From Ian:
Shai Davidai:
American Intellectual Antisemitism
At its core, American Intellectual Antisemitism recasts Jews as the embodiment of privilege, oppression, and global power. According to this ideology, Jews are White oppressors, settler-colonialists, and European capitalistic imperialists who wield disproportionate influence over foreign governments, financial systems, and global media in order to ethnically cleanse Palestine and establish a Jewish supremacist ethnostate through dispossession, apartheid, and genocide. Hiding behind a polished veneer of academic jargon and intellectual sophistication, American Intellectual Antisemitism portrays the Jewish people not merely as participants in historical events but as the embodiment of evil, responsible for all that’s wrong in the Middle East and far beyond it. By recasting rape as “resistance” and murder as the means for “liberation,” it creates a moral framework through which even the most horrific violence becomes justifiable. Within this framework, no atrocity against Jews, not even the kidnapping and killing of nine-month-old Kfir Bibas, is too horrific to rationalize.
Taken to its ideological conclusion, American Intellectual Antisemitism casts Israel — “the Jew among the nations” — as inherently evil and its very existence as inherently unjust. Insisting that justice can come only through the eradication of the world’s only Jewish state, from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, it holds that anyone who supports Jewish self-determination, Jew or non-Jew alike, must be opposed. Put into practice, this ideology sanctions the targeting of Jews and their allies as an act of moral virtue.
Of course, criticizing Israel’s past and current governments, policies, or conduct is not inherently antisemitic. Yet, by crossing the boundary between criticism of Israel’s actions and opposition to its very existence, this seemingly new form of Jew-hatred reproduces deep antisemitic patterns that are anything but new. Satisfying what Natan Sharansky famously called the “Three Ds” of antisemitism, American Intellectual Antisemitism does all three: it demonizes Jews and Israel, delegitimizes Jewish self-determination, and imposes double standards it demands of no other people or nation. Though its language may be new, the underlying Jew-hatred is ancient. Academia did not invent Jew-hatred. It just gave it a PhD.
Naming the ideology, however, was only the beginning. To understand how American Intellectual Antisemitism had taken hold of so many unsuspecting minds, I needed to trace not only its origins, but its transmission. I needed to uncover where these ideas were developed, who gave them legitimacy, how they traveled beyond campus, and which financial pipelines sustained their spread. I needed to expose not only what people had come to believe, but who had taught them to believe it and how obscure academic ideas had entered mainstream American life. Once I understood what I was seeing, I needed to make sure others could see it too.
That investigation became my book, American Intellectual Antisemitism: The Anti-Jewish Movement Tearing Through Our Universities. Tracing the rise of this radical and hateful ideology within American higher education, the book exposes the ideas, institutions, and individual – from Edward Said, Joseph Massad, and Rashid Khalidi to Nerdeen Kiswani, Judith Butler, Katherine Franke, and, of course, Mahmoud and Zohran Mamdani - that helped recast Jews from a persecuted minority into privileged oppressor. In doing so, I traced the pathways through which American Intellectual Antisemitism escaped academia and entered the media, K-12 education, professional organizations, cultural institutions, and politics. Following its journey from the seminar room to the protest encampment, from academic journals to social media, and from elite universities into institutions that shape how millions of Americans understand the world, I draw on my own transformation from a popular professor at Columbia Business School to one of the country’s most outspoken Jewish and Israeli advocates, enduring relentless defamation and death threats along the way, to reveal just how deeply American Intellectual Antisemitism has become entrenched within our academic system. Above all, the book tells the story of how antisemitism, long before it reached the streets, captured the syllabus.
Writing this book helped me understand how we got here, but it also forced me to consider whether things could have turned out differently. I often think back to my conversation with Mr. Rosberg and wonder what might have been. What might have happened had he taken me and the warning I was trying to deliver more seriously? What might have happened had he not dismissed me as a nuisance and an alarmist, but instead recognized that I was raising a critical alarm? What might Columbia have become had its leaders chosen moral clarity, accountability, and a constructive path forward rather than cowardice, appeasement, and indifference?
We cannot undo what has already been done, but we can still decide what happens next. The need for a better path forward is no less urgent today than it was on that bright November afternoon in Riverside Park. If anything, it is greater. We must be willing to name the hateful ideology of American Intellectual Antisemitism even when it disguises itself in the language of social justice, hold people accountable when they turn that ideology into intimidation and disruption, and offer something better in its place — democracy, pluralism, coexistence, intellectual humility, and universal human dignity. You don’t defeat destructive ideologies merely by exposing the damage they cause. You defeat them by helping people understand what is happening, refusing to accept it as normal, and standing up against it.
That is ultimately why I wrote American Intellectual Antisemitism. Not merely to explain what happened, but to prevent it from happening again. Jews and non-Jews alike must recognize the ideological hatred that has taken root within some of our most elite institutions, understand where it came from and how it spreads, and resist it before it takes root elsewhere.
I walked into Riverside Park that November afternoon believing Columbia could still climb out of the moral pit into which it had dug itself. Nearly three years later, I still believe that it can and that other ideologically captured institutions can as well. American Intellectual Antisemitism is a powerful and menacing ideology, but it is not undefeatable. No ideology is. By choosing moral clarity over confusion, accountability over appeasement, and hope over hatred, we can turn what threatens to become a historical turning point into a historical footnote.
I wrote this book because, once I saw what was happening, I could no longer remain silent. Now that you see it too, will you?
Lionel Shriver:
Sally Rooney is a posturing ingrate
Amnesty International indignation to the contrary, this is not a free-speech issue. Rooney may still shout her devotion to Palestinians from the rooftops. Should the author truly wish to fund their cause, legal outfits rowdily clamouring for “free Palestine!” are multitudinous: Palestine Solidarity Campaign, Stop the War Coalition, Medical Aid for Palestinians, Oxfam… But, no. Rooney has to plump for Palestine Action, because that will stir a kerfuffle.
This isn’t Rooney’s first gesture of impotent activism. She flaunted her refusal to sell Hebrew translation rights to her third novel, her Israeli publisher being politically impure. She helped spearhead a 2024 authors’ boycott of book festivals funded by Baillie Gifford, supposedly involved in fossil fuels and Israeli defence shares. Yet according to the investment management firm, only 2 per cent of its investments involved oil and gas, and claims of the company’s investment in the Israeli military were “offensively misleading”.
Did this showy, clubby boycott decrease the sale of oil and gas by a single litre or cubic metre? No. Did it deprive Israel of a single bullet? No. But it did convince Baillie Gifford that the fastidious literary set was more trouble than it was worth, leaving Edinburgh, Hay, Cheltenham and six other festivals with funding black holes. While most festivals have recovered, the boycott merely imperilled opportunities for fellow authors to promote their work.
The same Zero Benefit to the Real World model applies to Rooney’s PA spectacle. Will her novels’ withdrawal from British bookshops improve the lot of Palestinians a jot? This grandstanding appears to have nothing to do with Palestinians and everything to do with moral vanity. The gambit is attention-seeking self-aggrandisement. (It’s working. I’m bolstering Rooney’s rep right now.) Real virtue entails action with some small chance of helping the people on whose behalf it was ostensibly taken.
Maybe Rooney will still scrounge a few quid from her paltry savings to toss a proscribed organisation. But does Palestine Action have any effect on the Middle East? The outfit comprises a small, self-righteous group of halfwits in a small island nation itself with no influence on Israeli policy. During a violent 2024 assault on Elbit Systems, the group did over £1m in criminal damage and fractured a police officer’s spine with a sledgehammer.
I challenge you to construct a cause-and-effect narrative that demonstrates how these childish, spiteful ructions in faraway Britain have improved conditions in Gaza by a smidgeon.
Given the woman’s very occupation relies on creativity, Rooney’s pet cause is disappointingly trite, especially for an Irish national. This year, I appeared in two festivals in Ireland, where support for Palestinians, with zilch to do with the Republic, has grown crazed, irrational, manic – even hysterical. Palestinian flags on every lamppost. The signing queue for Avi Shlaim’s Genocide in Gaza out the door and round the corner.
Yet this Irish advocacy is perfectly pointless, reminiscent of the mass trooping about for Black Lives Matter in 2020, when European protests hadn’t the weensiest effect on policing in Minneapolis. This variety of Left-wing activism isn’t driven by a desire to affect the outside world positively. It aspires to a cosy self-regard and parades trendy political credentials. It’s all about me, me, me.
In a London synagogue, a Jewish David stands up to the Green Party’s Goliath
MEANWHILE, THE UK’s “little” David, Highgate Synagogue, steps forward.
The Greens’ Goliath, who passed the Zionism equals racism motion, sent a letter via Councillor Mark Blake, leader of Haringey Green Council, to the rabbi and chairpersons of the synagogue in his area.
He was trying to reassure them about the implications of the party’s disgraceful stance on Zionism and what it means for the local Jewish community. Everything was going to be fine.
This is the usual response of a coward. Having inflicted the blow, the antisemite then goes back to hide behind the parapet with false assurances. This is what Blake did.
Highgate responded with both barrels: “We reject your assurances. You make us unsafe.”
“You may see no connection between the ceaseless vilification of Israel, the blood libels that you and your party regularly trot out, and the hostility to Jews in this country, but we do.”
“We take it from tone and content (of your letter) that you are deeply embarrassed with the decision taken by your party to not only brand Zionism as racism but to call for the eradication by any means necessary, including violence, of the only Jewish state, the only practicing democracy in the Middle East and home to half of the world’s Jewish population…”
“This (motion) has been publicly celebrated by the Haringey branch of the Greens party, aligning itself with Hamas, a genocidal, homophobic, misogynistic, and Islamist terrorist organization.
