06/24 Links Pt2: The Church of England’s problem with antisemitism; Liberal Jews must stop appeasing the socialist radicals who hate them; VDH: JD Vance's Iran deal, midterms, & the right wing realignment

From Ian:

The Church of England’s problem with antisemitism

In the photos posted on social media, Sarah Mullally is seen in their living room, and prominent on the wall is a painting of a man; when they are standing and praying, Sarah is standing right in front of him.

This man is Layan’s great uncle, the brother of her paternal grandfather, Kamal Nasser. Nasser was born in 1924, and became a celebrated political leader, writer, and poet. In 1967, he joined the leadership of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), led by Yasser Arafat, who has invented the term ‘Palestinian’ to refer to those who wanted to destroy Israel and return to their land (prior to that, ‘Palestinian’ has been a regional term that described modern Israel, Jordan, and Syria). Nasser was also a ‘Palestinian Christian’—and this is the point where we need to recognise that, in this context, the term ‘Christian’ really functions as a tribal and ethnic identifier, more than the sense of someone who has made a personal commitment to Jesus as we might use it.

Nasser had joined the PLO just at the point where it made the Khartoum Resolution, in response to the defeat of the Arab armies by Israel in the Six-Day War of 1967. This was known for its three ‘Nos’: no peace agreement; no negotiation; no recognition of the State of Israel. This led inevitably into more warfare, culminating in the Yom Kippur War of 1973.

Part of the violence of the PLO, which (with Russian help) developed into the foremost global terror organisation, was the 1972 Munich massacre, when Palestinian terrorists infiltrated the Olympic village, killed two Israeli athletes, took nine more hostage, and eventually killed them during a failed rescue attempt. Nasser was one of the people who masterminded this operation.

For anyone outside the situation, it is hard to understand how ‘Palestinian Christians’ could be involved with anti-Israeli and antisemitic terror. But in fact the links between the two are longstanding and well developed. Nasser’s father was Reverend Butrus Nasir, who was a leader within Palestine’s Arab Protestant community from Bir Zeit. The founder of the PFLP, a radical Marxist terror organisation, was George Habash, a ‘Palestinian Christian’.

And the Greek Orthodox Church has had long links with the PLO going back to the 1960s. Many ordinary Palestinian Orthodox Christians and clergy of Palestinian descent are sympathetic to or actively involved in Palestinian nationalist politics — many Palestinian officials across ministries, the PLC, the PNA, and the PLO are Christians. There’s also a documented history of crossover between Greek leftists and the PLO more broadly: during the late 1960s and early 1970s, many Greeks belonging to the anti-dictatorship socialist movement trained in PLO camps in Lebanon, and when the PLO was forced to leave Lebanon, Greece—under PM Andreas Papandreou, who had close ties with Arafat—became its first destination.

That is why we can see a picture of Yasser Arafat on the wall of the office of Archbishop Benedictus, as he is meeting Sarah Mullally. Our archbishop has managed to be photographed in front of, not one, but two notorious terrorist leaders within the space of a couple of days—quite an achievement! And you can see the intertwining of terrorist resistance with Christian devotion in the painting of Nasser: in the background of the canvas, there is a traditional iconographic depiction of the Virgin Mary holding the infant Christ.

It is worth reflecting how both Israelis and British Jews will be made to feel by seeing these images.

Liberal Jews must stop appeasing the socialist radicals who hate them

The old saying goes that an appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile hoping it will eat him last.

When it comes to progressive Jews and the DSA, the well-fed crocodiles are just about ready for dessert.

I’ve been watching this strategy of inclusion of hateful actors by Jewish groups and politicians play out since I came to the US almost 20 years ago from Israel.

As someone who always believed in freedom, peace and equality, I imagined I’d find a home on the American left.

Imagine my confusion when I learned that in many circles, being a liberal in good standing meant denouncing the only democracy in the Middle East, staying quiet in the face of racism and violence directed at my community from other minority groups, and all but a pledge to agree that, sure, synagogues are being fire-bombed and Jews threatened every day, but don’t let the statistics confuse you — it’s only real antisemitism if it comes from the MAGA-hat region.

I have yet to encounter a club where turning my back to the truth was worth the price of admission.

So my confusion turned to rage over the years as I saw fellow Jews align themselves with people who openly and proudly spread hateful propaganda and support violence against the Jewish community.

Many cloaked these partnerships in the language of “allyship,” patting themselves on the back for being open-minded enough to have conversations with those who disagree with them.

But at what point do you close the flaps of the “big tent” of Jewish thought to those who are trying to destroy it from within?

Brad Lander, who less than a year ago still considered himself a Zionist, was happy to trade in his dignity for Instagram likes, embracing the lie of a genocide in Gaza, and posing happily in campaign ads alongside Darializa Avila Chevalier, who chose to celebrate the massacre of Oct. 7 in Times Square as Israeli mothers were still frantically searching for their missing and murdered children, among them several Americans and New Yorkers. They may not see eye to eye on political issues like whether Lander’s friends in Israel deserve to live or not, but hey — we can agree to disagree, right? Other politicians and activists practically trip over themselves to virtue-signal their standing as “Good Jews.”

Yehuda Teitelbaum: No, New York Didn't Vote on Gaza

I'm already seeing people trying to turn the election results into some grand lesson about Israel and Gaza. Sorry, but no.

If anti-Israel politics were really driving these races, Ritchie Torres would have been in trouble. Instead, he just won nearly 72% of the vote in one of the poorest and most heavily minority districts in the country.

Whatever else yesterday showed, it certainly didn't show that Democratic voters are punishing politicians for being pro-Israel.

