isn’t really even a Jordanian name as much as it’s a descriptive term. It has no significance whatsoever to any of the peoples who have ever lived in the territory. And again, there was never any legal Jordanian sovereignty so its nickname for Judea and Samaria is irrelevant.

The West Bank isn’t the only descriptive term involving the Palestinians. So is “Palestine,” which was an area of the Ottoman Empire and considered part of Syria in the minds of the Arabs of the region—including those in Palestine. Amin al-Husseini, the father of Palestinian Arab nationalism, had begun the period of the British Mandate by declaring Faisal I the king of Syria, including Palestine. Until about 1920, Husseini was a contributor to a the Jerusalem-based Arab newspaper called (in Arabic) Southern Syria. Once the Western European allies severed the territories, Palestinian nationalism was born.

All that aside, CAIR’s opposition to using the term Judea and Samaria instead of the West Bank has no Arabic or Palestinian-specific rationalization. It is only to deny the history of the Jews. The idea that calling the area something other than the West Bank amounts to the erasure of Palestinians from the map is a laughable claim; nothing Palestinian would be touched in the process.

The Arabs have given Arabic names to Jewish towns in the area, of course. But no one is even suggesting changing those back.

No one who calls it the West Bank is going to stop calling it the West Bank. And that’s fine—I use the term regularly. But CAIR’s policy memo suggests to me that I shouldn’t. If even CAIR understands that the West Bank is a term made up by an illegal Jordanian occupier which has long since renounced any claim on the land, and if even CAIR knows that the land has a proper historical name, perhaps that’s what the rest of us should use. Thanks, CAIR!

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12/09 Links Pt2: The Rise of Lifestyle Anti-Zionism; Oct. 7 communities: Still mourning but beginning to rebuild; Ireland Is a Wounded Tiger

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: The Rise of Lifestyle Anti-Zionism

Zionism is at its core a simple belief in Jewish rights in Israel. Much of the time when pro-Palestinian activists in the West use the word Zionist, they mean “Jew.” But when they attack “Zionism” as a concept, they are making a political and ideological statement about coexistence. Anti-Zionists believe that rights are zero-sum, that Arabs in the historical Land of Israel cannot be free unless the Jews there are unfree.

Similarly, they believe that the safety and security of Palestinians must come at the expense of the safety and security of Jews. Outside of Israel, this includes Zionists—people who support or advocate for equal rights for Jews in their homeland. Anti-Zionism has become a totalizing worldview, an ideology of far greater expanse and application than Zionism itself ever was.

Anti-Zionism is an all-encompassing ideology now. It requires no association with the land of Zion. Anti-Zionism, like ISIS’s infamous “jihad in place” strategy, is about hating Jews and punishing their supporters wherever you happen to be. Think global, act local.

This is why we are seeing the founding of explicitly anti-Zionist political parties in Western Europe, of all places. And it’s why anti-Zionism has swallowed anti-colonialism as a discipline on campus. It’s why we’re even seeing the advent of anti-Zionist coffee shops. Opposition to equal rights for Jews is becoming a lifestyle for a growing number of Westerners. Now there is really no limit to what you can blame on the Jews.

Anti-Israel Celebrities Accept Major Saudi Payday To Attend Jeddah Film Festival

Some of Hollywood’s most ardent anti-Israel activists are flocking to Saudi Arabia this week for a government-sponsored film festival—and the kingdom is compensating them well for their time.

The Red Sea International Film Festival, which has been held annually in Jeddah since 2021 under the authority of the Saudi Ministry of Culture, has drawn a star-studded guest list including actors like Riz Ahmed, Juliette Binoche, Michael Caine, Kirsten Dunst, and Idris Elba—all of whom have accused Israel of committing atrocities in response to Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack and none of whom have spoken about Saudi Arabia’s human rights record.

The festival has been known to pay large sums to celebrity guests. Filmmaker Spike Lee received between $2.5 million and $3 million for presiding over the festival’s jury last year, Puck reported, though it is unclear how much this year’s jury president, Oscar-winning director Sean Baker, has received. A source familiar with the festival confirmed Saudi Arabia has compensated actors and filmmakers for attending, and NBC reported that "many [attendees are] set to receive checks." The festival said in a statement to NBC that it will "on occasion engage with talent on a contractual basis for work we ask them to do at the festival which includes labs, in conversations, mentorship sessions with emerging regional talent." Though representatives for the festival did not disclose the names of actors and filmmakers it is paying, Ahmed is a member of the jury, Dunst participated in a conversation on Thursday, and Elba will do so on Wednesday.

The film festival—and appearances from actors who frequently condemn Israel—comes after a group of U.S. comedians faced scrutiny for performing at the Riyadh Comedy Festival in September in the face of Saudi Arabia’s policing of speech and widespread human rights abuses. Comedian Shane Gillis, who turned down a "significant" payout, said he declined the offer because most of the 9/11 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia.

"I’m not doing it," he said. "Then they doubled the bag. It was a significant bag. But I’d already said no. I took a principled stand. You don’t 9/11 your friends."

Dave Chappelle, meanwhile, used his performance at the festival to bash the United States—after signing a gag order shielding Saudi royals from criticism—because it was "easier to talk here than it is in America."

The Annual ‘Jesus Was a Palestinian’ Christmas Lie Is Back — and It’s Antisemitic

Each December, as holiday decorations go up and familiar music fills the air, another relatively new holiday ritual returns with equal predictability — social media fills with declarations that “Jesus was a Palestinian,” often joined by the equally fictional assertion that he was a “Palestinian refugee.”

These claims appear every Christmas season as reliably as ornaments and carols, as though the propagandists believe that repeating the lies might someday transform fiction into fact.

But this isn’t just a harmless anachronism — like depicting Moses checking Google Maps while wandering in the Sinai. It is part of a longstanding effort to erase Jews from their own history, an effort that has resurfaced in recent years precisely because it is politically useful.

The Truth Has Never Been in Dispute
Jesus lived and died as a Jew from Judea. He was born into a Jewish family, observed Jewish law, taught in synagogues, quoted Jewish scripture, and was addressed as “Rabbi” by his followers. Christian scripture traces his lineage directly to the kings of Judah.

No credible historian debates this. There is not a single academic school, anywhere, that regards Jesus as anything other than a Jew living in the Jewish homeland.

Denying the Jewishness of Jesus is not a new mistake. It is part of a familiar form of appropriation — including supersessionism (replacement theology) — that has targeted Jews for centuries.

The Colonialist Name Activists Pretend Was Ancient
The assertion that Jesus was “Palestinian” collapses instantly under the simplest timeline. During the first century CE, the land was known as Judea, Samaria, the Galilee, or the Land of Israel. At that time, there was no place or nation called “Palestine,” no “Palestinians,” and no political or cultural identity by that name. No person during Jesus’s lifetime ever referred to himself as a “Palestinian.” Claiming otherwise is like insisting that a Pilgrim stepping off the Mayflower in 1620 called himself an “American.”

Notably, the first political or national entity in history to use the word “Palestine” emerged nearly 2,000 years after Jesus, in 1920, when the British Empire established the “British Mandate for Palestine.”

And the Roman Empire only introduced the geographic term “Syria Palaestina” in 135 CE — a century after Jesus’ death — to punish Jews for the Bar Kokhba revolt and to try to break their connection to their own land.

Today, anti-Israel activists echo that Roman attempt at erasure and call it solidarity.

Dave Rich: We will fight tooth and nail for a better way of thinking

“What is anti-Zionism for, exactly?” The question was posed by Dr Dave Rich in his trenchant Robert Fine Memorial lecture to supporters of the London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism.

And Rich, director of policy at the Community Security Trust, in a complex and detailed analysis of the thinking behind present-day anti-Zionism and antisemitism, had a simple and chilling answer.