“This synagogue has had close relatives who were victims of October 7. And let there be no doubt the love of Zion is integral. The threat of the Greens is an ignorant and one-sided view, and we expect you to resign from it.”
The wagons are circled, the war continues.
There is no room for weaseling around, and Highgate Synagogue has sent a message – not just to our enemies who come in many guises, but also to the leaders of the community too often showing themselves inexplicably obsequious. Polite overtures often fall on deaf ears.
During the High Holy Days, government officials were given jars of honey to wish them a sweet new year. Their response was the imposition of sanctions and the desire to disestablish the state of Israel.
Our nation produces brave Davids, not timid Sauls.
As Elie Wiesel said in his oft-repeated guidance: “Stand up, do not stay quiet. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.”
From Ian:
Brendan O'Neill:
How ‘Palestine’ conquered France
This is why the omnipresence of the Palestine flag matters – it confirms France is being consumed by the flames of anti-Westernism, by a nihilistic disdain for the very virtues of our civilisation. For that is what the so-called Palestine cause now embodies – not concern for the Palestinian people but contempt for ‘the West’. Not a desire for a ceasefire in the Middle East but a longing for fire here at home.
Some of us have argued for a while that the Islamo-left’s hysterical, disproportionate, bigoted and at times demented loathing for the Jewish State is proof that Israel has been made into the whipping boy of modernity, into the scapegoat, the sin-eater, of the West and all its supposed crimes. That the birthplace of the Enlightenment is now being burnt down by mobs draped in the Palestine flag proves this beyond doubt.
As one commentator notes, the ‘Palestinian cause’ seems to have become ‘a symbol of protest against Western institutions, national identities and political establishments’, even in situations that ‘have nothing to do with Israel or the Palestinians’. It’s the great, mad omnicause – a raging engine of grievance that absorbs every local resentment and every anti-Western pathology into a single, holy crusade. The actual geopolitics of the Levant are irrelevant to the Palestinianism that has swept the West, except, of course, that many of these people long for the annihilation of the Jewish State as a proxy for Western sin. What Palestinianism really adds up to is a cult of self-loathing. The keffiyeh is the mask the death of the Enlightenment wears.
This is the intifada coming home. The West’s craven failure to hold the moral line after 7 October, its indulgence of the Islamo-left mobs who hailed Hamas and libelled Israel, has started a fire of anti-civilisational hysteria that it will be incredibly difficult to put out. The nation that erodes its borders, tells newcomers their culture is just as valid as ours, fails to assimilate its foreign-origin youths and coaches its own young to feel shame over their national history is a nation that has signed its own death warrant.
Gavin Mortimer at the Spectator made a striking observation. The far-left agitators in France are mostly white, while the looters and cop-fighters ‘appear to be of immigrant background’. ‘The people seen on television forcing their way into the city halls of Marseille and Lille were mainly white’, he said, where the store invaders of Paris and Bordeaux were non-white. This is the New France. The New Europe, in fact. A place where there are youths who have no real roots in society, and youths whose roots have been violently torn up by institutions that have incited them into national self-loathing. Youths who are unassimilated, and youths who are from here but are constantly taught to hate ‘here’.
Entitled whites, young Muslim irritants, foreign-born louts, Islamist troublemakers, post-Enlightenment leftists and sanctimonious pricks who hide their hatred for the West behind a love of Palestine – that’s France now. Who’s next? Germany? Britain? We have so much work to do.
How “Globalize the Intifada” Came to France’s Streets
Israel has seen the devastation and destruction of intifadas firsthand, with buses and cafes attacked by suicide bombers that left countless people dead, injured, and traumatized. The call to globalize such a catastrophe reveals the dark desire to spread that same violence beyond Israel’s borders.
This is especially true in France, where despite the Jewish population representing less than one percent, antisemitic incidents account for 53 percent of all anti-religious acts. And as the protests spread, Jewish institutions are likely to continue to be a target. It is for that reason that in the midst of the protests in Paris, a synagogue was vandalized. In another incident in Marseille, a journalist noted that only Jewish businesses were attacked and set ablaze.
But the trespassing, vandalism, and destruction of property do not stop at a synagogue. Those protesting in the streets of France have frequently found common ground in hostility toward Israel, the Jewish people, and the systems and framework of Western civilization, including the country they are protesting. As such, the Palestinian flag and slogans have been a primary marker at these initially anti-government protests in France and Europe more broadly. Whereas the Palestinian cause has been turned into a vehicle for the radical left to express deeper anti-Western and anti-Jewish grievances, the same protests provide Islamist movements an opportunity to bring the symbols and rhetoric of a far-away conflict closer to enemies at home.
The supposed interconnectivity of these previously unrelated causes led Greta Thunberg, who previously traded her climate activism for the publicity yacht that attempted to challenge Israel’s naval blockade of Gaza, to join the protestors in France. With a keffiyeh draped across her shoulders, Thunberg, who was “incredibly proud” of the protestors, insisted that all protest movements “need to be united” because they face the “same enemy,” which is an “extremely destructive system.”
Ultimately, the protests are a telling sign of how the pro-Palestinian movement is no longer confined to demonstrations explicitly concerned with Palestinians, Israel, or the war against Hamas. The Palestinian flag, symbols, and slogans being chanted have become attached to other social or political movements, regardless of relevance, making the cause a prop for broader anti-Israel or anti-Western activism.
The integration of such symbols has become so normalized that “globalizing the intifada” is no longer merely a slogan chanted without understanding its words, but a European reality. The result is the exportation and glorification of a campaign of violence onto the streets of France.
Don’t Tell Me London Wasn’t Warned
In August 1994, The Independent reported Jewish students’ complaints about intimidation and literature invoking the killing of Jews. Farid Kassim, quoted as a spokesman for the organizers of a Wembley conference, rejected allegations of antisemitism and said the quotations had been taken out of context. Omar Bakri Muhammad was identified as Hizb ut-Tahrir’s national organizer.
The report also recorded Muhammad condemning the London bombings and the authorities saying there was no evidence of terrorist attacks by the group’s followers. That did not dispose of the concerns about what was being preached and circulated.
By the time I photographed Abu Hamza, officials were familiar with him too. A released Home Office document, dated September 11, 2000, described his activities, his Supporters of Sharia organization and his extreme views. A year before the attacks in America, he was already the subject of government paperwork.
In November 2001, answering questions concerning Al-Muhajiroun and Omar Bakri Muhammad, Home Office minister John Denham said enforcement units were “monitoring and evaluating” information that might support prosecution.
There were investigations, and eventually prosecutions. The government’s later account of the Hamza case described earlier decisions that the evidence was insufficient, followed by material supporting charges in 2004. Knowing that somebody holds extreme views is not the same as having the evidence to prosecute them. I understand that. But the official record makes it impossible to pretend the concerns had never reached the people responsible for acting on them.
What I witnessed on London’s streets contributed to my decision to move to Israel in 2007. London remained the city where I grew up, learned my profession and spent much of my working life. Leaving did not remove that attachment. It is why the photographs still trouble me, and why there is anger in the pieces I write about the city today.
I look at today’s images with memories of what I photographed decades ago. I remember the people raising concerns, the public arguments and the assurances that the authorities were paying attention. My archive gives those memories faces, places and dates.
Outside the embassy that day, nobody needed an intelligence briefing to establish that an Israeli flag was burning. It was happening in front of us. I was recording it, and the police decided that my taking pictures risked antagonizing the people doing it.
Watching the rioting and looting in Paris over the past few days, I find myself worrying about London again. The immediate causes are different, but the sight of another European capital struggling with violence on its streets brings back uncomfortable memories. I fear London could face scenes like these. That is my judgment, shaped by years of standing behind a camera in crowds that the authorities knew perfectly well were there.
The police were warned repeatedly. So were the security services and successive governments. Jewish communal organizations kept raising concerns, and the public record shows how long those concerns had been reaching officials. There were investigations and prosecutions, but there are still questions about the years in between. I remember being told to stop taking photographs because I was “antagonising them.” Looking at those photographs now, I wonder how much more people were expected to tolerate before their warnings carried sufficient weight.
Should London face the kind of scenes we are watching in Paris, I will have very little patience for anyone in authority who claims they could not have seen trouble coming.
From Ian:
David Collier:
Inside Occupied Territory at the Green Party Conference
I attended the Green Party conference, spending time inside the conference halls and observing demonstrations outside. I tried to speak to as many Green Party members as possible. When I dive into sewers such as this, I rarely rush to publish. I need time to recover, as well as to analyse footage and digest and understand what I have experienced. My goal is to try to bring deeper insight to what is unfolding.
As always, I bring receipts. In these two photos, you can see me alongside Mothin Ali, Deputy Leader of the Green Party, and Ismail Patel, the Islamist Founder and Chair of Friends of Al Aqsa and one of the key people responsible for the hate marches that have plagued our streets for years.
Green Party conference selfies. Ismail Patel and Mothin Ali
To be fair, I doubt they knew who I was.
The Ignorant Cult of Hate
Lee Harpin captured footage of a group of Green Party members chanting “all of Palestine is Arab” in Arabic after the motion passed.
Harpin also uploaded two videos in which he spoke to Green Party members who had supported the motion. I identified both of those involved. In one video, Lambeth’s Serena Oliver explains that people who support Israel are the real antisemites, before outrageously suggesting that Jewish people who associate their Jewish identity with a belief in Jewish self-determination are the ones who need to educate themselves.
