10/12 Links Pt1: Herzog calls out Nobel Peace Price winner Pillay; Teen killed, 24 injured by unexploded Hezbollah munition; Israel has two years left to act. After that, it will be too late

From Ian:

Amit Segal: Israel has two years left to act. After that, it will be too late

On Jan. 20, 2029, in the early evening, a new occupant will sit down in the Oval Office at the White House. In front of the cameras, following the tradition of the last decade, he’ll sign a long string of executive orders that will instantly and sharply alter the course of the great American aircraft carrier. If he’s a Democrat, and the odds of that now stand at 50% at least, among the stack of papers his aides hand him will likely be recognition of a Palestinian state, a ban on importing goods from the settlements, sanctions on a string of right-wing Israeli politicians and more still to come.

It’s remarkable how little connection there is between the shabby, substance-free Israeli election campaign that’s been running here these past months and the real issue of the next term: the head-on collision approaching between Israel and the world over the Palestinian question.

This is the diabolical legacy of the tormentor Yahya Sinwar, the senior Hamas leader who, in dying, bequeathed the return of this issue to the center of the international table at the exact moment Israel has run out of supporters for establishing a hostile Islamist terror state next to the central city of Kfar Saba, given the bitter experience of Kfar Aza.

The only one who has proposed anything along these lines is Avigdor Liberman. His plan to bring Jordanian forces into the territories of Judea and Samaria is, in my view, a bitter mistake and a terrible error, but at least he understands that Israel has to seize the initiative rather than keep sailing calmly toward the iceberg. Gadi Eisenkot swings back and forth between visiting Gush Etzion and reversing Bezalel Smotrich’s moves in the West Bank; the coalition’s answer is to stick with the current course—another dunam, another goat—in the hope that the world will get used to it.

“This isn’t a foregone conclusion,” a source who knows a thing or two about U.S.-Israel relations tells me. “Even a hostile Democratic administration won’t rush to drop the automatic veto at the Security Council or recognize a state if we’re on a stable, positive track.”

He, for instance, laments the scrapping of the annexation clause in Trump’s “Deal of the Century,” whose absence has let settlement efforts sprawl across the whole territory instead of gaining legitimacy for applying sovereignty.

But looking ahead, he says, the real story is Gaza. That’s where everything started, and that’s where everything will be decided. The Trump plan that ended the war is a significant achievement worth holding onto because it’s the first one that attempts to decouple the territory between the Jordan and the sea from the Oslo framework.

Judea and Samaria and Gaza are no longer linked; a different governing arrangement is replacing the Palestinian Authority; the 1967 lines are being swapped out for an Israeli presence in the Strip; and above all, the United Nations is being pushed aside in favor of the Board of Peace. A Gaza that is rehabilitated, demilitarized, run by neither the Palestinian Authority nor Hamas could be exactly what stops the world from trying the same mistake it made in Judea and Samaria in the 1990s, hoping for a different result this time.

The first clause in the Trump plan includes something Oslo and its offshoots never did: deradicalization. Israel will always have that stick to wave against any rollback, and the world can’t object to it.

The problem is that everything is stuck.

The Americans are frustrated to the point of alarm with how Israel is conducting itself in the Strip, but the truth is they couldn’t have picked a worse moment to launch their plan: at the start of an election year. Two months passed before all the hostages’ bodies were returned, then came “Operation Roaring Lion” in Iran, and by then, the campaign at home was already heating up.

A senior Israeli official drummed it into Kushner’s ears: If you want the plan to die immediately, the surest way is to push for it right now. The right will kill it, and Netanyahu will have no choice. And the opposition? the Americans asked. They’ll make sure it’s dead too, he told them. Netanyahu, after all, is being attacked these days almost entirely for being too dovish, not too hawkish.

Amit Segal: Hamas: The Victim of Genocide

It’s Monday, October 12, and it took a Holocaust scholar six days after October 7 to accuse Israel of genocide in print, and South Africa less than three months to take the charge to the International Court of Justice. The Gaza Ministry of Health beat both to the punch: its count began with the first Hamas gunman to fall in southern Israel.

So far, researcher Salo Aizenberg has identified by name 364 Hamas attackers killed on October 7. Eighty percent of them appear on the Health Ministry’s list, counted among the victims of the “genocide.”

This not-so-subtle sleight of hand has been there for anyone to see for years. Of the 692 Gazans the ministry lists as dying on October 7, 2023, 646, or 93 percent, were men of fighting age. Most of the children recorded that day were boys aged 14 to 17.

More recently, under the October 2025 ceasefire, Israel returned roughly 400 Palestinian bodies to Gaza. To help families identify them, the Health Ministry published photos of the bodies along with the names of those already identified. Of 396 bodies listed, 91 have been named.

All 91 are on the ministry’s casualty list. All are men between 18 and 60. Sixty-three of them, 69 percent, are listed as having died on October 7, 2023, the day they crossed into Israel. Only three are listed as dying at any point between mid-November 2023 and the ceasefire, nearly two years of war. Twelve are recorded as dying after the ceasefire began, which for bodies dead this long most likely means no one knew the date and logged the day they came home. At least 23 have already been claimed as “martyrs” by Hamas’ Qassam Brigades or Islamic Jihad’s al-Quds Brigades.

All of them, regardless, made it into the database as victims of a supposed genocide.

But that’s not all. Roughly a third of the 91 were on the list before their bodies came back, and 26 were still on the last list published before the ceasefire. A Gazan family can report a presumed death with no body and no location, and the ministry will count it. That may be understandable for grieving families. It is not how you build a casualty count anyone should cite as evidence of genocide.

Add this to the mounting blows against the genocide accusation, and the charge is faltering. On Friday, the Nobel Committee tried to shore it up by awarding its Peace Prize to Navi Pillay, the South African jurist whose U.N. commission accused Israel of genocide last year. The infinitesimal courage it took to condemn Israel from a U.N. commission does not earn her a place beside laureates like Nelson Mandela, Elie Wiesel and Yitzhak Rabin, though she would have a comfortable seat beside Yasser Arafat.

The committee honored her for her efforts to promote “peace and international law.” Yet few things have done less to advance peace and international law than the genocide libel. The accusation did nothing to hasten the end of the war or the suffering in Gaza. If anything, it prolonged both by generating American pressure that could not stop Israel, only delay it. As for international law, the genocide campaign degrades law’s most basic principle: impartiality. In the trial of international law, its blatant anti-Israel bias is Exhibit A.

If President Donald Trump would kindly return Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado’s medal and take Pillay’s instead, everything would be where it belongs.

“Israel has shifted from a concept of containment to a concept of decisive victory”

Three years after the October 7 disaster, the Israel Defense and Security Forum (IDSF) held its “From Disaster to Victory” security conference yesterday, at which seven fundamental insights concerning national security were presented.

Senior figures from the defense establishment, defense industries, local government, and the public sphere are participating in the conference, which centers on the changes in Israel’s security doctrine since October 7 and the challenges that will accompany Israel in the coming years. The various discussions addressed military and technological strength, Israel’s diplomatic standing, national resilience, internal security, the threat of delegitimization, and the battle for our home.

Participants in the conference included Prof. Yuval Steinitz, chairman of Rafael; India’s Ambassador to Israel, Jitender Pal Singh; Brig. Gen. (Res.) Erez Winner, chairman of IDSF; Col. (Res.) Dr. Ronen Itzik, the IDSF CEO; Lt. Col. (Res.) Itamar Eitam; Col. (Res.) Ilan Dickstein; Gabi Naaman, head of the Shlomi Local Council; entrepreneur and philanthropist Yossi Hollander; and Dov Oster, father of the late Capt. Eitan Oster.

Prof. Steinitz addressed Israel’s military and technological strength: “Within 36 hours, the Air Force achieved decisive air superiority over Iran, even though our closest partners in the world did not believe we would succeed in achieving this for many months. This achievement was made possible, among other things, thanks to Rafael’s unique munitions, some of which are still classified.”

*A profound shift in the concept*
India’s Ambassador to Israel, Jitender Pal Singh, paid tribute to the victims of the October 7 terrorist attack and expressed solidarity with the affected families.

He reiterated India’s steadfast commitment to combating terrorism.

IDSF chairman Brig. Gen. (Res.) Erez Winner said in his closing address at the conference: “We are currently in a state of victory. We will not be - we are winning today. Israel has shifted from a concept of containment to a concept of decisive victory, from an enemy firing and us responding to a situation in which we act to prevent it from building the threat in the first place. Today, when people discuss a strike in Tehran, they no longer ask how and why - they ask when. This is a profound shift in Israel’s security doctrine.”

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10/11 Links: Israel Is Clear-Eyed, Not Traumatized by Oct. 7; The lone wolf illusion: Alone in action, not in ideology; 2,000-year-old Hasmonean aqueduct section uncovered in Jerusalem

From Ian:

Israel Is Clear-Eyed, Not Traumatized by Oct. 7

The third anniversary of Hamas's Oct. 7 attack on Israel was filled with agonizing and loving remembrances of the many civilians slain by Hamas in their bedrooms and the soldiers killed combating the jihadist Palestinian stormtroopers ever since. But through it all, the overwhelming sentiment I heard was patriotism, resilience, and defiance, not defeat.

Much of the media coverage described Israel as traumatized by the massacre and exhausted by three years of war. This infuriates me because it is an erroneous, even nefarious, reading of the Israeli mood. It is a wicked and insulting take on Israel's national psyche. The reality is that Israelis are neither crushed nor dispirited. Instead, they are appropriately angry and motivated to win against all enemies.

All Israelis across the political spectrum are proud of the brave reservists who threw themselves into battle against Hamas, and the selfless volunteers who mobilized to strengthen their families, tend to the wounded, orphaned, and dispossessed, till the fields, and manage the home front. No one in this noble cohort is drained, defeated, or paralyzed by trauma.

On the global front, Israelis are furious at the hostility and hypocrisy of the Western world, which has largely turned its back on Israel. Classic antisemitic stereotypes have saturated Western media. The deranged demonization of Jews has once again been renamed as morality itself.