The candidates who won have spent an extraordinary amount of time and energy spreading horrific blood libels about Israel, accusing Jews and Zionists of all sorts of crimes, praising convicted terrorist Rasmea Odeh, marching with people celebrating Hamas on October 8 while Jews were still being slaughtered, defending Mahmoud Khalil, and treating a conflict 6,000 miles away as though it were one of the central issues facing New York.

And yet I don't think any of those things are what put them over the top.

The average voter is not lying awake at night thinking about Gaza. The average voter is worried about paying the rent and buying groceries, and progressive politicians have figured out that they don't actually need to explain anything in order to capitalize on that anxiety. They don't need to explain where the money is coming from. They don't need to explain how any of it works. They just need to promise lower costs, free healthcare, free childcare, free college, debt forgiveness, more benefits, and some version of economic salvation.

Once people become convinced that there's a pot of gold sitting in front of them, almost everything else becomes irrelevant.

That's not an excuse for the voters, and frankly, I find it astonishing that someone can spread grotesque lies about Israel, praise actual terrorists, mock American symbols, and still get elected. Not very long ago, pulling just one of these stunts would have ended an entire political career.

But that's where we are, and confusing what voters tolerated with what they actually voted for is a serious mistake.

Read More

06/24 Links Pt1: Another evidence-free UN genocide charge against Israel – and another media feeding frenzy: Andrew Fox: A good offence is the best defence; Israel's alliance with America is vital, but Jerusalem can't outsource its security

From Ian:

Jonathan Sacerdoti: No, Israel isn’t ‘deliberately targeting’ children in Gaza

Once again, a United Nations body has accused Israel of the gravest crimes imaginable: this time, the deliberate murder of children. And once again, when you actually open the report, the evidence simply isn’t there.

The UN’s Independent International Commission of Inquiry has published a 94-page paper claiming Israel “deliberately targeted” Palestinian children during the war in the Gaza Strip – language implying war crimes and crimes against humanity. These are among the most serious charges in international law. So you would expect, at minimum, one clearly documented case: a soldier who identified a child as a child, and killed that child for no reason other than that they were a child. After 94 pages, the Commission cannot produce one.

What it produces instead, according to a detailed rebuttal by the watchdog UN Watch, is a chain of assumptions dressed up as findings.

Take the report’s own marquee example, set out in its paragraphs 59-60: a ten-day-old baby allegedly shot through the head by an Israeli “quadcopter” while breastfeeding inside a tent in the Nuseirat camp in April 2024. The Commission’s reasoning, in its own words, is that because it happened in daylight, the drone operator “would have been able to see inside the tent” – and from that single inference it concludes the baby was deliberately targeted. For this to be true, a drone would have had to hover at ground level, see through canvas, pick out a 35-centimetre infant’s head, and fire a precision shot, all based on a photo of a bullet, with no chain of custody, no ballistics analysis, and no witness who even claims to have seen a drone. The same pattern recurs case after case: a family account, a doctor’s guess about which weapon caused a wound, and a conclusion of premeditated murder. Nothing connecting the dots.

There is one cited incident in the report which might at first seem more plausible, coming from a soldier’s own account, via a December 2024 Haaretz investigation, of the shooting of a Palestinian teenager near a restricted corridor in Gaza.

The Commission cites it as evidence of a culture targeting children. But the soldier’s actual testimony says otherwise: his unit shot the boy under a blanket order that “anyone crossing the line is a terrorist, no exceptions, no civilians” – opening fire before anyone could see who he was. Only afterward, retrieving his phone from the body, did they learn he was unarmed and “just a boy, maybe 16.”

This strategy came about because, tragically, Hamas often uses minors as young as 16 as fighters, and during this war has almost always dressed its fighters in civilian clothes, not uniform, even sending them unarmed to collect weapons hidden earlier on at their destination.

This made it extremely difficult for the Israeli army to differentiate between civilians and combatants, so lines were drawn and warnings not to cross them were issued. In these circumstances, some have argued that that Israel’s rules of engagement were reckless, or some of its soldiers were trigger-happy, resulting in too many innocent people being killed. But even that would not be evidence of a policy to murder children because they are children – the far graver charge the Commission is actually making.

Stephen Pollard: Another evidence-free UN genocide charge against Israel – and another media feeding frenzy

The UN Guidance and Practice for fact-finding missions provides that evidence must be evaluated for its “reliability” and “truthfulness,” that investigations must be conducted with “integrity,” meaning “without any bias,” and that factual findings must be “adequately corroborated” by at least two other “independent and reliable” sources.” This would be a joke were it not to appalling.

The report is entirely one sided, takes its so-called evidence regarding intent, knowledge, and targeting decisions from witnesses whose outlook is prima facie loaded against Israel and whose testimony cannot be verified, and which ignores all facts which paint a different picture from the conclusion the report clearly sets out to reach.

To quote UN Watch again: “These shortcomings would be troubling in any fact-finding exercise. They are particularly concerning here because the Commission’s findings are intended to inform international legal proceedings, including before the ICC and the ICJ. Findings of this nature – particularly those purporting to establish intent and criminal responsibility – would ordinarily require rigorous testing and corroboration before being relied upon in judicial proceedings. Yet international courts have an established practice of relying on UN reports as evidence. This report therefore undermines not only the integrity of international fact-finding, but also the application of international law and confidence in the UN system as a whole.”

I urge you to look at UN Watch’s detailed legal rebuttal – destruction is a more accurate description – of the report, here.

Meanwhile, these are its key points. Most obviously, it exposes how the gravest accusation of all, that Israel deliberately targeted Palestinian children in Gaza, which is an accusation of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide, is made without a single verified example. The report simply concludes that because children died in the war – a tragic but unavoidable occurrence in war – this is proof of deliberate targeting.

