08/03 Links Pt2: Ceuta and the dangerous insanity of anti-Zionism; Simon & Schuster Gives Book Deal to Palestinian Writer Who Calls Jews ‘Demons’; Motherland Blues; Engineering Hate

From Ian:

Brendan O'Neill: Ceuta and the dangerous insanity of anti-Zionism

From the left, the Palestinian-American writer Susan Abulhawa said the rushing of Ceuta was ‘completely engineered’ by Israel and its allies. Their dastardly aim? To ‘re-educate’ Spain and force it to ‘fall back in line with Western imperial objectives’. Rich-boy keffiyeh clown Hasan Piker echoed this drivel, titillating his Ivy League followers by saying Israel and America ‘got the Moroccan government to send, like, 40,000 people into Spanish administered territory’. It was ‘classic Israel’, he said: a ‘shameless’ effort to destabilise a critical nation.

That there is no proof whatsoever that someone in the Jewish State phoned up Morocco and said ‘Unleash the migrants’ matters not one jot to the Israel haters. Indeed, conspiracy theorists are positively allergic to facts. Badger them for proof that the Jews engineered the Ceuta crisis, or coolly explain to them how Building 7 fell on 9/11, and they’ll say you’ve been ‘got at’. Evidence itself is suspect in the loony bin of anti-West conspiracism. They just scream ‘Israel launched an Islamic invasion of Spain!’ – as Alex Jones did – and hope that the loudness of their claims will drown out the insanity of them.

In Spain itself, lefty influencer Ana Alcalde – also known as ‘Gaza Barbie’ after she sailed to Gaza on one of those dumb flotillas – said Ceuta was part of a ‘plan’ to ‘take down’ the government of Pedro Sánchez. Even a Spanish official – transport minister Óscar Puente Santiago – hinted that the long fingers of the Jewish State were wrapping round the neck of Spain. ‘Well, things are starting to get pretty clear’, he said in response to an Israeli official’s tweet about Spain’s ‘colonial enclaves’ in North Africa. His tweet was interpreted by many as support for ‘the growing conspiracy theory’ that Israel ‘helped orchestrate the large-scale migrant incursion’.

This Jew-blaming that spread through the digital highways faster than the Moroccan men barged into Ceuta captures how unhinged and lethal anti-Zionism has become. It confirmed that it is the undisputed heir to classical Jew hatred. Jews were once accused of inflicting plague, poison and social mayhem on Europe. Now the Jewish nation is accused of inflicting ‘swarms’ of migrants on Europe. These conspiracy theories might be separated by centuries, but they share two striking things in common. First, a glaring lack of proof, the wilful sacrifice of reasoned thought at the altar of a neo-religious conviction that despicable ‘foreign’ elements are masterminding our moral downfall. And secondly, the Jews. It’s them again. The Jewish people brought plague to Europe, now the Jewish nation is bringing ‘plagues’ of foreigners. Different millennium, same vile racism.

The Ceuta conspiracy theory also shines a light on the double bigotry of the woke ideology. In the woke universe, a demented animus for the world’s only Jewish state sits comfortably alongside a cloying, patrician pity for Muslims. The Jews are seen as the sinister authors of every earthly wrong, and Muslims as the hapless victims of those wrongs. So in the Ceuta theory, we see the Jewish nation re-imagined as demonically powerful and we see the wholesale stripping of Moroccan Muslims of any agency whatsoever. They become mere tools, instructed on how to act by the wily Jewish State. The neo-racialists of the credentialled classes see the world as being inhabited by devils and children, the former requiring their performative fury, the latter their aristocratic sympathy. Muslims are dehumanised too under the rule of the hyper-racialists.

Anti-Zionism has become the suffocating religion of the cultural establishment. Every social ill – from war to broken borders to the rise of the far right – is giddily traced back to Israel. Not only does this hang yet more target signs around the necks of Jews, it also obscures the truth about Europe’s social problems. It is our own governments’ suicidal abandonment of the ideal of national sovereignty that has caused the migrant crisis, not the hand-rubbing plotting of the Jews of the Holy Land. Like their forebears in the pitchfork Middle Ages, anti-Zionists prefer to live in a house of lies than to confront the truth of their world, and themselves.