Israelis are angry at the politically malign accounts of their just, successful wars against Iran and its Hamas and Hizbullah proxy armies; at the raw antisemitism becoming mainstream discourse; and at the corrosive ideologies such as radical Islam that seek to undermine Western societies while destroying Israel. Israelis will resist all this. Israel intends to hunt down its enemies, not be hounded by them or hemmed in by fickle allies.

One in five Israelis ‘still struggling to function’ since Oct. 7 – new study

One in five Israelis continues to report severe impairment in daily functioning due to mental health since Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack, according to a study released Sunday, with women particularly affected.

The study was conducted by the National Mental Health Barometer, an ongoing project sponsored by Clalit Health Services’ Research Institute, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, and Myers-JDC-Brookdale Institute in Jerusalem.

The findings, based on a nationally representative sample of Israel’s population and updated through May 2026, show that while most of the population is recovering, a significant number of people continue to experience psychological distress.

Women reported higher levels of mental health-related functional impairment than men, three years after Hamas-led terrorists stormed southern Israel, killed 1,200 people, and kidnapped 251 people into Gaza.

In the three years since, Israel has also been in a constant state of war, with combat in Gaza and Lebanon seeing thousands of Israelis evacuated from their homes near the borders. There have also been two rounds of fighting with Iran,, which targeted most of the country with missiles.

“The findings show that alongside a steady increase in the proportion of people receiving mental health treatment, psychological distress is becoming chronic for a significant part of the population and is accompanied by deep functional impairment,” Prof. Ran Balicer, deputy director general and head of the innovation division at Clalit Health Services, said in a statement.

Unprecedented level of exposure
The study found an extraordinary level of exposure to significant trauma according to international standards.

Approximately 15% of all respondents described themselves as being at the highest level of personal exposure, meaning they were personally present at the events of October 7, 2023, or closely knew someone who was injured or killed during the subsequent fighting.

The researchers describe this as a dramatic and unprecedented level of exposure compared with other national trauma events worldwide. In comparison, following the September 11, 2001, attacks in the United States, approximately 4% of the population experienced direct exposure.

“The data once again demonstrate just how unprecedented October 7 was globally in terms of the scale of the population’s exposure to trauma, both directly and indirectly through exposure to disturbing videos and media content,” Balicer said. “This helps explain the findings regarding the intensity of the national trauma and its lasting effects.”

How Israel Views Gaza, One Year after the Ceasefire

The Trump plan for Gaza, launched last year, explicitly laid out Israel's goals: releasing all the hostages (which was implemented), disarming Hamas, removing it from power, and ensuring that Gaza could no longer be used as a platform for threatening Israel.

The plan offered a mostly political path to realizing these elusive goals, without enforcement on the ground. Yet Israel does not believe this approach will work with a violent Islamist actor like Hamas. It has therefore kept constant physical pressure on Hamas, conditioning any reconstruction on the group's disarmament.

Israel has continuously targeted senior terrorists and military infrastructure in the area under Hamas control, with quiet American consent, disrupting Hamas efforts to reassert governance and recover some of its military capabilities.

For Israel, disarming Hamas and other terrorist organizations in Gaza is the most important task. Israel insists that demilitarization be inclusive, comprehensive, verifiable, and permanent. Israel insists that until a full, verifiable disarmament process is completed, the IDF will conduct no further redeployments.

Despite the current environment of skepticism, Hamas has been significantly weakened militarily, financially, and politically. According to recent polls, Palestinian public support for the group and the "armed struggle" it represents has declined significantly.

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10/10 Links: Bret Stephens: Zohran Mamdani’s Moral Obscenity; The Nobel Peace Prize is now totally discredited; Why Dolly Parton sang a song about Daniel Pearl

From Ian:

Bret Stephens: Zohran Mamdani’s Moral Obscenity

Zohran Mamdani, New York City’s mayor, set off a firestorm of criticism Wednesday morning with a social media post ostensibly intended to commemorate the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre of Israelis. It devoted a brief paragraph to condemning Hamas and commiserating with its victims. The rest was a much longer denunciation of Israel’s “ongoing genocide in Gaza,” a “world in which occupation and apartheid continue” and a situation in which “our federal government continues its complicity with every arms shipment.”

In response, Ammiel Hirsch, the president of the New York Board of Rabbis, said the statement was “so offensive to so many Jews that it is hard to describe how offensive it is.” In fact, it’s a moral obscenity. Let me count the ways.

It is obscene in the same way it would have been obscene if the mayor had commemorated the 25th anniversary of Sept. 11 last month with a perfunctory nod to the victims of the day, followed by a much longer denunciation of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. What happened on both Sept. 11 and Oct. 7 was undiluted evil, each an unprovoked visit of deliberate and maximalist violence on people who had done nothing to invite that violence other than being at the wrong place at the wrong time.

It is obscene because many of the Jews murdered on Oct. 7, living in kibbutzim with conspicuously left-leaning politics, had been at the forefront of the peace movement, volunteering, for example, to drive sick Palestinians for treatment at nearby Israeli hospitals. Hamas wasn’t just killing and terrorizing the innocent; it was eliminating the good.

It is obscene because Hamas didn’t just kill its victims in pursuit of a strategic objective. It tormented and slaughtered them like an army of serial killers who delight in the suffering of their victims. Corpses of Israeli women were described by one coroner as “shot in the crotch, intimate parts, vagina, or were shot in the breast.” Others appeared to have been raped so violently that their pelvises were broken. Parents were killed in front of their children; children were murdered in their beds. A fieldworker was beheaded with a garden hoe. I know this because Hamas filmed itself doing this and I forced myself to watch the film. I know because that same month, I visited the bedrooms where the kids had been murdered, their mattresses still soaked in blood.

Zohran Mamdani’s antisemitism plan cannot survive his October 7 statement

Mamadani right that the suffering did not begin on October 7, but the history undercuts his antisemitic fable. Arab mobs murdered Jews in Jerusalem in 1920, Jaffa in 1921, and Hebron in 1929, where in a single morning they slaughtered 67 Jews after the circle around Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem and the era’s dominant Palestinian Arab leader, spread the lie that Jews were plotting against al-Aqsa. There was no Jewish state then, and no “occupation” to blame.

Husseini’s leadership rejected a Palestinian Arab state in 1937, 1939, and 1947. He spent World War II in Berlin as Adolf Hitler’s honored guest, urging Arabs over Nazi radio to kill Jews wherever they found them. His successors were offered a Palestinian Arab state in 2000, 2001, and 2008 and refused each time. In 2005 Israel pulled every soldier and civilian out of Gaza; Hamas answered with terror, rockets, a violent takeover and, eventually, October 7. Hamas’s charter declares the land from the river to the sea an Islamic trust no one may surrender and quotes a hadith about Muslims killing Jews. Ninety-four years after Hebron, Hamas named its invasion and massacre “Al-Aqsa Flood.” From the mufti to Hamas, the throughline is a violent, fascist Islamist rejection of Jewish sovereignty anywhere in the land.

None of this is hidden. The mayor left it out on purpose.

The genocide-libel itself collapses against the record. Genocidal regimes do not warn civilians to evacuate, pause fighting to vaccinate children against polio, or truck food to the people they are supposedly exterminating. In every genocide on record, the killers controlled when the killing stopped. In Gaza, Hamas could have ended the war any day by freeing the hostages and surrendering. Spreading that libel as mayor of the largest Jewish city outside Israel is reckless at best.

Anti-Jewish hate crimes rise in New York
The results are measurable. NYPD data show anti-Jewish hate crimes up about 8% in the first eight months of his tenure, with Jews targeted in more than half of all confirmed hate crimes. When the plan was announced, Israel’s consul general in New York, Ofir Akunis, warned that antisemitism would keep rising until the mayor recognized his own anti-Israel language as its main driver. Nine days later, the mayor delivered that same language to an audience of millions.

Most Jewish New Yorkers have no use for grant programs from a mayor who marks one of the worst days in Jewish history by calling the Jewish state a “genocidal apartheid regime funded by their taxes.” They have seen where that rhetoric leads: to their campuses, their synagogues, their streets.

Mamdani’s plan was written to show he takes antisemitism seriously. His October 7 statement showed it was written to give him cover for the hatred he keeps feeding.

Bill Maher mocks Mamdani for being ‘tone deaf’ criticizing Israel in Oct. 7 tribute

Mamdani’s reaction to the anniversary did not go over well with Maher, who harshly criticized the mayor.

“Mayor Mamdani, not all that sympathetic to this stuff, but he did make some nice remarks about it,” Maher said, referring to Mamdani’s statement.

“But then he pivoted right to, ‘but Israel made them do it,’” Maher said, offering his interpretation of the mayor’s remarks.

The comedian also mocked Mamdani’s past career as a rapper, during which he performed under the stage names “Young Cardamom” and “Mr. Cardamom.”

“You know, he used to be a rapper. His rap name was ‘Tone Deaf,’” Maher quipped.

Mamdani also faced criticism earlier this week after dining Wednesday at Ayat Hinds Hall, a Palestinian restaurant.

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10/09 Links Pt2: An Abusable Past; Mamdani spit on the graves of October 7 victims; Rabbi Soloveichik on "Fauda" and the Jewish Return to History

From Ian:

Allan Arkush: An Abusable Past

Anti-Zionism has been around almost as long as Zionism and has a respectable Jewish pedigree. When Zionists deny this and decry today’s Jewish anti-Zionists as self-hating Jews or even antisemites, those under attack can point, with some justification, to history. But usually they go further and return the insult. It is the Zionists, they say, who are tainted by antisemitism. It’s bad enough when such distortions are the stuff of sloganeering. It’s worse when they appear in books that educated people take seriously.

One such book is Molly Crabapple’s Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund, which The New York Times’s reviewer called a “terrific . . . authoritative history.”Despite her book’s subtitle, Crabapple is almost as interested in telling a story about the nefarious history of Zionism as she is about the noble history of the Jewish Labor Bund in Russia and Poland. Another that has just appeared and that seems destined to get a lot of attention is Pulitzer Prize–winning author Benjamin Moser’s Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History, a book pervaded by hatred of Zionism. Both books depict Zionism as a Jewish form of racism, not only resembling Gentile racism but in cahoots with it. Both not only use history for political purposes, but abuse it.

