From Ian:
Victor Davis Hanson:
Hating Israel Fatigue
Three recent chapters in the long history of antisemitism remain inexplicable.
First, hatred of Jews and Israel peaked immediately after the greatest single-day slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust—weeks before Israel entered Gaza, and only after Hamas refused to surrender the masterminds of the slaughter or the 251 hostages. The Jewish crime, apparently, was being so easily murdered by Hamas.
The clearest sign of that Pavlovian hatred was the jubilation on the far Left and among Islamists—and the strange new alliance these seemingly disparate groups were already forming—over the ease with which so many mostly unarmed Jewish civilians had been butchered and the prospect of even more killing to follow.
The ghoulish celebrants were not concerned about mass murder, torture, or mutilation of the women, children, and elderly. Instead, they grew ecstatic at the prospect of still more medievalism and blood to come.
Hamas, the darling of American campuses and Muslim communities, issued Arabic-to-Hebrew phrase books to the invaders with instructions for the rapist-killers on how to say in Hebrew, “Take off your pants,” “Take off your clothes,” “Raise your hands and spread your legs.”
Second, none of the Israel-haters ever offers any alternative course that the Israelis should have taken to retrieve the hostages and punish the murderers.
Much less do they imagine what other nations might have done—the United States, France, or the United Kingdom—had terrorists conducted such a mass slaughter at numbers proportional to their far larger populations.
I doubt any other nation would have petitioned the beloved International Criminal Court to bring the Hamas killers to justice.
Its chief prosecutor, the Israel-hating Karim Khan, refused even to examine Israeli evidence and instead rushed to condemn Prime Minister Netanyahu as an international war criminal.
Perhaps Khan’s hatred of Israel was aimed at hiding the fact that the now-fired Khan was being accused by his own legal team of sexual harassment and sexual misconduct. Who will police the police? Will Mayor Mamdani arrest the ICC predator if he lands at JFK Airport in New York City?
Third, when 6,000 Hamas terrorists and Gazan “civilians” invaded Israel, it was during an agreed-on peace. Indeed, take away October 7, and Israel would never have entered Gaza; indeed, even after the slaughter that took place on that day, Israeli officers dreaded walking into such a subterranean ambush. And prior to the mass murder, it was Israel, not the Muslim nation and adjacent Arab neighbor Egypt, that had supplied almost all of Gaza’s water, electricity, fuels, and telecommunications.
For years Israel had invited 20,000 Gazans to work inside Israel at two to three times the wages available in Gaza. Gaza itself had been “ethnically cleansed” of all Jews in 2005 by the Israeli government under then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who was generally considered a “hawk.” Any valuable infrastructure they left behind was immediately looted and destroyed. After the departure of all the Jews from Gaza, the grifting Hamas government shook down roughly $20 billion of the more than $40 billion in international aid given to the Palestinians in general.
Had Hamas simply sought to create a multiparty democracy, held regular elections, created a bill of rights, and adopted a Western economy, it would have garnered hundreds of billions of dollars more in foreign investment. And its privileged seaside location could have made it the next tourist hub like the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, or Oman.
Instead, the nihilist Hamas preferred to make Gaza an impoverished, violent, and pariah terrorist enclave, to rip off its own people, and to expose Gazan civilians to death on a regular basis to save its fighters’ skins and further its fanatical cause.
Hamas was never dedicated to bettering the daily lives of its own population, developing Gaza’s Mediterranean coastline or putting its enormous foreign aid to productive use. Instead, it had only a single homicidal agenda: to kill as many Jews as possible and to destroy the state of Israel.
Hating Israel while championing Hamas and its thousands of terrorist killers is a referendum not on Israel and its supporters, but a window into the mind of a sick, sick West—and an even sicker Middle East.
Simon Sebag Montefiore’s history of the Middle East is a masterpiece
In the Middle East, history fuses with theology into “an unbreakable rampart of absolutist faith”, and, as Sebag Montefiore puts it, “it is hard to negotiate maps and timetables with people who await the Mahdi or Messiah”.
Sebag Montefiore stresses the strange bedfellows in the region: the Syrian civil war’s tangle of enemies, the Abraham Accords, and Israeli soldiers manning Iron Dome to defend the Emirates against Iranian missiles in 2026. On the other hand, the Middle East is the only region on Earth becoming ever less diverse – Christians down from 20 per cent of the population in 1900 to 4 per cent today, and in Iraq from 14 per cent to 0.4.
The nation-state, Sebag Montefiore asserts, is an imported European idea badly matched to a multi-sectarian patchwork; he notes the irony that Western media, law and academia still promote nationalism for the region having rejected it at home, and calls the pretence that some failed states function “international cosplay”.
But the idea that the region is uniquely ungovernably violent is “a historical illusion”. Its history is filled with dramatic reversals that mock every preconception: “Kingdoms, empires and cities, heroes, monsters and fools fight and reconcile, gamble and deal, rise and fall. The prizes are power, salvation and safety. Survival is everything; no one wins for long; the caravan moves on; the spark wheel spins and spins.”
The book proper begins with what Sebag Montefiore identifies as one of the two key pivots of the past (loosely defined) century – the story of how in 1902 25-year-old Abdulaziz bin Abdul Rahman Al Saud, sometimes referred to as Ibn Saud, restored his fallen family to power in Riyadh. Having taken power, “Abdulaziz moved into the palace of his grandfather – and the modern history of the Middle East began.”
Sebag Montefiore writes that “even Abdulaziz would have been amazed at the success of his dynasty and his realm. He would reign during the fall and rise and fall of empires – Ottoman, French, British – that dominated his region, and through two world wars, into the nuclear-powered years of US-Soviet rivalry, through holy wars, civil wars and the creation and disintegration of new states, secular and Islamist, royal and nationalist, Muslim and Jewish. And as late as 2025, a son of his would still be ruling the Kingdom in the age of the iPhone, drones and X, when a US president, Donald Trump, would fly into this same Riyadh, now a gleaming towered modern metropolis, and call Saudi Arabia ‘the centre of the world’.” As he then writes: “This book is the story of how that happened.”
It’s fitting that The Cauldron ends in 2026 with the death of Ayatollah Khamenei in an air strike, because the other pivot on which The Cauldron hangs is the 1979 Iranian revolution. Sebag Montefiore argues that this was a moment on the scale of 1789 and 1917. Khomeini was a “murderous modern revolutionary and political strategist of the rank of Lenin, Stalin or Mao”. Grasp that and the next 50 years fall into place.
The Cauldron would have been a valuable work had it stopped in 1979 – because there has long been a need for a readable, serious, ambitious history of the past century or so in the Middle East. By taking it to 2026, however – a bold step for a book whose entire point is that it is a work of history – Sebag Montefiore has written something far more important, both invaluable and necessary. Lies started to be spread about October 7, 2023 from October 8, and those lies have taken hold across the world. There are few other historians of Sebag Montefiore’s stature who could have challenged the lies and the myths simply by doing their job and writing calmly and – patently – objectively. It is to Sebag Montefiore’s huge credit that he has stepped up to do this, mainly by allowing the facts to speak for themselves – especially the words of the perpetrators. Hamas’ Ghazi Hamad promises “a second, a third, a fourth” October 7. Its second chairman Khaled Mashal shrugs: “Thirty million Russians died to defeat Germany. In all wars there are civilian casualties. We are not responsible.” Sinwar, warned that 10,000 Gazans might die, retorts: “Let it be 20,000.”
But as Sebag Montefiore argues, Israel may be able to win on the battlefields but it has “totally lost” the narrative war. Hamas controlled the casualty figures, presenting every death as civilian and claiming there was no war with its fighters at all, only massacre.
The Cauldron’s conclusion is salutary and needs to be absorbed: add up every death in every Middle Eastern war from 1900 to today and the total roughly equals a single front of the First World War, or the Congo war of 1996 to 2003. It comes nowhere near the Second World War’s Asian theatre (20 million dead) or its Eastern Front (30 million). Eighty years of Arab-Israeli conflict, the Gaza war included, have killed around 150,000 people. The Partition of India killed a million in a few months. Algeria’s civil war in the 1990s killed 200,000, Iraq half a million, Syria 600,000, and Sudan, “in a tragic class of its own”, two million in its first civil wars, 300,000 in Darfur and more than 150,000 since 2023. The world’s fixation on the Jewish state’s wars is grotesquely out of proportion to their scale.
That notion is nothing new: but Sebag Montefiore’s magnificent work is not merely new. It is a masterpiece that demands to be read.
The Cauldron: The Making of the Modern Middle East 1900–2026, by Simon Sebag Montefiore, is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson
Uri Kurlianchik:
10 Quotes That Prove Palestinians Never Believed in Palestinians
Until recently, if you called an Arab living in Palestine, “Palestinian,” he’d be confused or offended.
Palestine wasn’t even an administrative unit before the British mandate. “Palestinian” is what you called these pesky Jewish upstarts who had dreams of freedom of statehood on Arab land. The Arabs of Palestine had no more separate national identity than the people of East Texas.
Here are 10 historic quotes that prove it:
“We consider Palestine as part of Arab Syria, as it has never been separated from it at any time. We are connected with it by national, religious, linguistic, natural, economic and geographical bonds.”
— First Congress of Muslim-Christian Associations, Jerusalem, 1919
“Palestine is an Arab country and natural part of Syria.”
— Istiqlal Party manifesto, 1931
“There is no such country! ‘Palestine’ is a term the Zionists invented! There is no Palestine in the Bible. Our country was for centuries part of Syria.”