The report does not consider in any way the role of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, as if they were not even present – concluding that the IDF, under orders from Israeli political and military leadership, was engaged in the deliberate killing of children for the sake of killing children. “Across 94 pages, the Report never acknowledges that the IDF was fighting a heavily armed force of tens of thousands of Hamas and PIJ operatives who constructed hundreds of kilometres of tunnels, embedded military infrastructure throughout civilian areas, and routinely operated from homes, schools, hospitals, mosques, and displacement zones. The result is a fictionalised account of the conflict in which there is no armed opposition, no complex urban battlefield, and no armed actors in Gaza other than the IDF. Combined with the erasure of militant activity in the West Bank, this distortion enables the COI to advance the fabricated narrative that Israeli forces were trained, directed, and deployed to deliberately target children as a matter of policy.”

As UN Watch puts it, the report’s extreme length is intended to create the impression of rigorous evidentiary and forensic review, yet it still cannot mask the fundamental absence of reliable proof for its central allegations.

None of this will be reported because it does not fit the now near-universal narrative – that Israel is a uniquely evil rogue state which commits genocide to satisfy its blood lust. But who now cares about the truth?

Andrew Fox: A good offence is the best defence

Supporters of Israel and the Jewish community (and, above all, the Jewish community itself) must be utterly exhausted. Since 7th October, we have seen an unprecedented global onslaught of disinformation. Wave after wave, day after day, blood libel after blood libel, centuries-old and vicious. If we ever wanted to know how the atmosphere that led to the Holocaust was created, we do now. We have all been constantly on the defensive for over two and a half years. Yesterday’s tiresome, evidence-free tissue of nonsense from the UN Human Rights Council is a masterpiece of the antisemitic genre. Every trope under the sun is there. It has been rebutted brilliantly elsewhere. This article is instead concerned with what to do about the gleeful antisemitic machine that has seized on this nonsense and will run with it for months to come.

Supporters of Israel and Jewish communities worldwide have spent too much energy responding to accusations after they have already passed through the institutions that lend them force. A hostile claim enters an NGO paper, moves into a UN report, becomes a headline, appears in a parliamentary speech, and then finds its way into campus motions, sanctions campaigns, divestment drives and street politics. By the time the correction arrives, the allegation has already acquired the authority of repetition. More to the point, nobody outside the pro-Israel ecosystem reads or believes any rebuttal. The lies are too powerful, and the machine pushing them wins the numbers game every time.

The campaign against them requires a different posture. It is time for accountability. We know by now that rebuttal alone cannot match the speed, emotion and reach of libel dressed in institutional language. Accuracy must be paired with consequences. False allegations should be treated as liability events, not merely as arguments to be answered. The task is to make the production, laundering and circulation of defamatory claims costly, documented and procedurally risky.

The most important shift is to examine the entire chain of allegations. A UN report, a media story, or a parliamentary intervention is usually the final expression of a longer process. Someone generated the claim, someone supplied it to investigators, someone gave it legal vocabulary, someone briefed journalists, someone amplified it, and someone used it to demand policy action. Each point in that chain offers a potential route to accountability. The relevant questions are practical: who made the claim, what evidence supported it, who checked it, who ignored corrections, who repeated it after notice, and what concrete harm followed?

We must begin with a litigation-grade dossier. Every contested allegation should be extracted, sourced, classified and tested. False facts, misleading omissions, circular citations, anonymous sourcing, legal exaggeration, and defamatory insinuations must be carefully distinguished. Courts, regulators, donors and professional bodies respond to precision. A strong dossier should identify the claim, the source, the contradiction, the affected person or entity, the republication history, the available jurisdiction and the remedy sought. That is legal intelligence.

Read More

06/23 Links Pt2: Jew-hatred drove the Montreal violence, even if it didn’t trigger it; Australian Teachers union seeks guidance on Holocaust lessons, claims it is ‘difficult’ to teach

From Ian:

Stephen Pollard: Starmer tackled antisemitism in opposition – but then helped fuel it in power

Whatever else may lie behind Labour’s attitude to Israel, that political demography explains why Starmer started to deal with the Jewish state not as one of our nation’s most trusted and closest allies, which has been engaged in a battle to defeat Iranian proxies since the October 7, 2023 massacre, but as a de facto enemy state.

Within weeks of taking office the then Foreign Secretary David Lammy had dropped Britain’s opposition to the ICC arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and former defence minister Yoav Gallant and had imposed an entirely symbolic ban on the export of certain defence equipment to Israel – symbolic because Israel had no need of them, and because our armed forces rely far more heavily on Israeli technology than the other way round. Last year the Royal College of Defence Studies was instructed no longer to admit Israelis.

Then last September Starmer did the bidding of antizionists and antisemites across the world by recognising a Palestinian state without demanding anything in return – especially and notably not requiring the release of the remaining hostages as a quid pro quo. His action was criticised as, at worst, rewarding Hamas for October 7 or, at best, giving Hamas a PR coup over more moderate Palestinians in showing that their terrorism had forced recognition.

Starmer’s government has relentlessly portrayed Israel as some kind of rogue state, which has added fuel to the antisemitic fire which has taken hold since October 7, 2023. And until very recently, when the explosion in antisemitic incidents turned violent, Starmer had uttered not a word of criticism of the hate marches and demos across Britain which have been a festival of Jew hate since the Hamas massacre.

It is all very well for Starmer to seek to portray himself as some sort of healer, expunging Jew hate from Labour. But he cannot have his cake and eat it. Since becoming PM, Starmer has hugely damaged relations with Israel (even if Israeli intelligence continues to provide vital information to our security services). The last two years will go down as the worst in living memory for relations with Israel – in large measure as a result of Starmer’s deliberate policy to appease the Muslim sectarian vote.