Molly Crabapple never met her remarkable great-grandfather, Sam Rothbort, but he opened a portal to an entrancing Jewish past of which she had known very little. A post-Impressionist painter of the lost world of the shtetl, he had been a Bundist activist before he came to America. Intrigued by his reference in one of his manuscripts to an Eastern European Jewish “underground,” Crabapple discovered the Bund (officially, the General Jewish Labor Union in Lithuania, Poland, and Russia), the Jewish socialist movement founded in 1897. It was a lost Jewish world that gave her something that she never got from the synagogue or Israel. Its heroes became her heroes, whose graves (some of which are located, due to the vicissitudes of history, in and around New York) she continues to visit.

The Bund, founded in the same year as the World Zionist Organization, was the product of Jewish Marxists, who promoted not emigration but revolution as the solution to Russia’s Jewish problem. But unlike the more famous Russian Jewish communists, such as Trotsky, the Bund leaders believed that the Jews had the right and the need to take part in the revolutionary movement not as mere proletarians but as a separate (nonterritorial) national group. The Marxist theorist Georgi Plekhanov called them seasick Zionists and tried to win them over to ideological orthodoxy.

In the eyes of the tsarist regime, the Bund was a subversive force that had to be uprooted. But it managed to survive government persecution while maintaining its independence as a distinct revolutionary movement, until the tsar fell. What the Bund couldn’t survive was the Bolsheviks’ rise to power in the Soviet Union. In independent Poland, however, between the world wars, the Bund had its heyday, and in its later resistance to the Nazis it made an unforgettable mark, before being all but completely extinguished.

The Bundists were, as Crabapple reminds us, admirable, often heroic, idealists. Vladimir Medem, the Bund’s leading ideologue, was born into a family of opportunistic converts and raised as a Christian, “yet turned his back on a posh upbringing to devote his life to a small and persecuted people,” at great personal cost. Tiny Anna Lipshitz, whose older sister had been tortured to death by the police, was only twenty-two years old in 1905 but already the movement’s best orator. Dispatched to Odessa to inspire revolutionary activists there, she was nicknamed “the Fury” by local newspapers. One of the characters in Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, identified by the script only as “a Bundist,” apparently represents her.

In the revolutionary year of 1917, the Bund fought for the preservation of the nascent Russian democracy but was helpless in the face of the Bolshevik onslaught in October, which one of its leaders, Henryk Erlich, described as a “monstrous calamity.” Erlich soon moved to Poland, where he became one of the leaders of the now legal Bund, which ran for elections to both the Polish Parliament (where it never won a seat), and within the country’s Jewish communities, where it sometimes did well. On the subpolitical level, the Bund set up economic cooperatives, day care centers, sanitariums, sports clubs, libraries, and schools. Crabapple writes: “In the words of Victor Gilinsky, son of Bundist leader Shloyme Gilinsky, “[t]he Bund was your union, your education and your church.”

But it also fought for you. One of the Bundists to whom Crabapple devotes the most attention was not a political leader or a social activist but Bernard Goldstein, a leader of its battle squads, which saw action first against the Jewish communists, the Bund’s bitter enemies in peacetime, and eventually, in wartime, against the Nazis. The communists were so enraged by Goldstein’s activities that they passed a death sentence on him. After one of them tried to assassinate him outside of his apartment, “Bernard shot back, wounding the communist, who left a trail of blood across the pavement. When the cops showed up, Bernard refused to reveal the identity of his attacker.” In the Warsaw Ghetto, after he was smuggled out (because he was too hard to conceal), Goldstein’s disciple Marek Edelman led the Bundist fighters. Both men miraculously survived the war. Goldstein despaired of a decent future for anyone in a communist Poland and moved to the Bronx, where he became “an honorary grandfather to his comrades’ children,” while Edelman become a cardiologist and eventually a leader of Solidarity in Poland.

Better the Devil You Can See By Abe Greenwald

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Which is why I like when my enemies come out of hiding and make themselves known. So two days ago, I found myself strangely satisfied by Zohran Mamdani’s October 7 denunciation of Israeli “genocide,” his statement of solidarity with its victims, and his dinner at an obsessively anti-Semitic Palestinian restaurant in New York.

Critics of Mamdani’s daylong stunt suggested that he “should have read the room,” released a statement of sympathy for victims of Hamas’s massacre, and just let the Jews grieve for one day. Or if he couldn’t do that, they offered, he should just have said nothing.

Why? Why despair that an anti-Semite chose not to hide his hatred? So we can go on playing pretend with evil people, helping them accrue more and more legitimacy until they can do large-scale harm?

Does every statement of anti-Jewish incitement put Jews at risk? Yes. But if our weapon of choice is urging our enemies not to say harmful things about us, the risk will become far worse.

Had Mamdani done what media critics suggested, he alone would have benefited from the con. Instead, his act of blatant anti-Semitism woke up a bunch of fence-sitting liberals (Jews and non-Jews alike) and sent them into our camp. I’ve spoken to some such people since, and it was the first time I heard “You were right” from any of them on any topic in ages.

I know exactly how those exchanges would have gone had Mamdani instead kept up the good-guy act. Liberal friends and family would have sent me screenshots of his pacifying mush along with digs about my unhinged position on him. I’d weigh the benefits of responding obnoxiously or trying to disarm with civility, knowing that either choice would only leave them in their ignorance. But Mamdani’s choice snapped them out of it for me. And while it’s tempting to punish such former Mamdani supporters for their blindness up till now, the truth is that we need them. So, I say, welcome to the land of the real and the side of the right.

Jonathan Tobin: A satire about Anne Frank explains woke antisemitism

A ‘secret’ ending
The producers of the play ask that critics not reveal the ending of the show so as to ensure that audiences fully register the “shock” of some of its denouement. But the secret ending of the play isn’t comparable to the last minutes of Agatha Christie’s “Witness For The Prosecution,” in which the true identity of the murderer and the eponymous witness is revealed. So, I don’t feel obligated to play by their rules.

What those who have lauded the play as “clever, gleefully provocative” or even “the most important new show around” aren’t telling you is what happens in the play’s final scenes.

Margot finally speaks, only to give an oration about the need to go to Palestine to displace and oppress its indigenous Arab population once the war ends. Anne then realizes that her family shouldn’t survive and betrays them herself, leading to their deaths. But then, after the bodies fall (they are shot on the spot rather than gassed or tortured and starved in the camps), Hitler turns up and, having shed his male identity and become a trans woman, he “cancels the Holocaust’ so the Jews don’t have to commit suicide to save humanity from the evils of Zionism.

Cue the applause, and the actors all turn up for a final chorus wearing t-shirts with woke slogans, including one reading “by any means necessary,” something that is embraced by those cheering for Hamas’s efforts to slaughter the contemporary living Jews that are not as popular as the dead Anne.

Sure, we’re not supposed to take any of this seriously except to embrace the notion that no one is 100% correct and that all causes are suspect. But the reaction of the audience to the mention of “Palestine” and the cheers that greeted Anne’s claim that the “seven million colonizers” currently committing crimes there are the result of the six million dead Jews told you all you need to know about the impact of this play at this moment.

Despite the hopes of some who lauded the play, and believed it to be a jab at the tweet that inspired it,the audience wasn’t acknowledging that Jews don’t have “white privilege.” Rather, they were nodding along at the false claim that Jews have no right to live in Israel. And this is because Jews are now wrongly viewed as “white” oppressors.

Contrary to its press clippings, “Slam Frank” is not an equal-opportunity offender. It may be poking fun at most things, but the one thing it is deadly serious about is denying the Jews their stories, as well as the right to mourn their dead with dignity and to live in freedom in their own country without being smeared as monsters and targeted for genocide.

Would they do this to another group?
Moreover, could anyone imagine someone putting on a play today in which black or Hispanic victims of racist crimes were portrayed as Jews or any identity other than their own? Would they deny them their culture and history and use them as stand-ins for more fashionable identities? Of course not.

Such a play, even if it claimed to be a satire, would be denounced as racist. Even the hit musical comedy “The Book of Mormon” by the creators of the cartoon satire “South Park,” to which “Slam Frank” has been compared, is kinder to its targets—the adherents of that faith—than Fox and Sinesky are to the objects of their scorn. But you can do this to Jews with impunity and still be applauded by liberal critics as having accomplished an act of creative genius.

This isn’t the first time the story of Anne Frank has been utilized to advance a non-Jewish agenda. The aforementioned play and movie adaptations of the Diary deliberately downplayed the Jewish elements of the story and sought to universalize Anne as a girl just like everyone else. That pleased Anne’s father, Otto, who had little use for Judaism or Jewish identity. It also drove writer Meyer Levin, who had worked to promote the book and wanted to write a more Jewish play, nearly out of his mind.

Yet, just like those adaptations of Anne’s story that came at a time when Jews were eager to fit in and be seen as the same as everyone else, “Slam Frank” speaks just as loudly to the current desire of many, including some Jews, to erase not just Israel but also Jewish peoplehood itself.

The answer to the question as to why antisemitism is flourishing in a way that it hasn’t since the Holocaust is that contemporary Western culture is willing to mock everything but not the lie that Jews, as both Hitler and woke ideologues alike have claimed, are “weaponizing antisemitism.”

While some Jews thought the unspeakable atrocities of Oct. 7 against Jews by a genocidal Islamo-fascist terror group and its supporters would generate sympathy for the victims, the opposite has occurred. The shedding of their blood in the largest mass slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust didn’t shame or deter antisemites; it excited them.

And though the movement to demonize and delegitimize the one Jewish state on the planet had been building toward this for several decades, the explosion of antisemitism shouldn’t have surprised anyone—since, for the chattering classes, the Jews remain a metaphor, rather than a people with rights.

A product of this moment in cultural history
A world in which “Slam Frank” is acclaimed as a work of comic genius is not only one in which nothing sacred to the Jews is granted even minimal respect. It’s one in which people, including New York theater audiences who think of themselves as enlightened liberals, can believe blood libels about Jews committing “genocide,” and that the war to eradicate the sole Jewish state and to commit another Holocaust against its people is a righteous one.