“If we strip away the political sloganeering and academic ambiguities, it is a plot to kill a nation. That’s it. Anti-Zionism is a campaign, across decades and continents, to kill the nation of Israel, erase its name and its national identity from history, and replace it with something non-Jewish…Anti-Zionism is utterly unique, and fundamentally anti-democratic.”

In his searing lecture, Rich broke down the levers of anti-Zionism and antisemitism, using references ranging from the Star Wars Death Star to even more prosaic examples of everyday Jewish hatred. His audience laughed and shivered at much the same time.

He cited Loose Women’s Nadia Sawalha, who “took to social media to defend Louis Theroux, after his interview with Bobby Vylan, from what she called the ‘group of people’ who ‘live by their pound of flesh rule…So many of us are sick and tired of being bullied…the threat that has hung over our heads for years and years that we may be antisemitic — you’ve worn it out.” Rich commented: “There’s a brashness, a daring sense of freedom in finally saying what needs to be said about the Jews”.

Dave Rich: The Robert Fine Memorial Lecture: where are we now? (text)

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12/09 Links Pt1: Netanyahu: "We're Not Going to Create a State that Will Be Committed to Our Destruction"; Doha Puts the Horseshoe on Full Display; Ron DeSantis Designates CAIR, Muslim Brotherhood as Foreign Terrorist Organizations

From Ian:

Netanyahu: "We're Not Going to Create a State that Will Be Committed to Our Destruction"

At a joint press conference with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz on Sunday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said: "The purpose of a Palestinian state is to destroy the one and only Jewish state. They already had a state in Gaza, a defective state, and it was used to try to destroy the one and only Jewish state. We believe there's a path to advance a broader peace with the Arab states and a path also to establish a workable peace with our Palestinian neighbors. But we're not going to create a state that will be committed to our destruction at our doorstep."

"We are obviously going to take care of our security. The one thing that we will always insist upon is that the sovereign power of security from the Jordan River, which is right here, to the Mediterranean Sea, which is right there, will always be in Israel's hands. And that means that Israel will control its destiny, continue to protect its security."

Hamas not committed to peace plan or disarming, Israeli foreign minister says

Israel’s foreign minister warned that Hamas is not committed to the US-backed peace deal, which calls for the terror group to cede its weapons, warning that the Jewish state would enforce the condition no matter what.

Speaking with The Post on Monday, Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar slammed Hamas’ latest insistence that it would neither give up its arms nor cede power to an international board unless its demands for Palestinian statehood were met.

“We will give a fair chance to see whether we can get Hamas to disarm and Gaza de-militarization in the context of the plan,” Sa’ar said about the ongoing negotiations. “If not, we will have to do it ourselves.”

Sa’ar’s statement echoes Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has repeatedly warned that war in Gaza could be reignited if Hamas fails to comply with the terms of the cease-fire deal.

Hamas’ leadership has recently claimed that it would give up power to Palestinian technocrats, as laid out in President Trump’s peace deal — but the terror group has fully rejected the formation of a Board of Peace set to rule Gaza in the interim.

“So I believe that if you read the statement that was given publicly this weekend, it doesn’t demonstrate that [you are] really committed to the peace plan and what it requires from them in the next stage,” Sa’ar explained.

The foreign minister also expressed distrust in Hamas’s willingness to cede power as it has effectively regained control of the 43% of the Gaza Strip not occupied by the Israeli military.

Seth Frantzman: Gaza ceasefire's Catch-22: Hamas delays disarmament as it calls for IDF withdrawal

Hamas is trying to slow-play the Gaza ceasefire deal so that it can eke out as much wiggle room as possible and remain in charge of the Gaza Strip. “We accept the deployment of UN forces as a separation force, tasked with monitoring the borders and ensuring compliance with the ceasefire in Gaza,” Hamas official Khalil Al-Hayya said recently.

The goal of Hamas now is to perpetuate a Catch-22 in the Strip, whereby it says it will only disarm if the IDF withdraws, knowing full well that the IDF won’t withdraw until the terror group disarms. As such, Hamas creates a situation in which it always has an excuse to do nothing. It assumes time is on its side. Hamas knows that Israel doesn’t want to return to fighting.

There is one hostage that must be returned. There is no major pressure in Israel or any incentive to go back to war.

Hamas also knows that Israeli officials don’t want the Palestinian Authority to run Gaza. As such, Hamas knows that the power vacuum in the Strip will also lead to de facto Hamas control.

For almost two decades, Hamas has relied on the assumption that Israeli officials prefer to have Hamas in Gaza in place of the PA, in order to divide the Strip from the West Bank. It thus benefits from this situation. Disarmament is also an amorphous term. Hamas assumes it can quietly find a way out of this obligation.

What is the regional media saying? Arab News noted last week that “Hamas said Saturday it was ready to hand over its weapons in the Gaza Strip to a Palestinian authority governing the territory on the condition that the Israeli army’s occupation ends.”

As noted above, Hayya said, “Our weapons are linked to the existence of the occupation and the aggression… If the occupation ends, these weapons will be placed under the authority of the state.”

Hamas also said: “We accept the deployment of UN forces as a separation force, tasked with monitoring the borders and ensuring compliance with the ceasefire in Gaza.”

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12/08 Links Pt2: Unapologetic American Jewry Is the Future; F grades handed to 14 colleges in antisemitism ‘report card’ as Jewish students forced to hide identities

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: Unapologetic American Jewry Is the Future

So what’s the dog that didn’t bark? That would be the legion of personalities connected to the UJA who ignored the haters and celebrated the gala and refused to consider a groveling apology in the days after the event. No apology was necessary or even appropriate, of course. But it is crucial that the organized Jewish community recognizes this.

Meanwhile Isaac Herzog, Israel’s president and a scion of the Labor left, was in New York last night and delivered an equally unapologetic speech to Yeshiva University.

In New York City, Herzog said, “We see the rise of a new mayor-elect who makes no effort to conceal his contempt for the Jewish democratic state of Israel, the only nation state of the Jewish people.”

Notice the word “Jewish” twice in that one sentence. The attempts by anti-Zionist groups to shame Jews into severing their history and heritage from their modern identity must fail.

Herzog slammed Mamdani’s justification for an anti-Semitic mob that descended on a Manhattan synagogue that was hosting an event about making aliyah. The incoming mayor had suggested the shul was facilitating the violation of international law by talking to prospective emigrants to a sovereign state. Herzog pulled no punches:

“Delegitimizing the Jewish people’s right to their ancient homeland and their age-old dream of Jerusalem legitimizes violence and undermines freedom of religion. This is both anti-Jewish and anti-American.”

Well said. Mamdani, let’s remember, is still vowing to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which would be a truly lawless act. Herzog and Netanyahu were once political rivals, but that could not possibly matter less at the moment. Herzog’s message to American Jewry was to be steadfast, unapologetic, and to be able to recognize those who seek its harm. That message is, thankfully, catching on.

Who You Gonna Call?

Amit Segal is having a moment. A longtime TV reporter for Israel’s Channel 12 and print journalist for Yediot Ahronot, the country’s most widely circulated newspaper, Segal burst into the English-speaking spotlight courtesy of multiple post–October 7 appearances on Dan Senor’s Call Me Back podcast, numerous op-eds in the Free Press, the Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere, and a popular Substack aimed at a foreign audience. He presents a cogent, witty, and likeable center-right perspective, often in friendly contrast to center-left sparring partners like Yediot’s Nadav Eyal, and he comes across as a happy warrior, a smiling avatar of mainstream, security-minded Israelis.

His latest book follows this blueprint, cheerfully but critically examining the history of leadership (and, at times, lack thereof) in the Israeli prime ministerial class. A Call at 4 AM is about some of the consequential choices of Israel’s premiers during the country’s eight-decade-long existence. “My aim,” Segal writes, “is to describe the political decisions that they made,” like the ones that helped create Israel’s byzantine electoral system under the guidance of its first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion. In seating the 120 members of their Knesset, Israelis elect by party, not geography, a method used by Slovakia and the Netherlands and no other land on earth. And so, in Israel, Segal contends, “the movement is more important than the man; the party more important than the individual.”