The only question that remains now is how much worse this will get under Burnham.

The Kurds are the real victims of the Middle East, not the Palestinians

At the end of the day, perhaps the likeliest explanation for this indifference to the plight and promise of the Kurds is quite simple.

Could it be that the Palestinian cause can be made to fit into the contemporary, and all too simplistic, binary narrative of oppressor and oppressed, with Israel – the world’s only Jewish-majority state – cast as villain, a framing that echoes age-old tropes and carries a powerful emotional charge for some audiences?

The Kurdish story might seem more complicated from the outside. The antagonists include Arabs, Iranians, and Turks, but not Jews and Israelis, making it harder, and perhaps less comfortable, to fit into prevailing ideological frameworks and orthodoxies.

The result is a striking asymmetry. One national movement attracts enormous global attention, endless demonstrations, celebrity endorsements, campus encampments, and international campaigns. The other, despite representing a population many times larger and, in the case of Iraq, endured genocide, does not begin to command comparable concern.

The real question, then, is why a people of more than 40 million, denied a state for more than a century and subjected to repeated waves of repression, has attracted so little of the moral passion mobilised elsewhere.

Until that question is honestly confronted, claims of universal principles, support for self-determination and national liberation movements, and concern for human rights will continue to ring hollow.

Divided over vilification laws

Victoria’s strengthened anti-vilification laws have produced no convictions since taking effect, raising questions about whether the changes will deliver meaningful outcomes for the Jewish community.

Amendments earlier this year removed the requirement for the Director of Public Prosecutions to approve prosecutions before charges could be laid.

Jewish Community Council of Victoria CEO Naomi Levin said the change was a step forward, but cautioned it was too early to judge.

“Removing the barrier, which was DPP approval, is a real step in the right direction, but we need to give these laws time to be implemented, for police to become familiar with them, and for charges to be laid before we can really judge whether it’s satisfactory.”

Levin acknowledged a broader erosion of confidence.

“There’s been a breakdown of trust between the Jewish community and police and government, because we’ve seen so many really challenging incidents of vilification go unprosecuted.”

Some question whether further reforms really addresses the underlying problem.

Jewish activist Menachem Vorchheimer argued the new laws were unlikely to make a meaningful difference, because the key legislative gaps had already been addressed under existing provisions.

“There is no evidence that there is any difference since recent changes to the laws came into place. Victoria has had a legal framework to deal with racism against Jews for 25 years,” he said.

Read More

06/23 Links Pt1: The JD Vance foreign-policy test ride is a disaster; UN report a ‘predetermined indictment dressed up as an investigation’; Former hostage condemns UN Special Rapporteur's silence on Hamas' October 7 sexual violence

From Ian:

Jonathan Tobin: The JD Vance foreign-policy test ride is a disaster

Israel is no vassal state. The United States gets enormous benefits from its alliance with this democratic Middle East partner in terms of weapon development and intelligence. As Vance himself stated in 2024, it’s the ideal MAGA ally since, unlike Europe, Israel fights alongside America.

Still, Vance’s willingness to characterize Iran’s possession of weapons to threaten other nations as morally equivalent to Israel’s military was troubling. “You can’t tell a country, whether Israel or Iran, they’re not allowed to have any self-defense,” he said.

And yet, Vance revealed his own bias against Israel when, perhaps channeling the blood libels spread by leftist antisemites like his podcaster friend Tucker Carlson, he warned the Israelis that those who decried an American decision to surrender were simply being bloodthirsty.

“I guess my response to them would be: What is your exact proposal? You’re a country of 9 million people. You can’t just kill your way out of solving every single national security problem that you have,” said Vance.

That accusation was as reckless as it was unfair. Israel isn’t trying to kill its way out of anything. It was viciously attacked on Oct. 7, 2023, by Iranian minions who carried out the worst mass slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust. It was the target of direct missile barrages launched on April 14 and Oct. 1, 2024. And it was attacked by missiles, rockets and drones throughout the war that started on Feb. 28, leading to casualties, damage and sending much of the country into bomb shelters day after day.

Had America been similarly attacked, we know very well that Trump and Vance would have exacted a far greater revenge on the assailants than the targeted strikes that Israel executed on Iranian targets.

Being able to vent his contempt and lack of sympathy for an ally that fought side by side with American forces and who were essential to the success America achieved may have given Vance some satisfaction. But it won’t get him out of the fix in which he now finds himself.

A weak negotiator
Simply put, the Iranians know that Vance’s position in the talks is weak. That’s why they are treating him with the same contempt that they once treated Obama’s envoys, as they continually take back any concessions he says he’s wrung out of them, making it clear that if he wants an agreement, then it will have to be on their terms.

We don’t know yet how the negotiations will end. Perhaps Trump’s natural aversion to bad deals and his unwillingness to be a party to a pact that will rightly be characterized as an abject surrender that will not achieve any of America’s war goals will cause him to recall Vance and return to war. He ought to know that as unpopular as the war may be, ending it in defeat will be even more unpopular. Having invested so much political capital in the conflict already, he won’t win it back by mimicking Obama’s appeasement.

Or perhaps he is so sick of the conflict and too panicked by gas prices, plummeting polls and the prospect of a Democratic sweep of the midterms to reverse course again.

Either way, he has set up Vance to fail. Trash-talking Israel may earn him cheers from the antisemitic groyper wing of the GOP, but neither they nor his fellow Israel-bashers at mainstream media outlets like The New York Times will win him the 2028 GOP presidential nomination. And if the vice president is the architect of an end to the war that will be the moral equivalent of President Joe Biden’s retreat from Afghanistan, then it may earn him a place in history, but not one that will be a stepping stone to the Oval Office.