“Slam Frank” seems unlikely to have a long afterlife or hold the stage in the future, and not merely because it isn’t as clever as its admirers think it is. Rather, because it is a product of this particular moment in cultural history.

Since Oct. 7 three years ago, it has once again become permissible to strip Jews of their past and identity and to smear them as “colonizers” and oppressors. We can only hope that this episode passes quickly, ensuring that this travesty is relegated to the trash heap of theatrical history, where it belongs.

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10/09 Links Pt1: Natan Sharansky: Is the Whole World Wrong?; October 8: The war Israel still has not learned to fight; The Nobel Committee Just Made a Mockery of Its Peace Prize, and President Trump Called It Out

From Ian:

Natan Sharansky: Is the Whole World Wrong?

This morning the Norwegian Nobel Committee announced that it has awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for 2026 to South African judge Navanethem “Navi” Pillay, who led the 2025 U.N. commission that found Israel guilty of genocide against the Palestinians. This appears to be the greatest possible legitimization of the now-established consensus about Israel’s war in Gaza.

As Jews around the world react with despair, I am reminded of an excellent article by Ahad Ha’am, written in 1892 and titled “Half Solace.” Observing the renewal of the ancient blood libel in his own time, the great cultural Zionist notes that “philosophers know that there is no lie and no evil that cannot obtain ‘general agreement’ if only the conditions of existence are suitable to it.” Unfortunately, however, “only philosophers know this, and in the eyes of the masses, even now there is no greater authority than ‘consensus.’”

It was a general consensus for hundreds of years that Jews killed Christian children to collect their blood for the Passover Seder. In Russia, for example, in the so-called Velizh affair of 1823, 43 Jews were arrested and interrogated over a period of 12 years on charges of killing a 3-year-old Russian boy. Many spent almost a decade in prison, and some died there. Of course, the accusation was a lie, and those who survived were eventually released without guilt. But what is particularly interesting about this episode is that even the Tsar Nicholas I, who personally signed their release, remarked in a postscript to his signature that he was not fully convinced these men were innocent, because there were so many similar Jewish crimes throughout history. How could all of these reports be wrong, he asked?

Or take another example, from a very intelligent Christian activist whom I met in a Soviet labor camp and who would become my best friend. He told me that while he knew Jews no longer used Christian blood, they must have done so a few hundred years earlier. Otherwise, how could such a widespread belief have come to be?

Ahad Ha’am concludes his essay with the same question. Is it really possible, he asks, that the whole world is wrong and the Jews are right? “It is possible,” he answers, “and the blood libel proves it.” It is therefore precisely here, he says, that Jews can find a useful lesson and some consolation. We can free ourselves from the power of false prejudices and find strength in the conviction of our own moral cause.

As I write, Israelis and Jews around the world are marking the genocidal campaign waged against us on Oct. 7, 2023, and mourning the thousands of innocent lives taken that day. A genocide, according to the legal definition, comprises acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group. This is exactly what the sadistic terrorists who rampaged our communities, raping, burning, torturing, and murdering everyone they could reach, intended to do that day.

Yet at this very moment, the masses are busy accusing us of genocide against our enemies. On university campuses and in the streets of capital cities, protesters used our day of somber remembrance to amplify the growing consensus that we are the ones committing unspeakable atrocities.

I’ve seen Naza and it’s a nasty piece of propaganda

The horrors of October 7, 2023, are almost impossible to comprehend. Behind the staggering scale of the Hamas massacres are individual stories of unimaginable cruelty and suffering. Stories that must not be forgotten.

Baby Kfir, for example. Or his brother Ariel. Or their mother, Shiri. The two red-haired Israeli boys were just nine months and four years old when terrorists from the Palestinian Hamas abducted them to Gaza. Videos of their kidnapping show the shock and boundless despair in their mother’s eyes as the Islamists, shouting “Allahu Akbar”, violently forced the young family onto a pickup truck and took them to Gaza.

Months later, news spread around the world that the terrorists had murdered the two brothers and their mother with their bare hands. In an act of breathtaking cynicism, Hamas handed over the Israelis’ bodies to the Red Cross. The event was staged as a family celebration, complete with music and cheering. On the boys’ coffins were images of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu depicted as a vampire drinking the blood of the Bibas family. Instead of returning the body of the murdered hostage Shiri Bibas, Hamas handed over the remains of a Palestinian woman.

It is difficult to imagine anything more despicable.

Yarden, the father of Kfir and Ariel and Shiri’s husband, survived 484 days in Hamas captivity. He will never see his children or his wife again. Nothing will ever be right again for Yarden. Nothing. Ever.

Or Vivian Silver. The Israeli peace activist lived in Kibbutz Be’eri, right on the border with Gaza. Throughout her life, the 74-year-old campaigned for the Palestinians in Gaza and for a two-state solution. Every week, she drove to the border to collect children suffering from cancer and take them to Israeli hospitals for treatment.

On October 7, Hamas terrorists stormed her home, opened fire and then threw several hand grenades into the safe room where Vivian Silver had sought refuge. It took weeks to identify her remains. Her teeth were found beneath a pile of ashes.

Or Shani Louk, the radiantly beautiful 22-year-old German-Israeli woman who had gone to the Nova festival to dance and celebrate, only to be beaten, abused and shot by Palestinian terrorists, like so many other Israeli women. Afterwards, as Hamas triumphantly paraded her body before the people of Gaza, a mob of Palestinian civilians beat, spat upon and desecrated her remains.

A reminder: On the morning of October 7, 2023, Hamas breached Israel’s border with a single objective: to kill as many Jews as possible. The genocidal terrorist organisation murdered more than 1,200 Israelis in southern Israel. At the same time, hundreds of rockets were launched at Israel from the Gaza Strip.

The Palestinian terrorists were supported by Hezbollah, the heavily armed militia in Lebanon supplied by Tehran. From Yemen, Iran, Syria, Iraq and the West Bank, Hamas’s allies also sought to destroy the Jewish state and its citizens – precisely as the slogan goes: “From the River to the Sea!”

Israel was surrounded by a Shiite ring of fire. Overnight, it found itself fighting a war on seven fronts. Once again, the country was forced to fight for its very existence.

At the same time, Hamas abducted more than 250 innocent Israeli civilians and took them into Gaza. Accounts have documented how hostages were raped, abused, subjected to horrific torture and starved to the brink of death.

For weeks, Hamas ignored Israel’s offers to secure the hostages’ release. Jerusalem responded to Hamas’s war of aggression, or, more precisely, Israel did what any state in its position would have done. It defended itself, sought to end the relentless rocket fire from Gaza and attempted to bring its kidnapped citizens home alive.

Why this lengthy introduction to a film review?

Because none of this is shown in NAZA (a title derived from the Hebrew word for “collateral damage”). That is the filmmakers’ prerogative. But it is dishonest.

Would a film depicting the Allied attacks on Nazi Germany be credible if it failed to explain why those attacks took place? Would a film be credible if it gave the impression that the Allies had attacked Nazi Germany for no reason whatsoever? Or even suggested that they had done so out of some bloodthirsty impulse to kill other human beings?

October 8: The war Israel still has not learned to fight

On Wednesday, October 7, like many Israelis, my wife and I made the long drive from Jerusalem to the Nova music festival memorial. We wanted to offer support to families whose tears, understandably, have not dried up three years later.

We met the ZAKA commander who led teams recovering human remains from the devastated festival grounds. With extraordinary dignity, he described what his teams encountered and carefully showed us what was appropriate to see.

A crowd gathered. Fighting back tears, he asked everyone to stand together, united as one nation.

On our drive home, his words stayed with me.

Because as Israel approaches another election, we are doing something we do extraordinarily well.

We are fighting among ourselves.

Who knew what exactly, before October 7? What did Netanyahu know? Which agencies and/or intelligence officers failed? Who ignored the warnings? Why are these accusations only appearing now before the elections? Why, three years later, are we still fighting over a credible commission of inquiry?

These questions demand answers. Accountability is essential. But instead of allowing October 7 to strengthen our common purpose, we risk turning its memory into another political battlefield.

Meanwhile, we are overlooking something potentially more consequential.

October 8.

Two dates. Two different wars.

October 7 was a catastrophic failure within a world Israel understands.

Israel knows armies, terrorism, intelligence, deterrence, and military technology. We built an extraordinary defense ecosystem: the IDF, Mossad, Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency), defense industries, reserves, intelligence organizations, and alliances.

That ecosystem failed catastrophically. But we understand how to repair it.

October 7 revealed the failure of an ecosystem Israel already knew it needed since its inception.

October 8 revealed something entirely different.

An ecosystem we had never adequately built.

Before Israel’s military response in Gaza could explain the international reaction, anti-Israel demonstrations and narratives were already spreading.

The vocabulary of colonialism, apartheid and resistance was ready. Campus organizations, activists, influencers and digital networks were prepared to mobilize.

This did not require one giant conspiracy.

It required an ecosystem.

Foreign governments fund academics who produce ideas. Activists translate them. Organizations create campaigns. Influencers generate content. Algorithms amplify it. Demonstrations produce images. Media broadcast them. Politicians respond.

And the cycle accelerates.

Sinwar’s victory beyond the battlefield
Yahya Sinwar did not launch October 7 expecting Israel to remain passive.

He knew Israel would retaliate. He accepted the prospect of devastating consequences for Gaza while seeking a confrontation that could ignite additional fronts.

In effect, he launched a suicidal strategic gamble, sacrificing Hamas’s military position and exposing Gaza’s population to catastrophic consequences in pursuit of a larger objective.

Sinwar and his colleagues were killed. Hamas suffered enormous military losses. But we should not confuse military defeat with defeat on every battlefield.

Sinwar achieved a consequential victory in the battle for international perception.

Whether he anticipated every dimension of the international response is debatable. What is undeniable is that a preexisting pro-Palestinian ecosystem was capable of exploiting the war at extraordinary speed.

And where were we?

Still explaining. Still correcting. Still reacting.