Segal calculates that Israel, in its first 72 years, wasted more than 11 years on elections and coalition negotiations. The opportunity costs are no less steep. Had the 1969 elections been held on a regional basis, Ben-Gurion’s party would have won an astounding 103 seats. In 2020, Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party would have secured 92 mandates. Equally striking is “the massive gulf between public opinion on matters of religion and state,” the result of the perpetual horse-trading created by Ben-Gurion.

Still, security questions dominate Israeli politics and have for half a century. The question that means the most to voters is this: “When the red telephone rings at 4:00 a.m., who should answer?” That notion, which provided Segal with his title, arguably originated with an actual 4:00 a.m. call on October 6, 1973, when Prime Minister Golda Meir belatedly came to realize a war was brewing. Her failure to act resulted in military and political disaster.

The prime beneficiary of Golda’s disaster was Menachem Begin, the long-suffering leader of Israel’s national camp, who overcame decades of electoral failure and finally secured the premiership in 1977. He cobbled together disparate center-right parties and appealed to the neglected Sephardi community, skillfully navigating what Segal calls the “multiple identities” possessed by all Israelis. Begin recognized that “internal contradictions do not always impede the creation of victorious political alliances; sometimes they are even a hallmark of them.”

David Collier: The Vermont Hate Crime Fantasy Sweeping the Nation

Who in the world wishes for a hate crime in their community? Apparently, Vermont elected officials do.

With no hate crime charge, no law enforcement or judicial finding of deliberate targeting, and no evidence establishing motive, Vermont U.S Senators Bernie Sanders and Peter Welch, and Representative Becca Balint used the two-year anniversary of the tragic shooting of three Palestinian students to tell Vermonters a divisive fiction – a story crafted to satisfy sectarian political appetites rather than to reflect the truth.

It is not a new pattern. In another era, during the Dreyfus Affair, French elites clung to a narrative too emotionally gratifying to question. The parallel is not the substance of the case but the psychology: when a story feels right, it becomes a story that must be true, no matter what the evidence says. The Shootings and the Race to Interpretation

On November 25, 2023, three college students were shot on a residential street in Burlington, VT – the largest city in America’s second-smallest state. The three, Hisham Awartani (Brown University), Kinnan Abdalhamid (Haverford College) and Tahseen Ali Ahmad (Trinity College) were visiting during their Thanksgiving breaks.

Two are U.S citizens and one a legal resident. All three are of Palestinian heritage. Two of the victims were wearing keffiyeh (the headdress associated with Arab Palestinian nationalism since it was adopted during the Arab Revolt in the 1930s). All three were wounded; Awartani was the worst-injured – according to his family, a bullet lodged in his spine left him paralyzed from the chest down.

Local CBS affiliate WCAX-TV was the first to report that the victims of this tragic shooting were Palestinian – a detail initially unsupported and unattributed, but later confirmed by police.

The anti-Israel movement weaponised the tragedy instantly. Neighbours targeted local Jews online, joking that their whereabouts at the time of the shooting should be investigated.

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12/08 Links Pt1: ‘International Law’ Isn’t Real; Israel must refuse phase two of Trump’s Gaza plan until Hamas is fully disarmed; Gaza Fatality Analysis: The Truth Behind the 70,000 Number

From Ian:

JPost Editorial: Israel must refuse phase two of Trump’s Gaza plan until Hamas is fully disarmed

The problems, of course, are that Hamas is refusing to disarm, the PA has indeed not reformed from its path (particularly its pay-for-slay policy of financing the families of terrorists), and, as pointed out last week, Hamas is still holding onto the body of slain policeman Ran Gvili.

Trump is banking on all of the parties being on board, including the immediate surrounding countries, the states making up the ISF, and, of course, Israel.

The pressure on Israel is already beginning to mount. Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani agreed that there really is no ceasefire in Gaza, and put the onus on Israel.

“A ceasefire cannot be completed unless there is a full withdrawal of the Israeli forces; [until] there is stability back in Gaza, people can go in and out, which is not the case today,” he said on Saturday at the Doha Forum.

Saudi minister Manal Radwan said at the same forum that it’s not the PA but Israel that needs reform.

“We have an Israeli government that opposes the two-state solution. We have an Israeli government that has officials continuously inciting against Palestinians, against Arabs, and against Muslims,” said Radwan. “We don’t see that we have a partner for peace, not even a partner for a sustainable ceasefire. So that is the actual and important reform that we are hoping to see.”

The question now is whether Trump will stick to the 20-point plan and insist on the disarmament of Hamas, or if he will join the ISF partners, like Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan, who told the forum that disarming Hamas only needs to take place once there is a governance body set up in Gaza.

That’s why Israel must be more vigilant than ever and demand that Hamas be disarmed at the outset of Phase 2 of the ceasefire. The pressure from the Arab partners on the deal is one thing, but with Trump intent on seeing his deal work, he’s likely to join in the pressure on Israel to compromise.

That’s something we cannot do. Others may see the rebuilding of Gaza and the “peace” trophy in the Middle East as the most urgent items on the agenda. For Israel, however, the safeguarding of its borders and removing the Hamas threat, once and for all, is the overarching goal.

Regardless of the pressure, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu must defy his closest ally in Washington and insist that the second phase commences with Hamas disarming and no longer posing a threat to Israel.

Gaza Fatality Analysis: The Truth Behind the 70,000 Number

Conclusion
This analysis points to a grounded estimate of 61,125 war-related deaths due to IDF action: approximately 25,000 combatants and 36,125 civilians (plus the 4,000 deaths caused by Hamas and internal actors). Civilian casualties are tragic, and the large number of minors killed cannot be dismissed; however, they overwhelmingly result from Hamas’s human-shield strategy, in which military assets are deliberately embedded where civilians are present, and in which civilian deaths are viewed by Hamas leadership as beneficial to its aims.

A civilian-to-combatant ratio of 1.45 to 1 is remarkably low by the standards of modern urban warfare in Iraq or Afghanistan, and it demonstrates that the IDF conducted a highly targeted campaign against Hamas under extraordinarily difficult conditions. Claims that large numbers of civilian deaths remain unreported do not withstand scrutiny: families had over two years to report fatalities, even without a body, and numerous “rubble” deaths are already known to have been added through the MoH’s notification process.

The evidence shows that Hamas’s headline fatality toll is a distortion. The true picture is of a war in which Israel inflicted massive losses on Hamas’ fighters while carrying out one of the most targeted urban campaigns in modern military history.

More People Died in 1 Month in One City in Sudan Than in Entire Gaza War

So what’s different in the coverage?
1. The media reports on it, but doesn’t make it the lead, doesn’t push the story constantly and treats it as something happening ‘over there’ the way it does most foreign wars. This is very different than the coverage of Israel where even the most minor confrontation, like clashes between Jewish farmers and Muslim/leftist activists in which no one is hurt, somehow become major stories.
2. The reporting doesn’t directly clarify the players in a way that’s easily understandable. That’s opposed to the media’s constant denunciations of Israel. Who is the RSF? Most people don’t know or care. Tell them that the RSF is really an Arab Islamic militia known as the ‘Janjaweed’ and that it’s backed by Muslim countries and they might have more clarity. Which is why the media tends to bury that part. Especially the Muslim racism.
3. Leftist activist groups haven’t taken up the cause, so there are no protests, little in the way of social media posts, little conversation. Whatever conversation there isn’t amplified by the media in the same vicious cycle that saw Gaza take over everything in 2024.

Neither Muslims nor the Left are especially interested in discussing the topic. Some genuine human rights activists care, but they’re not going to get any traction.