— Arab leader Auni Bey Abdul-Hadi, to the Peel Commission, 1937
“Palestine is part of the Province of Syria… the Arabs of Palestine were not independent in the sense of forming a separate political entity.”
— Representative of the Arab Higher Committee to the United Nations, 1947
“The union of Arab Palestine and Jordan had been brought about as a result of the will of the people.”
— American diplomat Stuart W. Rockwell, 1950
“It is common knowledge that Palestine is nothing but southern Syria.”
— Ahmad Shukeiri, first chairman of the PLO, to the Security Council, 1956
“Between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese there are no differences. We are all part of one people, the Arab nation.”
— Zuheir Mohsen, PLO Executive Committee, 1977
“I don’t think there is such a thing as a “Palestinian nation”, I think it’s a colonial invention, when were there Palestinians? Where is it? I think there is an Arab nation.”
— Arab anti-Zionist activist and politician Azmi Bishra, 1995
"We don’t differentiate between Palestinian, Egyptian and Arab blood.”
— Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal, 2010
“Who are the Palestinians? We have many families called Al-Masri, whose roots are Egyptian. Egyptian! They may be from Alexandria, from Cairo, from Dumietta, from the North, from Aswan, from Upper Egypt. We are Egyptians. We are Arabs. We are Muslims. We are a part of you.”
— Hamas Minister of the Interior and National Security, Fathi Hammad, 2012
From Ian:
Melanie Phillips:
Wise up, America!
Once again, American officials have failed to grasp that Islamist terrorists will lie shamelessly and sign ceasefires just to break them.
Instead of understanding that no deal would be worth the paper it was written on, Kushner was sent to Cairo to grovel to a bunch of psychopathic mass murderers. He thus legitimized these enemies of civilization, humiliating America and signaling to Hamas that they have Washington precisely where they want it.
The impasse arose because Hamas is refusing to honor the agreement signed by Israel last October in which the terrorist group would disarm before Israel started to withdraw from Gaza.
But the Board of Peace itself had moved the goalposts over this sequencing when Nickolay Mladenov, a senior board official, said Israeli withdrawal “must move in lockstep” with Palestinian disarmament (from which the board later retreated under Israeli protest).
Its own Gaza Roadmap, published at the start of this month, would not lead to disarmament and the end of Hamas rule. On the contrary, according to an analysis published by MEMRI, it would enable Hamas to retain military capabilities, ensuring that its political infrastructure would survive.
Worse still, by stating that its aim is a credible pathway towards Palestinian self-determination and statehood, the Roadmap cements the appalling message that the Hamas-led attack in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023 created a political opening for the establishment of a Palestinian state.
Not surprisingly, Hamas sees this as a great achievement, reinforcing its belief that the slaughter of Oct. 7 was a huge step towards the destruction of Israel.
Such duplicity by the Board of Peace is hardly surprising. Since its members include those foes of civilization Qatar and Turkey, alongside two-faced false friends such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia, it should more properly be known as the Board of Appeasement.
Meanwhile, the Israelis have sent the White House a list of violations by Hamas. They say the terror group continues to retain and smuggle weapons; rebuild its military infrastructure, recruitment and training; continue with armed activity and intelligence gathering; and prepare and use explosive devices against Israeli troops. This report documented 14 Hamas violations within a single 24-hour period—the overwhelming majority of which were classified as developing threats to Israeli forces.
Not only is the Board of Peace preventing Israel from destroying Hamas and thus ensuring that it can never again pose an Oct. 7-style threat to the Jewish state. It is also negating the crucial task of setting back the Islamist threat to the West.
Although Hamas has been sponsored by Iran, it’s the armed wing of the Muslim Brotherhood. Total defeat of Hamas in Gaza would be a shattering blow to the Brotherhood and its activities throughout the world.
The Brotherhood is the link between Turkey, Syria, Qatar and Hamas. Qatar has been bankrolling American institutions and individuals to insulate it against recognition of its anti-West agenda. Turkey has its thumb on the immigration spigot into Europe, which has already destabilized it and threatens even more social and cultural mayhem.
And the Brotherhood, whose strategy for conquering America through mass immigration and democratic entryism was revealed at the Holy Land terror-financing trial in 2007-08, is enmeshed in an extensive network of mosques and Islamic charities and other institutions throughout America, Britain and Europe.
The war in the Middle East is not distinct from the war of conquest against the West, which is one unified project involving Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood. The United States is currently fighting the former without grasping what it’s up against, and not fighting the latter at all.
America needs to wise up, urgently.
Palestinian Rejectionism Is the Harder Problem
We have been told that poverty and humiliation provide fertile ground for extremism, that if we improve Palestinian living standards, violence will diminish.
Give people jobs, better infrastructure, greater freedom of movement and a stake in economic prosperity, and they will have more to lose from conflict.
But this does not explain a conflict in which rejection of Israel has repeatedly survived periods of diplomatic opportunity, economic assistance and improved living conditions.
For more than a century, Palestinian and Arab leaders have rejected a succession of proposals that envisaged some form of territorial partition or coexistence between Jewish and Arab states.
The agreements of the 1990s created the Palestinian Authority, transferred significant governing responsibilities to Palestinians, and generated new possibilities for economic cooperation.
Yet the decade also witnessed a wave of suicide bombings and other attacks, culminating in the Second Intifada in which more than 1,000 Israelis were killed.
The uprising demonstrated that greater Palestinian autonomy and economic cooperation were not sufficient to prevent a return to mass violence.
A movement like Hamas that is motivated in part by the belief that Israel itself is illegitimate will not necessarily abandon violence simply because its supporters become more prosperous.
A durable peace requires more than the absence of poverty. It requires political acceptance of the other side's legitimacy.
Where children are taught that national liberation requires the elimination of the other side, economic development alone is unlikely to resolve the underlying dispute.
That is why the debate over Palestinian living standards can become a distraction when presented as the central explanation for the conflict.
If poverty were the decisive cause of Palestinian violence, decades of aid, economic initiatives, employment inside Israel, and diplomatic engagement should have produced a consistent decline in hostility. They have not.
How Central Asia Thinks about Israel
Central Asia is dominated by Muslim-majority, largely Turkic countries. The region has taken a pragmatic approach toward Israel even after hostilities began in Gaza.
Israel's best friend in Central Asia is Kazakhstan, which joined the Abraham Accords in November 2025. Along with Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan supplies a significant portion of Israel's oil imports.
Even with an Islamic majority, the country has historically been tolerant of Jews. Many Jewish refugees fleeing Europe found safe harbor in Kazakhstan, where a sizeable number of German, Polish, and Hungarian Jewish populations temporarily resettled.
Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Turkmenistan all have diplomatic ties with Israel, but the relationships aren't meaningful. More than Kazakhstan, these countries are majority-Turkic states whose relations with Turkey are lucrative and growing.
Tajikistan has the weakest Israel connections due to the country's close cultural proximity to Iran. The Tajik population speaks a Persian dialect.
From Ian:
Seth Mandel:
The Plague of ‘and Genocide Studies’
Segal and his supporters appear to be arguing that it’s a violation of academic freedom for Segal’s superiors to delete something Segal wrote for the website. I don’t know whether Segal is right about that, but I do know that his written words ought to be an embarrassment to the university that hired him.
First of all, when Segal says “according to official figures,” he means Hamas. But also, he goes further than Hamas is actually willing to go in its own statistical presentations. The important point is that what Segal writes isn’t true, and isn’t even arguably true.
To defend himself, Segal “points to a vote by the International Association of Genocide Scholars last year in which the group declared that ‘Israel’s policies and actions in Gaza meet the legal definition of genocide’ detailed in the United Nations Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.”
But that organization was revealed to be a joke, and its “voters” included a large number of internet trolls who realized you could just pay for “membership” and pretend to be a genocide scholar in good standing.
That is, Segal points to a known scam to claim that scholars agree with him.
But the wider point is the counterproductivity of the industry of “Holocaust and genocide scholars.” The Holocaust was a unique event, and it should be studied as such. Universities don’t enhance anybody’s education by diluting the Holocaust. And Jewish organizations should stop universalizing the Holocaust by adding “and genocide” to their own institutions and programs. In fact, where possible they should remove those terms.
The purpose of Holocaust education is education. The purpose of the work being done by Raz Segal, Briahna Joy Gray and the Democratic Socialists of America is the opposite of education. Let’s help society stop confusing the two.
Seth Mandel:
Democrats Take Aim at the Civil Rights Act
Like clockwork, Jamie Raskin, the Maryland congressman and ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, took the baton handed to him by Van Erem and promised retribution for Trump officials. He called the anti-Semitism investigations a “frame-up operation” and threatened to push changes to the Civil Rights Act itself.
Raskin’s promised lawfare against federal employees involved in strengthening the enforcement of civil-rights law is no doubt the goal of complaints like those voiced by Van Erem. Raskin, further, is the perfect receptacle for these complaints. His Jewishness provides cover for Democrats who are, as Raskin presumably is, intent on dismantling federal protections for Jews and insulating the Democratic Party from accountability for its exploding anti-Semitism.
Raskin is also a co-sponsor of legislation that would enforce a partial arms embargo against Israel. He has fought anti-Semitism-related legislation and has been critical of Israel’s response to the October 7 massacre since the beginning of the Hamas-instigated war.
Raskin also demanded testimony from Harmeet Dhillon, the Justice Department’s assistant attorney general for civil rights, alleging that it was a “a distinct possibility” that Dhillon “deliberately orchestrated a scheme to attack universities, their faculties, and their administrators for political purposes while defrauding the American people and the courts.”