A September 2026 Marquette Law School national poll found that 59% of Americans now view Israel unfavorably, compared with just 29% favorably. Only 18 months earlier, Americans were evenly divided, 43% to 43%.

It is a dramatic deterioration in Israel’s standing among the American public. The consequences are for the political and social environment in which American Jews must live, and for Israel’s ability to manage current American government support.

Not all this change can be attributed to propaganda. Israel’s decisions, the war’s humanitarian consequences, and changing American attitudes matter. But that makes our strategic failure more urgent, not less.

We failed to build a sufficiently competitive ecosystem before the crisis arrived.

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10/08 Links Pt2: Melanie Phillips: The Jewish fifth columnist; David Collier: The BBC’s Spiteful Hamas Propaganda; NY Jews deposit hostage tags into new art installation on Oct. 7

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: The Jewish fifth columnists

This movement has made a fetish of these Jewish fifth columnists. They include politicians like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.); talking heads like journalist Peter Beinart; political operatives like former Obama administration foreign-policy adviser Ben Rhodes and J Street founder Jeremy Ben-Ami; left-wing activist groups like IfNotNow and Jewish Voice for Peace; nongovernmental organization stalwarts like Human Rights Watch’s former executive director Kenneth Roth; and others.

Kerstein calls such people, who enjoy high social, economic, cultural or political status, “Jews of Privilege.” Such Jews, he writes, have always strongly disliked and often hated Zionism, feared its potential impact on their chances of assimilation and the preservation of their privilege, and have felt little or no solidarity with other Jews.

Kerstein gratifyingly skewers such people. He quotes journalist Ezra Klein sanitizing the Muslim fanatic Mamdani as being “thoroughly if banally liberal.”

Klein, writes Kerstein, has endorsed the ultimate conviction of the “Jews of Privilege” that only minority status is moral, only powerlessness is redemption, and that multi-ethnic democracy guarantees the safety of Diaspora Jewry.

But, of course, the past three years in Klein’s Western multi-ethnic nirvana have been a nightmare for Diaspora Jews. As Kerstein witheringly writes, the “Jews of Privilege” are facing demographic collapse while the Jews of Zionism are burgeoning in a state that has proved itself “remarkably resilient and successful.”

Kerstein’s account is all the more powerful because he himself originally shared these anti-Zionist views. Although he didn’t come from a privileged background, he was alienated from his Jewish identity and, as a teenager, believed that Israel had no right to exist. Much of his book is an account of how his personal voyage of the soul led him to move to Israel, discover the complexity of the Middle East—and find himself as a Jew.

Indeed, the nature of Jewishness is perhaps the most significant and least understood element in anti-Zionism. Anti-Zionist Jews want to detach Zionism from Judaism to uphold what they refer to as “Jewish values.”

What they’re actually doing is swinging a wrecking ball at those values.

For Judaism consists of a fusion of three elements: the religion, the people and the land. Judaism holds that the Jewish people were given a divine mission to establish a particular society in “Zion,” the land of Israel.

While Jews don’t need to prove their Jewishness through religious observance, living in Israel or even just supporting it, detaching the land from Judaism is to dismember it. Anti-Zionism is an attack on Judaism itself.

Anti-Zionist Jews want to reframe Jewish values—the most particularist set of principles on earth—as universalist. This inevitably privileges the values and interests of non-Jews over those of the Jews.

This is because, writes Kerstein, anti-Zionist Jews have decided that it’s impossible for the “vast and kind” non-Jewish world to be wrong and the Jews to be right. And the outcome of that attitude is the belief that Israel must be dismantled and the Palestinian Arabs granted domination over everyone else.

Kerstein has performed a vital service in holding such people to account. Jewish community leaders refuse to do so because they are terrified of disunity and of washing dirty linen in public.

Undesirable though that is, there’s worse. We are living through an unprecedented cultural emergency for Jews and for the West in which they live.

While it’s vital not to lose focus on the battle against those who are out to destroy the Jewish people, it’s suicidally reckless to turn a blind eye to those Jews who, in their abysmal ignorance and pathological confusion or worse over their Jewish identity, are assisting them in their infernal aim.

Inside NAZA’s Activist Network and Its Calls to “End Zionism”

NAZA, the documentary film that won Venice’s Special Jury Prize in September, grew from a reporting network whose editors and writers have publicly advocated ending Zionism and rejecting Israel’s nature as a Jewish state, according to a new Jewish Onliner investigation.

The documentary portrays Israeli military operations in Gaza as a system of “calculated mass killing.” Produced by The Guardian and JW Films, it draws on reporting published by +972 Magazine, Local Call and The Guardian between 2023 and 2025. These institutional connections place the film within an openly activist media network, parts of which pursue political goals extending far beyond the documentary’s stated focus on Israel’s military conduct in Gaza.

A Local Call Editor Explicitly Demanded an End to Zionism
One of the clearest statements came from Orly Noy, an editor at Local Call, the Hebrew-language publication whose reporting helped underpin NAZA. In a September 2025 essay published by +972, Noy wrote:
“Zionism, in all its forms, cannot be cleansed of the stain of this crime. It must be brought to an end.”

She demanded a process of “denazification” across Israeli society and rejected the country’s combined Jewish and democratic identity. Her position explicitly targeted Zionism itself, not simply the government in power.

The Guardian Published Calls for the “End of Zionism”
In an August 5, 2011 column, David Hearst, then a Guardian foreign editorial writer, envisioned “The end of Zionism, no less.”

An April 24, 2024 essay by Guardian US columnist Naomi Klein called Zionism a “false idol” and declared: “So tonight we say: it ends here.”

In July 2024, the newspaper published Ahmed Moor’s essay calling for the “end of Zionism.”

The newspaper’s involvement in NAZA went beyond commentary: it produced the film, drawing on reporting by The Guardian, +972 and Local Call.

David Harsanyi: America owes Mahmoud Khalil nothing

Pro-terrorist activist Mahmoud Khalil was asked by CNN the other day if he would condemn Hamas. He, of course, would not, calling the question “silly” and “disingenuous.” It is not “black and white,” he whined.

Even if you oppose Israel’s reaction to the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre, the answer is still black and white for any person with a conscience. Certainly, it should be for any person who wants to become a naturalized citizen of the United States. After all, Hamas is designated by the State Department as a terrorist organization for, among other things, murdering Americans. Stay informed.Stay ahead.

But the fact that Khalil can’t condemn Hamas — and anyone paying attention understands that he supports the terrorist army — not only tells us that he deserves to be deported but also that it’s imperative we deport him.

During the 1960s and 1970s, immigration officials grilled newcomers to the U.S. and elsewhere about their affiliations with communist parties. Why would we import people who want to destroy our system? Newcomers were, and still are, compelled to disavow associations with illiberal movements, violent groups, and ideologies. They were also required to promise not to engage in any subversive or revolutionary activity.

Well, Khalil’s entire job as an “activist” is to engage in subversive or revolutionary activity.

Khalil is an Algerian, incidentally, not a Palestinian, though he is a champion of Palestinianism, one of the most nihilistic, bigoted, violent, anti-Western ideologies of the age. There’s no anti-American or Marxist protest or riot anywhere in the world these days where Palestinian flags are not prominent.

The French, of course, don’t need much impetus to riot. But protests that began over a lack of school funding a few weeks ago have now escalated into increasingly destructive and violent riots across France, clearly fueled in part by Marxist pro-Palestinian elements. The red-green alliance between Islamists and communists isn’t new — it’s just more popular than ever. France has over 5 million Muslims.

What you see happening on the streets of Paris is exactly what Khalil hopes to see in the U.S. We saw as much when he was the lead “negotiator” for Columbia University Apartheid Divest, which rioted at the school in 2025. The group’s goal is to fight for the “total eradication of Western civilization,” “global intifada,” and the “armed resistance” of Hamas. That doesn’t sound very American.

Khalil’s friend, Mohsen Mahdawi, another leader of CUAD fighting against deportation, reportedly has a propensity to make Hamas-like statements, such as “I like to kill Jews,” “soon, very soon, we will annihilate the Jews,” and that “servants of the Jews or the Americans” will have their heads “cut off.” Would we give citizenship to a foreigner who said, “I like to kill blacks” or “I like to kill Christians”? I hope not.

Khalil is being deported for lying on his application, though he was initially picked up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers for threatening U.S. foreign policy. These deportations should not be treated as a matter of botched paperwork but as a matter of national security.

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10/08 Links Pt1: Andrew Roberts: I documented the crimes of October 7. Too many still believe the lies of Hamas; After Oct. 7, Israel Rewrote the Rules of the Middle East

From Ian:

Andrew Roberts: I documented the crimes of October 7. Too many still believe the lies of Hamas

As the Red Army closed in on Auschwitz, the Nazis blew up the crematoria to hide the atrocities they had committed. On Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas did the opposite. Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar ordered his fighters to film their killing and broadcast it to spread terror. With GoPro cameras strapped to their chests, they filmed themselves gleefully slaughtering, burning, and raping Israeli citizens, young and old, and uploaded the footage in real time.

In three decades writing about war, I have rarely encountered an atrocity documented in such detail. The 7 October Parliamentary Commission Report which I chaired, and the evidence that underpins it, runs to more than 300 pages. Yet the same organization that broadcast its own atrocities in real time began denying the specifics within hours. Hamas leader Khalil al-Hayya told the BBC that Hamas never targeted women and children, and called footage of terrified families Israel's invention.

These same men now lead Hamas's negotiations, and their assurances sit at the heart of the diplomatic process. A movement instructed to showcase mass murder, not conceal it, cannot expect its word to be trusted - least of all on disarmament. Disarmament cannot depend on assurances. It must be verified: inspectors must have access to every depot and tunnel, a timetable must be published, and each missed checkpoint must trigger consequences, not renewed negotiation.

Hamas leaders have vowed to repeat Oct. 7 "again and again" until Israel is destroyed. Those are not the words of a movement reconciled to peace, but of one waiting for its next opportunity. Peace does not require trusting Hamas; it requires ensuring Hamas no longer has the means to break it.