And that’s why real Islamic genocides get ignored, whether in Sudan or Nigeria, while any self-defense against Islam, such as by Israel, America or India, are falsely labeled as genocide by the actual Muslim genociders.

We know why this happens. And we can see it happening again. It’s not about the genocide, it’s about the propaganda.

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12/07 Links: The Seven Days that Shatter the ‘Nakba’ Myth; Our Man in Amman; Hamas chief rejects key points of Trump peace plan, calls for Israel’s destruction

From Ian:

David Collier: The Seven Days that Shatter the ‘Nakba’ Myth

In anti-Israel circles, the dominant narrative of the Palestinian ‘Nakba’ rests on a single, almost unchallenged assumption: That a passive and defenceless Arab population was suddenly overwhelmed by violent Jewish militias determined to expel them and seize their land. From this foundational myth flow all the modern accusations of ethnic cleansing and genocide, repeated by governments, activists, and even the UN. This is the central pillar upon which the entire pro-Palestinian movement is built

Take this recent post from the UN Palestine account which ties all the different strands together:

But that story collapses the moment you look at what actually happened. Not decades later, not in later stages of the war, but in the very first seven days after the UN partition vote.

Using mostly Arab newspapers of the time, the record is unmistakable: within hours of the UN decision, Arab political factions, militias, and regional actors launched a campaign of violence and mobilisation aimed at preventing the creation of a Jewish state. The civil war that followed – and the refugee crisis it produced – emerged from this aggressive, openly-declared Arab rejectionism, not from a premeditated Jewish plan.

What follows is a look through that history, reconstructed day by day from contemporary Arab and Jewish press.

Day one – November 30 1947
Arab media reacts to partition with mobilisation and incitement.

The morning after the UN vote, neither Ad-Difa nor Al-Wahda reported the partition as a political event. Instead, both papers erupted with outrage and calls for Arab mobilisation across the region. The pages were saturated with threats, anti-Jewish invective, and demands for an ‘Islamic Front’ to rise.

Ad-Difa’s lead built explicitly toward violent resistance. Al-Wahda’s headline declared: “O Arabs, the West has chosen your enemies. Will you remain stunned, or will you prepare?”

There is no ambiguity here. Arab media was calling on the Arab people inside the Mandate area and across the region to mobilise.

Day two – 1 December 1947
Violence erupts across the country. The Palestine Post reported seven Jews murdered in multiple attacks on 30 November.

Arab newspapers themselves documented the killings. Look at Ad-Difa’s own front page on the same date. Ad-Difa was a staunchly Pan-Arab media outlet that was aligned with the Husayni, ‘Holy War’ factions in the mandate area. It eventually promoted open support for the Nazis. At the time, the paper was run by Ibrahim al-Shanti.

Its headline read: “23 Jews killed and wounded in 8 separate incidents in Haifa, Jaffa, Beit Ve-Gan, Sarona, and Jerusalem.”

The article described bus ambushes around Jerusalem, attacks in Lod, Tulkarm, Haifa and Jaffa, and other assaults on Jewish civilians.

The war had begun – and it had begun with Arab-initiated violence.

The scholars fueling the current wave of antisemitism

Former US President Bill Clinton understood this when then-Palestinian Authority leader Yasser Arafat declared that Jerusalem had never been Jewish. Clinton threatened to walk out of the room at the Camp David Summit in July 2000 if Arafat continued uttering such false claims. He recognized the statement for what it was—the purest form of antisemitism.

What Clinton grasped instinctively, these intellectuals refuse to see: that the Jewish people and Israel are inseparable. To delegitimize Israel is to delegitimize Jews. That is why antisemites applaud efforts to weaken IHRA; it leaves them free to proclaim Israel a crime and Zionism a pathology.

Delrio’s initiative represents moral courage at a time when it is desperately needed. The Jewish scholars who oppose him, intentionally or not, provide cover for those who seek to dissolve the line between criticism and hatred, between debate and incitement.

These Jews do not understand that the Jewish people and Israel are the same. The stances expressed by King, Clinton and now Delrio are more Jewish than theirs.

History is watching. And today, as in the past, the refusal to name antisemitism is its most reliable accomplice.

Our Man in Amman

Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown that was invented by the British and then funded by the Americans. Constantly lies the head of state who claims to protect the Palestinians while cooperating with the Mossad. Abdullah II is the fourth king of Jordan, the state that Winston Churchill lopped off the Palestine Mandate in 1921 with, he said, "the stroke of the pen one Sunday afternoon in Cairo." The plan, as proposed by Lawrence of Arabia in 1918, was to install the three sons of Hussein, the Sharif of Mecca, as the Hashemite emirs, Britain's proxies in the states it was carving out of Ottoman territory. Abdullah is the last Hashemite standing. He has a pronounced facial tic.

In 1951, the first Jordanian emir, Abdullah I, was shot to death at Jerusalem's Al-Aqsa mosque by a Palestinian terrorist. His son Talal lasted a year before being deposed on grounds of mental illness. But Talal's son Hussein saved his family. He saved Jordan too, notably by massacring Palestinians when they tried to overthrow him in 1970, then cutting them loose when the Palestinians in the West Bank rebelled against Israeli control in 1988. Abdullah II inherited the poisoned chalice after his father's death in 1999.

The Most American King, by the journalist Aaron Magid, is the first biography of Abdullah, who will probably still be king by the time your copy arrives. Deeply researched with plenty of interviews, it is both a groundbreaking primer on our man in Amman and a study in timeless imperial politics. Take away the helicopters and Swiss bank accounts, and the Hashemites' relationship to the United States is no different from that of the ancient Moabite and Edomite satraps to their Hittite, Assyrian, or Neo-Babylonian emperors.

The British invented Jordan, but the Americans took over after the Suez Crisis of 1956. Abdullah's mother was the daughter of a British military adviser; she may have met Hussein on the set of Lawrence of Arabia, where she was a typist and he was catching up on some family history. Abdullah was educated at an English boarding school, Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts for high school, and then Sandhurst for officer training, despite not being a British subject. He then read international relations at the University of Oxford despite, a contemporary tells Magid, having shown no academic aptitude at Deerfield beyond being the "incredibly ripped" captain of the wrestling team. Favorite food: cheeseburger. Language he had trouble learning: Arabic.

Abdullah returned to Jordan in 1983, for the first time in 15 years, short vacations aside, and joined an armored brigade. As Magid reports, he put away much "vodka and beer," wore cowboy boots when he listened to country music, and was never seen praying. He built up an extensive collection of Luger pistols, because you never know. In 1987, when he was studying at Georgetown, he impressed his Israeli tutor with a paper arguing that the Israelis had been right to pursue Palestinian terrorists across the Jordan River and into his father's territory in 1968. In 1993, Abdullah married Rania al-Yassin, a Kuwaiti-born Palestinian whose family had been expelled from Kuwait in 1991 by Saddam Hussein. They honeymooned in the United States, obviously.

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12/06 Links: American Antizionism; Natasha Hausdorff on Israel Eurovision row, new UN Resolutions and Marwan Barghouti; Scarlett Johansson’s ‘Eleanor the Great’ lives up to its name

From Ian:

American Antizionism

A year after the Six Day War, the French scholar Leon Poliakov published the penultimate volume of his magnum opus, a millennia-spanning four-part history of antisemitism. He concluded Volume 3, From Voltaire to Wagner, with the declaration, “Historians are not prophets, and I will refrain, finally, from making any prognosis. Only the future will show if, and to what degree, a hatred of the Jews, justified theologically until the French Revolution and ‘racially’ until the Hitlerite holocaust, will have a third incarnation under a new ‘anti-Zionist’ guise.”