If the Democrats, as expected, win control of the House in the midterms, they are vowing to use this power to make government officials pay, and pay dearly, for daring to investigate universities’ discrimination against Jewish students. In the past, this would have struck most observers as a bizarre choice of priorities. In 2026, it’s what the public has come to expect from Raskin and company.
Thomas Friedman is wrong again, this time about AIPAC
For as long as I have been writing about the Middle East, Thomas L. Friedman has been one of my favorite foils.
I don’t mean that personally. Friedman is an accomplished journalist, a gifted writer and the possessor of perhaps the most influential foreign-policy column in America. The problem is that when it comes to Israel and the Middle East, he has been spectacularly, repeatedly and confidently wrong.
More remarkably, being wrong never seems to alter the prescription.
Now he has turned his attention once again to AIPAC.
Writing in The New York Times about Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in Michigan, Friedman advised him that he can remain true to his pro-Palestinian views, appeal to Jewish voters and still “stick it to AIPAC.”
That phrase deserves more attention than Friedman probably intended.
AIPAC is fair game for criticism. So is every political organization in America. Its spending can be questioned. Its endorsements can be questioned. Its political strategy can be questioned.
But “stick it to AIPAC” is not a policy argument. It reflects an increasingly fashionable idea that there is something distasteful, or even illegitimate, about Americans organizing politically in support of Israel.
Friedman should know better. And this is not his first trip down this road.
In 2011, Friedman notoriously wrote that the standing ovations Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu received in Congress had been “bought and paid for by the Israel lobby.” Two years later, he suggested that lawmakers would do what the Israel lobby wanted because they needed Jewish votes and campaign contributions.
The implication is difficult to miss.
When environmental organizations spend millions trying to influence elections, that is democracy. When organized labor does it, that is democracy. When gun-control or gun-rights organizations do it, that is democracy. When Arab-American and Muslim-American organizations lobby Congress on Middle East policy, that is democracy.
But when Americans who support Israel organize, contribute money, lobby Congress and vote according to their beliefs, Friedman repeatedly treats their influence as something requiring special suspicion.
Why?
From Ian:
To Palestinians and their supporters: How’s the resistance going?
This is not a hostile or inconsiderate question. It is perhaps the most important question anyone who actually cares about Palestinians could ask. The resistance strategy—violent, stubborn and uncompromising—has been one of history’s most expensive strategic failures. Yet it continues, sustained in part by a global industry whose financial survival depends on it never ending.
Since 1993, more than $50 billion in international aid has flowed to the Palestinian cause. The U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) has received billions since it was founded in 1949, with the United States alone providing more than $7.3 billion from 1950 to 2016. Private charities devoted to Palestinian relief collectively raise hundreds of millions more annually. There are now thousands of careers, institutions and funding streams whose existence depends on the Palestinian crisis remaining unresolved.
When a problem becomes an industry, the incentive is not to solve it but to sustain it. Who loses their funding when Palestinian refugees are finally settled and integrated? What happens to UNRWA if there are no longer any refugees?
Do the people who most loudly claim to speak for Palestinians actually serve Palestinian interests or do they serve their own? The people most loudly advocating for the Palestinians are frequently the ones with the most to lose from a peaceful, prosperous Palestinian society that no longer requires their services.
What would it look like for Palestinians to succeed? Not in the sense of defeating Israel, but in the sense of their people living well?
Hong Kong, Taiwan and Estonia, among other countries surrounded by hostile neighbors, built prosperity not through military resistance but through trade, rule of law, open markets and human capital development.
What if Palestinian leadership had, at any point, decided that the primary measure of their success is the economic well-being, education and individual freedom of their people? What if, instead of funneling resources into armed factions and international lobbying campaigns, they had built transparent institutions, embraced civil liberties, cultivated a tech sector and made the present Palestinian enclaves a destination for investment? In other words, what if they actually built a vibrant country?
At least one person is trying this by creating a technology hub in Judea and Samaria. Rawabi, the planned Palestinian city developed by entrepreneur Bashar al-Masri, is a tentative proof of concept. It has faced enormous obstacles, many of them political. But it is at least an attempt at a different strategy, and it points toward a different kind of future.
The definition of strategic failure is not losing a single battle. It is pursuing the same approach, decade after decade, and watching it produce more destruction, more poverty, more displacement and more death than the alternatives you refused to consider. One definition of mental illness is doing the same thing over and over, and expecting a different result each time.
The most radical thing that Palestinian leadership could do right now is not to launch another resistance campaign or fire rockets at Israel. It would be to announce, credibly, that henceforth it will measure success by the flourishing of its people; by school-enrollment rates; per capita income; startup formation; and the quality of hospitals, courts and roads.
The strategy of perpetual resistance has produced perpetual suffering. What if Palestinian leaders choose prosperity instead? That would indeed be revolutionary.
Andrew Fox:
The ghouls feeding on Hind Rajab’s death
The IDF has opened a criminal investigation into the deaths of Hind Rajab and eight others. That is the entire development. No verdict is implied. The announcement identifies no suspect, nor does it specify an offence. Online carrion crows have turned Hind’s death into clickbait by stripping the news of its qualifications and selling an investigation as a verdict.
The IDF examination states that troops fired at the approaching family car on 29 January 2024. Five passengers were killed; Hind and her cousin Layan survived the encounter. Hours later, a Palestine Red Crescent ambulance, whose movement had been coordinated, went to recover them. The announcement describes the alleged shelling of that ambulance and records that the girls and two paramedics were later found dead. It does not establish what happened during the intervening hours.
Mark Zlochin’s close reading exposes the misrepresentation. The formal finding concerns the initial fire at the car. The later events remain reports and allegations. His earlier analysis raised unresolved questions about the route and timeline and tested whether the telephone material and available lines of sight supported more than one source of fire. Those questions do not resolve the deaths, and today’s announcement provides no new evidence of criminal guilt.
There is one awkward point for Israel’s defenders. The IDF’s first account said no troops were in the area. Its subsequent examination now acknowledges that troops fired at the car. That correction cannot be wished away, and anyone who repeated the first version should amend their view. The acknowledgement revises the official account of the initial encounter. Hind and Layan, it now says, survived the initial fire, while the ambulance strike and their later deaths remain under investigation. Criminal responsibility remains unresolved.
The carrion feeders have ignored that distinction. They demanded an investigation. The moment one was announced, they called it an admission. Their trick relies on readers confusing suspicion with conviction. They use a dead child for emotional force and borrow legal vocabulary to manufacture authority. Nobody has been charged. No court has tested individual liability in the Hind case or in the separate Tel al-Sultan referral. There is no legal conclusion in either case. For these people, the case is not about truth or justice for Hind Rajab: it is about validating their preconceptions about Israel no matter what.
The IDF’s Fact-Finding and Assessment Mechanism compiles operational material for the Military Advocate General. Reasonable suspicion triggers a military police investigation; prosecutors then assess whether the evidence offers a reasonable prospect of conviction. A referral records suspicion but supplies no answer. The suspected offence may involve negligence in following procedure. The announcement does not say.
I have always maintained that where credible evidence supports a war crime charge, it should be prosecuted. That remains my position. The World Central Kitchen case illustrates the distinction. Australia’s review by Air Chief Marshal Mark Binskin found that the strike was not knowingly or deliberately directed against the charity. It recorded mistaken identification and failures to follow procedures. Binskin made no criminal finding. A catastrophic outcome can warrant criminal scrutiny without establishing deliberate murder.
Aviva Klompas:
Iran was a regional threat. War with the US changed that
For years, Tehran’s influence rested on a network that gave it strategic depth. Hamas threatened Israel from Gaza. Hezbollah amassed an arsenal on Israel’s northern border, while serving as Iran’s most powerful regional proxy.
Syria provided the logistical bridge connecting Tehran to Lebanon and the Mediterranean. Iraqi militias extended Iranian influence westward while pressuring American forces. The Houthis gave Tehran a foothold on one of the world’s most important maritime choke points.
That network allowed Iran to keep its adversaries under pressure while minimizing risks to itself. Today, much of that architecture has been degraded.
Hamas remains in control of parts of Gaza, but much of its senior leadership has been killed, large portions of its military infrastructure have been destroyed, and its ability to rearm and reorganize has been sharply constrained by Israel’s operational presence in significant areas of the Gaza Strip.
Hezbollah remains dangerous, yet it is no longer the force it was before the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks. The group has also lost much of its senior leadership, including longtime Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah, along with key commanders, weapons stockpile and infrastructure.
Hezbollah now faces growing pressure inside Lebanon from a population exhausted by economic collapse and increasingly unwilling to see the country’s future subordinated to Iran’s regional ambitions. The group still possesses formidable capabilities, but it is increasingly focused on preserving what remains rather than expanding its influence.
Syria may represent the most consequential loss. For decades, the Assad regime served as Iran’s indispensable ally and the critical land bridge connecting Tehran to Hezbollah. The collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s government and the emergence of a new political order have severely disrupted those supply lines and deprived Iran of one of the central pillars of its regional strategy.
In Iraq, Iranian-backed groups continue to wield considerable influence, but they operate in an environment that is increasingly complicated by Iraqi nationalism, domestic political pressures, and growing demands that armed groups answer to the Iraqi state rather than to Tehran.
Only the Houthis retain something approaching their previous freedom of action, continuing to threaten commercial shipping and disrupt maritime trade. Yet even there, Iran’s success reveals its limitations. The Houthis can create instability, but they cannot create regional order.
Iran is being forced to play defense
The result is that Iran increasingly finds itself doing something it spent decades trying to avoid: relying on its own territory and its own capabilities to sustain confrontation.
An equally important shift is taking place elsewhere in the region.