Bret Stephens: When Criticism of Israel Goes Off the Rails

Zealous criticism of Israel goes off the rails when it somehow imagines, or pretends, that blame for the crises in the Holy Land falls on one side alone and that Israel's security challenges are either a product of its imagination or payback for its own policies.

Israel came into existence with its enemies avowing its extermination, and nearly eight decades later those intentions remain unchanged.

The experience of Israelis in this century is that every time they have vacated territory, whether in southern Lebanon in 2000 or Gaza in 2005, they have gained neither international grace nor physical security.

Instead, their retreats created staging grounds for the kind of horror that so many Israelis experienced firsthand on and after Oct. 7 - horrors that many of the world's so-called humanitarians and justice-seekers chose to celebrate, downplay or flat-out deny.

Constant critics of Israel might try to remember that Israelis aren't simply hallucinating their own peril.

Weaponizing the charge of genocide fuels an increasingly dangerous antisemitism

Genocide, the intentional annihilation of a group of people, is the gravest of crimes. As malicious actors weaponize the term and endanger Jews everywhere, meticulous use of the charge is more essential than ever.

We are honored to serve as the current and former chairs of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, an institution memorializing history’s most well-documented genocide: Nazi Germany and its collaborators’ attempt to systematically murder every Jewish man, woman and child in Europe. They almost succeeded. Two-thirds of European Jews – 6 million – were killed. The global Jewish population has yet to recover, with fewer Jews alive today than in 1939, when World War II began.

Holocaust survivors fervently hoped antisemitism would wither when Germany was defeated and its crimes exposed. Yet, they knew from centuries of persecutions long before the Nazis, this ancient hatred is impossible to eradicate. Even so, after World War II, antisemitism became socially unacceptable. The shocking reactions from many quarters to Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel, three years ago, show this is no longer the case.

On that day, Hamas terrorists invaded Israel intending to murder as many Jewish people as possible, bringing about the deadliest day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust. As Israel defends itself, we reiterate our wholehearted conviction that Israel has not committed genocide, reflecting the United States government’s consistent and prevailing view. Rescuers and police escort elderly woman and others after synagogue terror attack in Manchester.

At the same time, we cannot forget the terrible tragedy many innocent Gazans have experienced as a result of the war. The loss of tens of thousands, including many children, is horrific.

As we mourn so many innocent lives lost, we cannot ignore that Hamas puts civilians in harm’s way as a central part of its strategy to demonize Israel. Despite this deadly strategy, Israel has made efforts to warn civilians when to evacuate, provide food and relief, and facilitate vaccine distribution.

Israel, like any country, is not exempt from criticism. And yet, whether out of ignorance or malice, people from all walks of life, often with little knowledge or legal expertise, including in the specific definition of genocide, continually wield the term. Others weaponize it to delegitimize the world’s only Jewish state. Regardless of their intention, the impact is a terrifying eruption of antisemitism and a more dangerous world for Jewish people everywhere.

Furthermore, state actors like Iran, Qatar, China and Russia spread antisemitic and anti-Israel conspiracy theories and Holocaust denial to stir hatred of Jews and sow chaos in democracies. They are succeeding. Antisemitism is no longer lurking at society’s fringes. It is marching openly through its institutions. Violent antisemitism is at levels not seen since the Holocaust. From Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue to Bondi Beach in Australia, to Manchester, England, and far too many other places, Jews are under deadly attack. And every day, Jews face relentless harassment and threats on streets, campuses and online.

Talk about "Genocide" Should Start with Israel's Murdered Mothers and Children

When I heard that students were planning a pro-Palestinian march through London on the third anniversary of the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, I thought how grotesquely insensitive is it possible to be? What is wrong with people?

You want genocide? Young women at the Nova peace festival, half-naked, strung up from trees the better to defile them. Twin baby boys, their mother slaughtered in the kitchen, their father riddled with bullets; the orphaned babies used as bait for 14 hours, little Guy and Roi, 10 months old, left to scream so they would lure neighbors to rescue them and those brave souls were then picked off by the terrorists lying in wait. Killing parents in front of their sobbing children, then setting the house on fire so those children are burnt alive.

Here we are, three years on from one of the darkest days in history, and it's Jews - not Islamists - who are either fleeing the UK or living in fear. Their children attend heavily fortified schools and worship in high-security synagogues.

I am not Jewish, but I believe the Jews deserve and need a homeland. I hate their enemies because they are our enemies. So that makes me a Zionist. If you have any sense of what history teaches us, you should be a Zionist too. No more "Yes, buts." Today, Oct. 7, of all days, let us stand with our Jewish brothers and sisters.

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10/07 Links Pt2: Who still fights the war on terror?; Simon Sebag Montefiore: Iran, America, Israel, and the End of Khomeinism; Iran’s sickening celebration of October 7

From Ian:

Clifford D. May: Who still fights the war on terror?

Addressing Congress nine days after Sept. 11, President George W. Bush declared: “Our war on terror begins with al-Qaeda, but it does not end there.” He added: “It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated.”

A dozen years later, President Barack Obama announced that what had become known as the global war on terror “like all wars, must end. That’s what history advises.”

History doesn’t actually advise, though it can reveal patterns—and Obama drew the wrong one. Wars against an enemy driven by an ideology of conquest rarely end until that enemy is decisively defeated or abandons its demands.

Since 2001, some Islamist terrorist organizations have been diminished by the United States and its partners. But not one has surrendered. Nor have any forsworn what they call the jihad—the holy war that began in the seventh century and for more than a millennium drove the expansion of vast empires.

As for the Islamic Republic of Iran—long described by the U.S. State Department as the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism—it, too, is committed to jihad. Only three years ago, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the late supreme leader, said plainly that “Death to America!” should be understood as “not just a slogan; it is a policy.”

His challenge was to develop the capabilities necessary to implement that policy. If you understand that, you grasp why U.S. President Donald Trump, unlike his predecessors, decided to take concrete steps to end Tehran’s nuclear-weapons development.

The U.S. military and the Treasury Department have been depriving Iran’s rulers of the oil revenue they need to rebuild a missile arsenal that would shield their nuclear-weapons program, support their foreign terrorist proxies and utilize the Strait of Hormuz to hold the global economy hostage.

Meanwhile, more good news: Within a few days of one another, three attempted terrorist attacks—one in the Middle East, one in Europe and one in the United States—were foiled.

Jonathan Tobin: In Michigan, the issue is erasing Jewish interests, not the Jewish vote

Sen. Elissa Slotkin’s (D-Mich.) decision to campaign on behalf of Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic candidate for Senate in her state, was, she says, a function of a desire to help someone who would be on what she calls “Team Fight” rather than “Team Flight.” By that, she meant someone who would battle President Donald Trump alongside her in the U.S. Senate, rather than seek compromises with the Republican administration like her more moderate colleague Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.).

In taking this stand, she has fallen in line with the rest of her party in backing El-Sayed. But in framing the question as one of “fight” or “flight,” she was deliberately avoiding the historic implications of her choice. One more Democrat in the Senate could give her party control of both houses of Congress, and make it easier for them to impeach and try Trump, regardless of the partisan nature of such a procedure.

Given that even under those circumstances, a conviction and his ouster from office would likely be impossible, the stakes won’t involve the future of the republic as much as handing Democrats the sinecures and power that come from being in the majority.

But electing an open antisemite like El-Sayed would be truly momentous not just for the Jewish community, of which Slotkin is a member, but for its implications for the future of her party and the nation. From that perspective, characterizing the decision as one of “fight” or “flight” is actually quite apt. But the truth is that what she and a host of other Jewish Democrats, including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, are doing is engaging in “flight” rather than fighting to hold the line against antisemitism inside her party at a time when it is surging around the globe.

‘No such thing as Jewish voters?’
What made her decision to join forces with El-Sayed particularly interesting was revealed during a joint interview with him on the MS NOW cable-TV channel.

In it, Slotkin didn’t just play the loyal Democratic soldier swallowing the indignity of endorsing a man who seeks to drive the overwhelming majority of American Jews out of the public square. In doing so, she is supporting someone who embodies the illiberal red-green alliance of leftists and Islamists that is taking control of liberal parties around the world.

When asked about the fact that most Michigan Jews, including the majority who are loyal Democrats and politically liberal, simply won’t go along with electing an antisemite, Slotkin’s reply was succinct.

She said, “There’s no such thing as the Jewish voters, just like there’s no such thing as the Muslim voters or the black voters. People have their own views, and the things that they prioritize are going to drive their vote.”

In a sense, she’s right. Citizens vote as individuals and not as part of groups. And, indeed, most American Jews have not voted in lockstep on issues like Israel, even if the majority of them are supporters of the Jewish state. That is especially true of Jewish Democrats, who have always placed Israel’s security below many domestic concerns, whether it was health-care costs or legalized abortion. It’s something that has particularly frustrated Trump, whose pro-Israel policies and efforts to fight antisemitism in education have not been rewarded by most Jewish voters.

To some extent, that’s also true of other groups, like Muslims and African-Americans, though both of those constituencies have been more likely to treat issues relating to their community’s safety as a priority. By contrast, liberal Jews tend to treat universal concerns as more important than those that personally concern them. As writer Cynthia Ozick famously said, “Universalism is the ultimate Jewish parochialism.”

Tolerating antisemitism
But as Jews in Michigan and elsewhere have come to learn in the three years since the Oct. 7 Hamas-led Palestinian Arab terror attacks on Israeli communities incited an unprecedented increase in antisemitism, El-Sayed’s candidacy is not, strictly speaking, about voters’ views about the Jewish state. It’s about their willingness to tolerate the mainstreaming of Jew-hatred here in the United States.

So, when Slotkin seeks to deny that there is such a thing as “Jewish voters,” she’s signaling something very different from the fact that not all Jews cast votes solely on the basis of a candidate’s views on Israel. Along with other Democrats, both Jewish and non-Jewish, she is seeking to establish something far more important.

'Not yet out of danger': Israeli envoy to US shares update on son following terror attack

Israel ambassador to the US Yechiel Leiter, whose son Neria was seriously wounded during a car-ramming terrorist attack in September, said Wednesday that his son “has severe head injuries, but in recent days he has begun breathing on his own.”