It is hard to imagine white people on the left dismissing the self-identity of any other minority group in this fashion. As if to prove she has been totally brainwashed by ahistorical garbage, Oliver says Jews should learn about how the “Zionist project was linking with the Nazis.” Turning her Holocaust revisionism dial up to maximum, she implies that “history has been rewritten” to suggest otherwise.
It may shock her to learn that Jews at Auschwitz were not divided into Zionists and non-Zionists before being selected for the gas chambers.
The second video features Alex Blower from Peterborough. Blower was one of those singing “Palestine is Arab” in Arabic, although it is unclear whether he knew what he was saying. Then, speaking straight to camera, Blower suggests that “Zionism has to go” and that the motion “empowers UK people”. He tells them to “go out and fight” Zionism. Stressing how important this mission is, he says “we cannot have a world with Zionism”, adding that the future of humanity depends on it.
This is unhinged, irrational hate, fuelled by ignorance and targeting the only Jewish state in the world. This is what the Green Party has unleashed – and it is their motion the party adopted.
Standing Next to a Jew
This movement evolved within Corbynism, but many of those involved believed Corbyn was too weak. They are more forceful in their antisemitic ideology, more confident in their manner, and now supported by an army of arrogant, cocky young people who truly believe Israelis are the new Nazis. A generation educated through doomscrolling classes on Instagram or TikTok.
“How on earth can we be antisemitic?” they will respond. “The leader of our party is Jewish.”
Finding Jewish outliers to hide behind is standard practice for left-wing antisemitic movements.
History is littered with examples. The early communists created a special group, the Yevsektsiya, for just this purpose. The Soviets did it again in 1983, creating the Anti-Zionist Committee and placing Jewish figures at its forefront to deflect accusations of antisemitism.
The Soviet propaganda statement that accompanied the 1983 launch stated that Zionism “concentrates in itself extreme nationalism, chauvinism and racial intolerance, justification for territorial seizures and annexations, armed adventurism, the cult of political permissiveness and impunity, demagoguery and ideological diversions, filthy maneuvers and perfidy.” It also rejected attempts by Zionists to call their opposition to Zionism “antisemitic.”
That 1983 Soviet propaganda statement is mirrored in the Green Party’s 2026 ‘Zionism is Racism’ motion.
Within ten years of the committee’s formation, the Soviet Union had collapsed, its borders had opened and approximately 1.5 million Jews had escaped, most of them to Israel. So much for the committee’s insistence that there was no Jewish problem in the Soviet Union.
Yet the strategy is still deployed successfully on the left. Corbyn’s inner circle created Jewish Voice for Labour. It is no coincidence that, after Corbyn’s defeat, ‘Jewish Voice for Labour’ changed its name to ‘Jewish Voice for Liberation’ and some of its founders became Green Party members. I saw JVL executive member Jonathan Rosenhead at the conference. In the video below, Mike Cushman, a JVL founder and now a member of ‘Jewish Greens’, talks about how happy he is that the motion passed:
This is always how it is done: find fringe members of the Jewish community and use them as cover.
Andy Burnham, knowing he was going to swing left to chase the Islamist vote, deployed Ed Miliband in the Foreign Office to make criticism of his anti-Israel policies more difficult. The Green Party chose Zack Polanski.
Once that protection is in place, fringe anti-Zionist groups form around the larger movement to reinforce it:
Green Party Jews against Zionism
For Jews, the strategy is transparent. They know most of these token Jews already have one foot, if not both, outside the community. But non-Jews are left scratching their heads, and this confusion helps to blunt the voices of Jews who speak out in opposition. After all, how can a movement be antisemitic if Jews are there defending it?
Someone should ask the 1.5 million Jews who fled the Soviet Union.
The antisemites have invaded and occupied the Green Party.
I am unsure whether the Green Party has the numbers or the energy to oust them.
When Sunday arrived, I could not wait to get home.
Predictions of Gaza’s death toll were wrong - why is no one being held accountable?
Gaza’s Health Ministry, an arm of Hamas with every incentive to inflate, reported 455 malnutrition deaths across nearly two years of war, fewer than Somalia’s famine killed in half a day at its height.
By the IPC’s own threshold, two deaths per 10,000 people a day, the declared famine should have killed about 9,000. Hamas’s own ministry counted fewer than 200, across all of Gaza, fewer than the US records in four days.
Rafah followed a familiar pattern. Before Israel entered the city in May 2024, the Palestinian Authority’s Foreign Ministry warned an assault would bring “the annihilation of about 1.5 million Palestinians.” The EU’s then-foreign-policy chief, Josep Borrell, scoffed at evacuating civilians: “Where? To the moon?” Within three weeks, about a million people had evacuated Rafah. There was no annihilation and no apology.
The pattern is older than this war, and it only ever runs in one direction.
In April 2002, during Israel’s operation in Jenin, PA negotiator Saeb Erekat told CNN that Israeli troops had killed more than 500 people. The UN secretary-general’s own report later counted 52 Palestinians dead, at least half of them terrorists, along with 23 Israeli soldiers, and found the 500 figure unsubstantiated. By then, the “Jenin massacre” had entered the world’s vocabulary.
Operation Cast Lead followed the same arc. Hamas initially acknowledged fewer than 50 dead combatants. The since-discredited 2009 Goldstone Report cited a Palestinian Centre for Human Rights tally identifying just 236 of the dead as combatants. Then, in November 2010, Hamas interior minister Fathi Hammad acknowledged that up to 700 men from Hamas’s military wing and security forces had been killed, close to Israel’s count of 709.
Abroad, the dead were nearly all civilians. At home, they were Hamas martyrs.
On October 17, 2023, Hamas’s health authorities instantly blamed Israel for the Ahli hospital explosion and reported nearly 500 dead. American, British, French, and Canadian intelligence assessments concluded that a misfired Palestinian rocket was the likely cause; US intelligence put the toll at a fraction of the ministry’s tally. The New York Times later conceded that its early coverage had relied too heavily on Hamas’s claims.
The progressive Left, which prides itself on following the science, rarely asks why so many catastrophic predictions and claims about Israel fail. A growing faction of the populist Right, the so-called “woke Right,” recycles Hamas figures and UN forecasts it would ridicule on any other subject.
The method works because the claims and predictions do their work before they can be tested. Put Israel in the dock. Push for sanctions or an arms embargo. Pressure Israel, but not those sworn to its destruction. By the time the evidence arrives, the damage is done.
Tom Fletcher still runs the UN’s humanitarian office. The IPC has not retracted its 2025 famine declaration. Newsrooms still headline the forecasts and bury the accounting.
In most fields, predictions this consequential would at least produce an audit. When the subject is Israel, they produce the next failed prediction.
If Gaza Is "Genocide," What Was Tokyo?
On March 9, 1945, close to 300 American B-29s bombed Japan under cover of darkness, dropping 1,665 tons of napalm incendiaries on Tokyo. Between 80,000 and 100,000 people died in a single night. More than 60 Japanese cities followed.
Yet almost nobody calls the firebombing of Japan "genocide," and for good reason. Genocide requires intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group "as such." America aimed to completely defeat a regime that murdered millions of civilians across Asia, massacred Nanjing, ran the "comfort women" system of sexual slavery on an industrial scale, and performed human experiments under Unit 731 - a regime whose cruelty rivaled that of the Nazis.
The clearest proof of intent came after the surrender. America occupied Japan, gave it a democratic constitution, fed its people and poured money into rebuilding it. A country bent on destroying the Japanese people, as such, does not spend seven years rebuilding them.
In Gaza, instead of fire, Israel used precision munitions. Instead of surprise, it warned civilians by leaflet, text message and phone call before strikes, and opened evacuation corridors. It moved food and medicine into the territory it was fighting in. It accepted losses no army in 1945 would have accepted to spare enemy civilians.
The law is clear about who bears responsibility when one side hides its war machine among civilians. The 1977 Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions forbids using civilians to shield military targets and requires each side to keep military objectives away from populated areas as much as possible. Hamas spent 16 years doing the reverse. The presence of civilians does not make a military target immune. If it did, then every terrorist group and tyranny would win every war simply by hiding among its people.
America burned dozens of Japanese cities to the ground and is remembered, correctly, as the nation that defeated a monstrous regime and helped rebuild its people into a free and prosperous ally. Israel faced a more entrenched version of the same problem, chose far greater restraint, and stands accused of "genocide."
There is one more lesson from 1945: Japan became a free and peaceful nation only after its militarist regime was totally defeated, disarmed and replaced, and its schools stopped teaching children to die for the emperor. Nobody suggested leaving Japan's rulers in place to rearm.
From Ian:
'Now is not a time to tremble': Casey Babb's Moral Case for Zionism
Babb's new book argues Zionism is not the colonialist or racist caricature commonly presented by its critics, but a Jewish national-liberation movement
No part of this book is me pontificating about Zionism or how to live a Jewish life or a Zionist life. In fact, as I mention in the book, the recommendations I make in the book are for me, too.
That said, one of the ideas I raise is to remember that the Jewish people and our allies have never been stronger, never in history, and that now is not a time to tremble. There’s a distinction between fear that sharpens your attention, which I think is what we need now, and fear that paralyzes action, and the second kind is the enemy of Jewish life in virtually every era.
There’s no need for us to retreat inwards. We need to really remember who we are, embrace our story, and all that comes with it, and muster up a new level of chutzpah and courage, because that’s what it’s going to take to get through this. We cannot allow ourselves to fall victim to the gaslighting and the moral inversion that has characterized not just Jewish life, but most of our society the last number of years.