For years, many Arab governments concluded that accommodation was the safest response to Iranian aggression. After months of unrelenting attacks on their territory, that assumption is changing.
Bahrain and Kuwait have launched strikes inside Iran, Saudi forces have joined attacks on Iranian-backed militias in Iraq, and the United Arab Emirates has reportedly provided intelligence and air cover. Persian Gulf states are also deepening cooperation on missile defense, intelligence sharing and maritime security.
In attacking its neighbors, Iran has pushed its adversaries closer together and closer to the United States.
Iran remains powerful, but less so than before
None of this means Iran is on the verge of collapse. Its missile program remains formidable. Its nuclear ambitions are a source of legitimate concern. Tehran retains the ability to disrupt global commerce, and it has repeatedly demonstrated that even a weakened network can impose real costs on other nations.
But there is an important distinction between the ability to disrupt and the ability to shape the regional order. For decades, Iran played offense. Today, it finds itself increasingly on defense.
That could prove to be the most consequential outcome of this war. Not the destruction of the axis of resistance, but the gradual unraveling of the network through which Iran projected power across the Middle East.
The ring of fire has not disappeared, but it has become a ring of embers.
From Ian:
What Happens When Jews Don’t Fight
On Friday night, a maniac named Larry Montes stormed into Manhattan's Central Synagogue, shouted obscenities, spat, punched a congregant in the face, and smashed a bunch of candles before being escorted out by security. Watch the footage from the synagogue's livestream cameras, and you'll see Montes as he runs up and down the aisle uninterrupted. You'll also see a host of congregants, men and women alike, recoiling in horror, receding deeper into the pews for safety and looking desperately for the guards to intervene and save them.
Jewish pride isn't about being safe. It's about being free. This means refusing to turn our synagogues into nightmarishly fortified bunkers, which teaches our children that Judaism is interchangeable with anxiety and fear and which signals to our neighbors that hunting Jews is simply the norm in America these days.
It means bringing in a few Krav Maga dudes to teach congregants of all ages what to do next time some pogromist rolls in and starts acting up. It means conditioning congregation membership on the willingness to get trained and volunteer to become part of an organic security detail that doesn't rely on outsourcing our safety to others.
The FBI's recently released report on hate crimes in the U.S. shows that Jews, 2.4% of the population, are the target of 64% of all religion-based hate crimes. A Jew is currently 190% more likely than a Muslim to be the victim of a hate-based attack.
Somewhere, the next attacker of Jews is watching the footage, taking great pleasure in seeing the terrified looks on the faces of helpless Jews, and taking comfort in knowing that the worst that can happen to anyone storming a synagogue is being manhandled by some paid guard reluctant to inflict too much harm. The part we can control is what happens when the next attack on a synagogue occurs.
Once Rejecting Israeli Citizenship, the Golan Druze Are Now Getting Ready to Vote
Walid, 35, a resident of Majdal Shams in the Golan Heights, said, "For 60 years, people here were afraid to speak out against the Syrian regime, fearing harm to their relatives across the border," before mentioning the massacre of Druze in southern Syria's Sweida province by government and Bedouin forces a year ago.
"I feel we're nearing the completion of the Israelization of Druze society in the Golan - toward a new era."
In 1981, when Israel annexed the Golan, most Druze there refused to accept Israeli citizenship, declaring loyalty to Syria.
Three decades later, the Syrian civil war broke out and the number of Druze who requested Israeli citizenship steadily increased from single digits to hundreds annually. Still, by 2023, only a fifth of the Golan Druze were Israeli citizens.
But in 2024, 572 residents from the four Druze towns requested Israeli citizenship, a number that ballooned to 3,750 in 2025. In the first half of 2026, 1,444 Druze from the Golan requested citizenship.
Now 44% are citizens. The main reason was the massacre in Sweida and the Israeli airstrikes in the province and Damascus that followed.
"I think the Druze in the Golan had an epiphany, mainly because Israel was the only one that stood by the Druze in Syria," says Salim Brik, a political scientist at the Open University of Israel.
The sharp increase in Golan-Druze citizenship is probably also linked to the disaster of July 2024, when 12 children in Majdal Shams were killed by a Hizbullah rocket, he says.
Cambridge University-linked project erases Israel
An academic project hosted by Cambridge University promotes an “Islamic curriculum” which tells 12-year-olds that Hamas is an “excuse that Israel uses to justify its attacks on the Gaza Strip,” calls the civilian hostages taken by the terror group on October 7 “prisoners of war” and publishes in pupils’ course material a map of the region from which Israel has been erased.
The project also publishes a guide aimed at parents and children, written after the attacks, which asks: “What is the reward of a shaheed [a martyr]? How does this make you feel when you think of all the children of Gaza who are now shuhada [martyrs]?” and states, quoting the Quran: “Never say that those martyred in the cause of Allah are dead – in fact, they are alive but you do not perceive it.”
The project which promotes the claims, the Islamic Educator Learning Community (IELC), is led by Cambridge’s assistant research professor of education, Farah Ahmed, a member of the same faculty which employed Jason Arday and a former activist in the now-banned terror group Hizb ut-Tahrir.
This article marks the third in our continuing series about the deep problems in the subject of Education at Cambridge. It follows our disclosure of Ahmed’s long record of bigoted, extremist and separatist views on Tuesday and our revelation on Saturday that Ahmed’s unit has also promoted support for creationism and attacks on evolution.
Ahmed’s IELC is “hosted by” and “partners with” a university body called the Cambridge Teacher Research Exchange, Camtree. Camtree is a project of Hughes Hall, the Cambridge University college where Ahmed is a governing fellow. Ahmed is also an “affiliate” of Camtree.
IELC’s website promotes something called the “Islamic Curriculum Initiative,” describing it as a response of Muslim educators to the 7 October attacks. As IELC puts it: “We know that silence, neutrality, and business-as-usual in education are no longer options. The events following October 7 made that painfully clear. What we see today is not new: it is the continuation of a colonial legacy, now repackaged in modern forms, and it demands a clear, principled response from educators.”
For its own part, the Islamic Curriculum Initiative (ICI) says that “Palestine is not just a cause – it is a litmus test of our moral clarity, a reflection of our connection to faith, justice, and the Ummah…Our curriculum places Palestine where it belongs: at the heart of how students understand justice, faith, and responsibility…making Palestine not a footnote, but a formative part of identity.”
From Ian:
Gerald Posner:
Genocide for Dummies
There is a question the statistics above cannot answer on their own, and almost nobody thinks to ask it: who, exactly, is Israel at war with?
Genocide requires intent to destroy a protected group as such — national, ethnic, racial, religious. Not a government or army or a political movement. That is why the Khmer Rouge, who killed a quarter of Cambodia, were convicted of genocide only as to the Cham and the Vietnamese. So, the threshold question in Gaza is whether the belligerent Israel is fighting is Hamas or the Palestinian people. Most of Israel’s own conduct supports the former inference.
Start with the most obvious fact, which is so obvious that it disappears. Israel negotiates with Hamas—repeatedly, publicly, through Qatari and Egyptian mediators—over ceasefires and hostage exchanges and the return of bodies. There is a ceasefire in force as I write this. Nobody negotiates a truce with a people it intends to erase, because the point of erasure is that there will be no one left to negotiate with. The Wehrmacht did not broker prisoner exchanges with the Jews of Warsaw. The Interahamwe did not sign agreements with the Tutsi. In every case on the recognized list, the perpetrator’s relationship with the victim group was total and one-directional. Here it is bilateral, mediated, and ongoing.
Second, South Africa, which brought the genocide case against Israel before the ICJ in December 2023, identifies “Palestinians” in Gaza as a substantial part of the broader Palestinian national, racial and ethnic group that extends far beyond Gaza. Roughly two million Arab citizens live inside Israel, vote in its elections, sit in its parliament, and have served on its Supreme Court. Some three million Palestinians live in the West Bank. If the intent were to destroy Palestinians as such, one might expect the campaign to reach the group wherever it is found. That is what happened in the actual genocides: the Nazis pursued Jews across a continent, into countries they did not govern; the Hutu Power militias hunted Tutsi from one prefecture to the next.
The Genocide Convention says, “in whole or in part,” and tribunals have held that a geographically limited portion of a group can qualify — Srebrenica was one town. The absence of any campaign against Palestinians in Haifa or Nazareth therefore does not by itself defeat the charge. It does, however, make the claim considerably harder. Why would a state supposedly bent on destroying a people be content to concentrate its military actions only where Hamas governed and attacked from? Under the ICJ’s test, that alternative cannot simply be wished away.
Third, some Palestinians in Gaza publicly make the distinction themselves. In March 2025, hundreds took to the streets of Beit Lahia and Deir al-Balah in the largest anti-Hamas demonstrations since the war began. One protester told CNN that he was oppressed by both the occupation army and Hamas, and that Hamas launched October 7 while Gazans paid the price. Reporting through 2024 and 2025 documented widening anger at a movement that fought from tunnels while civilians absorbed the response.
Those protests do not tell us what all Gazans think, and the victims’ perceptions do not determine the perpetrator’s intent. They establish something narrower: some Gazans distinguish Hamas from Israel’s war against Hamas even while condemning Israel’s occupation and attacks. That distinction is consistent with the alternative inference that Israel’s object was to defeat Hamas, not to destroy Palestinians as such.
The ICC warrants against Netanyahu and his then–defense minister Yoav Gallant allege that Israel’s conduct during the offensive constituted war crimes and crimes against humanity, including starvation as a method of warfare, murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts. But assuming for the sake of argument that what is alleged in the ICC warrants was correct, look at what they do not say. The prosecutor assessed the same evidence everyone else has examined, before the same court that would have to sustain the charge, and he did not charge genocide. He is far from anyone’s idea of an Israeli apologist, and yet he had the option.