“He remains unconscious,” Leiter added in a video recorded for the Evangelical Christian community’s memorial ceremony honoring the victims of October 7, held in Jerusalem.

In an additional statement shared by the ambassador, the family clarified that despite several encouraging signs, Neria remains in very serious condition and is not yet out of danger.

The Leiter family said Neria is receiving the best possible medical care in the intensive care unit at Shaare Zedek Medical Center in Jerusalem. The family thanked the medical staff and the public for their prayers and immense support and asked people to continue praying for the recovery of Neria Dov ben Chana.

Seriously wounded in terror attack
Neria Leiter, an IDF reservist and American citizen, was seriously wounded in a terrorist attack at the Bell checkpoint on Route 443.

He underwent several hours of brain surgery at Shaare Zedek Medical Center, where his family later received a visit from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, The Jerusalem Post previously reported.

The family also received numerous messages of support on X from Israeli leaders, including President Isaac Herzog, Defense Minister Israel Katz, and US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee.

From bedside of his son on life support from terror attack, Israeli envoy to US decries Mamdani’s ‘dangerous lies’

Yechiel Leiter, Israeli ambassador to the United States, was so put off by the statement that New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani released on the third anniversary of Oct. 7 that the envoy decried it from the hospital in Israel, where he is at the bedside of his son, who is on life support after a Palestinian terrorist hit him with a car.

“It’s actually hard to find a sentence in Mamdani’s post that isn’t a lie,” Leiter stated.

“Paying lip service to the victims of Oct. 7 just to spread blood libels about Israel might play nicely to the red-green/communist-Islamist alliance that he promotes in the United States, but those of us who know better see his perverted language for what it is,” the Israeli envoy stated. “This man is a defender of Palestinian terrorism, a promoter of antisemitism and an advocate of anti-Americanism.”

Even on the anniversary of the bloodiest day for Jews since the Holocaust, the anti-Israel mayor “can’t help but attack the Jewish state with absurd accusations and outright propaganda,” according to the Israeli envoy.

“The only attempted genocide in this conflict was perpetrated by the barbarians he supports, Hamas, who butchered, raped and murdered in the most horrific ways imaginable,” Leiter stated. “There is no genocide, ethnic cleansing or famine in Gaza. Hamas embeds itself among, behind and beneath the people of Gaza, knowing that the IDF will not, ever, intentionally target civilians. It robs its own people of the humanitarian aid that Israel has facilitated into Gaza since the war began.”

Leiter called the mayor, who campaigned on having the Israeli prime minister arrested, an ally of Hamas, a U.S.-designated terror organization since 1997.

“Hamas knows that its allies, including Zohran Mamdani, will regurgitate its lies, demonizing Israel and endangering Jews everywhere,” the Israeli envoy stated. “Israel and its allies will not be deterred from defending civilization against terrorist savagery. Those of us who envision a peaceful and prosperous Middle East will root out the evil that is Islamic terrorism and build a better future for all, Jew and Arab alike.”

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10/07 Links Pt1: How will we remember October 7?; In Israel, even fear and grief can become courage, resilience and joy; Mamdani chose to play Hamas’ spokesman on Oct. 7 anniversary

From Ian:

How will we remember October 7?

Three years later and at times October 7 still feels like yesterday.

For the victims and their families time has stood still, stuck in the moment of the last hug, smile and time they heard the sound of their voices. For the survivors and for the first responders who answered the call for help that morning, time has not moved forward either. Trauma from the scenes of death and destruction still haunt their minds eye. But the calendar still says three years has past since that infamous day.

Across Israel and the Jewish world, we are still trying to make sense of what happened. Many conversations focus on how such a catastrophe could have befallen the Jewish state, defended by one of the strongest armies in the world. Others focus on how our enemies still seek our annihilation. Then there are the quieter conversations focused on stories of sacrifice, selflessness and survival that are intertwined with the horrors of the day.

Our Jewish tradition commands us to remember. It has been woven into our national consciousness. We remember slavery in Egypt. We mourn the destruction of the Temples. We recall attempted systematic extermination of our ancestors, both recent and ancient. But with each tragedy we cling to the hope that the suffering also paves way for moments of jubilee. The story of slavery is juxtaposed to the birth of the Nation of Israel. The desecration and destruction of both Holy Temples in Jerusalem has served as inspiration for millennia of prayer and hope of rebirth. Even the attempts to annihilate the Jewish people are interconnected to our return to our ancestral Homeland. It's like the age old Jewish joke, they came tried to destroy us, G-d saved us, let's eat.

So how will we remember October 7?
We do not have to look very far for an answer.

Even before Israel’s leadership fully grasped the magnitude of what was happening that morning, hundreds of United Hatzalah volunteers had already made a decision. They were going south.

There was no grand order telling them to go. For many, the decision was intensely personal. They heard the call for help and understood that people were in danger. They put on their orange vests, grabbed their medic bags and drove toward the gunfire.

By the end of that first day, more than 1,500 United Hatzalah volunteers were engaged in treating and evacuating the wounded.

Three years later, United Hatzalah founder and president Eli Beer retraced the steps taken by some of those volunteers. We returned to the Nova festival grounds and to communities along the Gaza border whose names were once familiar only to those who lived there, but are now etched into our national story.

At every stop, another story surfaced.

Gil Troy: In Israel, even fear and grief can become courage, resilience and joy

The image of a plane plummeting toward certain doom, then soaring up thanks to gutsy Israelis and a courageous pilot, captures the whiplash emotions we all experienced this Sukkot. Or, as the comedienne Dana Perry Segal dryly put it, “in Israel, we just call this Wednesday.”

Many of us olim – immigrants to Israel – particularly appreciate Sukkot in our restored old-new homeland. The rabbis called it Z’man Simchateinu – our joyous season. But, in the Diaspora, it often feels like Z’man Schikateinu – our burnout moment. After skipping work or school for the High Holy Days, Sukkot – with four more down days – can be burdensome.

In Israel, with schools out, glorious weather, sukkahs popping up like mushrooms everywhere, it’s a delight. Last Wednesday, many Israelis were sitting in their sukkahs when they heard this breathtaking story about an attempted kamikaze suicide bombing with 174 passengers flying to Israel, including 27 children.

One friend rushed out of her Sukkah to get Psalms to pray for everyone’s safety. By the time she returned, she heard the news that dazzled the world.

Naturally, through tears of joy, prayers of thanksgiving, and happy high-fives, we Israelis wondered – again – “why do so many hate us,” “what kind of people would want to kill so many of us just flying home from vacation,” and “boy, that was too close a call.”

When courage rises in moments of terror
Our pride in the Israeli passengers who responded instantly – as well as the plucky pilot – commingled with despair that so many of our fellow citizens need that instinct to react, the grit to try, and the fighting skills required to subdue a knife-wielding co-pilot in seconds, then stabilize the plane.

And as we entered a searing week of October 7 commemorations, we linked those fighting instincts that saved the plane to the same instincts that kicked in for so many heroes who saved the country three years ago when Hamas barbarians invaded – often at the cost of their lives.

Fortunately, my wife and I had tickets that evening for the perfect event matching those mixed emotions: “Comedy for Koby.” This sold-out Jerusalem Theatre performance marked the 25th anniversary of the Koby Mandell Foundation.

The Foundation was founded by Rabbi Seth and Sherri Mandell in 2001, after Palestinian terrorists brutally murdered their beloved 13-year-old son Koby and his friend Yosef Ishran.

Seeing how emotionally isolated their other kids were, even at summer camps that lovingly embraced them, the Mandells launched this marvelous effort to help families suffering from these kinds of heartbreaking losses.

Since 2001, they have hugged, cried with, processed with, and laughed with 28,742 recovering family members from 9,500 families – with 11,233 siblings, parents, widows and widowers participating in 140 healing retreats, and 13,742 campers being bolstered at Camp Koby & Yosef.

Eliana Mandell Braner, Koby’s sister, now directing the foundation, noted that before October 7, they were helping 750 families; it’s now 2,500 families.

Opening the evening, Sherri Mandell recalled how, after the horror, “the Jewish people became our Sukkah, the place where we could feel safe.”

Afterward, this inspirational powerhouse told me that in 2001, many Israelis were in denial about the trauma caused by Palestinian terrorism. They – and the massive extended family they’ve raised since – were trailblazers in developing what Rabbi Seth Mandell calls “a community of resilience.”

So there we were, 760 of us, mourning Koby and Yosef, empathizing with the saved-but-obviously-rattled passengers and crew, bracing for the grief waves already hitting us as we approached Simchat Torah and the third anniversary of October 7.

Then, in the spirit of Israel, capturing the whiplash many of us experienced when dancing around the Torahs last Friday night hours after visiting gravesites, came five magical, uplifting words: “Are we ready to laugh?”

Phyllis Chesler: Thinking about Oct. 7 from Geula Cohen’s point of view

Israel needs heroes and has always had them in abundance. We still do.

Once, I was “chosen” by one of Israel’s heroes, none other than Geula Cohen, who took me on a tour of Judea and Samaria way back in 1980. I now think that a mutual friend might have told her that I was “one of hers.”

I doubt that I would have had the sheer physical courage and reckless daring to break out of jail—not once, but twice—as membership in the Jewish underground fighting organization Lechi in the 1940s demanded. Geula’s story as a member of Lechi, translated into English, is free and available online. Lechi fought the British, who were, at the time, murdering Jews and supporting Arabs in their murder of Jews in Mandatory Palestine. The British tortured, jailed and hanged members of the underground, even exiling them to Africa.

The Jewish underground exacted “measure for measure.” After they, too, tortured a British soldier to death, that practice among the British stopped, but the jailing and hanging did not.

Geula wrote, “For every murderous British law the Hebrew underground will enact an opposite and equally cruel law of its own. There will be quick justice and no mercy for all British criminals. The foreign regime has decided that prima facie evidence is no longer necessary in order to condemn a man to death. We have decided the same! The foreign regime has decided that membership in an enemy organization is punishable by death. We have decided the same!”