Poliakov did not refrain for long, perhaps because the future showed itself more quickly than he had anticipated. Before turning to the final volume, which carried the history of antisemitism through the rise of Nazism, he rendered his prognosis on the Jewish question of his own day. “[T]he devil painted on the wall has swapped his name from ‘Jewish conspiracy’ to ‘Zionist conspiracy,’” Poliakov wrote in a 1969 monograph. The title of that book, De l’antisionisme à l’antisemitisme, telegraphed the argument. “Under the pretext of a critical attitude toward the Jewish state and its supporters, an ancient passion inspired by hatred continues to make its way.” A meticulous historian, Poliakov then added a nuance that current debates over antizionism routinely ignore: “However, it does so in different ways, depending on the region and the regime.”

Two years after Hamas’s “Al-Aqsa Flood” (we must confront the name for reasons that I will explain below), it is less the horrors perpetrated on October 7 than the traumas of October 8 that have forced an American Jewish reckoning. What does it mean that, of all places, America’s campuses and cities were the most likely to meet Jews in their grief with rationalizations, exhilaration, silence, abandonment, and shunning? Jews in the United States are now discovering how antizionism makes its way here in this region. The experience has caught them intellectually, emotionally, and politically unprepared. I am neither a pastor nor a politician, so I cannot offer much on the latter two. But to those hoping to gain some intellectual footing, I can offer my perspective as a sociologist who has written on social movement activism, a historian who has studied antizionism in the USSR, and a professor who has been navigating academic antizionism in the US since the 1990s. These shape how I understand what American antizionism is, how educational failures enabled it to gain a foothold, how it has become more dangerous (at least for now) than race-based antisemitism, and how Jewish Americans might begin to blaze a path forward.

Nicole Lampert: All the ways Israel is being cancelled

Spain, Ireland and the Netherlands boycotting the Eurovision Song Contest due to Israel’s inclusion in the competition is only the latest attempt to “cancel” the Jewish state over its war against Hamas.

Indeed, only this week, it emerged that Guinness World Records had informed the Matnat Chaim charity that its plans to bring together 2,000 people to donate kidneys couldn’t become an official record because it is an Israeli organisation. The London-based organisation claimed this was fair, as it was also banning submissions from the Palestinian territories unless they were done in co-operation with the UN (an organisation with which Israel now refuses to work due to perceived bias).

Guinness World Records justified its policy on the basis of “just how sensitive this is at the moment”.

“Sensitivity” has become a familiar refrain, as Israel has been cancelled by individuals and organisations in almost every area of public life since Hamas’s attack on the country on Oct 7 2023.

Academia
The Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel has been going strong for more than 20 years in academia, led by the University and College Union, which represents lecturers, but it took on a new momentum after the Israel-Gaza war started in 2023.

In general, the attempted boycotts have not worked in the UK, but in Europe, it is a different story. Universities in Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy and Spain have increasingly voted to suspend agreements with Israeli institutions.

Emmanuel Nahshon, head of an Association of Israeli Universities task force to combat academic boycotts, told The Times of Israel that his organisation tallied 300 instances of boycotts in the year following the Oct 7 attacks, and a year later, that number had more than doubled to 700. This includes boycotts on individual researchers, as well as restrictions on those working with institutions.

In other cases, known as “shadow boycotts”, universities simply stop working with Israeli researchers or avoid engaging in joint projects without giving any reason.

Senior West Midlands Police chief 'apologises to Jewish community in Birmingham for telling MPs they BACKED ban on Maccabi Tel Aviv fans for Aston Villa match'

A police chief has apologised after appearing to mislead MPs by telling them that Jewish people in Birmingham had backed a ban on Maccabi Tel Aviv fans attending an Aston Villa match last month.

West Midlands Police assistant chief constable Mike O'Hara told a select committee last week that concerns were raised by the religious community over supporters of the Israeli football team travelling to the city.

He said this contributed to the decision to bar the fans from their Europa League fixture at Villa Park on November 6, which sparked a huge backlash - with claims officials were caving into Islamist thugs.

Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer was among those who condemned the ban, declaring: 'We will not tolerate antisemitism on our streets.'

However, the force has now been accused of using the community as a shield to avoid scrutiny after sources within the local community claimed there was no 'meaningful consultation' before the ban was decided.

One source told The Sunday Times that O'Hara's comments were a 'twisted' distortion of the facts and consultation with Birmingham Jews had been minimal.

The senior officer has since written to representatives of the city's Jewish community to apologise, emphasising he had 'no intention' of implying its members 'had explicitly expressed support for the exclusion of Maccabi fans'.

He also accepted it was 'not the case' that members of the Jewish community had expressed support for the ban and will 'ensure this is clearly articulated' to MPs in further written questions.

In a letter seen by The Sunday Times, O'Hara wrote: 'I am aware that there is some consternation within the local Jewish community about what I presented on Monday. There were a number of questions asked, often with several parts and secondary points.

'Please can I apologise and make very clear that it was not my intention to imply that there were members of the Jewish community who had explicitly expressed support for the exclusion of Maccabi fans.

'Having re-watched the footage, I am sorry if my response has created confusion by suggesting members of the Jewish community had expressed support for the ban. From my perspective that is not the case and I will ensure this is clearly articulated when I respond to the further written questions we are anticipating.'

Sweden’s funding scandal empowered antisemitic networks, endangered Jews

In a country that prides itself on democratic and liberal values, social media discourse has become increasingly toxic, fueled by misinformation about Jews, Israel, and the Middle East conflict, often amplified by the very institutions that received public funding.

A central question emerging from the scandal is how a developed state with a robust regulatory framework failed to detect a phenomenon involving $100 million in misallocated funds.

It appears that Sweden’s commitment to a tolerant and open immigration policy created a dangerous blind spot that allowed extremist groups to exploit the system.

Authorities reacted only after the investigation went public. Schools were closed, arrests were made, and assets seized. But for the Jewish community, much of the damage had already been done.

This affair is not merely a story of financial corruption. It illustrates how ideological organizations can infiltrate state mechanisms to advance hatred.

Like much of Europe, Sweden is waking up too late to the reality that antisemitism is not a marginal phenomenon. It is sustained by funding, ideology, and the absence of oversight – and when granted institutional support, it becomes a threat to democratic society as a whole.

The Swedish government is now being called upon to take full responsibility: strengthen security, remove extremist influence from public institutions, and ensure that taxpayer funds serve their intended purposes rather than fueling hatred.

The $100 million scandal is more than an oversight failure. It is evidence that even advanced democracies can fall victim to networks of radical incitement. Antisemitism in Sweden reached new heights because it was allowed to grow unchecked for years – and once it received public funding, it became a tangible threat.

In a country that fails to protect its Jewish community, it is not only Jews who suffer-the entire democratic order is at risk.

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12/05 Links Pt2: Boycotting Fun to Own the Jews; The boycott of Eurovision exposes the racism of the Israel-bashers; Why Hamas Sympathizers Love Ms. Rachel

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: Boycotting Fun to Own the Jews

Which brings us back to the ridiculous meetings that took place yesterday among European broadcasters. The gathering voted to adopt a set of contest reforms rather than ban Israel from participation. It’s darkly funny that some of the reforms were aimed at quieting resentment toward Israel for its success—last year, Yuval Raphael finished second overall and won the public vote, leading to protests that the Jews somehow must have cheated. But it mollified enough of the Europeans that Eurovision avoided the nightmare scenario it most feared: having to ban Israel while Austria was hosting the competition.

Still, several countries have announced they will boycott the contest rather than share a stage with the Jewish state: Spain, the Netherlands, Ireland and Slovenia. Perhaps more will join them.

How should we judge the countries who stomped out of Eurovision over Israel’s participation? Harshly. A singing competition is not a diplomatic convention. Would you leave a karaoke bar because there was an Israeli Jew there? Will these folks boycott all establishments that serve Israeli Jews?

Aside from emitting a faint segregationist stink, these Europeans are politicizing every cell in their bodies in an attempt to enforce those same artistic limits on everyone else. If rare apolitical music gatherings are impossible, it has a stunting effect on the industry and on the minds and temperaments of the people participating in their own dumbing down.