This is the distinction the chant of genocide obliterates. There is an enormous legal and moral difference between a state that fights a war brutally, and one that sets out to eliminate a people. The first describes a great many wars, including wars fought by countries whose citizens are now doing the chanting. The second describes a small handful of adjudicated cases in the modern era, aand Gaza does not fit their pattern.
The Battle of Mosul in 2016 and 2017 produced devastation — a city largely destroyed, thousands of civilians killed, an enemy entrenched in residential blocks — and no serious legal analysis called it genocide. The difference was not the destruction. It was the enemy.
Fighting Hamas in Gaza kills Palestinians. That is a fact, and I am not going to soften it with a euphemism. But killing Palestinians while fighting Hamas and killing Palestinians in order to destroy Palestinians are different acts with different names, and the entire architecture of international criminal law rests on keeping them apart.
British Historian: "Hamas Must Be Dismantled"
The historian Simon Sebag Montefiore says, "The October 7 Hamas attacks against Israel...changed everything. It was years in the planning that did what it was meant to do, which was to put the Palestinian issue at the center of the world, unleash the ideology of anti-Zionism in Western universities, and nix the Saudis normalizing agreements with Israel. The only thing it hasn't succeeded in is helping the Palestinian people."
The speed and intensity of anti-Israel sentiment that has spread like wildfire through Britain took Montefiore "by surprise." "There's nowhere better to live now than Britain or America or France than at any other point in the last 10,000 years. Yet that unprecedented comfort, liberalism and freedom have permitted the hothouse of exciting but intolerant radicalisms such as 'de-colonialization,' anti-Americanism,' 'anti-Westernism,' 'Third-World-ism'...particularly in many cultural, academic and media institutions in this country."
"People absolutely have the freedom to preach the destruction of the liberal democracies that protect them. I'm not in favor of banning or cancelling anybody unless they're encouraging killing. But a lot of the people on the pro-Palestinian marches in this country, for example, were doing just that....They were also filled with extreme ideologues, who were backing Iran, and who were backing Hamas."
While Montefiore has long been a champion of a Palestinian state, he says Britain's "recognition of a Palestinian state, for instance, was a [virtue-signaling] absurdity that achieved nothing. Instead, it revealed Britain's impotence in the Middle East and it rewarded a genocidal organization that is much more nihilistic than humanitarian....Hamas must be dismantled."
The hostages held by Hamas at Al-Shifa Hospital
In the final months of 2023, the eyes of the global public were firmly fixed on Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza. As international media heavyweights—including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal—reported extensively on the military operations, the medical crisis, and the conflicting claims of the warring parties, a profound systemic flaw characterized the coverage.
The mainstream international reporting largely followed the official narratives of the information war. While The Wall Street Journal detailed how Israel released footage attempting to prove the site was used by militants, The New York Times focused on official video releases showing tunnel infrastructure under the besieged hospital, and The Washington Post published deep open-source analyses on the military claims, these major outlets remained confined within a narrow framework: they focused primarily on macro-level military infrastructure, tunnel claims, and institutional statements.
What was missing from virtually all major Western reports during those critical weeks was the forensic reality of the micro-level visual material generated by the actors themselves. While major newsrooms analyzed satellite coordinates and official releases, they overlooked or omitted the immediate, local choreography happening at the gates and in the courtyards of the hospital—including the unhindered movement of local participants documenting the aftermath of the October 7 events.
This investigation closes that gap. It does not offer a general overview of wartime politics; rather, it provides a forensic, image-by-image reconstruction of the path taken by the hostages and their captors. By combining geolocation, frame-by-frame video analysis, and contemporaneous field communications, this dossier challenges the uncritical or restricted framing accepted by major global news outlets in late 2023—providing the definitive record that was missing when the story broke.
Remains of Yehuda Katz, IDF soldier who went missing in 1982 battle, returned to Israel
The remains of Israeli soldier Sgt. First Class Yehuda Katz, who went missing in the First Lebanon War’s battle of Sultan Yacoub in 1982, were returned to Israel on Tuesday, the military announced, with Israeli leaders hailing the country’s commitment to bring back every missing or fallen soldier.
The battle, 44 years ago, was a skirmish between the Israel Defense Forces and the Syrian army in Lebanon’s Beqaa Valley. It claimed the lives of 21 Israeli servicemen and injured more than 30.
Katz, a tank soldier, went missing during the battle, along with Sgt. First Class Zachary Baumel and Sgt. First Class Zvi Feldman.
Baumel’s remains were recovered with Russian assistance and returned to Israel in 2019, and Feldman’s remains were recovered by Mossad agents in May 2025.
In a statement, the Israel Defense Forces said that in a special operation led by the Military Intelligence Directorate, in coordination with the Mossad spy agency, Katz’s bones were located and brought to Israel for burial. No details were given on where they were found.
The operation was based on intelligence obtained in recent months, according to the military. The IDF added that the finding was made possible due to a “series of intelligence and operational activities that continued for more than four decades, since he fell in battle.”
Earlier on Tuesday, the IDF said that personal findings belonging to Katz were brought back to Israel during the operation and given to his family for inspection. Meanwhile, Katz’s bones were taken for identification and confirmed on Tuesday evening to belong to the slain soldier.
The military said Katz’s family was updated over the years regarding the ongoing efforts to locate his remains and return them to Israel. “Upon completion of the mission, the family was informed of the return of their loved one. Unfortunately, Yehuda’s parents, Sarah and Yosef Katz, did not live to receive the news,” the army said.
In a statement, IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir said, “The return of Yehuda Katz, the last fallen soldier from the Battle of Sultan Yacoub, is a significant moment for the IDF and for the State of Israel.”
“Decades have passed, but our duty toward our fallen has not changed. We will leave none of our people behind,” Zamir added.
The military chief later spoke with Katz’s family, which he told, “After 44 years, the Battle of Sultan Yacoub has come to an end.”
“All those missing from the battle have been returned to Israel. This is a special day for me, both as chief of the general staff and as a soldier of the Armored Corps,” Zamir was quoted as saying. “From the day I enlisted in the Armored Corps, I was raised on the legacy of that battle and on the moral commitment to bring all of our missing home. An entire nation stands united with you and shares in your emotion today.”
From Ian:
Ireland is green with envy against Israel
So let me understand this: Britain was the enemy from whom the Irish were seeking liberation. The Irish struggled to found a republic – which they did. There were founding heroes of the state. Is this starting to ring a bell?
The British Army was the enemy of Israel during the mandate. Surely Ireland could not fail to become the natural ally of Israel?
Wasn’t Chaim Herzog raised in Dublin, serving in the Hagana and the British Army during World War II, making a close link when he became president of Israel? Has not the new president been able to forge the connection?
The answer is no.
Their relations have gone from bad to worse, and in the years since October 7, the Irish have launched a tirade of invective against the State of Israel and its leaders.
Examples: the previous president of Ireland, Michael Higgins, has slandered Israel’s actions in Gaza on every occasion. He had, of course, sprinkled terms like “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing” around like confetti.
Higgins is not a very tall man – he’s only 160 centimeters tall – but each and every centimeter is carefully honed with spite and hate for the only Jewish state.
The new taoiseach (Irish prime minister), Micheal Martin, has changed the views he had when foreign minister to the usual – “genocide” and “collective punishment” – urging the European Union to take ever stronger steps against Israel.
But whilst taoiseachs, presidents, press, and TV all seem united in their prejudice, they are followed sheep-like by the public, a majority of whom support trade restrictions and full BDS.
On The Late Late Show, discussing Iran, Alan Shatter, a former justice minister, mentioned tunnels and rapes to an audience of 500. He was met with laughter and derision.
Why? In Ireland’s case, pure envy is a likely candidate. Ever since it became a member of the EU in 1973, it has had a reputation of “take, take.”
By 2010, Ireland faced financial collapse due to housing and banking bubbles. In total, they received a €67.5 billion external bailout package from the EU, including loans from other nations, like Sweden – coincidentally, another Israel-hating friend.
By contrast, it sees Israel as strong and standing on its own two feet. Ireland has seen incoming hi-tech giants from America, from whom it takes taxes. Israel leads on its own.
My in-laws are part of the dwindling Jewish community who do not know from which direction the next abuse will come, as Ireland has succeeded France as the most antisemitic country in the world. A shame, as Ireland richly deserves its romantic label.
The expression “green with envy” happens to coincide with Ireland’s national color. It is also the butt of jokes, which claim the folk from the countryside are stupid.
Both envy and stupidity recently combined when the government purchased a jet for its “high-flying” greedy representatives. So driven by envy and hatred, they removed the plane’s landing assistance for the fog because it was manufactured in Israel.
A combination of envy and stupidity motivated their actions. Mind you, even without fog, Ireland clearly has lost its way.
JPost Editorial:
Mamdani fans flames of antisemitism by pairing false allyship with anti-Israel rhetoric
The cycle is repeating itself almost daily. Anti-Israel rhetoric is uttered by progressive US officials like New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani. An antisemitic attack takes place, and those same officials rush to condemn the attack, defend the Jewish population, and express outrage.
What duplicitous trickery, transparently cynical manipulation, and utter refusal to see the blatant cause-and-effect of the cycle is taking place on the American landscape.
The latest incident occurred Friday night when Larry Montes, 46, of the Bronx, disrupted services at the famed Central Synagogue in Manhattan (which are streamed live to congregants around the world), allegedly hitting a woman, head-butting a security guard, and yelling antisemitic tropes before being escorted out of the sanctuary and arrested by the NYPD. He was later charged with six hate crimes.