When the British put her on trial, here’s what she said in the courtroom: “The accused does not recognize the authority of the court. I am a Hebrew fighter of the Freedom Fighters of Israel … you are intruders subjugating our homeland. We have our own set of emergency regulations: Any British soldier in this land is our enemy, and there is only one sentence that can be given him—death.”

Yes, I know some might think this sounds just like a Palestinian terrorist, but Geula was opposed to real colonial oppression. The Arabs have fabricated a new narrative, based on the Big Lie, claiming they are fighting the Jews who “colonized” their country—even though the Arabs have never actually had a country called “Palestine.”

Geula was one of the two voices of the Jewish underground radio broadcasts. I learned that Lechi had an anthem: “Hayyelim Almonim” (“The Anonymous Soldiers”). However, Geula named each precious person, and she knew most, if not all, of them.

At the time, Britain was also turning back and shooting down the “illegal” ships that were trying to bring European Jews to Palestine during and after the Holocaust. Britain also refused visas to Jewish survivors. It was always a heartless colonial power.

According to Geula, British official “Lord Moyne in Cairo refused one million Jews. ‘What would I do with them?’ He ordered the sinking of Jewish refugee ships. Two members of Lechi assassinated him—and were hanged.”

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10/06 Links Pt2: Three years since October 7: Why Zionism is more relevant than ever; Dancing on Jewish Graves: Protesting on October 7th Is Obscene; Christians plant millions of Israeli flags in 14 countries ahead of Oct. 7

From Ian:

Jpost Editorial: Three years later, October 7 is still not in the past for Israelis

Life after October 7 is more about learning to live with what happened
For much of the country, then, the past three years have been less about moving on from October 7 than about living with its consequences – and with the questions it left behind.

But for many Israelis, October 7 is not simply something they have been living with. They are still living it.

For former hostages, freedom itself remains a daily reminder of what was taken from them. Emily Damari, abducted and wounded from her home in Kfar Aza, has spoken about how captivity changed her relationship with the most ordinary parts of life.

“Today, I open the fridge, and I say thank you,” Damari said. “I drink cold water, and I say thank you.”

Eli Sharabi spent 491 days in captivity after being taken from Kibbutz Be’eri. His wife, Lianne, and their daughters, Noiya and Yahel, were murdered on October 7. His brother Yossi was taken hostage and died in Gaza. After his release, Sharabi said he had learned in captivity “how precious every moment and every choice can be.”

“I choose life,” he said. “I choose to keep living fully, while carrying Lianne, Noiya, Yahel and Yossi with me in everything I do.”

For Hagar Brodutch, who was abducted with her three children and a neighbor’s daughter, returning to life has been a more complicated process than the word “freedom” might suggest. She has described the immense daily struggle, particularly for children, and recently began taking pastry-baking classes as a way to build something new.

“This is about much more than learning how to bake,” she said. “It is about finding a new path, creating something with my own hands, and slowly building a future.”

Then there are those for whom there can be no return to the life they had before October 7.

Michal Negri’s son, Maj. (res.) Roee Negri, 28, was killed fighting Hamas terrorists in Kibbutz Be’eri after spending the day rescuing civilians.

How can Israelis hold their government accountable after October 7?
In an interview with The Jerusalem Post, Negri said that three years had done little to diminish the questions raised that morning. Above all, she wants those responsible for the failures leading up to October 7 to be held accountable through a state commission of inquiry.

“Everyone that was in the government, in any position of management, has to take responsibility and be inquired into, so we will be sure that it will never happen again,” she said.

“How can you be sure that it will not happen again if you don’t inquire and ask questions?”

That question is larger than one bereaved mother.

Israel has changed dramatically since October 7, with the country’s political and defense establishments learning painful lessons about its enemies, its defenses and its own institutions. But lessons must be implemented, failures examined, decisions questioned – and responsibility determined.

Three years later, Israel still has no state commission of inquiry into the worst national disaster in its history.

That means October 7 remains unfinished business. For many Israelis, October 7 is not three years ago – it is both the past and the present.

Ahead of Israel’s national elections, Israelis must remember that our enemies aren’t within, but those seeking to destroy us. May the memory of those killed on October 7, 2023, and since, be blessed.

Three years since October 7: Why Zionism is more relevant than ever

ZIONISM DID not promise that Jews would not be attacked. It sought to ensure that when they were attacked, they would not be helpless.

This is perhaps the deepest expression of the meaning of Jewish sovereignty. When communities in Israel were attacked, there was no need to wait for the mercy of a foreign ruler, hope that another government would send forces to defend the Jews, or rely on the willingness of the international community to intervene.

The State of Israel, despite the terrible failure of that morning, was able to mobilize hundreds of thousands of soldiers and reservists, fight back, and defend its citizens. For centuries, that possibility was simply unavailable to the Jewish people.

Yet October 7 and the period that followed also raised another question concerning the status of Jews in the Western world. Many Jews, both in Israel and in the Diaspora, were shocked not only by the scale of the attack but also by the responses to it.

At some of the most prestigious universities in the West, the massacre was quickly translated into familiar ideological frameworks of “oppressors” and “oppressed,” “colonialists” and “indigenous peoples.” Instead of beginning with the facts and the moral responsibility of those who carried out the massacre, some rushed to interpret the events through theoretical frameworks in which the identities of victim and aggressor are almost predetermined.

The US congressional hearing in which the presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and MIT were required to answer questions concerning calls for the genocide of Jews on their campuses became, for many, a symbol of a deeper crisis. Institutions accustomed to speaking with great confidence about justice, equality, and the protection of minorities suddenly appeared hesitant precisely when Jews were the targets of threats.

For many Diaspora Jews, this was a deeply unsettling experience. Those who believed that their full integration into Western societies had made their Jewishness a secondary component of their identity discovered that, in the eyes of parts of the societies around them, Jewish identity still carries profound political and social significance.

Not because their American, British, or French identities are not genuine, but because Jewish history teaches that Jewish identity is not always something the individual alone can determine the significance of, in the eyes of those around them.

The international arena also exposed the limitations of relying on external institutions. Shortly after the massacres, resolutions were adopted at the United Nations calling for a ceasefire without including an explicit condemnation of Hamas. UN Secretary-General António Guterres stated that the Hamas attack “did not happen in a vacuum.”

Proceedings in international courts placed Israel at the center of some of the most serious accusations in international law, while organizations responsible for defending women’s rights struggled for a considerable period to give adequate expression to the evidence of sexual violence committed during the Hamas-led attacks.

THE CUMULATIVE picture recalls a truth that Zionism understood more than a century ago: the international community can be a partner, a friend, and an ally, but Israel cannot entrust its existential security to it. This was one of the fundamental principles of political Zionism, and since October 7 it has taken on renewed significance.

For generations, the Jewish people witnessed the rise and fall of kingdoms and empires, often without having any meaningful ability to influence the forces that determined their fate. They survived, and at times even prospered, but time and again it became clear how fragile their achievements could be when their security depended on the goodwill of others.

The State of Israel changed that equation. It does not guarantee that the Jewish people will not be attacked, that antisemitism will disappear, or that the world will always stand by their side. It gives them something more fundamental: the ability to act, defend themselves, and take responsibility for their future.

Three years after October 7, this is perhaps the most important Zionist lesson: the principle that the Jewish people are no longer mere spectators in their own history. Responsibility for our fate rests, first and foremost, in our own hands.

Three years later, I still think about the stories the 'Post' did not tell on October 7

There are families who wrote to me after October 7 and never received an answer. Others heard back too late. They sent photographs, names, and stories of people they loved, hoping we would write about them in The Jerusalem Post. Some of those stories never appeared.

To those families, I am sorry.

I understood what they were asking. After a terrorist attack, part of our job is to call the families and write about the people who were killed. An article can stay with a family for years. Somebody searches a name and finds something about the person: what they did, who loved them, what their friends remember.

After October 7, the numbers kept going up. Hundreds, then more than a thousand. We did not even know who had been killed, who was missing, and who had been kidnapped. Meanwhile, we were covering a war and trying to explain to readers abroad what had happened.

I remember looking through casualty lists and wanting an article about each person. Families were sending messages, press releases were arriving, and we used what we could get to. Sometimes a relative reached a reporter who had time to make the calls. Sometimes a message was buried under hundreds of others.

More accounts of heroism, faith, and horror than we could handle
I don’t know how many more reporters we would have needed just to write those stories. We had more than we could handle, every day. That still bothers me, especially when I think about how much harder it may be to find those families’ stories years from now.

Take Tamar and Yonatan Kedem-Siman Tov and their children Arbel, Shahar and Omer, who were murdered in Nir Oz. Yonatan’s mother, Carol, was murdered there too. The kibbutz’s memorial page recalls that Yonatan, known as Johnny, made sure the field was watered before its kite festival to keep the dust down. I wish we had published more of those details about more people.

When we looked through testimonies for our October 7 cover, there were accounts of heroism, faith, and Hamas’s antisemitism. Others described Arab and Jewish Israelis helping each other. There were so many powerful stories. Naama’s hit us in the stomach. She was 17, from Kfar Aza, and she thought she was going to die. On her grandfather’s prescription, she wrote:

“Naama of a few hours from now, if you are reading this, you are alive.” 0710JDN01

She couldn’t find a pen, so she used eyeliner. We kept coming back to that: her grandfather’s prescription, whatever she had available to write with, and the thought that she might survive to read it. At 17, she had left a message for herself on the small chance that she would get through those hours.

It was also very visual. A prescription is familiar to readers almost anywhere. They can imagine that piece of paper in their own home, belonging to a parent or grandparent. These ordinary details helped explain what we wanted the cover to convey about the everyday people caught in the attack.

Testimonies, hope for a future
There was hope in her sentence, too. She allowed for a future, even one only a few hours away, and lived to describe what she had written. The illustration on our cover is based on that account, recorded by Edut 710.

We chose one testimony for the cover knowing how many others deserved that space. I hope readers who look up Naama’s account will stay with the archive and listen to someone else as well.

Edut 710 began as a volunteer initiative after the attack. Witnesses can tell their accounts at their own pace, including life before October 7 and what followed. Their consent governs publication and use. A detail that a reporter might have left out to meet a deadline can remain available to someone studying the account decades later.

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