And the soccer snobs are also—you just know it—coming for the Olympics at some point. Unhealthy people trying to make the planet an unhealthy world through a totalitarian-political mindset. I’d tell them to get a hobby, but they’d just ruin that too.

Andrew Pessin: Onward, ho!

Meteorological Discourse: How Language Erases Jewish Agency and Conceals Antizionist Actors

When Jews freeze under the antizionist gaze, they begin using a vocabulary of atmosphere rather than agency. Instead of identifying who is targeting Jews and why, they often describe anti-Jewish hate as though it were weather. We hear phrases like:
“It’s getting bad”
“Antisemitism is rising”
“This campus is terrifying.”

These are weather reports, not analyses. They lack actors, motives, structures, ideologies, and systems. And this linguistic pattern continues even in descriptions of violence. In an eerie way, events happen to Jews, yet no one causes them:
“Israeli women were raped”
“Nasrallah was lionized”
“A Jew was beaten in Montreal”
“Jewish businesses were vandalized”
“Jewish students were harassed”
“Sarah Milgrim was shot”

Such formulations render the harm without rendering the perpetrator. They mimic the structure of meteorological statements (“It rained,” “The streets flooded”) in which no actor exists and no intention is named. Violence becomes a condition rather than an action; Jews become a medium through which harm moves, not subjects whose safety is violated by identifiable agents.

Contrast this with what Jews should say—language that restores agency to those who commit, legitimize, or amplify anti-Jewish harm:
“Antizionists raped Israeli women”
“The New York Times lionized Nasrallah”
“Antizionists beat a Jew in Montreal”
“Antizionists vandalized Jewish businesses”
“Antizionists harassed Jewish students”
“Elias Rodriguez shot Sarah Milgrim”

This linguistic shift restores agency to the actors who commit, legitimize, or amplify anti-Jewish harm. It makes the ideology and its adherents visible. It generates accountability. And crucially, it reorients the public gaze away from Jewish victims and toward the structures targeting Jews.

'Antizionism Is a Hate Movement': A Conversation with Adam Louis-Klein

Something happened while I was writing a book about how to fight antisemitism. Forget internal arguments over hyphens or whether to call it “Jew-hate.” A new consensus is beginning to form around using the word “antizionism” instead. I always thought that, whatever you call it, this form of bigotry adapts to the times and, like a parasite, hitches a ride on whatever version of anti-Jewish hatred is socially acceptable. I’m beginning to understand that antizionism is different. It gives antisemites plausible deniability for their hatred, and we need a new set of tools to fight it.

At the forefront of this effort is anthropologist Adam Louis-Klein, who has led a push on social media to change the way we think about antizionism and to name it as a hate movement. He launched an organization, the Movement Against Antizionism to advocate for this shift.

I had many questions, so I interviewed Adam last month. I thought it best to let him speak for himself, so here is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.

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12/05 Links Pt1: How time ran out on Blinken’s plan for postwar Gaza; Hostages as leverage: Iran's secret demand aimed at crippling Israel's agriculture; Did the Red Cross do all it could for hostages in Gaza?

From Ian:

The day after that never came: How time ran out on Blinken’s plan for postwar Gaza

Had the world not been turned upside down, Antony Blinken would have been in Israel on October 10, 2023. Had Hamas terrorists not shaken the Middle East and pulverized plans for its future, the US secretary of state would have flown from Israel to Saudi Arabia a few days later as part of a multi-stop tour aimed at bridging some of the final gaps between the two countries on long-elusive normalization, a deal that could have been as positively transformative as the Hamas massacre and ensuing war were devastatingly destructive.

For months ahead of the scheduled trip, the US had been hard at work crafting a document with Saudi Arabia, laying out what Israel would need to do in exchange for Riyadh joining the Abraham Accords, namely a series of relatively minor concessions meant to assuage Palestinian aspirations for statehood. Blinken planned to bring that document to Jerusalem for approval, two senior Biden officials told The Times of Israel.

Israel was aware of where things stood and was comfortable enough with the modest steps discussed by Washington and Riyadh for the Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem to draft a normalization agreement with Saudi Arabia, according to the two former US officials and a current Israeli official.

Blinken did end up making it to Israel that week, but under very different circumstances, as then-US president Joe Biden’s administration rallied to support the Jewish state following the Hamas-led cross-border attack on October 7 that cut down some 1,200 people and saw 251 more taken hostage into Gaza.

Documents uncovered by the IDF from Gaza during the war revealed that one of the motivations of Hamas’s leaders in launching the attack was scuttling the US effort to broker that brewing normalization deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia.

To a great extent, the terror group succeeded. The Biden administration’s normalization push was shelved in favor of, first, providing Israel with the military and diplomatic support needed to restore deterrence against Iran and its proxies, and second, working to secure an end to the war through a hostage release deal. Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (L) meets with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken in Jeddah on June 7, 2023. (Amer Hilabi/Pool/AFP)

Many leading figures in the administration saw freeing the abductees as the key to ending the war and accordingly concentrated their attention on the indirect hostage negotiations between Israel and Hamas, which largely ran through Qatar and Egypt. But Blinken grew to believe that setting up the security and governing bodies to help administer Gaza the “day after” the war was no less critical.

“Israel needed the confidence to know that [its] security would not be threatened by withdrawing from Gaza, and Hamas needed the confidence to know that the war would end if it gave up the remaining hostages,” said a senior Biden aide, who was one of 10 government officials and well-placed regional sources interviewed for this story.

That logic was the basis for a “Transitional Mission” that Blinken worked to establish, which would steer the Strip after the war. The initiative, as laid out in a 14-point plan that would have been part of the ceasefire agreement, was aimed at “support[ing] the provision of governance, security and humanitarian assistance for Gaza” after the war, according to a never-before-reported US government document outlining the plan, which was obtained and verified by The Times of Israel.

The proposed mission was to involve civilian and military personnel, funding and other contributions from a handful of foreign governments, including Saudi Arabia, whose involvement Blinken hoped would provide an opening to revive the stalled normalization negotiations. Displaced Palestinians stand on a road after heavy rain in Jabalia, in the northern Gaza Strip, on November 25, 2025. (Omar Al-Qattaa / AFP)

To ensure strong Arab support, the proposal characterized the initiative as a “first step toward establishing an independent and sovereign Palestinian state.” That made the idea a hard sell to Jerusalem, but Blinken believed the prospect of Saudi normalization could be enough of a carrot to overcome Israel’s likely objections.

The result was a precarious house of cards, but one that Blinken thought could lay the foundation for not just a temporary halt in hostilities, but a durable, lasting peace and a truly transformed region.

The US held months of talks to advance the plan and Saudi normalization, but neither got off the ground by the time Biden left office in January 2025. A ceasefire between Israel and Hamas was brokered during the waning hours of the previous administration, helped by critical pressure from the incoming Trump team. But Israel still wasn’t interested in discussing postwar arrangements of the kind Blinken sought to finalize, and the Trump administration backed Jerusalem’s decision to resume the war in March.

Hostages as leverage: Iran's secret demand aimed at crippling Israel's agriculture - exclusive

Iran offered Thailand help in securing the release of Thai hostages held in Hamas captivity on the condition that Bangkok label Israel an “unsafe country” and instruct its tens of thousands of agricultural workers working there to leave immediately, two sources familiar with the matter told The Jerusalem Post on Thursday.

The Iranian message was clear: help us apply economic pressure on Israel, and we’ll help you bring your people home.

In the tense and chaotic weeks following the October 7 attacks, while Israel was still counting its dead and searching for missing civilians, a drama was unfolding thousands of kilometers away in Bangkok.

Thailand’s government, shocked by the scale of the massacre in which 39 Thai citizens were murdered and desperate to protect its citizens, began urgent diplomatic efforts to secure the release of the 31 Thai laborers abducted by Hamas and other terrorist groups.