Mamdani quickly responded to the attack, predictably stating that he was “horrified.”
“I can only imagine the pain and fear an attack like this, during Shabbat services, causes for the congregation and for Jewish New Yorkers across our city,” the mayor said. “Every New Yorker must be able to observe their religion without fear of violence. This despicable act has no place in our city, and our administration will do everything in our power to keep Jewish New Yorkers safe.”
Mamdani ignores connection between anti-Israel rhetoric, antisemitism
However, Mamdani is ignoring the clear connection between his frequent statements calling Israel’s war in Gaza a “genocide” and launching a campaign to arrest Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a war criminal, which are fanning the flames that he’s trying to extinguish with his crocodile tears.
Less than a month ago, the synagogue’s senior rabbi, Angela Buchdahl, had warned Mamdani about the consequences of his anti-Israel rhetoric. In a July 23 statement addressed to the mayor, Buchdahl urged him to refrain from making statements that “demonizes Jews and the Jewish state” and “helps create the climate in which threats and violence flourish.”
Just last week, 10 New York rabbis also met Mamdani at City Hall to raise concerns about his statements about Israel and their effect on Jewish New Yorkers. The rabbis told the mayor that presenting the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a simple story with Jews cast as the villain could prove dangerous.
“I told the mayor directly, the way you continue to talk about Israel endangers the Jewish community at large,” said Rabbi Rick Jacobs. “If, instead of vilifying Israel, you spoke constructively, in measured tones, that would move the needle more than anything else, and I’m hopeful you’ll use that power.”
I study antisemitism for a living: El-Sayed’s rhetoric is a case study
In an effort to facilitate his success in the upcoming November election against his Republican rival, El-Sayed sought to reassure the public and the Jewish community, whom he and many of his supporters have placed in their crosshairs for over a year, of his goodwill. The reassurance was compelled by conduct, not just his campaign rhetoric, within El-Sayed’s own political orbit.
Consider, for instance, the indictment of one of El-Sayed’s staff, who, along with seven others, stands accused by a federal jury of alleged threats and vandalism against the University of Michigan, pro-Israel organizations and their family members. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, the accused “also discussed methods by which to harm the targets and their families, including poison, bombs and psychological torture.”
As FBI special agent Jennifer Runyan explained: “In the dead of night, masked and hooded defendants allegedly threw noxious chemicals through the windows of families’ homes and taped demand letters to their front doors. At every step, they attempted to cover their tracks and delete evidence of their crimes.”
When concealing Jew-hatred is no longer possible or politically preferable, there is greater candor and/or the suggestion that it does not matter. Seven months after the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, El-Sayed’s most notorious supporter, Hasan Piker stated, “It doesn’t matter if rapes happened on October 7th” … “It doesn’t change the dynamic for me.” That’s because Piker admires the terrorist organization Hezbollah and its “dope flag.”
“It’s got an AK [rifle] on it and a f**king hand holding it up,” he exclaimed, podcasting beside an LGBTQ flag and wearing a T-shirt that read “show me your d**k.” It strains credulity that the provocative podcaster is oblivious to the fact that leaders of both Hezbollah and Hamas claim that homosexuals should be executed in accordance with Quranic principles. Despite posing with peace signs beside the candidate, Piker’s support for terror could not be clearer.
For those voters who continue to insist hatred of any kind is simply unacceptable comes the promise of protection against it. And, as any abused woman knows, one of the most effective ways an abuser conceals his behavior is through offering his victims protection from it.
This came to mind when I heard El-Sayed’s paternalistic statement to Jewish Americans. He declares: “My commitment to Jewish safety is the same commitment I have to the safety of my own daughters.” As is common in such instances of insincerity, he never noted the role that his own rhetoric has played in fostering the fear he claims to safeguard against.
Most concerning was that, on the morning his victory was declared, El-Sayed appeared on national television and invoked the ancient blood libel against Jews by characterizing the world’s only Jewish state as having been “bloodthirsty” for decades. This libel was not a criticism of the particular policies of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or any Israeli government, but instead a condemnation of Israel’s very existence, and thus her people and supporters.
Like those before him, the aspiring politician grasps the appeal of the blood-curdling myth. It is worth recalling that, in 1943, Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, instructed Berlin’s Chief of Police to investigate ritual murders long attributed to Jews, with the intention of disseminating the ostensible findings to the press. This strategy was aimed at promoting the narrative that would support the “evacuation” of Jews from Europe. Himmler understood that virulent Jew-hatred could be leveraged to the advantage of his movement.
That today’s aspiring politicians seem eager to do the same reveals our country is under serious threat and that unless such forces are soundly defeated, the future of substantive democracy will be bleak.
From Ian:
Jake Wallis Simons:
The West is still committed to its fatal delusion about Hamas
When it comes to the Middle East, Tony Blair is not known for his wisdom. His invasion of Iraq left the region in chaos, leading to mass jihadist mobilisation and the strengthening of Iran, while as the Quartet’s Middle East representative, he singularly failed to ease the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.
What better man, therefore, to meet Hamas in Cairo, alongside Jared Kushner, to press the jihadis to fulfil their commitment to disarm on Sunday? Blair’s problem has always been the same, and it has been shared by the entire Western political establishment since the end of the Cold War. Namely: gullibility.
The thread running through decades of Western failure to encourage peace and prosperity in the Middle East is our damnable assumption that deep down, the Islamists are just like us. Lord Renwick famously labelled this the “Wykehamist fallacy”, the tendency to assume that even the most bloodthirsty despot had an inner civilised chap of the sort one might find at Winchester College.
If it were true that the Islamists’ core concerns were freedom, prosperity and a better future for their children, then all you would have to do would be to remove the despots and nurture a framework of democracy. Societal happiness would then bloom of its own accord.
Iraq put paid to that idea. So did the unilateral Israeli withdrawal from Gaza in 2005; under the direction of the late Ariel Sharon, all 21 settlements in the Strip were forcibly dismantled and the IDF withdrew to the last man.
Even Israeli farms and businesses were left intact for the Palestinians to use. What happened? These were all razed by the mob out of spite. Hamas took over and, over the following two decades, the enclave became a civilian-jihadi terror complex, involving subterranean infrastructure, total militarisation and ubiquitous brainwashing. Then came October 7.
So forgive me if I view these direct talks with Hamas – itself an unprecedented diplomatic move – as just more of the same painful naïveté, only this time under the mad leadership of Donald Trump. Can a jihadi group ever be serious about disarming? Could Rosemary West be plausibly retrained as headmistress of a girls’ boarding school?
Think, for a moment, of the level of fanaticism required to build up to 450 miles of catacombs in Gaza, in conditions of mortal danger, then to invite the apocalypse upon your own heads with an orgy of butchery, rape, mutilation, necrophilia and kidnap, before deploying your own families as human shields above ground.
Yes, between the suicide bomber and the Western diplomat lies a pretty big cultural gulf. Truly, these people love death as we love life. As Israeli leader Golda Meir famously remarked: “Peace will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us.”
Desert Reconnaissance Battalion: The Arab IDF unit the world needs to know about
For years, the world has been told a very simple story about Arabs and Israel. Arabs on one side. Israelis on the other. It is always pinned as conflict, division, or suspicion. But recently, I stood in a space that told a very different story.
I was attending the anniversary of IDF Unit 585, the Desert Reconnaissance Battalion, a unit made up predominantly of Bedouin soldiers, alongside other Arab and minority service members. The battalion was established in the late 1980s and has long operated in Israel’s south, particularly around the Gaza border. For many of its Arab soldiers, service is voluntary rather than mandatory.
This unit is made up largely of Arab soldiers, including but not limited to members of Israel’s Bedouin and Druze communities. And as I looked around the event, I realized how few people outside of Israel even know this unit exists, because I myself didn't know it existed.
That matters. Because when the world talks about Israel, it often speaks in absolutes. Israelis and Arabs are presented as two groups who could never share a uniform, a mission, or a sense of responsibility for the same country. Then you meet the soldiers of Unit 585.
At the anniversary, I spoke with veterans who had served in the unit decades ago. Their names cannot be published, but their pride was impossible to miss.
“We are soldiers from Unit 585,” one group of veterans told me. “We enlisted in 1979, and today we came to honor and celebrate 40 years.”
There was something striking about hearing that sentence while standing beside Arab soldiers serving in the battalion today. Different generations. The same unit. Men who had enlisted decades earlier had returned to stand alongside young Arab soldiers currently serving in Israel’s military, including soldiers who have operated in the Gaza border region and across southern Israel.
One current soldier described the moment simply: “Today we are marking 40 years since the battalion was established. Some of our veterans, together with the soldiers serving today, are here with us.” It was a place full of people whose lives complicate the version of Israel most of the world has been taught.
Western hypocrisy ignores Turkey’s occupation of northern Cyprus and Syria while condemning Israel
While the world obsesses over Israel, Recep Tayyip Erdogan is quietly appropriating land for Turkey, rewriting borders, and making a mockery of international law. The man who never misses a chance to denounce "occupation" and castigate Israel presides over two illegal occupations himself. And he is no longer simply occupying territory. He is positioning Turkey as the dominant Islamist power in the Middle East and the heir to Iran's self-appointed leadership of the anti-Israel “Axis of Resistance".
And if senior figures in his government are to be believed, his ambitions do not end in Cyprus or Syria. Erdogan’s sights are firmly fixed on Jerusalem.
Northern Cyprus has been under Turkish control for more than half a century, and northern Syria is rapidly going the same way. Yet the sanctimonious West, ever eager to moralise elsewhere, ignores these flagrant breaches of international law and treats Erdogan as a legitimate, valued partner.