Surrender Is a Verb, Not a Vibe By Abe Greenwald

Via Commentary Newsletter, sign up here.
Because the U.S. had become so unaccustomed to the notion of victory, Israel’s post–October 7 determination to defeat one enemy after another struck many Americans (and others) as something monstrous. Even setting aside the unique standards to which the Jewish state is held, people seemed to think that a country is supposed to end a war once it’s taught the enemy a lesson. Israel, of course, reminded the world that wars are fought to be won, not ended.

So I took Trump’s invoking “unconditional surrender” as a kind of logical next step in reclaiming the purpose of war fighting. When one side surrenders, the other achieves victory. And surrender is also regime change by other means. Once imperial Japan surrendered in 1945, it was no longer imperial Japan. An Islamic Revolutionary Republic that surrenders to the United States would cease to be an Islamic Revolutionary Republic.

Anyway, that was what I had in mind to write about today. But then I saw that White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt just said this about Trump: “When he as commander in chief of the U.S. armed forces determines that Iran no longer poses a threat to the United States of America and the goal of Operation Epic Fury has been fully realized, then Iran will essentially be in a place of unconditional surrender.”

That’s not unconditional surrender. It’s laying out a potential off-ramp for Trump to get out of his demand.

In war, surrender isn’t a “place.” It’s not in the eye of the beholder. And it’s not “essentially” determined. Surrender is an action that someone takes. In Leavitt’s definition, there is no place for the active agent; there is no surrenderer.

Of course, Trump could contradict her before the end of the day. And perhaps Leavitt was just winging it. But as things stand, we’ve taken a step back once again. Back to the murky talk of timelines, exit strategies, and undefined goals.

So perhaps this war, like other recent American wars, will be ended instead of won. And the biggest problem with wars that merely end—no matter how devastated one side may be—is that they don’t end at all.

Bethany Mandel: What Jews hear when JD Vance talks about Israel

The same dynamic appeared recently during a press conference in Switzerland focused on negotiations with Iran. When a reporter referred to what he described as a “genocide in Lebanon,” Vance did not challenge the characterization, nor did he mention Hezbollah’s role in the conflict, and did not note that the organization responsible for years of rocket attacks against Israeli civilians is itself an Iranian proxy. Instead, he moved quickly into a discussion of diplomacy and peace.

Then came perhaps the clearest example. During a White House briefing last week, Vance delivered a remarkably sharp rebuke of Israel, far more aggressive than his statements about Iran, declaring that Trump was effectively the only world leader sympathetic to Israel and suggesting that Israeli officials would be wise not to antagonize the one powerful ally they had left, aggressively asserting that the U.S. has bankrolled Israeli security.

At a moment when Iran remains the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism, funds and directs proxy groups across the Middle East, openly calls for the destruction of the U.S. and Israel, and has American blood on its hands, Vance seems more animated by Israeli behavior than by Iranian aggression. His frustration is directed primarily toward Jerusalem, while the regime in Tehran receives far more rhetorical restraint.

That imbalance is why many Jews heard something different in his comments to Stuckey. Had those remarks come from someone whose public rhetoric displayed at least equal skepticism toward Iran, they might have sounded like a reasonable plea for moderation. Coming from someone who has spent recent weeks and months repeatedly criticizing Israel and members of its government, they instead were part of a larger pattern.

We have watched a rapid deterioration take place over the last decade on the Left, where anti-Israel activism has served as a gateway into broader conspiratorial thinking about Jews, power, and influence.

It would be a tragedy to watch the Right make the same mistake after spending years recognizing that pattern on the other side. Conservatives concerned about Jew-hatred metastasizing on the Right may be increasingly hysterical in their rhetoric, but their paranoia is far from unjustified.

The conservative movement has spent years warning about ideological contagions that distorted the Left’s judgment and detached it from reality. It would be an extraordinary act of self-destruction if, having correctly identified the disease, we embrace our own version of it.

Read More

06/22 Links Pt2: A Jew Among Jews; Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood: BDS is like “taking books off shelves”; Maccabi Tel Aviv’s Hélio Varela scores at FIFA World Cup

From Ian:

A Jew Among Jews By Abe Greenwald

Via Commentary Newsletter, sign up here.
During Passover, the Free Press published a beautiful piece by Olivia Reingold titled “I Am an October 8 Jew.” In it, she describes how, after October 7, she began to reclaim the Jewish heritage she had all but abandoned as a child. Eventually, Reingold would find herself moved to tears during a recent Shabbat service, “a day that used to mean nothing to me, except more time to scroll online or work.”

I can’t say that I’m an October 8 Jew, as I was devoted to the cause well before then. But something about my Judaism has also changed since October 7.

I’ve long been a passionate Zionist, and I’ve felt that I owe everything to God. While I am a devoted believer, however, I’m a very negligent observer. Having come fully to embrace my Judaism only in adulthood, I’ve done slightly more than the bare minimum to maintain a personal sense of Jewish tradition.

Beginning a few decades ago, I went about kosher eating in my own way (and I’ve got my biblical justifications for it). I wrap tefillin in phases, the way others might go to the gym, slack off, and then resume. I pore over the Hebrew Bible regularly but in no regimented fashion. I tread lightly and humbly into the Talmud.

All of which is to say, I have cobbled together my own version of observance and continue to fine-tune it. Many Jews do the same.

Judaism, as I came to it, was about my relationship with my God, my place in history, and my inheritance. A lot of “my” was involved in this, but somehow “my people” barely came up.