It was a humanitarian crisis, not a political one; Thailand had no direct conflict with Hamas. But as often happens in the Middle East, even humanitarian crises can become bargaining chips.

Tehran, which maintained influence over Hamas, signaled it might be able to facilitate the release of the Thai hostages; however, the offer was not unconditional. Possible damage to Israel's agriculture sector If Thailand complied, it would deliver a painful blow to Israel’s agricultural sector at the very moment it was struggling to recover from the shock of the attack.

Between 30,000 and 40,000 Thai laborers worked on Israeli farms and in greenhouses – some of them in the western Negev and near the border with Gaza, the area hardest hit on October 7.

Their sudden withdrawal would have crippled Israeli food production and inflicted long-term economic damage.

Joshua Namm: Et Tu America? For Israel, No Ally Is Forever

There has been a lot of serious discussion recently about America’s role in the recent agreement between Israel and Hamas. And while I wrote about that topic last month, this month contains my favorite holiday of the year: Chanukah. I wrote about the incredible importance of that holiday two years ago. This year, those two things are connected.

What’s the connection?

As Chanukah approaches there are two, seemingly different, but related reasons that “make this year different than all other years” (sorry about mixing two Jewish ideas in that way).

According to a story in the Jerusalem Post, the United States, obviously under Donald Trump, is planning to build a large military base in Israel along the Gaza border. The aim is purportedly to aid “stabilization efforts” in Gaza during the current conflict, and (more tellingly) to “serve future international stabilization efforts.”

At the same time, the acceptance of Trump’s plan, and the various ways the U.S. has been involved in shaping Israel’s policy during this war, under Biden and Trump, demonstrates an expansion of America’s influence on Israel, representing an increasing Israeli willingness to relinquish sovereignty – in much the same way it has given up land for a phantom “peace,” for decades.

That isn’t as threatening if we’re talking about the U.S./Israel relationship as it has existed for most of the last 50 years. But Israeli/American relations haven’t always been this friendly, and there is no reason, especially given the events of the last two years, to believe that they will remain so in the future.

It is no longer entirely in the realm of fantasy to believe that at some point America could be a significant opponent to Israel’s interests (and to wider Jewish interests). When I was growing up, I assumed that any conflict in which Israel and America found themselves on different sides, would be an America so different than the one I grew up in, that it would be unrecognizable as America. I also assumed this to be an almost entirely theoretical question, one which, if it did occur, could occur only after many, many generations.

That was naively idealistic.

Again, we aren’t there yet, but now we can easily see how things could get there. The rise of the antisemitic left (most recently embodied in the elections of not one, but two Jew hating socialist mayors in New York AND Seattle, with a newly declared socialist mayoral candidate in Los Angeles announcing on November 15), and the rise of the antisemitic right, embodied in the Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Thomas Massie, etc., is a wake up call that every Jew should heed.

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12/04 Links Pt2: Israel WILL participate in Eurovision 2026 – Netherlands, Spain and Ireland to boycott; I Want a Democratic Party that Believes Jewish Lives Matter; What the Celebrity Crusade for Barghouti Says about Our "Elites"

From Ian:

Prof. Gerald Steinberg and Anne Herzberg: UK Funding for Hamas-Linked Groups

Since 2007, Hamas has amassed power and resources in no small part by diverting international aid and developing an unprecedented terror infrastructure. Billions of dollars in Western taxpayer funding were funneled into Gaza ostensibly for humanitarian projects via 13 UN agencies and dozens of NGOs.

Internal British and Hamas documents reveal multiple ways in which London was aware of Hamas involvement in its aid pipeline, and in some instances even cooperated with that organization. In May 2025, NGO Monitor published a detailed report, using information and documents obtained through Freedom of Information proceedings, which demonstrated that UK Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) officials were fully aware of Hamas involvement in certain Gaza cash assistance programs they funded. As of mid-2025, UK and UN databases revealed that this support was still ongoing.

These programs were implemented through UNICEF in coordination with Gaza's Hamas-controlled Ministry of Social Development, which was responsible for providing the lists of aid beneficiaries for cash assistance. Hamas was able to determine just who would receive British taxpayer funds, and NGOs linked to other terrorist groups (such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine) would be among those recipients.

In addition, the evidence indicates that Hamas skims exorbitant sums from cash transfers in Gaza. According to Eyal Ofer, an expert on Gaza's economy, "People are getting aid via banking apps, but to turn that into real currency, they must go through brokers. They withdraw funds from these digital wallets and charge outrageous fees - anywhere between 20% and 40%. This is one of the ways Hamas is making a profit."

The events of Oct. 7 and the regional war it precipitated were made possible in large part due to the diversion of billions of dollars in aid by Hamas and its pressure campaign on UN agencies, international NGOs, and foreign diplomats to facilitate the terror organization's activity and control.

The detailed record discussed here demonstrates complicity, if not close cooperation, between the UK FCDO, officials of the NGOs that receive millions in taxpayer funds, and Hamas. It also shows how the humanitarian aid industry knowingly operates outside of and in contradiction to the legal conditions and requirements established by the British Parliament. In November 2021, London fully proscribed Hamas as a terror organization. Funding or supporting it is a crime.

The glaring absence of oversight and due diligence in British funding enabled the potential transfer of millions of pounds to Hamas terror infrastructure and personnel under the guise of humanitarian aid. When presented with concrete evidence, British government officials have thus far chosen to deflect and deny rather than reform the way in which aid pipelines operate, to ensure they help Gazans, not Hamas.

I Want a Democratic Party that Believes Jewish Lives Matter

I was an intern in the Clinton White House. I went on to work in senior positions for the campaigns of Sen. Chuck Schumer and Rep. Joseph P. Kennedy, and for President Joe Biden's Super PAC. I helped elect Democrats up and down the ballot, staunchly defending them in public and in private. I attended almost every Democratic National Convention, as a professional and as part of a community of friends who were my political family. In 2020 I proudly served as a delegate for Joe Biden.

For decades I championed women's rights, reproductive choice, civil rights and equality. As a Jew, I was especially drawn to the teachings of Martin Luther King Jr., for whom Zionism - the Jewish longing for self-determination - was inseparable from the universal struggle for human rights. That was the Democratic Party I believed in.

Then came Oct. 7, 2023, and the massacre of Israelis and Jewish Americans. It forced me to confront the reality that members of my own party responded not with grief or solidarity with the victims but with protests that framed the attack as "resistance." It horrified me. There was no denying that under the banner of a "big tent," Democratic leaders were making room to shelter and legitimize extremism. Voices once on the margin suddenly dominated the narrative.

Then came the breaking point. The term "genocide" - reserved for the worst crimes in human history, like the Holocaust - was weaponized as a political slogan and hurled at Israel and Jews with ease. It was suddenly applied to a nation defending itself after an actual genocidal terrorist organization slaughtered families in their beds and hunted down and killed teenagers at a music festival.

Genocide is a ruse, a malicious inversion of reality. Yet few Democrats pushed back. Many embraced it. In November, 20 Democratic lawmakers introduced a measure in the House accusing Israel of genocide. The North Carolina Democratic Party and the Young Democrats of America adopted official positions accusing Israel of genocide. What we're seeing among Democrats is a broad, networked, antisemitic movement with cultural power and political influence.

The Democratic Party has allowed and lately encouraged the normalization of rhetoric that dehumanizes Jews and distorts history. It has become acceptable to be an antisemite who hates Israel. I cannot be affiliated with a party that espouses that message. Democratic leaders must speak clearly: Terrorism is terrorism, Jewish lives matter, moral consistency matters. Only after my community's safety is secure, and the party recognizes it not as a favor but as a fundamental principle, will I consider coming home.

The non-Jewish Israel supporters who have lost friends over Gaza

GEOFF Baker was always rather proud that his dad helped fight against the fascists targeting Jews in the East End of London in the 1930s.