Turkey’s occupation of northern Cyprus began in 1974, when its army invaded the island under the pretext of protecting Turkish Cypriots. They dropped napalm and burned villages. They stayed, and drove 170,000 Greek Cypriots from their homes. UN resolutions demand withdrawal. Ankara ignores them to this day. In reality, Turkey has seized 37 per cent of the island and split the capital, Nicosia, in two, making it the last divided capital in Europe.
The European Court of Human Rights has repeatedly ruled that Turkey exercises “effective control” over the north, making Ankara legally responsible for every violation of property and human rights there. None of that matters. In 2021, Erdogan personally toured the sealed-off resort town of Varosha, a virtual ghost town and symbol of occupation. He vowed to reopen it, in direct defiance of the UN Security Council. He brazenly declared, “There are two states in Cyprus, and the world will eventually recognise this reality.”
The reality is an illegal military occupation propped up by nearly 40,000 Turkish troops, fortified bases, and a growing Turkish “settler” population now outnumbering local Turkish Cypriots. Ankara has installed drone bases, new mosques, and schools teaching Turkish curricula. Erdogan hasn’t just preserved the occupation. He has institutionalised it.
Since 2016, Turkey has launched four invasions into northern Syria, Operations Euphrates Shield, Olive Branch, Peace Spring and Claw-Sword, claiming to fight terrorism and create “safe zones”. In reality, it is occupation by instalments, a creeping annexation.
Cyprus ramping up pressure on Tel Aviv while eyeing Israel’s Merkava tanks for its military
Cyprus is ramping up pressure on Israel to allow them to purchase Merkava tanks (Mk3 or Mk4), pan-Cypriot daily newspaper Phileleftheros reported on Monday.
The Merkava is the primary tank used by the IDF’s Armored Corps. While development for the tank began in 1970, it only entered service in 1979 and was extensively used during the First Lebanon War.
The Merkava Mark 4 Barak is the version of the tank that is currently in use.
According to Phileleftheros, opinions within the Israeli government are divided on the matter, with some in support of providing Cyprus with Merkava tanks and some against such a move, wanting the tanks to remain available to the IDF.
Phileleftheros noted that the Merkava’s suitability for Cyprus’s National Guard stems from two main reasons.
Israel-Cyprus talks reportedly stall because of Oct. 7
The first, being the similarity between Israel and Cyprus’s terrain; and the second being the proximity of the two countries, which would ease logistical support for the tanks.
Talks between Cyprus and Israel for the purchase of second-hand Merkava tanks had stalled with the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas War on October 7, 2023, reported Cypriot media, with Israeli reassurances that discussions would resume once the security situation had eased.
Several other contenders for Cyprus’s National Guard have been put forth, according to Cypriot media, including Greece’s Leopard 1A5 and France’s EBRC Jaguar.
The Leopard, however, has reportedly been rejected by Cyprus for not meeting the country’s national guard’s operational requirements.
Several contracts for smaller equipment, such as drones and other equipment that have shorter production times, have already progressed, according to Phileleftheros.
It added that contracts for larger equipment, such as armoured vehicles, are slated to begin in 2028.
Israel, Greece, Cyprus sign trilateral work plan
Currently, Cyprus’s National Guard is using Russian-built T-80 tanks, but Russia’s deteriorating relations with Western counties and sanctions placed upon it have made it difficult to reliably secure spare parts and ammunition.
In December 2025, Israel, Greece, and Cyprus signed a trilateral work plan for military cooperation for 2026.
Among other things, the plans include joint exercises and training, working groups in various fields, and strategic military dialogue on issues of joint interest.
From Ian:
Why Is There No Palestinian State?
There has never been a Palestinian state in all of history. There was never an independent Palestinian Arab country with its own government, army, currency, or capital. The word "Palestine" does not appear in the Hebrew Bible, the Christian New Testament, or the Koran.
In the modern era, Palestinian Arab statehood was repeatedly put within reach and repeatedly rejected beginning in 1937. In 1947, the UN proposed dividing British Mandatory Palestine into two states, one Jewish and one Arab. The Jewish leadership said yes, and the Arab leadership said no. From 1948 to 1967, Jordan controlled Judea and Samaria, while Egypt controlled Gaza. Yet no Palestinian state was created during those years.
In 1993, Israel decided to test a different path. Israel recognized the PLO, withdrew from Palestinian population centers, and helped establish the Palestinian Authority, expecting negotiations to lead to a permanent settlement. In July 2000, at Camp David under U.S. President Bill Clinton's auspices, Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered Yasser Arafat far-reaching territorial concessions, including in Jerusalem. Arafat rejected the deal. What followed was the Second Intifada. Israeli buses, restaurants, and cafes were attacked by Palestinian terrorists.
In 2005, Israel withdrew its soldiers and uprooted every Jewish community from Gaza - in a test of what Israeli withdrawal could produce. Hamas seized control and turned Gaza into a terrorist fortress. Rockets were fired at Israeli towns. Terror tunnels were dug under the border. On Oct. 7, 2023, 18 years after Israel had left Gaza, it became the launching pad for the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.
If Israel were really the main reason there is no Palestinian state, then the periods when Israel was absent should have produced one - from 1948 to 1967 in Judea and Samaria and Gaza, and in the years following Israel's 2005 withdrawal from Gaza. They did not. Territory surrendered by Israel was used to prepare and launch the Oct. 7 massacre.
A Palestinian state under present conditions would be a gamble with millions of Israeli lives. After Oct. 7, why should Israel be expected to ignore every lesson of the past and take the same risk again?
Peace Index: 24% of Israeli Jews Support the Two-State Solution
According to Tel Aviv University's Peace Index survey of Israeli public opinion conducted on July 26-30, 2026, only 12% of Jewish respondents believe that negotiations will lead to peace in the coming years.
24% of the Jewish public support the two-state solution, but only 13% believe it has a chance of being achieved in the foreseeable future.
66% of the Jewish public support the expansion of Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria based on security needs, while 25% oppose this.
Adam Levick:
Antisemitism at London-based ‘Guardian’ is worse than you think
“What struck me most,” wrote Andrew Fox, a British army veteran specializing in defense, the Middle East and disinformation, about presentations he has given to anti-Zionist audiences, is “not just the hostility” but “the epistemic closure.” These people, he explained, “operate within a sealed universe of alternative facts,” where they have “absorbed over two-and-a-half years of propaganda via social media, activist networks, campus politics and the Hamas narrative laundered through supposedly respectable institutions.”
One of the supposedly “respectable institutions” that has taken this pro-Hamas propaganda laundering to the most extreme level is The Guardian—an outlet, CAMERA has demonstrated, that has spread libel after libel about the Jewish state and, by extension, Jews qua Jews, thus contributing to the antisemitism epidemic in the United Kingdom.
For instance, the mainstream media outlet began promoting variations of genocide libel on Oct. 14, 2023, just one week after the worst antisemitic atrocity since the Holocaust, and 12 days before the Israel Defense Forces entered Gaza. They would publish op-eds hurling this libel another 12 times over the next 11 days.
The outlet was also the most enthusiastic promoter of the now-debunked Gaza famine libel, going further than most outlets by charging that Israeli leaders were intentionally starving Palestinians, including children, as a weapon of war while characterizing Israelis as monstrous and lacking basic humanity.
Even more troubling is the fact that their coverage at times crossed the line to explicit antisemitism by drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis, defined as antisemitic by the most widely accepted antisemitism definition.
On Oct. 24, 2023, a little more than three weeks after the Oct. 7 massacre of 1,200 people and the kidnapping of 251 others, the outlet published an op-ed by Swedish academic Raz Segal. It “contextualized” the Hamas-led terrorist attacks by citing “the historical context of Israeli settler colonialism since the 1948 Nakba” (what Palestinian Arabs call the “catastrophe” of the establishment of modern-day Israel) before suggesting that the views of Israeli leaders concerning Gaza are informed by Nazi logic.
On June 25, 2024, an op-ed in The Guardian by the New York City-based writer John Oakes actually likened the situation in Gaza to the Nazis’ starvation of Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto. Meanwhile, on Aug. 13 that year, the outlet published a piece by Brown University professor Omer Bartov, who alleged that Israel’s descent into Nazi-like behavior arguably predates the Oct. 7 war and could be seen in the anti-terror policies of then Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin during the First Intifada.
On May 7, 2025, Guardian contributor Ahmed Moor published a piece likening the actions of Israeli leaders he libeled as ordering the starvation of Palestinian civilians to those of Rudolf Höss, the Nazi Kommandant who led the Auschwitz prison camp in Poland during World War II and oversaw the extermination of millions of Jews from 1940 to 1943. The story of Höss and his family was recently made into a 2023 film called “The Zone of Interest.”
Norwegian Center for Conflict Resolution engaged directly with Hamas, NGO Monitor claims
The Oslo-based Norwegian Center for Conflict Resolution (NOREF) engaged in direct, systematic coordination with high-ranking Hamas officials, according to internal Hamas documents recovered from Gaza, declassified by the IDF and translated by NGO Monitor.
NOREF describes itself as an “independent foundation” that works to prevent, mitigate, and resolve international conflicts. It was, however, established on the initiative of the Norwegian government and remains primarily funded by the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA).
According to NGO Monitor, the newly uncovered documents indicate that Hamas explicitly viewed NOREF as a strategic channel for influencing European Union policy and mitigating Hamas’ international isolation.
The evidence also reportedly shows that NOREF’s activities extended beyond occasional mediation and included at least one unpublicized joint project with EU-designated terrorist organizations.