October 7 changed me in this important respect. Before that day, I had never felt much of an ongoing obligation to my fellow Jews around the world. Of course, whenever I heard news of threatened or assaulted Jews, the bonds of history and faith would take hold. But they would once again recede. I didn’t think a great deal about how my actions or words affected the Jews of Australia, Asia, Europe, and elsewhere.

It hadn’t occurred to me that we were all, as Jews, in the same position. Because, at the time, we really weren’t. I was born well into the age of Jewish emancipation, and up until October 7, 2023, the overwhelming majority of the world’s Jews were counted foremost as individual citizens of their countries of residence. Their circumstances varied.

‘Fauda’ producers issue content warning regarding Oct. 7-based episodes

he producers of the action TV series “Fauda” warned viewers on Sunday that they may want to skip the upcoming episodes based on events during the Hamas-led massacre in Israel’s northwestern Negev on Oct. 7, 2023.

“Episodes 7 and 8 [of Season 5], which will air tomorrow [now today] ... include content, sights, and sounds that may be difficult to watch. It’s important for us to say: These episodes return to that terrible day and stand on their own. If watching is too difficult, it’s OK to give up and connect with the season’s plot, which will continue in the episode that will air next week,” Israeli satellite television network Yes said in a statement on social media. The renowned show, which debuted in Israel in 2015, has aired in 190 countries.

The newest season of the series was filmed primarily in Israel and Budapest, Hungary, after plans to shoot its European segments in Marseilles, France, were changed due to security concerns.

It was rewritten to address the aftermath of the Oct. 7 attacks. The 11-episode Season 5 runs weekly on Yes in Israel and is distributed internationally on Netflix as well.

Israeli actor Idan Amedi, who played undercover agent Sagi Tzur in earlier seasons of the series, does not appear in the latest season due to the serious injury he sustained while fighting against Hamas terrorists in the Gaza Strip.

Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood compares boycott-led show cancellations to “taking books off shelves”

Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood has likened his gigs with an Israeli artist being cancelled due to boycotts to “taking books off shelves”.

In May 2024 and again in March 2025, Greenwood played in Tel Aviv with Israeli musician Dudu Tassa, incurring criticism from the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. A pair of UK performances by the duo, scheduled for June 2025 in Bristol and London, were later cancelled following pressure from pro-Palestinian campaigners.

The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) said those cancellations followed “peaceful BDS pressure”, citing what it called the artists’ “clear and irrefutable links to whitewashing Israel’s genocide in Gaza that has killed at least 62,000 Palestinians”. Its post also said: “Dudu Tassa has repeatedly entertained genocidal Israeli forces in between these massacres of Palestinians in Gaza, willingly acting as a cultural ambassador for apartheid Israel.”

Greenwood has now given an interview to El País, in which he was asked to compare his stance on playing in Israel to the cultural boycott of apartheid South Africa in the 1980s.

“I’m a fan of lots of Israeli films and writers and musicians, and the music I make with Dudu is resurrecting songs that are older than most of the countries that are currently fighting each other,” Greenwood responded.

“That’s always going to be more important to me,” he added. “There are bookshops in Madrid that are openly selling Amos Oz’s novels and he’s Israeli. To me, cancelling music is the same as taking books off shelves.”

Greenwood responded in a statement at the time of the cancellations, saying: “The venues and their blameless staff have received enough credible threats to conclude that it’s not safe to proceed.”

“Forcing musicians not to perform and denying people who want to hear them an opportunity to do so is self-evidently a method of censorship and silencing,” he continued. “Intimidating venues into pulling our shows won’t help achieve the peace and justice everyone in the Middle East deserves. This cancellation will be hailed as a victory by the campaigners behind it, but we see nothing to celebrate and don’t find that anything positive has been achieved.”

Read More

06/22 Links Pt1: Jewish man and Cop killed in Montreal shooting; UN Watch chief seeks indictment of UNRWA head; Gazan terror groups admit some slain journalists were fighters

From Ian:

JPost Editorial: Escalation must cost: Current Switzerland talks leave Iran stronger, Israel exposed

The United States and Iran concluded talks in Switzerland on Monday. Mediators Qatar and Pakistan described “encouraging progress” and announced a 60-day road map toward a final agreement.

The talks had created a “good foundation,” US Vice President JD Vance said, adding that Iran agreed to allow International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors back into the country. Washington also issued a temporary 60-day license that allows Iranian oil and petrochemical sales through August 21.

The talks included discussion of a Lebanon “deconfliction cell” aimed at preventing renewed escalation between Israel and Hezbollah. Israel was absent. Iran was present.

That fact should trouble every Israeli. Diplomacy with Iran can be useful when it weakens the regime, freezes a threat, or buys time under conditions that favor the West. The Switzerland talks risk giving Tehran time, money, legitimacy, and a role in managing the fires it helped set.

Over the past 24 hours, criticism has focused on one concern: Tehran appears to have gained a road map without publicly accepting the hard conditions that would make it meaningful. It appears to have secured breathing room on sanctions while its proxies remain armed. It appears to have turned the Strait of Hormuz into a bargaining chip and Lebanon into part of a broader US-Iran understanding.

Iran should not be rewarded for threatening global shipping. It should not receive economic relief after using regional chaos to force the world back to the table. It should not gain influence over arrangements involving Lebanon while Hezbollah remains its most important Arab proxy and the direct threat facing Israel’s border communities.

A Lebanon deconfliction mechanism may sound technical. In reality, it could become a diplomatic trap. Israel cannot allow its freedom of action against Hezbollah to be filtered through a process shaped by Iran. The residents of Metula, Kiryat Shmona, Moshav Margaliot, Kibbutz Manara, and other northern communities do not need another committee. They need Hezbollah pushed back, disarmed, and deterred.