As a journalist, and then PR to Paul McCartney, he also had many Jewish friends. One of his abiding memories of post-Holocaust trauma was when the former Beatle discovered a German venue he was playing in had been a favourite of Hitler: Geoff witnessed the deep discomfort of Paul’s Jewish wife Linda.

And so when October 7 happened, he wrote of his shock on Facebook and put a “I stand with Israel” banner around his photograph.

Two of his friends in particular took objection to this. The online rows became ever more bitter. “I’d write about my horror after reading an article about a woman who was decapitated by Hamas after she tried to fight off being raped and they would be saying things like ‘What about 1948?’ or ‘Did you see what the settlers have done?’” says Geoff, 69. “And I’d argue, ‘If you don’t want Hiroshima, don’t do Pearl Harbor.’

“This went on for weeks, all the rows were happening on my Facebook page. I realised I was inadvertently giving a platform to their views. So I blocked them and we no longer speak. One of them had been my friend since we were at school. I look around and I fear this new normal where it has become acceptable to be antisemitic and I don’t understand why no one is doing anything about it.”

Geoff, an old friend, was one of scores of people to get in touch with me after I put a call out on Facebook asking if any non-Jews had fallen out with friends over the Israel-Hamas conflict. I’d seen it reported in a More in Common poll that around four out of every ten Brits who were either firmly pro-Israel or pro-Palestine would consider dropping a friendship because of the war.

While I barely know a Jew who hasn’t fallen out with at least one person over the war, I was curious about how this issue had become so toxic for people who had no skin in the game – as it were – that they would fall out with friends. This is a conflict that is 2,000 miles away but its impact on our lives, our politics, has taken on a life of its own.

My post attracted 350 comments and was shared dozens of times. The comments read like a confession of pain. Person after person described how they had fallen out with friends, siblings, children and how sometimes the damage might be irreparable.

The direct messages also came in from people too frightened to say how they were feeling publicly. For many, the pain is abiding, yet they are also terrified about being further cancelled in this world of binaries.

In some ways, the messages were a balm: it has felt lonely being a Jew in this increasingly hostile atmosphere. These are people, strangers, who have our backs and have paid the price for their conviction in the most awful of ways. Sometimes that conviction has even involved them arguing with anti-Zionist Jews.

But also, they exposed me to a world of antisemitism that lingers beneath the surface – the way that non-Jews talk to each other when Jews aren’t in the room.

Let’s start with the left.

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12/04 Links Pt1: Why Trump's Gaza Plan is Not a Peace Deal; Trump to announce transition to Phase II of Gaza deal, 'Board of Peace' by Christmas; The World Will Not Help Israel with Hamas;

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: No, Americans Don’t Really Think Israel Is Guilty of Genocide

The key here is that genocide requires intent to destroy not just civilians but the specific population, and to judge something as genocidal requires one to determine that genocide is “the only inference that could reasonably be drawn from the acts in question.”

This is part of why the claim that Israel committed genocide was so unserious: Definitionally, a genocide did not take place. There are plenty of other words that can be used to describe the war, but “genocide” has been indisputably ruled out unless one changes the definition of the word, as some NGOs tried to do. But again, that would also be an admission that Israel was innocent of the charge.

Israel’s civilian-to-combatant fatality rate was unprecedentedly low for urban warfare, and the intent issue becomes absurd when you remember that Israel sent its military into Gaza to rescue hostages that Hamas refused to return.

But back to the poll. Even the response that Israel intentionally harms civilians doesn’t necessarily meet the definition of genocide. So if about 8 in 10 don’t think Israel is intentionally harming civilians, it’s likely that about 9 out of 10 don’t think Israel committed genocide.

That doesn’t mean there aren’t warning signs for Israel and its supporters, even in the IGC poll. Just because respondents don’t believe Israel committed genocide doesn’t mean they approve of Israel’s actions. As one can see, the poll shows plenty of criticism of Israel’s prosecution of the war.

Moreover, in the IGC poll—as in virtually every such survey—the trend is clear: Younger Americans of either party are tougher on Israel than their elders. But there is still a wide partisan gap: The farther left one goes on the spectrum, the more likely are respondents to assume ill intent on Israel’s part.

Another notable aspect of the poll is that there is a ton of uncertainty among respondents, so presumably a fair number are persuadable in one direction or another. Uncertainty regarding Israel’s intent is incompatible with a finding of genocide.

Two lessons. One, by definition the people who accuse Israel of genocide are feigning a certainty they almost surely don’t or can’t possess, at least from afar and during the war. As a rule, beware such people, especially when they are rewarded professionally for their dishonesty.

Two, anti-Israel activists have killed the concept of genocide. They have turned it into just another descriptive term meaning one side lost the war badly. There will continue to be victims of actual genocide in the world, and they will all be harmed by the “genocide” fraud perpetrated by professional anti-Zionists.

Khaled Abu Toameh: Why Trump's Gaza Plan is Not a Peace Deal

In the eyes of Hamas and other Palestinian terror groups, the plan is nothing but another temporary ceasefire, not different than previous ones reached between Israel and Hamas over the past two decades.

Those who think that Hamas, by agreeing to Trump's "peace plan," has abandoned its desire to eliminate Israel or has softened its position toward Israel are unfortunately dead wrong.

Hamas leaders have stressed their opposition to the involvement of any non-Palestinians in the future administration of the Gaza Strip.

Hamas has also made it clear that the role of any international troops should be limited to monitoring the ceasefire and safeguarding the borders of the Gaza Strip, not to disarming the terror groups and their military infrastructure.

Hamas's remarks are a not-so-veiled threat that they intend to launch terrorist attacks against members of any international force that tries to disarm the terror groups in the Gaza Strip.

That is doubtless the major reason most Arabs and Muslims appear reluctant to dispatch soldiers to the Gaza Strip: they do not want a direct confrontation with Hamas and the other terror groups operating there.

To understand the mindset and intentions of Hamas, it is crucial that one pay attention to what the terror group says in Arabic, not what some of its leaders tell US envoys in meetings behind closed doors.

Regrettably, there can be no peace, security, or stability in the area if Hamas and its allies are left standing on their feet and preparing for more massacres against Israel.

Is Gaza Peace Plan on the Verge of Crumbling?

"Everything is stuck," a senior Israeli defense official told me this week. Because diplomats have failed to capitalize on the disarray of Iran and its allies, "all the fronts in the Middle East are still open," he warned.

Most of Gaza's population is still controlled by Hamas, Lebanon hasn't fully regained its sovereignty from Hizbullah, and Iran is rebuilding its battered military.

The Middle East is still waiting for a stable "day after." Other than the release of all living Israeli hostages from Gaza, most of the goals of Trump's peace plan appear stillborn.

Nations that had volunteered to join the international force have been backing away, and donor countries are refusing to begin reconstruction projects until there's security in Gaza.

Prof. Efraim Inbar: The World Will Not Help Israel with Hamas

Hamas is tightening its grip on the half of Gaza that it controls and rebuilding its military infrastructure. It is difficult to imagine Hamas voluntarily disarming or relinquishing control. Israel must be prepared to "do the dirty work" for the civilized world and finish off what remains of Hamas's evil in Gaza. This is not a boxing match that can be won on points. Israel must win by a knockout.

Israel cannot claim victory while Hamas remains in Gaza. Israel must therefore seek American backing to resume fighting in order to implement the Trump plan. Repeated military defeats have not altered the Palestinians' fundamental opposition to the existence of the Jewish state. There is no "day after" if Hamas remains as an armed presence in Gaza.

Every regime that has a peace agreement with Israel - Egypt, Jordan, the UAE, Bahrain, and Morocco - despises Hamas. All of these states, as well as Saudi Arabia, view the Muslim Brotherhood and its financial patron Qatar as a threat to their regimes and a destabilizing force in the region.

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