People need to know who they are, know the story that they’re part of, and know that they aren’t alone. Another thing, is to do Zionist things. Help people in your community. Start living a more Zionist life. There’s a temptation to orient ideas and day-to-day living around opposition and defensiveness. I understand that, but we can’t allow that to shape who we become. That’s no way to live. We have to say yes to things like Shabbat. We have to say yes to the Hebrew language. We have to say yes to Israeli culture, have the full fullest expression of what living a Zionist life actually means – a genuine abundance of meaning, of connection, of beauty, of purpose, of pride, and of exhilaration.
How is your book different from Alan Dershowitz’s “The Case for Israel”?
OK, so that was published 25 years ago and much has changed since then. Too much. Dershowitz’s is principally a prosecutorial defence of Israel against historical, legal, and political accusations. It is legalistic and forensic.
I make a more affirmative moral, historical, and civilizational argument for Zionism itself. I speak of dignity, belonging, return, liberation, tikkun olam, democratic pluralism, Jewish historical continuity. He speaks of legal context, double standards, anti-Israel demonization. I’m not refuting charges against Israel; I’m building a case for Zionism as a morally serious, positive ideal – one of the most morally inspiring stories and ideas in all of history.
I think there’s a lot to be said about keeping Zionism alive and modernizing it and renewing it. If Dershowitz’s book asks, “Why is Israel not what its detractors say it is?” mine asks, “What valuable moral ideas are its detractors failing to see?”
'American Intellectual Antisemitism': Shai Davidai exposes universities’ deep-rooted antisemitism
In 1919, my grandmother applied for admission to Barnard College of Columbia University. The notoriously antisemitic dean at the time, Virginia Gildersleeve, told her she would not be notified of her acceptance until after the start of freshman year, in an attempt to encourage her to choose a different school. My grandmother stood her ground and entered the graduating class of ’23 only a few days late.
In ousted Columbia Prof. Shai Davidai’s exposé, American Intellectual Antisemitism, I learned that Gildersleeve, who supported Nazi Germany’s expulsion of Jews from academia, was taking her cue from the higher-ups at Columbia.
“After Jewish enrollment reached 40% of the incoming class of 1919… the university implemented a series of exclusionary policies explicitly designed to curb the presence of Jews on campus,” he writes.
Jew-hatred is nothing new in the Ivy League. It just takes on new forms.
“American Intellectual Antisemitism” is the term Davidai coined for what he defines as “a modern and insidious form of Jew-hatred that cloaks itself in progressive jargon and academic rhetoric,” using the “language of social justice” to disguise bigotry as intellectual virtue, and constitutes “a direct assault on Western liberal values.”
Davidai became known throughout the world after he posted a long letter on social media on October 18, 2023, in reaction to vile and violent post-October 7 events – and top-tier American university leaders’ shocking support, or at least lack of condemnation, of those pro-terror, anti-Jewish incidents.
'We cannot protect your child[ren]'
“I want this message to get to every parent who sent their kids to Columbia University, entrusted their kids and their children’s safety with us. I want this message to get to every parent in America who sent their kids to New York University, to Harvard, to Stanford, to Berkeley, and I want you to know one thing: We cannot protect your child[ren],” he wrote, calling Columbia University President Minouche Shafik “a coward.”
Over the following year, he organized rallies, appeared on prime-time television, and testified before Congress.
Davidai paid dearly for his ongoing peaceful activism on behalf of beleaguered Jewish students, organized with “a small but dedicated group of Jewish students, postdocs, faculty, staff, and alumni.” He and his family received death threats, and he was barred from teaching his award-winning business course. He was derided by detractors as a “genocidal maniac,” “a hate-mongering charlatan,” and an “extremely dangerous” professor.
A year after the Hamas-led massacres in Israel, when Davidai’s video of the unchecked disruption of a campus memorial service for October 7 victims garnered over a million views in a few hours, Columbia’s administration suspended him – not the perpetrators – from campus.
“The decision’s timing told me everything I needed to know about Columbia’s priorities,” he writes.
Blending a firsthand account with broader analysis, his book exposes the radical politics, ideological indoctrination, institutional indifference, leadership failures, and moral unraveling of American academia.
The timing of the book’s release coincides with the beginning of another school year. “Across the nation, more than 1.5 million new students are stepping into lecture halls for the first time, joining student organizations, and attending campus events where the dogmas of American Intellectual Antisemitism are paraded as moral virtue,” he writes.
Mother referred to Prevent for ‘over-identifying with Israel’
When Holly Passmore heard a knock at her front door at about 11am on July 4 last year, she assumed it was an Amazon delivery.
Instead, the 44-year-old mother-of-two from County Durham found two plain-clothes police officers on her doorstep wanting to know why she had recently visited Israel.
“They said it was a safeguarding matter,” recalled Ms Passmore, who cares for her nine-year-old son, Rex, who has severe autism, while studying for a master’s degree.
She assumed they were concerned she had taken her son into a war zone.
“I said, ‘Well, my son didn’t go to Israel. He stayed here with my mum and my daughter, who’s 20’,” she recalled. But the female officer replied: “No this is about you – because you may be at risk of manipulation.”
The officers from Durham Constabulary were investigating an anonymous referral to Prevent, the Government’s counter-extremism programme.
Ms Passmore suspected her support for Israel had prompted the referral. It was only months later, when she obtained police records through a subject access request, that her suspicions were confirmed.
A police intelligence report seen by The Telegraph reveals that the referral said she “over-identified with the conflict between Israel and Palestine” and was “supportive of Israel to the point that she has travelled to Israel”.
It also described her as having “MH” – meaning mental health – issues and being “vulnerable to negative influence”.
“Nobody would describe me as vulnerable,” said Ms Passmore, who combines caring for her son Rex with studying for a master’s degree in Holocaust studies at the University of Haifa.
Ms Passmore said that, while she has health concerns, including severe endometriosis and adenomyosis, and has been diagnosed with ADHD and autism, she has no mental health issues.
“I think they knew I’m not vulnerable but they wanted to monitor me because I was advocating for Israel,” she told The Telegraph.
“When they came to the door they didn’t discuss my health. They only asked about Israel.”
The police intelligence report Ms Passmore obtained under data protection laws acknowledged that there “is no CT [counter-terror] concern with an individual being supportive of Israel as a democracy and it would not be a CT concern for a person to travel there”.
From Ian:
Simon Schama:
Jew hatred feeds on lies. The antidote is truth
Antisemitism is now the fastest metastasising race hatred in the Western world. Eighty years after the end of the war that exterminated two-thirds of their European population, Jews are experiencing a drastic contraction of citizenship. They no longer enjoy the assumed right, for instance, to wear in public what clothing when and where they wish; to gather for prayer or weddings or bar mitzvahs without the necessity of armed guards in front of their place of worship.
Should Jews have the temerity to show up near a pro-Palestinian demonstration carrying a sign indicating their allegiance, they are the ones threatened with arrest unless they remain silent or, preferably, remove themselves altogether from the scene. In April 2024, the head of the Campaign Against Antisemitism was told that looking “quite openly Jewish” near to a demonstration (he was wearing a kippah) constituted “a breach of the peace”.
Never mind that this dramatic loss of security in the Diaspora makes the case for Zionism more effectively than anything Herzl or Ben-Gurion wrote (though in many ways it rehearses their prophecies and warnings); the pile-on continues unabated. College faculties are commanded by student demonstrators to cleanse themselves of suspect – or, worse, professed – Zionists.
An undergraduate leader of marches and rallies at my own Columbia University in New York excitedly proclaimed on video that he would like to go out and murder as many Zionists as he could. A British government review in June 2026 revealed National Health Service workers saying they would refuse to treat Israeli patients, even if they were on the verge of death. Medical staff at a hospital in Bankstown, Australia, were filmed performing a throat-slitting gesture, indicating how much they looked forward to prime opportunities to hasten the death of any Israeli patients.
Everywhere, Jews have been instructed that they cannot expect to remain in cultural or social institutions in which they have participated, should they not publicly and vehemently repudiate their ancestral homeland. Installed on this cultural and social selection ramp are the arbitrators of which Jews may pass this acceptability test and which not.
In Italy, Keshet Italia and Keshet Europe, Jewish LGBTQ organisations, were forbidden from joining a Pride march in Rome for insufficiently denouncing Israeli genocide. The Israeli presence at the Eurovision Song Contest was enough for Spain, the Netherlands, Slovenia, Iceland and Ireland to pull out of the event, claiming in high dudgeon that it would be morally tainted. Purges and exclusions, active or passive, are now the norm.
On a New York subway car in 2024, a shouty pro-Palestine militant demanded to know whether there were any Zionists aboard, as they would have to exit before the train could proceed. In November the following year, supporters of the Maccabi Tel Aviv football team were banned by Birmingham City Council from attending a Europa League match against Aston Villa on the grounds that they had demonstrated a thirst for exceptional violence at an earlier match in Amsterdam.
The council acted on information supplied by the West Midlands Police; the fact that the information turned out to be false did not prevent the chief constable from repeating it to Parliament. In January 2026 it was revealed that the WMP had had intelligence about local groups planning to arm themselves and target Maccabi fans but failed to disclose this to the MPs.
On 3 June 2026, an unhinged woman on the C train subway in New York shouted that “Jews are eating kids”, adding that she could smell the children on a nearby Orthodox woman whom she went on to assault.