Mark Dubowitz: Why Squander The Greatest Leverage Ever Built Against Iran?

Most importantly, how much damage will be done to the sanctions architecture that took years to build?

Tehran could also gain access to tens of billions of dollars in additional oil revenue and portions of the roughly $100 billion in Iranian funds frozen abroad. That would be a massive windfall.

If the MOU includes broad waivers covering banking and transportation transactions, that would represent far more than a narrow licensing arrangement. It would fracture the core architecture of American oil and financial sanctions.

Once the United States normalizes Iranian oil exports to major buyers such as China, India, and the United Arab Emirates, alongside the repatriation of oil revenues back to Tehran, the damage becomes difficult to reverse.

If companies, traders, insurers, shipping firms, banks, and governments become accustomed to doing business with Iran again, restoring today’s pressure campaign would take years, not weeks — precisely why sanctions relief should come at the end of successful negotiations, not at the beginning.

And prematurely weakening this leverage will make it even more difficult to secure the final nuclear agreement with Iran that the MOU is supposedly designed to deliver.

The regime has played this game successfully against multiple American presidents. Indeed, the only arena in which the Islamic Republic has consistently defeated the United States is at the negotiating table.

President Trump argued he still retains the military option. But leverage erodes. Deployments end, Washington’s attention shifts, and Tehran may simply pocket economic concessions while waiting for pressure to dissipate or for a next president not willing to stop Iran.

If negotiations fail — as they likely will — the administration should be prepared immediately to restore maximum economic pressure, return to military operations including in Hormuz, and suffocate the regime’s remaining sources of power.

There is one final instrument that every administration has neglected.

The Iranian people.

Economic pressure and military power can weaken the regime. Only the Iranian people can ultimately end it.

Nothing can match the power of tens of millions of Iranians who despise the regime that rules them. No one has sacrificed more to challenge the Islamic Republic.

Despite enduring killings, incarceration, torture, corruption, and economic ruin, they continue to resist.

The truly decisive question is not how long the United States can pressure this regime.

It is whether America is finally prepared to help Iranians finish the job themselves.

President Trump should immediately instruct his intelligence services to build a plan. Call it Operation People’s Fury. And have it ready for when Iranians courageously return to the streets, as they have done repeatedly for decades.

Hamas held 'top secret' meeting with French officials, discussed return to '1967 borders'

Senior leaders of Hamas' political bureau held a highly confidential meeting with a French delegation, according to a Monday report from Saudi newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat.

It reported that the meeting took place "recently" in an unspecified country in the Middle East.

Two Palestinian sources spoke to Asharq Al-Awsat, one from Palestinian civil society elements who maintain working relations with France and other European countries, and the other from a Palestinian organization close to Hamas. They described the meeting as "top secret," adding that some Palestinian factions were only informed shortly before or after it was held.

This marks the first reported meeting of Hamas leaders with European officials since the October 7 massacre.

According to the report, the French delegation included current and former diplomats, as well as members of parliament from the ruling coalition and opposition parties.

Focus on Palestinian Internal affairs
A source from Palestinian civil society said the talks were largely focused on Palestinian internal affairs, improving national reconciliation, and advancing a political process aimed at ending the conflict with Israel.

The source also told Asharq Al-Awsat that discussions also touched on supporting establishing a Palestinian state within "the 1967 borders," meaning the pre-Six-Day War armistice lines.

Since October 7, France has been a leading advocate for a two-state solution that would allow for the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside the State of Israel.

Read More

06/21 Links: A Judge's Verdict on Israel; JNS Summit: Melanie Phillips Gives Chilling Warning on Islam!; IDF killed PIJ terrorist who kidnaped 12 y.o. hostage Yagil Yaakov

From Ian:

Eugene Kontorovich: A Judge's Verdict on Israel

REVIEW: 'Israel on Trial: Examining the History, the Evidence, and the Law' by Roy K. Altman

Countries exist, and whether they're the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan or Bosnia and Herzegovina, Belarus or China, no one doubts their basic right to continue their existence—unless it is Israel. Roy Altman, a young federal judge in Miami, has been lecturing about Israel widely on campuses since October 7. Israel on Trial distills his rebuttals of the six claims he has most often encountered that aim to undermine and delegitimize the presently constituted Jewish state.

I'm pleased to say Judge Altman is a friend, and kindly praises my work in his book—but I will risk my other friendships by recommending this book as absolutely indispensable equipment for any college student in America today.

The first three claims challenge Israel's creation or existence, claiming it is a "settler colonial project," illegitimately founded, and displacing what should be a Palestinian state. The other three focus on Israel's supposed conduct. Israel cruelly occupied Gaza before Oct. 7, 2023, one claim goes. This lets Hamas sympathizers, especially on campus, present that attack as more like a plucky prison break than an attempt to destroy Israel. Then there are the invocations of seldom-used international criminal law concepts of genocide and the even more obscure crime of apartheid.

Altman's answers to these critiques draw broadly from law and history. He provides excellent distillations of the abundant archaeological evidence for Jews' indigeneity in the Land of Israel. He also shows how this has not impeded their willingness to make repeated territorial concessions in the name of peace. Altman details six occasions on which the Jews agreed to the creation of a Palestinian state, only to have the Arabs reject it. His longest and most thorough chapter shows that "if anyone has colonized the Land of Israel, it has been [a] succession of Muslim armies." This is particularly important to recount now, as arguments challenging the authenticity of Jewish historical claims have started to sprout up on the political right, transmogrified into crank theories about how today's Jews are not the real Jews (a pet theme of Tucker Carlson's).