Motherland Blues

Yet the Ukraine war was already eroding the logic behind that restraint. By the summer of 2022, after failing to achieve a rapid victory and expending large quantities of precision-guided weaponry, Moscow had turned to Tehran for attack drones. Russian officials visited an Iranian airfield twice to inspect weapons-capable systems; deliveries followed, and Iranian-designed Shaheds soon became a central component of Russia’s attacks on Ukrainian cities and civilian infrastructure. Iran, one of the powers Russia had previously attempted to balance in Syria, was becoming an increasingly important supplier to the Russian war effort.

At roughly the same time, Moscow began withdrawing or repositioning some personnel and equipment from Syria to meet the demands of the Ukraine front. In August 2022, satellite imagery indicated that Russia had removed an S-300 air-defense battery from Syria and shipped it toward the Black Sea, apparently to reinforce defenses closer to the Ukrainian theater. Russia did not abandon its principal Syrian bases, but reports of withdrawals and repositioning suggested that Iran and Hezbollah were seeking to fill some of the resulting gaps. The contradiction was becoming difficult to ignore: Israel was preserving its accommodation with Moscow partly because Russia could restrain Iran in Syria, even as Russia’s battlefield failures made it more dependent on Iranian weapons and less capable of performing that restraining role.

The community most exposed by this ambiguity was not in Jerusalem. When the invasion began, Russia’s core Jewish community still numbered roughly 155,000 people, along with a much larger population estimated at around 600,000 eligible for Israeli citizenship under the Law of Return. Three days after the invasion, Boruch Gorin, a senior spokesman for Russia’s Chabad-affiliated Federation of Jewish Communities, wrote bluntly on Facebook, “Stop the war!” On March 2, Chief Rabbi Berel Lazar—nicknamed “Putin’s Rabbi,” given their close relationship—issued his own carefully worded appeal to “stop this madness to prevent future deaths.” Their statements were striking because Putin had spent two decades cultivating a tacit compact with Chabad: After 70 years in which the Soviet state had repressed religious life and sharply constrained Jewish practice, the Kremlin supported the rebuilding of Jewish institutions, while Chabad’s leaders generally avoided confronting the government.

By the summer of 2022, Moscow was pressuring the institutions connecting Russian Jews to Israel. Russia’s Justice Ministry asked a Moscow court to dissolve the Russian branch of the Jewish Agency, the organization responsible for facilitating aliyah. The case was formally framed around alleged violations of Russian privacy law, but it unfolded amid deteriorating relations with Israel and a growing exodus of Russian citizens. By July, nearly 20,000 immigrants had arrived in Israel from Russia since the invasion began, with similar numbers arriving from Ukraine. Then Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid initially warned that closing the agency would be “a grave event” with consequences for bilateral relations, then softened his language, emphasizing Israel’s readiness for dialogue while “maintaining the important relations between the countries.”

The same community Putin had long presented as evidence of his tolerance could now serve as leverage against Israel. In October, Alexei Pavlov, an assistant secretary of Russia’s Security Council, described Chabad as a supremacist cult in the state-owned newspaper Argumenty i Fakty. Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev subsequently apologized, saying the remarks were erroneous, and stressed that they did not represent the council’s official position. Even so, the episode alarmed Russian Jewish leaders: Former Moscow chief rabbi Pinchas Goldschmidt urged Jews who were able to leave Russia to do so, while Boruch Gorin warned that official antisemitism would mean “the end of a Jewish presence in Russia.”

Putin’s own rhetoric was shifting as well. At the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum in June 2023, he defended Russia’s absurd claim that it was fighting to “denazify” Ukraine by turning directly to Zelenskyy’s Jewish identity. “I have a lot of Jewish friends,” Putin said. “They say that Zelenskyy is not Jewish, that he is a disgrace to the Jewish people.” Putin, who had spent two decades presenting himself as a protector of Russian Jews and a guardian of Holocaust memory, was now claiming the authority to distinguish authentic Jews from shameful ones and conscripting Jewish suffering into the ideological justification for his war.

After Oct. 7, the deterioration became even harder to disguise. Moscow blamed the conflict’s eruption largely on the failure of American policy and intensified its criticism of Israel’s campaign in Gaza, while Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said the bombardment violated international law and risked producing a catastrophe lasting decades. Less than three weeks after the massacre, Russia hosted a Hamas delegation led by senior official Moussa Abu Marzouk in Moscow, prompting an angry Israeli protest that the Kremlin was sending “a message legitimizing terrorism against Israelis.”