Specifically, a July 2021 document details how Hamas explicitly sought to utilize NOREF’s access to Western political circles to manipulate European foreign policy.
Hamas officials met with NOREF staff in push to sway European position
The document said a meeting took place on May 15, 2021, between high-ranking Hamas officials – including Basem Naim (Head of Hamas’ Foreign Relations Office in Gaza) and Abdallah Walid (from the same office) – and a senior NOREF delegation consisting of Deputy Head Dr. Marte Heian-Engdal, Middle East Department Head Dr. Frida Nome, and Advisor Dr. Ziad Abu Mustafa.
The meeting’s stated agenda included “Mediating the relationship between Hamas and the European Union.”
During the meeting, Hamas detailed its strategy to capitalize on the “negative reality in the Palestinian territories to push toward changing the European position.”
The NOREF delegation allegedly solicited Hamas’ input on how to interface with European leaders to maximize benefit for Hamas, and asked, “What are the channels of communication that are currently working on dialogue between the movement [Hamas] and the European Union? How are we able to contribute to this dialogue without obstructing these efforts?”
A NOREF representative also praised Hamas’ cooperation on a joint initiative, stating, “We have the youth project, and we value your effort with us in facilitating some of the meetings and communications on this matter.”
From Ian:
Moderates vs. Hard-Liners
Right from the beginning of Operation Epic Fury, after it had killed Khamenei, the Trump administration was already laying out scenarios for how to deal with the regime, including a so-called Venezuela option, which meant dealing with an IRGC regime minus those who have been eliminated. Early on, IRGC veteran and Parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf was floated as the Iranian version of Venezuela’s Delcy Rodriguez: the regime insider who would cut a deal with the Americans in exchange for regime continuity. Soon the administration began negotiating with the Iranians, led by Ghalibaf, and it immediately settled into its version of the “moderates vs. hard-liners” classification as it pursued talks over the next four months.
Echoing Obama’s aforementioned use of the Rouhani election as cover, Trump labeled the Iranians with whom he was talking as “new” and “reasonable,” contrasting them with a previous tier that was eliminated in strikes. Secretary of State Marco Rubio echoed this assessment in late March but refrained from disclosing the identities of the Iranian negotiators “because it probably would get them in trouble with some other groups of people inside of Iran,” suggesting an internal struggle with a more radical “hard-liner” faction. Although, Rubio added, it wasn’t clear which of the two factions was the one running the show. “At the end of the day, we have to see if these people”—that is, the “reasonable” moderates—“end up being the ones in charge, seeing if they’re the ones that have the power to deliver.”
Vice President JD Vance, meanwhile, struck a more optimistic tone, including about the so-called hard-liners, claiming a breakthrough that had supposedly eluded every previous American administration for 47 years. In June, he told CNN that “the coolest thing about the progress we’ve made of the last few weeks is that you see people within the Iranian system—senior leadership, even IRGC officials—say, ‘You know what, we may have some animosity, we may have some mistrust, but we recognize the way that we’ve done business with the United States for 47 years is a mistake; let’s try something else.’ We’re gonna verify that, of course, but we’re certainly willing to try something else if they comply.”
Of course, none of that was real. The regime’s behavior did not change, and talks broke down. So, in July, Vance pivoted from his assessment of the new and cool IRGC and reverted to a variant of the “hard-liners” as spoilers. Only in Vance’s telling, the hard-liners were going through growing pains in their evergreen struggle with the “pragmatists.” In an interview with podcaster Joe Rogan, Vance offered his theory for why the deal he negotiated had unraveled: Iranian hard-liners, alarmed at how much leverage they had surrendered once the Strait of Hormuz reopened and oil began flowing again, panicked and started shooting at ships. “There was this kind of freak-out in their system. So they shot at a couple of ships,” Vance offered. “The hard-liners have really, really reacted strongly to all the oil that’s coming out of the Strait of Hormuz. … Now the pragmatists in their system are saying this was a mistake. Let’s keep on talking.”
Trump and Vance had now introduced a variant of Obama’s innovation with the “moderates vs. hard-liners,” projecting that dichotomy onto the IRGC/hard-liners themselves. In a June 12 briefing, for example, a senior administration official—likely Vance himself—offered the following assessment: “The Iranian hard-liners, some of them want to kill the deal, but I think most of them actually want the deal.”
But since nothing in Iran’s behavior had changed, with the regime continuously attacking U.S. bases, regional allies, and targeting international shipping while ignoring Trump’s threats and occasional retaliatory strikes, the U.S. president has oscillated between contradictory characterizations of the Iranians. The people he had earlier described as reasonable became lunatics and sick scum. But, now fully invested in his deal with them, Trump also leaned on one of the established functions of the “moderates vs. hard-liners” device, attributing bad behavior to the “hard-liners” and thereby justifying continued talks with the imaginary “moderates.” After a thwarted missile strike against U.S. positions in Jordan in late July, Trump attributed the action not to the reasonable, moderate pragmatists, but rather to those pesky radical hard-liners. “It was a different group than we’re dealing with,” he insisted. “They’ve already apologized.”
Similarly, and using essentially the same language as the Obama administration more than a decade ago, Vance told Fox News in early August that the Iranians “have a fractured system. So there are people within their system who want the war to be over. There are also people in their system who are crazy radicals who want the war to continue.”
In other words, as things stand, Trump has adopted entirely the framework, categories, and rhetorical devices of his predecessors, whom he had described as losers who didn’t know how to deal with the mendacious Iranian regime. And he has done so for the same reason: to justify continued talks with, and concessions to, the hard men of the IRGC.
What’s more, the administration—specifically Vance—has adopted Obama’s other malignant innovation: blaming Israel and accusing domestic critics of being warmongering agents of influence on its behalf. As the vice president told Rogan last month, he knew “beyond a shadow of a doubt” that the Israeli government was trying to keep the war with Iran going indefinitely and that it was Israeli interference that sabotaged the cease-fire he and special envoy Steve Witkoff had negotiated. Moreover, Vance added, “certain elements within the Israeli government” had funded a campaign “to try to derail the negotiation and try to derail the deal.”
Further echoing Obama’s language, in a June 15 briefing, a senior U.S. official—again, likely Vance himself—employed, verbatim, Obama’s characterization of domestic critics as a mirror of Iran’s hard-liners. “What you’re seeing now is hard-liners on both sides. In the Iranian system, they’re protesting [against the deal]. And we have certain people in the American system who say there’s no deal you could ever do with Iran ever, who are obviously making a lot of noise.”
After five decades of dealing with the regime, to observe that the theory of an Iranian moderate faction opposed to the hard-line security establishment misreads the nature of the regime is to state the obvious. The fact is, going back at the very least to Obama—that is, two of those five decades—the U.S. government has perfectly understood what the Islamic Republic is.
Israeli officials have argued publicly and consistently, since well before the JCPOA was signed, that a deal with the regime is futile not because they are uniquely hostile to diplomacy, but because they, too, have spent decades watching the IRGC’s behavior up close. But the Israelis, and American critics, are also missing the point. The function of the “moderate vs. hard-liners” instrument is not epistemological, a faulty understanding of the nature of the regime. The Americans know well what that regime is. Donald Trump certainly has known it since the 1980s. Rather, “moderates vs. hard-liners” has long ceased to be a genuine misreading of a nascent regime and is now firmly established as a rhetorical device the function of which is to justify an accommodation with the IRGC and paint domestic critics as treasonous warmongers working on behalf of the Jewish state.
Jake Wallis Simons:
Israel isn’t an enemy of Christianity. It’s a sinister distortion to suggest otherwise
Don’t take my word for it; consider a remark by Abdul Azim Wadi, the mayor of Qusra, a Palestinian village between Ramallah and Nablus, where Jewish “terrorists”, as American ambassador Mike Huckabee has called them, have been laying siege to an Arab family for days.
Speaking to the Telegraph last week as troops struggled to tame the fanatics, Mayor Wadi said: “There are good soldiers sometimes, and there are bad ones.”
There you have it. To you or me, this might seem obvious; to those in the West who have appropriated Palestine as a personal totem, however, there can be no such thing as a “good” Israeli soldier on the grounds of ideology.
“Death, death to the IDF.” Remember that? Try suggesting to Western progressives that some Israeli troops are “good”. The Nazi-grade radicalism, which broke into the mainstream when the deplorable rapper Bob Vylan led the chant at Glastonbury last summer, goes way beyond the venom even of many Palestinians who live cheek-by-jowl with Israelis.
According to one poll, 50 per cent of Britons (and 67 per cent of Labour voters) now believe the lie that Israel committed “genocide” in Gaza. And what about British Christians? Perhaps the most substantial polling of that group comes from December 2024. It found that 47 per cent of believers had already swallowed the “genocide” libel.
Dig into the study and it gets worse. A quarter of believers said it was “probably true” that Jews “don’t care what happens to anyone but their own kind”; a third thought Jews talk “too much about” the Holocaust; and one-in-six claimed that Jews were “responsible for most of the world’s wars”. This is anti-Semitism and it creates fertile soil for propaganda.
I mention the Church because, judging by the responses to a story last week about the Israeli military “surrounding” a Christian town on the West Bank, many readers were imagining a Jewish version of the Siege of Constantinople, with artillery fire and waves of troops mounting an assault against the valiant soldiers of Christ.
But listen to Father Bashar Fawadleh, the priest at Christ the Redeemer Church in Taybeh, northeast of Ramallah: “A closed military zone for non-resident Israelis may be a positive step.” Turns out the army was trying to protect the Palestinians, not rout them.
Friday, August 21, 2026
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