Appearing at an anti-Israel rally in the heart of a conspicuously Jewish district of Toronto, Abbas Hamze – who has been an instructor at Canadian colleges, including the University of Niagara Falls – spoke of Jews “practising black magic” and raping and eating children. The fleeting period when social media platforms made an ostensible effort to block evidently harmful lies from multiplying has given way to the higher imperative of clicks, triggered not by conscientious resistance to conspiracy and malevolent fantasy but by encouraging its profitable sensationalism.
The road to revenue is lined with lies and Jews are its run-over casualties.
In the digital universe, the revelation of outlandish falsehoods is no guarantee of their impotence, much less their disappearance. Long gone are the times when John Milton, arguing in Areopagitica for an unlicensed press, could write, “Let her [Truth] and Falsehood grapple; whoever knew Truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter?”
The Silenced Howl of Howard Jacobson
Is a brilliant new novel about Britain after October 7 being cashiered?
Many of Draxler’s demoralizing and deranging experiences are inspired by real events, among them teenagers filmed tearing down posters of October 7 hostages, London police officers telling “obviously Jewish” people to get off the street lest they provoke Gaza marchers into violence by their mere presence, and upper-middle-class activists vandalizing paintings to protest Zionism. Even so, there is a surreal quality to Draxler’s experiences. He is a far from reliable narrator, and even he wonders whether his Holocaust-shadowed childhood is distorting or intensifying his perceptions of post–October 7 London.
Does his daughter really have “Kill all Zionists” tattooed around her belly button? Could it be that it was his own brother, not roving anti-Semites, who daubed “Yid 1” on his car while he sleepily kept guard outside his mother’s house? And on the night of October 7 itself, did Draxler really hear his neighbors chorus “gas the Jews” as they “popped prosecco corks”? In real life, there were no reports of such an incident in Britain, as bad as things became in the days after October 7.2
Draxler is well aware that his mind is swimming in paranoia, but he also knows that there are sound historical reasons for a Jew like himself to be fearful, and that on a more local scale, there really are people who are out to get him.
In one of the richest parts of the book, Draxler has a friendly conversation with a Syrian Arab doctor, the father of one of his pupils. (Draxler has carefully made sure that a copy of the Koran is prominent on his office bookshelf.) The physician tells him about the hadith concerning the Gharqad tree. He explains that during the End of Days, when the Faithful are in their final war with the Jews and the very rocks and stones call out “O, Muslim, there is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him,” only the Gharqad tree will refuse to take part and stay silent. But then, says the doctor, “because Jews seek safety behind Gharqad trees we will know where to find them.” The doctor says he doesn’t subscribe to this teaching; he just wants Draxler to know what he is up against.
But Draxler’s predicament is not just a question of fear and the reasons for it. He is dealing with overwhelming disillusionment. He (like Jacobson, presumably) has always put his faith in the morally improving effects of knowledge, education, and culture, a faith that has become untenable in the face of campus bloodlust and bigotry: “Teach people and Belsen will never happen again, the world said in 1945. We forgot that it depended on what we taught.” Far from a source of hope, the young generation programmed in the West’s universities possesses an ugly moral certainty as profound as its ignorance. Language itself can no longer be trusted: “The language I’d been reading all my life assumed a common enterprise of imagination and compassion. Words were there to help us navigate our way to the truth. Not any more.”
Howl is not without flaws. Despite Jacobson’s acute understanding of the various forms of anti-Semitism, he does not and maybe cannot portray a convincing anti-Semite. Then there is his own predilection for Jewish stereotype. Draxler, like most of Jacobson’s male stand-ins, is proudly ignorant of the natural world, compulsively argumentative, impractical, and obsessed in a quasi-Oedipal way with his mother. Perhaps in the 1960s, when Jacobson’s comic sensibilities were taking shape, it was a cute act of aesthetic rebellion for Jewish authors to favor male Jewish protagonists who were hairy, sweaty, neurotic, self-conscious, unathletic, sexually perverse, and socially awkward. As quintessentially Jewish as those qualities may have seemed in the era of Lenny Bruce, today they feel like tired shtick.
None of this diminishes what Jacobson has achieved with Howl, a comic novel that is as serious and important as it is funny. Its implications reach far beyond Britain and the predicament of its Jewry—a predicament that has actually darkened since the book was written, as the Manchester synagogue attack in October 2025 made clear. Howl is the Catch-22 of the post–October 7 era, the first major artistic response to that horror and the ways in which it has changed the world.
It is therefore all the more bizarre—and troubling—that the novel could not find a mainstream American publisher.
That failure is so striking that it has become a key exhibit in the charge that mainstream American publishing has become institutionally hostile to Jewish authors and Jewish books (with the exception of those that are explicitly hostile to Zionism and/or reek of anti-Semitism).
According to a widely circulated article in the Wall Street Journal, there is considerable evidence of something that looks like an informal boycott in the publishing industry: “Published writers with overtly Jewish books say their agents have dropped them from their roster; writers are being asked by editors to purge Jewish or Israeli elements from their books.”
Jacobson’s mixed commercial record over four decades and the general decline of the literary novel could make for a plausible market-based explanation for the failure of Howl to find a U.S. publisher—if it weren’t so topical, so timely, so well-reviewed in the UK, and, above all, so damned good.
A publisher would have to be an idiot not to see the commercial potential of a comic masterpiece like Howl. Given that most heads of major publishing houses are not idiots, it does look, troublingly, as if some other, less creditable factor has been at play.
At best, it could reflect the cowardice of politically correct middle-aged executives who fear more than anything condemnation by their intolerant young staff. Certainly, it would be interesting to know what influenced the decision-makers at Simon & Schuster, which previously published two of Jacobson’s novels (Kalooki Nights and The Act of Love). It is not as if S&S has been afraid of publishing politically controversial authors. It has, after all, bought the novels of the Arab-American writer Susan Abulhawa, whose overtly anti-Semitic remarks have been condemned as “reprehensible” even by Zohran Mamdani.
Eventually, Wicked Son, the small publishing house that has inaugurated a new line of books specifically from the list of those by Jewish authors who find their work summarily rejected by the big firms, bought Howl. It is apparently due to come out in 2027. The fact that no mainstream American publisher would touch Howl is a disturbing confirmation that Ferdinand Draxler’s October 8 perceptions of a world changed for the worse are spot-on: “I had suffered no loss but the space I moved in, like the air I breathed, had acquired a different density.”
Seth Mandel:
You Hate To See It
Though the Times gushes that Mamdani could have been built in a lab, he is running into a problem: his voters believed him.
Mamdani was always looking for ways to up the ante—rhetorically, at least. And so he infamously told socialist activists that the Jewish state was to be blamed for every local New York City problem. If you see police brutality, he mused, picture an IDF soldier lacing the cop’s boots. Then he insisted he would abuse his office by directing the NYPD to arrest a foreign head of government, the prime minister of the one and only Jewish state.
These were ludicrous claims, and they suggested Mamdani was very much a bigoted con man who would try to sell New Yorkers the air they breathed. But people believed him, because they hated Israel enough to believe anything.
And what is one thing you’d expect of a man who blamed Jews for NYPD misbehavior and who claimed total control over the police force as if it were his praetorian guard? Of course: His rabid supporters want the head of Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch, who wears a Star of David pendant around her neck.
Demands to purge high-profile Jews who haven’t renounced their own people are not unprecedented, of course. But rarely are they so nakedly proposed in New York, home to more Jews than any city outside Israel (and most cities inside Israel).
Of course, the pro-Palestinian fire-the-Jewess campaign is part of a larger menu of items on which anti-Zionists seek to gorge themselves. As the Times notes, Mamdani “is being asked to fulfill an activist wish list unlike any delivered to mayors in the recent past. It includes abolishing the City University of New York Board of Trustees (over investments tied to Israel); intervening in the programming decisions of local synagogues; and halting any military shipments to Israel through the city’s major airports, which the mayor does not control.”
Why would they think he had control over U.S. foreign policy? Perhaps because he indicated that he had precisely those powers when he threatened to J. Edgar Hoover the NYPD on Bibi Netanyahu.
The reporting on this all suggests poor Zohran Mamdani has been put in a tough spot. But of course, that’s not true at all. Mamdani put himself in that spot. He deserves all of this. It is important, in fact, that an anti-Semitic power-hungry demagogue be brought back down to earth with simple politics.
Mamdani’s mob wants what it voted for. They won’t get it—not all of it—and Mamdani will look like what he is: a man who over-promised and under-prepared for a serious role in a democracy.
From Ian:
Bret Stephens:
Going Back to To Jerusalem and Back
Current events books tend to age poorly. Controversies fade. Trends that seem unstoppable in one decade are unexpectedly reversed in the next. Predictions based on extensive data and careful analysis nonetheless prove wrong. It’s hard to make sense of one’s time, or of its direction, while living within it.
Yet to read Saul Bellow’s To Jerusalem and Back a half century after its publication feels remarkably, almost disconcertingly, current. On a visit to Kiryat Arba, the Israeli settlement next to Hebron, Bellow is distressed by the sight of Jewish kids playing so close to the Palestinian town: “It’s when I see the children on their bikes that I feel most uneasy, knowing how much madness there is just over the horizon.” (Remember: This is the mid-1970s.) Speaking of settlements, Bellow worries about “ultra-Orthodox zealots who insist that to settle on the West Bank is their God-given right.” The occupation, he says, “is costly and embarrassing. Israel, born out of a national liberation movement, now seems to be denying the Palestinians their political liberties.” But the attitudes of Israel’s enemies aren’t far from his mind, either. He quotes Syria’s minister of defense urging his troops not only to butcher Jewish foes but to eat them. “Egyptian and Syrian leaders speak of the founding of Israel as ‘the original sin,’” Bellow writes. “Is this sin so great that it justifies not only slaughter but cannibalism?”