Days later, an antisemitic mob stormed the airport in Russia’s Makhachkala, Dagestan, searching for rumored Jewish and Israeli passengers arriving on a flight from Tel Aviv. Hundreds of men overran the terminal and runway, inspecting vehicles and demanding to see passengers’ documents. Putin condemned the violence only indirectly, blaming Ukrainian agents acting on behalf of Western intelligence services, without presenting evidence, rather than confronting the antisemitism animating the riot. The Kremlin did not organize the mob, and Russian authorities later prosecuted participants; by July 2025, Russian courts had sentenced 135 people in connection with the riot. But the episode exposed how quickly official anti-Western and anti-Israeli narratives could merge with older hatreds inside Russia itself.

By then, well over 40,000 Russian citizens eligible under the Law of Return had immigrated to Israel. Those who remained belonged to a community Moscow and Jerusalem had spent two decades treating as a strategic asset: evidence of Putin’s professed tolerance, and an electoral and demographic constituency in Israel.

However, the rupture did not happen. Israel preserved its access to Russia, while Moscow stopped short of severing relations with Jerusalem. But beneath that continuity, the arrangement was decaying. Russia was becoming more dependent on Iran, less capable of regulating Syria, more willing to pressure Jewish institutions, and increasingly prepared to align itself diplomatically and rhetorically against Israel. The relationship survived Ukraine and Oct. 7. The strategic logic that had sustained it did not.

Engineering Hate

REVIEW: 'Unsafe At MIT: A Chronicle of a Campus War on the Jews' by Yossi Sheffi

Yossi Sheffi is the author of this intensely disturbing book about the experience of American and Israeli Jews on campus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the aftermath of the October 7 massacre. Sheffi holds an endowed chair in engineering systems at MIT and is a member of the faculty in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department, the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society, and the Operations Research Center. He is a leading expert in supply chain management and the author of nine books in his areas of professional expertise. He has been a member of the MIT faculty for almost 50 years.

Sheffi's 10th book is also the first of its kind. Sheffi commissioned an unnamed journalist to interview dozens of American and Israeli Jewish undergraduate and graduate students, postdocs, and faculty about their experience on campus following October 7. Based on those interviews, the text of the book consists largely of a chronological narrative of the 2023-24 school year recounting their experience.

As the introduction puts it, "This is the story of what it felt like to those whose lives and studies were turned upside down." Like Ken Kesey's fictional One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Unsafe at MIT takes us inside the asylum at MIT.

Sheffi's narrative demonstrates that the anti-Israel and antisemitic inmates ran the asylum. By contrast with One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest's Nurse Ratched, MIT president Sally Kornbluth proved herself to be a spineless weasel. Kornbluth's betrayal of the applicable rules governing student protest on campus is one of the book's most powerful motifs. Unlike her counterparts at Columbia and Harvard, Kornbluth nevertheless kept her job.

Sheffi himself is an Israeli immigrant to the United States. He was born in Mandatory Palestine. He emigrated to the United States from Jerusalem in 1975 to pursue his graduate studies at MIT. Many of the students and postdocs interviewed are Israelis with a background of service in the Israel Defense Forces. Sheffi does not make a point of it, but MIT appears to be unusual in this respect. The pain of these students permeates the book.

MIT is a magnet for those seeking the development of technical expertise that has made Israel a multidimensional powerhouse. October 7 hit these students hard. MIT provides a window onto the wave of hatred of Jews and the Jewish state that manifested itself on elite campuses following the massacre. It should be noted that the students whose experience forms the core of this story are mostly identified only by first names or pseudonymous first names.

Read More

08/03 Links Pt1: How a UN study shatters the Gaza starvation narrative; The Warning Netanyahu Got Before the War; B'Tselem report ‘demonizes Israel by rebranding terrorists as minors’

From Ian:

Does Israel want peace?

While Israel never lost the hope of peace, it understood that it would not come about merely through slogans, chants, campfires, or peace symbols.

Among Israel’s neighbours, rallies all too often called for the murder of Jews and the destruction of the Jewish state. Survivors of Nazism, jihadism, and communism knew such words could become reality. They had seen it before.

Israelis, therefore, had no appetite for the catastrophic illusions that led Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister, to declare after Munich in 1938: “I believe it is peace for our time…” Genuine peace partners

Nor were Israelis ready to risk being sacrificed on the altar of geopolitical expediency, otherwise known as appeasement, as happened so shamefully to Czechoslovakia.

Israelis needed no sanctimonious lectures from afar about the virtues of peace. They understood those virtues better than most. What they needed were genuine peace partners.

Anwar Sadat had once been a bitter foe of Israel and had sympathies for Nazi Germany during the Second World War. Yet he came to understand that Egypt’s future prosperity depended on making peace rather than pursuing Israel’s destruction.

It worked. Paired with Menachem Begin, Israel’s first Right-of-centre prime minister, and with the help of the United States, they achieved the seemingly impossible in 1979 – peace.

To get there, Begin agreed to a full withdrawal from the Sinai Peninsula, three times the size of Israel itself, and from the strategic depth it represented.

It worked again in 1994, this time with Jordan, while Yitzhak Rabin was Israel’s leader. As with Sadat, King Hussein convinced Israel he was sincere about peace, understood Israel’s security concerns in a country the size of Wales, and grieved for the loss of innocent lives – Arab and Israeli alike. Another peace treaty, more Israeli concessions, and no Israeli second thoughts.

A third breakthrough came in 2020, when Israel had to choose between partial annexation of disputed West Bank territory and a normalisation agreement with the United Arab Emirates. The Right-of-centre Israeli government chose the latter.

The decision has paid dividends ever since. In addition, there was the unilateral Israeli withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, which could have led to peaceful coexistence, but instead was seized by Hamas to create a new launching pad for its war to the death with the Jewish state.

Anyone visiting Israel and speaking with people going about their daily lives would be hard-pressed to find an Israeli who welcomes decades of army reserve duty, rejoices as their children enter life-and-death military service, looks forward to 3am dashes to bomb shelters while carrying toddlers or helping elderly relatives, or relaxes on a bus while wondering whether a nearby package contains groceries or nail bombs.

Of course, the big question is whether peace with the Palestinians is possible. Hopefully, one day it will be. It requires, though, not just a territorial negotiation, but something bigger.

Can the Palestinians convincingly accept that Israel, whatever its final borders, is there to stay, that Jews are indigenous to the region, and that living alongside Israel, not replacing it, must be the outcome?

Neither the late Yasser Arafat nor Mahmoud Abbas, by their actions, has shown the courage and sincerity of Anwar Sadat or King Hussein. Will the next Palestinian leader? Only time will tell.

Meanwhile, Israel continues to pray fervently for peace, while never forgetting that it lives in a part of the world where, as Shimon Peres, the late Israeli president and Nobel laureate, liked to remind visitors: “In the Middle East, either you’re at the dinner table or you’re on the dinner menu.”

Nadav Eyal: Exclusive: The Warning Netanyahu Got Before the War

An in-depth look at Roaring Lion — the war aim Israel never made public, the intelligence assessment that failure could push Iran toward the bomb, and what the Mossad told the Kurds

It is impossible to think about Israel’s plan to bring down the Islamic Republic without first thinking about its sheer presumption. Grinding a regime down over years — sanctions, influence operations, the slow seeding of fear and confusion — is one thing. Recruiting Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the former Iranian president and Holocaust denier, as an asset and installing him in power is another. So is launching a full-scale Kurdish invasion. This is the kind of project superpowers fail at. Israel tried it, and poured an enormous effort into the attempt.

Over the past weeks, The New York Times and Haaretz have published a great deal about that effort. What follows adds to the record on the most ambitious regional objective Israel has ever pursued: regime change in a country of roughly 100 million people, a regional power — attempted in wartime, and in coordination with the only superpower, the United States.

In the presentation the Mossad gave the Israeli cabinet on the eve of the operation, regime change was projected to take “one to three years.” That was a reasonable hedge; the Islamic Revolution did not happen in a day either. The ministers heard a different tune. “We understood,” one of them told me, “that we were going for regime change in a fast, sweeping move — killing the current leader, a Kurdish invasion, Ahmadinejad as our agent, protesters in the streets.”