Turning to global perceptions of Israel, he relates a conversation he had over lunch with Yitzhak Rabin, then the prime minister. “The Arabs have succeeded in winning worldwide public support,” Bellow warns, and “Israel had better give some thought to the media intelligentsia in the United States.” Rabin, like Israeli leaders before and after, shrugs.
In Europe and the U.S., far-left critics of Israel “are not overtly anti-Semitic” but discuss the country using “the Marxist-Leninist categories: finance capital, colonialism, and imperialism.”
The Ford administration, along with prominent commentators who speak for it, are growing weary of what they see as Jerusalem’s recalcitrance in the face of American diplomatic maneuvers, leading Israelis to fret constantly about whether their only true ally is about to turn on them.
Then there’s the problem of historical ignorance, particularly of young people passing judgment on Middle East affairs. “Very few Americans,” Bellow writes, “seem to know, for instance, that when the U.N., in 1947, proposed the creation of two separate states, Jewish and Arab, the Jews accepted the provision for the political independence of the Palestinian Arabs. It was the Arab nations which rejected the U.N. plan.” Many French intellectuals agreed with the Arabs, Jean-Paul Sartre most of all, leading Bellow to note: “A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.”
As for the Israelis with whom Bellow spends time—not just political figures such as Rabin or Shimon Peres or Abba Eban but also kibbutzniks, Soviet émigrés, fellow novelists, Holocaust survivors, academics, masseurs and barbers, people of the left and others of the right—they were in 1976 very much what they are in 2026: brimming. Brimming with anxieties and hopes, recrimination and self-recrimination, opinions on every subject, profound doubts about the future matched by that unmistakable Israeli resoluteness. “Life in Israel is far from enviable, yet there is a clear purpose in it,” Bellow writes. “People are fighting for the society they have created, and for life and honor.”
If Bellow’s experience of Israel feels familiar, it’s a reminder that while much has happened in the intervening 50 years, little has changed. Threats from Egypt, Syria, and their proxies may no longer keep Israeli generals awake at night. Threats from Iran, Turkey, and their proxies do. The social tensions and splits that Bellow saw then—between the religious and secular, Israelis and Palestinians, critics of the occupation and defenders of it—remain more or less unchanged. Unchanged, too, is the volcanic hostility Israel arouses from its critics, so completely disproportionate to its place in the world or, even on the most invidious reading of its actions, the comparative scale of its alleged crimes.
Seth Mandel:
Anti-Semites Waste So Much of Our Time
You have to laugh at the “can spill over into hostility towards Jews” when the post is about encouraging anti-Israel “resistance” anywhere in the world one sees an Israeli buying a house. And of course the post ends with praise for the United Nations.
Back in J Street’s early days, its founder Jeremy Ben-Ami told the New York Times that the organization’s mission was to help Barack Obama, who was trying to put daylight between the U.S. and Israel: “Our No. 1 agenda item is to do whatever we can in Congress to act as the president’s blocking back.”
There are various practical effects this “blocking back” strategy has. One of those effects is to waste lots of everybody’s time.
I’ll explain. When a political figure emerges as a harsh critic of Israel, there is an instinctive circling of wagons around him, even when he don’t exactly radiate good faith.
Organizations like J Street that exist to point out Israel’s flaws don’t want anybody on their side of the aisle accused of anti-Semitism, because smart anti-Semites (I know, I know, that’s an oxymoron) will use the arguments already advanced by such groups. It gives them cover. They can say, “I’m just saying what these Jewish groups have already said.”
But anti-Semites obsess over Jews and Israel. And before long, that fixation asserts itself. They continue using the kind of rhetoric that a group like J Street might use—but they start using it all the time. Pretty soon they can talk about nothing else but the evils of the world’s one Jewish state. It’s a clear red flag that this person has an unhealthy concept of Jewish power in his head and self-pitying resentment in his heart.
That’s an explosive combination, and eventually it blows up. When that happens, crass anti-Jewish comments and actions start to show in place of the previously-measured “just anti-Zionism.” When that rhetorical escalation is criticized, the anti-Semite will toss aside all pretense and embrace the fame of podcasters and influencers who rally around them.
It will become obvious that those who initially raised concerns about them were right all along. At that point, partisan pressure groups will throw in the towel. They will condemn the rhetoric, after months (or years) of either silence or running interference for the now-obvious-anti-Semite.
Zohran Mamdani seems to finally have hit that point after his ghoulish statement and behavior on October 7. In the opinion of many liberal Jews in Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed is getting there, too. The defenses of Graham Platner’s Nazi tattoo—his Nazi tattoo—went on for months, during which time we were expected to pretend the Nazi tattoo didn’t have a very obvious explanation.
It is into this illustrious company that I guess we can finally place Francesca Albanese. For well over a decade Albanese has been making openly anti-Semitic comments. But her cheerleading for Hamas after October 7 really crossed a line for the Biden administration, which called her an anti-Semite. Even the secretary-general of the United Nations admitted she was “a horrible person.” Now there appears to be no one left with a sliver of mainstream legitimacy to defend her.
And all that was lost is time. What a waste of everyone’s time.You have to laugh at the “can spill over into hostility towards Jews” when the post is about encouraging anti-Israel “resistance” anywhere in the world one sees an Israeli buying a house. And of course the post ends with praise for the United Nations.
Back in J Street’s early days, its founder Jeremy Ben-Ami told the New York Times that the organization’s mission was to help Barack Obama, who was trying to put daylight between the U.S. and Israel: “Our No. 1 agenda item is to do whatever we can in Congress to act as the president’s blocking back.”
There are various practical effects this “blocking back” strategy has. One of those effects is to waste lots of everybody’s time.
I’ll explain. When a political figure emerges as a harsh critic of Israel, there is an instinctive circling of wagons around him, even when he don’t exactly radiate good faith.
Organizations like J Street that exist to point out Israel’s flaws don’t want anybody on their side of the aisle accused of anti-Semitism, because smart anti-Semites (I know, I know, that’s an oxymoron) will use the arguments already advanced by such groups. It gives them cover. They can say, “I’m just saying what these Jewish groups have already said.”
But anti-Semites obsess over Jews and Israel. And before long, that fixation asserts itself. They continue using the kind of rhetoric that a group like J Street might use—but they start using it all the time. Pretty soon they can talk about nothing else but the evils of the world’s one Jewish state. It’s a clear red flag that this person has an unhealthy concept of Jewish power in his head and self-pitying resentment in his heart.
That’s an explosive combination, and eventually it blows up. When that happens, crass anti-Jewish comments and actions start to show in place of the previously-measured “just anti-Zionism.” When that rhetorical escalation is criticized, the anti-Semite will toss aside all pretense and embrace the fame of podcasters and influencers who rally around them.
It will become obvious that those who initially raised concerns about them were right all along. At that point, partisan pressure groups will throw in the towel. They will condemn the rhetoric, after months (or years) of either silence or running interference for the now-obvious-anti-Semite.
Zohran Mamdani seems to finally have hit that point after his ghoulish statement and behavior on October 7. In the opinion of many liberal Jews in Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed is getting there, too. The defenses of Graham Platner’s Nazi tattoo—his Nazi tattoo—went on for months, during which time we were expected to pretend the Nazi tattoo didn’t have a very obvious explanation.
It is into this illustrious company that I guess we can finally place Francesca Albanese. For well over a decade Albanese has been making openly anti-Semitic comments. But her cheerleading for Hamas after October 7 really crossed a line for the Biden administration, which called her an anti-Semite. Even the secretary-general of the United Nations admitted she was “a horrible person.” Now there appears to be no one left with a sliver of mainstream legitimacy to defend her.
And all that was lost is time. What a waste of everyone’s time.
Former Archbishop of Canterbury says Israel is ‘the land that God promised’
Former Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby has said that Israel is “the land that God promised, and we must hold on to that”.
Speaking to a mostly Jewish audience at an event in Westminster, he said: “I think that the pattern of the history of God's people is that the nature of the land [of Israel] is embedded in who they are, and if we lose sight of that truth, we lose sight of why the situation there now is so difficult.”
The speech was for an event organised by Repairing the Breach, a group which works to “build healing relationships” between the UK and Jewish people who suffered under the British Mandate, especially in the post-Holocaust.
Addressing the current situation in the region, he said: “I'm not commenting on what's going on at the moment.
“It doesn't mean everything else is fine, you can do anything – but it does mean that place and promise, journey and return, are utterly and deeply embedded in the story of Israel, and we have to listen to that truth, and recognise that we must live in that truth.”
Guests heard from speakers who as small children had boarded the Exodus, a ship which carried more than 4,500 Holocaust survivors towards then-Mandate Palestine in 1947, and which was attacked and seized by the British Royal Navy, with passengers forcibly removed and sent back to Europe.
Others spoke about their relatives’ role in the Bricha movement, the underground network that helped Jewish refugees escape post-war Europe and make their way towards the land which would soon become the state of Israel.
“There are no reflections that are adequate in the face of those stories,” Welby said.
“Listen to the truth as to what the British did. Listen to how we kept people from going to the land which they were intending to make sure was the one place of safety in the world, and how we stopped that.
“It’s very easy for institutions to do the wrong thing because the rules say X or Y, or because we've been given orders to do it.
"But the lesson for me and the reflection I hear is that we must act according to what is right, to love justice and do mercy and walk humbly with our God.
“Where we have gone wrong, as the British nation, in our recent history and in our further history, it is a cause for repentance and sorrow and acknowledgement.”