Begin with a distinction
Again and again this has been described as “a Mossad operation.” The Mossad — Israel’s foreign intelligence service — was without question the animating force, the planner, the one pushing. But this was an operation of the State of Israel, ordered by its cabinet. It grew out of a conviction that had taken root at the political level and was then imposed on the security establishment: there would be no solution to the Iranian nuclear crisis, and no end to the friction with Iran, without a change of regime in Tehran. The 12-day war of June 2025 had created an opening, and Donald Trump was in the White House. Israel had to try, because the window might close. The cost of inaction, even weighed against the risk of failure, was higher than the cost of action.

Those words were said explicitly by Benjamin Netanyahu to the American president. The doctrine is his.

None of this is interpretation. The war aims of Operation Roaring Lion were never officially published. After conversations with a double-digit number of sources, military and political, the central objective can be reconstructed:
To deeply degrade or remove the threats Iran poses to Israel by creating the military conditions for a change of regime in Iran. Those may not be the exact words. But “creating the conditions for regime change” was the bottom line.

The phrasing was a compromise, negotiated in part with the IDF. From the first moment, the army said it did not know how to produce regime change on its own. For the General Staff, the main effort was strategic damage to Iran — the erosion of capability over time. Support for the Mossad was, as the army understood it, a secondary effort.

Why “creating the conditions” rather than “toppling the regime”? One defense official offered me a guess: the IDF knew this was a complicated objective, possibly an impossible one. It did not want to be dragged into a war with an aim so absolute that it could run forever — far past the number of interceptors in Israel’s magazines.

And yet the cabinet voted for an objective that was, in practice, an attempt at regime change. An objective that large — Megalomanic, some would say — dictates the allocation of resources and carries severe regional consequences. Put another way: the nuclear program and the ballistic missiles mattered, but they were not the holy grail, and they were not the message of the new war that followed. Where Rising Lion, the June 2025 campaign, prioritized the nuclear project — and did in fact halt enrichment — Roaring Lion was meant to be the war that ended all wars. With Iran, at least.

Andrew Fox: Hamas’s ‘disarmament’ deal is not what it seems

Western powers continue to misunderstand Hamas. They treat it as a stack of rifles with a political office attached. But it’s far more than an armed force. It ruled Gaza for almost two decades and infested its civil machinery. It shaped schooling through the education bureaucracy. The health sector operated under its government, while Hamas-run courts enforced its authority. Municipal employees and emergency committees kept its presence visible when formal ministries broke down. Collecting the weapons of Hamas and other factions removes an immediate threat of armed force, but it leaves Hamas’s human infrastructure in place.

The proposed handover to the National Committee exposes the danger. Hamas has sought to carry over 40,000 civil servants and security personnel into the new technocratic order. Roughly 10,000 belong to the Hamas-run police. A new nameplate on a ministry changes little if the same officials control salaries and local permits, with loyal policemen on the streets. Hamas can surrender the administrative title while retaining its governance networks.

Hamas’s behaviour during the ‘ceasefire’ does not bode well for the Board of Peace plan. Hamas gunmen reappeared as Israeli forces withdrew last year, crushing local rivals. The movement then resumed enforcing order with extreme brutality. Its remaining bureaucracy collected revenue and paid loyalists. Israel now says Hamas continues to recruit and rebuild. Every month of quiet exposes the superficial appearance of calm, even as renewed Hamas coercion demands another violent confrontation.

Verification of Hamas’s surrendering of weapons is going to be nigh-on impossible. No audited inventory exists for an arsenal dispersed across ruins and private buildings. Inspectors must prove the absence of hidden rifles and explosives across a dense urban landscape designed to frustrate surveillance. Hamas can hand over expendable weapons and reveal tunnels Israel already knows about, while continuing to conceal those Israel is unaware of. The commanders who remember how to rebuild can remain underground or melt into civilian employment. A weapons store controlled by a fragile administration remains a future armoury.

Hamas’s leaders are unusually candid about their objectives. Political bureau member Bassem Naim said the agreement preserved ‘our strategic project’. He praised the ‘Al-Aqsa Flood’, Hamas’s codename for the 7 October pogrom, and called for other arenas to advance the ‘liberation’ project.

The Board of Peace’s roadmap therefore offers Hamas an opportunity. Surrender enough metal to secure Israeli withdrawal, then protect the organisation embedded within Gaza’s new administration. Rearmament can wait until scrutiny fades. The weapons left inside Gaza will be waiting, too.