Welby, who served as the 105th Archbishop of Canterbury between 2013 and 2025, also spoke positively about the “people of Israel”, and of his reaction on encountering the opposite sentiment.
“One cannot look at the history of the people of Israel in any place without realising that wherever they are, they bring blessing,” he said.
From Ian:
Gil Troy:
It’s Time to Wake from Woke
Painfully divided and ideologically adrift, American Jewry has become a case study of weakness at a time when the Jewish people need to display strength and determination. Instead, the news is filled with items like these:
In Michigan, an anti-Semitic, anti-Zionist Democratic senatorial candidate who cavorts with someone who blames America for being attacked on 9/11 has received messages from a Jewish organization proclaiming, “Mazal Tov Abdul El-Sayed.”
In New York, whose new mayor can’t stop demonizing Israel, more than 230 rabbis declared that Zohran Mamdani’s “support for Palestinian self-determination stems not from hate, but from his deep moral convictions.”
The pressure group J Street has released millions of its donors’ dollars to go “on offense against AIPAC-backed incumbents”—effectively setting themselves against politicians who are supportive of the Jewish state.
Indeed, as more and more American Jews have internalized the mass mania demonizing Benjamin Netanyahu, they have also seemed to sour on Zionism, implicitly joining those who place the onus on Israel for the burgeoning anti-Semitism worldwide.
What kinds of people keep siding with their sworn enemies? I believe the answer is that these people are so emotionally and politically invested in dated, outmoded, and discredited ideas and fantasies that they would rather believe the best of the enemies of the Jewish people and the worst of their fellow Jews.
Three years after October 7, Israelis continue to wonder how it was that their leaders so easily deluded themselves with the conceptzia—the term used to describe the consensus view that Israel had found an effective modus vivendi with Hamas that occasionally required the Jewish state to “mow the lawn” when the terrorist-gang government got too obstreperous but did not require an all-out war to defeat and extirpate Israel’s enemy.
With justification, many have accused Netanyahu and his government of refusing to revisit the conceptzia and explain what went wrong. But no one doubts that Netanyahu has moved on from the conceptzia itself. That cannot readily be said of many American Jewish organizations and prominent American Jewish individuals, who find it impossible to move on from their pre–October 7 hopes, dreams, and delusions. They remain frozen in their own versions of the conceptzia, mired in a set of dated and sentimental notions about coexistence, the pursuit of peace, and being liked, when the nation’s enemies have made it clear that they’re not interested in any of those lovely illusions.
I am not speaking of those who have joined the enemy camp, building careers and delighting the haters as anti-Zionist Jews, declaring that at least Nazi Germany had the decency to seek to hide its genocide; rather, I am referring to mainstream liberal Jews, whose constant invocations of phrases such as “two-state solution” and “doing the work” indicate the degree to which their opinions have calcified. Even as they recognize the threat from growing Jew-hatred, they cannot surrender their priors, among them the certitude that the people with whom they agree on matters as various as abortion and climate change remain their allies rather than participants in a bloodless backstab that has been going on since October 8.
It has indeed been a disillusioning period, since many of the institutions American Jews both shaped and venerated over the past century have been the choreographers of today’s anti-Semitic, anti-Zionist mania—from the universities to the media to the publishing houses to the art world to Hollywood and the Democratic Party. And yet they persist, as do the delusional Jews who refuse to see the truth about those whose love they have long sought and whose approval they apparently continue to need.
Jonathan Tobin:
The Democrats have abandoned Israel, not just Netanyahu
The idea that an Israeli prime minister not named Netanyahu could fix relations with a Democratic Party that treats antisemites like El-Sayed as worthy of support is just wishful thinking on the part of people like Shapiro.
That’s because this issue is not just a matter of the positions taken by radicals like El-Sayed and Mamdani or far-left “Squad” members in the U.S. House of Representatives like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), who is also considering a 2028 presidential run.
Democrats like Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.), who are perceived as moderates, are also signaling that the alliance with Israel will undergo a “thorough re-examination” in the coming years. Coons, who is in line to become chairman of the powerful Foreign Relations Committee if the Democrats regain control of the Senate in November, is already planning on proposing discriminatory sanctions on Israelis similar to those already put forward by British Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband.
None of this is because, as Foer claims, Netanyahu cultivated ties with Republicans while neglecting to do the same with Democrats. To the contrary, it was the Democrats who have aligned themselves against Israel’s interests and—under the influence of a base that has swallowed the toxic ideas of critical race theory, intersectionality and settler-colonialism—view the Jewish state and Jews in general as “white” oppressors who must be suppressed. The claim that Netanyahu should have rejected the support of conservative Republicans (who were not under the spell of these ideologies) to placate Democrats is not a serious argument.
Shapiro may hope this will all fade away if Netanyahu is defeated on Oct. 27. But his problem is not just the possibility that Israeli voters will reject his advice. It’s that the same Democratic primary voters who elevated people like El-Sayed, Mamdani and a host of other “progressive” candidates in the last year view those who express “love” for Israel, even if it is qualified with Netanyahu-bashing, as simply beyond the pale.
In the recent past, Shapiro’s combination of political liberalism, largely successful governance and record of electoral success would have put him among the frontrunners in a presidential race. But over the course of the last year, even the most enthusiastic supporter cannot have missed the shift in the opinions of Democrats.
To them, a figure like Gadi Eisenkot, the former Israel Defense Forces chief of staff who is Netanyahu’s principal opponent, is just as much of a “war criminal” deserving of sanctions as the prime minister. No conceivable concessions that Eisenkot could make to the Palestinians will be enough to win back Democratic voters indoctrinated in left-wing ideologies or the officeholders they want to send to Washington to blow up the alliance with the Jewish state.
A liberal failure
The remnants of a once-dominant pro-Israel faction of Democrats prefer to blame Netanyahu. But the responsibility is theirs. It was Democrats like Schumer and Shapiro who abetted the rise of Obama and who looked the other way as he set in motion the train of events that created so much “daylight” between their party and Israel. They were the ones who refused to anathematize members of the “Squad,” like Reps. Ilan Omar (D-Minn.), Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) and AOC when they helped legitimize antisemitism and Israel-bashing. And they are now the ones who, in the hope of appeasing their left-wing critics, are bolstering the candidacies of Jew-haters like El-Sayed.
Democrats who are blasting criticism of El-Sayed’s radicalism and Islamist opposition to Israel’s existence as “Islamophobia” while ignoring or downplaying his bigotry aren’t open to rethinking their opposition to Israel. Nor are they likely to embrace a Democratic presidential candidate who is emotionally committed to the U.S.-Israel alliance but just wants a different prime minister in Jerusalem.
Simply put, Shapiro’s pro-Israel/anti-Netanyahu stand is not likely to satisfy a party base that now regards hostility to the Jewish state, along with opposition to enforcement of immigration laws, as the organizing principle of politics in the second quarter of the 21st century. And it’s likely that neither he nor any other Democrat is going to be able to get past that problem with the sort of nuanced position articulated at his debate. The collapse of the pro-Israel wing of the Democratic Party is a liberal failure of nerve and principle that won’t be undone, regardless of who wins the next election in Israel.
Brendan O'Neill:
Ireland has been conquered by Israel Derangement Syndrome
If the reports are accurate, then this could not be more serious. To kick people out of your hotel for the sin of ‘combating anti-Semitism’ is a flagrant prejudice. To see the words ‘combating anti-Semitism’ and think to yourself ‘Is this an IDF thing?’ is wild. It is proof of the Israel Derangement Syndrome that has Ireland in its unsparing grip. Increasingly in Irish polite society, Jews and the Jewish State and Gaza and ‘genocide’ are all thrown together in a big pot of suspicion and hysteria.
Remember when it was racists who risked being cancelled from public venues? Now it’s anti-racists – if the racism they’re discussing is the one targeted at Jews, that is. In a development that will shock precisely no one, some Israelophobes are cheering for the hotel. One Palestinian journalist offered his ‘full solidarity’ with the hotel’s refusal to host ‘delegates attending a conference about “fighting anti-Semitism”’. ‘Noble, noble people’, he said. Once again, the keffiyeh slips, revealing the ancient animus that lurks behind so much ‘Palestine activism’.
The delegates found somewhere else to stay. The Jew-haters of Europe and beyond who were rubbing their hands with glee at the prospect of an anti-Semitism conference collapsing will have to suck that up. And yet serious questions remain. Is it now hazardous to discuss anti-Semitism in Ireland? Is Ireland now hostile territory for people who want to end Jew hate? Will the government speak up loudly and clearly against the hotel cancellation? We will see.
Dublin’s chattering classes should fret less about the IDF and focus more on IDS – the Israel Derangement Syndrome that has colonised Ireland as surely as the Brits once did. Israelophobia courses through the nation’s veins. The Irish parliament froths with invective about the ‘repulsive’, ‘obscene’, ‘disgusting’ Jewish State. The Irish government demanded a watering down of the meaning of genocide in order that the Jewish nation might finally be found guilty of it. The entire Irish establishment puffs itself up with nauseating fake virtue against the world’s only Jewish nation. Irish music acts scream ‘Up Hamas!’ while virtually the entirety of Dublin’s posh college intake consists of keffiyeh cultists who dream of Israel’s erasure. Little wonder Israel shut its embassy in Dublin, citing Ireland’s surrender to ‘anti-Israel’ mania.
‘Virtuous’ Ireland now defines itself almost wholly by its opposition to the Jewish State. It is the most tragic, envious, bitter and bigoted style of politics imaginable, and it flings open the door to outright anti-Jewish prejudice. ‘Are you linked to the IDF?’ Imagine asking that of people fighting anti-Semitism. What are we doing here, Ireland?
From Ian:
Eugene Kontorovich:
Europe Risks an Economic War over Israel and the ICC
Last month the Netherlands and the UK both announced bans on business activities with what they described as Israeli settlements [Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria]. That includes Jerusalem and other areas America regards as fully under Israeli sovereignty. At the same time, the UK and Dutch governments are leading efforts to undermine new U.S. sanctions on the International Criminal Court in The Hague.
Some of the measures directly conflict with U.S. antiboycott laws, which have been on the books for half a century. These laws were passed to ensure that foreign countries couldn't pressure American companies to give up lawful trade with third countries. Under the Dutch measure, companies trading with Israel must furnish "negative certifications" that boycotted goods aren't included - a requirement explicitly forbidden by U.S. law.
Khaled Abu Toameh:
No Elections, No Reform: The Palestinian Authority's Endless Excuses Are the Smallest Part of the Problem
[H]olding elections under the current circumstances will almost certainly strengthen Hamas....
On the other hand, Abbas's decision cannot be mistaken for a genuine effort to reform anything in Palestinian politics.
While elections can be important, they can also be bogus, faked, or even harmful, as one can see in Russia, Turkey or Iran.
Elections do not mean there is a democracy, especially if they take place before any reforms. Elections are needed after the institutions of democracy -- freedom of speech and of the press, the separation of powers, freedom of religion or from religion, due process, equal justice under the law -- meaning accountability for everyone, property rights, rights for women, children and laborers, an independent judiciary, and so on -- have been set in place and are smoothly functioning. Only then can there be elections that mean anything.
What is really needed to help the Palestinian people, now being held hostage by corrupt and self-serving leaders in all of their parties, is not just elections but reforms, all of them, and serious international accountability, starting with shutting down funding for slow or nonexistent compliance.
So far, the international community has been funding leaders who mistreat their own people first, then their neighbors and everyone else second. For the sake of the Palestinians, this has to stop.
Will [Western governments] condition financial assistance on measurable reforms?... Will they impose consequences on Palestinian leaders who obstruct reform? Or will they issue statements of regret, continue providing financial support, and wait for Abbas to pretend he is finally instituting reforms by announcing yet another -- presumably fake -- election date?
Western governments should also avoid the mistaken assumption that an election announcement, by itself, represents progress.
The test of reform is not the number of "presidential decrees" Abbas issues promising elections. It is whether Palestinians acquire institutions that can hold their leaders accountable.
A recent poll conducted by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research found that 83% of the Palestinians believe corruption exists within Palestinian Authority institutions.
The poll also showed that Hamas leaders are more popular than Abbas and that 79% of Palestinians want him to resign.
The Palestinian political system offers no credible, nationally competitive third alternative to Fatah and Hamas.... Hamas remains an armed terrorist organization, while Fatah has presided over a system marked by authoritarianism, patronage, and corruption.
Western governments have too often treated elections as the principal answer to Palestinian political dysfunction. They are not. Palestinians need new leaders, new faces, and new political ideas. They need pragmatic, realistic, and accountable representatives who prioritize the welfare of their own people over factional interests and revolutionary slogans. They also need an overhaul of an education system that should prepare young Palestinians for peaceful coexistence, critical thinking, and economic opportunity rather than perpetuate hatred and glorify violence. They need independent institutions, financial transparency, effective anti-corruption mechanisms, and a free press capable of scrutinizing those in power.
Ottawa paid a London consultancy $989,714 to prepare Palestinian elections now postponed
Global Affairs Canada signed a $989,714 contribution agreement on April 22, 2026 with Adam Smith International Ltd of London, England, to "foster electoral readiness, political participation, and democratic renewal in Palestine", according to the federal grants disclosure database. The project, titled "SAWT Programme: Support to Elections and Political Processes", runs to March 31, 2028.
The record says the money supports "the scheduled April 2026 local elections and the November 2026 Palestinian National Council (PNC) elections", pays for "independent monitoring and technical assessments", and sets up an "International Observer Coordination Unit" to work with diplomatic missions. It names the Palestinian Central Elections Commission and Ministry of Local Government as direct beneficiaries and says the project indirectly benefits "approximately 2.8 million eligible voters in the West Bank and 1.2 million potential voters in Gaza".
The local elections went ahead on April 25. The Associated Press reported that turnout was 56 per cent in the West Bank, that "many races were not contested", that candidates had to accept the Palestine Liberation Organization's program, and that the Gaza vote was a single "largely symbolic pilot" in Deir al-Balah with 23 per cent turnout.
The November vote is off. Reuters reported on October 9 that Palestinian Vice President Hussein al-Sheikh wrote to French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot on October 8 recommending "that the date of the legislative elections be adjusted by several months", because holding them "under the current circumstances faces fundamental obstacles". The election had been set for November 28.
Rebel News reported on October 9 that Carney had pointed to the scheduling of those elections on September 22 as progress justifying Canada's recognition of a Palestinian state.
From Ian:
This Is Not the London I Grew Up In
I grew up with London’s history of resilience in the face of war and terrorism. Now a giant statue of a man convicted of five murders has appeared above a London street, his handcuffed hands raised as a symbol of Palestinian resistance.
I was born within the sound of Bow Bells. That makes me a Cockney, an Eastender, and someone who still feels a very personal connection to London, however many years I have lived away from it.
So when I saw the photograph of a giant statue of Marwan Barghouti displayed above a London street, I felt something considerably stronger than disappointment.
The statue has appeared on the balcony of Palestine House in High Holborn, against an enormous Palestinian flag. It depicts Barghouti with his hands raised above his head, joined by handcuffs. From the street, the figure presents an unmistakable image of defiance, intended to transform a convicted terrorist into a symbol of Palestinian resistance.
I understand perfectly well what the people responsible for this display want us to see. A prisoner, defiant despite his captivity, presented as a man struggling for freedom.
What the image doesn’t tell us is why he is in prison.
In May 2004, an Israeli court convicted Barghouti of five murders connected to three terrorist attacks during the Second Intifada. Among the victims was a Greek Orthodox monk murdered in the West Bank in 2001. An Israeli woman was killed near Givat Ze’ev in January 2002, while three people were murdered in an attack on a Tel Aviv seafood restaurant that March.
Barghouti was sentenced to five consecutive life terms plus 40 years. He rejected the legitimacy of the Israeli proceedings, and his supporters continue to challenge the convictions. Nevertheless, the court’s findings are part of the historical record, documented at the time by The Guardian.
There is something particularly revealing about the statue’s design. The handcuffs are not an incidental detail. They are the entire visual argument.
By emphasizing Barghouti’s imprisonment, the display directs attention away from the people whose murders resulted in his conviction. The viewer is invited to identify with the prisoner rather than consider his victims. It is an effective piece of political imagery, and I suspect that is precisely why it was chosen.
This is not even the first attempt to give Barghouti a prominent place in London. In June, campaigners tried to install a statue of him in Parliament Square. Police intervened and prevented the installation.
The Mandela comparison comes from the campaign surrounding Barghouti itself. Supporters seeking his release have promoted him internationally as a “Palestinian Mandela,” presenting his imprisonment as part of a struggle for national liberation. It is a powerful piece of political branding, but one that risks obscuring a fundamental part of Barghouti’s history: he is serving five life sentences following his conviction for five murders.
Where should Canadian Jews go? Where is the Promised Land?
Lederman's article was interesting and timely, but I was surprised there was no mention of Israel. While it is true, as she notes, that Canada and the US share a common language and culture, Canada and Israel are a closer match when it comes to social support in areas like health and education, not to mention, for Jews, history, and religion.
She does mention that her maternal grandparents obtained visas to go to British Mandate Palestine, but did not go and were murdered in Treblinka.
However, many of the Jews who had to go did, and are still going. In fact, about half of the more than 7.5 million Jews living in Israel today are either immigrants or descendants of immigrants, most from either the post-war DP camps of Europe, the Arab/Muslim world, or the former Soviet Union.
A small but steadily increasing stream of immigrants has also arrived from North America. The Israel Central Bureau of Statistics indicates that about 16,000 Canadians have made aliyah since the establishment of the state in 1948.
Israel’s Aliyah and Integration Ministry reported that 440 Canadian Jews moved to Israel from September 2025 to September 2026. Another 1,000 Canadian Jews have opened new aliyah files. This is a formal process, including an interview with a representative of the Jewish Agency and the submission of documents, including birth certificates and marriage records.
While the Tulsa initiative has received a significant number of inquiries from Canadians, the number of families who have actually made the move so far is quite small, according to an article in The Forward by Benyamin Cohen.
It quotes Jewish Canadian journalist Jesse Brown: “There’s a sadness,” he said about the Jewish exodus from Canada. “I’m not enthused or compelled by what I see as a ‘re-shtetling.’”
The Canadian Jewish population, about 400,000, is almost as large as that of France, the third largest Jewish community in the world. Antisemitism is a serious problem there as well. This year, 4,000 French Jews made aliyah, about 10 times the Canadian number.
A 2026 Canadian survey cited by Lederman indicates that one quarter of Canadian Jews are planning to leave Canada or are thinking seriously about it, and there are no signs that the antisemitism experienced by Canadian Jews is abating. While I don’t think we will see a stampede of Jews leaving Canada, I do think the numbers leaving will gradually increase.
As in the French example, Israel will be their primary destination. After all, in the final analysis, it turns out that America is not the Promised Land.
Tuesday, October 20, 2026