Lee Smith: The President of PEACE

So, if Trump can’t win the war, or won’t, he can win a peace by pocketing Hamas’ nonconcessions to pad his résumé as a dealmaker—indeed, a “PRESIDENT OF PEACE,” as U.N. Ambassador Mike Waltz described the commander in chief now determined, like the loser presidents who preceded him, to waste American time, prestige, and money on “a credible political path that achieves self-determination and Statehood” for a Palestinian terror enclave.

The Hamas deal, like the administration’s arrangement with Hezbollah-controlled Lebanon and Trump’s repeated and unrealized threats against Iran, is evidence that the president is in danger of losing the plot, if he hasn’t already.

The White House includes the cease-fires between Israel and Hamas and between Israel and Iran as two of the eight peace deals Trump has arranged since taking office. Some of those deals are holding up, like the one between Armenia and Azerbaijan, and some aren’t, like the agreement struck between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. But none of that really matters to most Americans, nor should it. We go to the polls every four years to vote not for the candidate most likely to win cease-fires for foreigners, but rather for the one who will advance our prosperity by imposing our peace.

Rome imposed its peace on rivals, and on those who might someday cause trouble, to bring wealth and glory to Rome. Caesar Augustus turned Rome from brick to marble, but the architecture of the Pax Romana was made of steel and blood. They make a desert and call it peace, said one victim of Rome’s devastations to serve Roman interests. Our version of peace has been much gentler, but the purpose of the 80-year Pax Americana is the same: to make things better for Americans, regardless of what that might mean for foreigners.

Trump seemed to grasp this most fundamental concept of statesmanship more clearly than his most recent predecessors, from Bill Clinton through Joe Biden. He seemed to understand what peace, outside of the clichés promoted at beauty pageants, really means. “Peace through strength” is how he formulated the true nature of peace, or the only kind of peace that can matter to Americans: America’s peace.

One of the pillars of the postwar order is the Strait of Hormuz, through which the free flow of oil stabilizes international energy markets. Of late, administration validators have argued that the strait is becoming less strategically important with the construction of Saudi and UAE pipelines that bypass the strait and reach the Red Sea directly. But as those who can read a map or even a newspaper understand, the Red Sea is also vulnerable to Iran via its Red Sea proxy, the Houthis.

The strait is still crucial to America and its allies. And losing it to Iran would mean a strategic defeat for the United States, one significantly more consequential than losing in Iraq and Afghanistan. But White House messaging tells adversaries and allies alike that the Pax Americana is a broken reed. Sure, the Americans once protected the strait against a nuclear superpower—for decades—but under Trump, America’s patrimony is up for grabs.

Leaks from Trump officials that plans to take the Strait by force are complicated by the lack of interceptors tell American adversaries little about our stockpiles they haven’t already counted. Rather, they indicate that, since a massively funded military has many other ways to ensure victory against an obscurantist third-world regime like Iran’s, the president is looking for excuses to fail to win. When the administration publicly frets over the possible targeting of desalination plants in the Arab Gulf states, it is indicating that it doesn’t truly understand the stakes and sacrifices involved in stopping Iran’s nuclear weapons program. And when Trump reasons, as he did in a Truth Social post Saturday, that he is once again walking back his plans to strike Iran for “the future benefit of the WORLD and, likewise, the survival of a successful and prosperous Iran,” he is saying that America’s peace, now and for future generations, is not his priority.

Trump can’t say how these ghoulish puppet shows with Iran and its proxies augment America’s wealth and glory because they don’t. Rather, they make America complicit with monsters. They put us in the same room as Hamas, whose cruelty, Trump said less than a year ago, “struck to the core of humanity itself.” He vowed then that America stands with Israel under the motto “Never again,” but now he’s leaning on a wartime ally to play along with phony deals he’s struck with Hamas and Hezbollah that deter Israel while shielding the terrorists on its borders. These aren’t the acts of a president of peace, never mind a commander in chief who understands the nature of America’s peace and the character of our adversaries who want to break it.

Read More

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.

Read More

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.

Read More

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.

Read More

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.

Read More

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

Via Commentary Newsletter, sign up here.
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.

Read More

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."

Read More

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.

Read More