Many have heard of Israeli "settlers" living in the supposedly Arab city of Hebron, but do not know about the Arab ban on Jewish entrance into the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron—800 years ago. They have heard of "Palestinian rights," but not Napoleon's proclamation recognizing Jews as the "rightful heirs of Palestine." Altman's quick tour through history is crucial for a generation that, at best, knows about the past from podcasts and social media.

One place Altman falters is in describing Gaza and the West Bank as having been occupied before Israeli troops left in 2005. He makes the remark in passing, as his discussion focuses on rebutting the unprecedent proposition that Israel has since then occupied Gaza without physically occupying it, a unique doctrine invented for Israel. But Israel's presence before 2005 was not an occupation either, because these areas were both part of the League of Nations’'Mandate for Palestine, also known as the British Mandate, formed after the collapse of the previous sovereign, the Ottoman Empire. As the successor state to the Mandate, Israel inherited its borders under the international law doctrine of uti possidetis juris (Latin for "as you possess under law")—the same rule that accounts for Jordan's odd borders, the Kurds' statelessness, and Syria's boiling melting pot.

Altman analyzes the accusations with a legal methodology, closely examining the evidence presented for each—and marshaling the facts to the contrary. But unlike in a courtroom, Israel's "acquittal" is not enough. The accusations are so sensational and passionately made that many neutral observers would conclude that even if they are off the mark, Israel must be guilty of some lesser included offense. Proof is not necessarily the point of these criticisms as much as creating a taint. Dreyfus's acquittal surely did not convince his accusers that he was entirely honorable.

Altman points out that the Palestinians' claims all mirror those of the Jews. The Jews' indigeneity in the Land of Israel has served as a paradigm for a people connected to a particular land. The Palestinians present themselves as the genuine natives. The word "ghetto" was invented to describe the tiny, crowded areas in European cities where Jews were permitted to live—and, therefore, Gaza becomes the world's largest open-air prison.

Why the genocide libel is central to the propaganda war against Israel and Jews

The Gaza war may have ended, but the genocide libel marches on. That libel, the false accusation that Israel and Diaspora Jews perpetrate genocide against others, allows anti-Zionists to invert the Holocaust, erasing Jews’ Holocaust victimhood and bestowing it upon Palestinians. And given this libel’s ubiquity, it’s worth understanding the libel’s origins, why it was amplified and went viral after Oct. 7, 2023, and why some Gazans dubbed themselves “Holocaust survivors” on social media as combat ceased.

The genocide libel is a central plank in “the propaganda war against Israel, which has become one of the most organized and sophisticated narrative campaigns in modern geopolitics,” said Faran Jeffery, director general of operations at the U.K.-based Midstone Centre for International Affairs. It focuses on “framing Israel … as a moral aberration.”

This propaganda war builds upon decades-old Soviet anti-Zionism. While the postwar West marginalized Nazi-style antisemitism, anti-Zionism evaded that strong taboo with thinly disguised libels about Israel and “Zionists.” Leveraging that loophole, the contemporary Western Left has recycled the extensive Soviet playbook, and its emphasis is clearly on efficacy over accuracy.

Professor Gunther Jikeli, associate director of the Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism at Indiana University, wrote, “If we apply the accepted legal definition of genocide, the accusation is simply untrue — and constitutes a form of defamation and demonization of a country. Second, it has a direct impact on Jews in the U.S. and elsewhere: Jews face constant suspicion of supporting an ‘evil’ state.”

Lest this prompt cognitive dissonance, anti-Zionism offers a preemptive remedy. “Anyone who senses that hostility toward Jews might be racist risks feeling a kind of moral contamination — becoming, in that sense, ‘like a Nazi,’” said Adam Louis-Klein, founder of the Movement Against Antizionism. With Nazism still widely considered objectionable, “that guilt must be instantly inverted and projected onto the object of hatred itself. Thus, a core feature of anti-Zionist ideology is to depict ‘Zionists’ as ‘racists’ and ‘Nazis,’ while Palestinians are recoded as the ‘Jews’ or ‘Holocaust survivors.’”

Pierre Rehov: Trump's Iran 'Deal'

The 14-point text is unambiguous on the point the White House is most eager to fog. It commits the United States, "with regional partners," to develop a "plan with at least USD 300 billion for the reconstruction and economic development of the Islamic Republic of Iran" -- $3 billion of which has, according to the unsurpassed journalist, Lee Smith, already been sent to Iran through by way of the United Arab Emirates. The president has called reports of that figure "fake news" and insisted nobody is putting up "ten cents." The clause nevertheless sits prominently in the document he signed.

Only one question really matters: what does the agreement, if honored by Iran, deliver? It leaves enriched uranium inside Iran, concedes a right to enrichment that was recently a red line, permits the Iranian ballistic-missile program Trump now defends supposedly because other countries have missiles too, and pours reconstruction money into an economy whose ruling institution is the brutal Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

An interim framework can easily be a device for extracting one concrete concession -- opening the shipping lanes in the Strait of Hormuz -- while the other clauses quietly expire.

Trump has repeated that if the deal collapses he will return to force – but who will do that after he is no longer president?

Each Israeli reprisal can trigger an Iranian walkout, and each walkout hands Washington a legal pretext to resume the war it paused. If Trump, however, is reluctant to use force against Iran again now, why should anyone think that he would be more inclined to use it later?

Without a united opposition to inherit power and without an army to seize Tehran, talk of liberation is a consolation, not a strategy. The war degraded the regime; it did not remove it -- and nothing in this agreement will. In fact, the MOU promises to enrich the IRGC again so that it can tighten its hold on the Iranian people even more viciously.

So the memorandum sits there, looking like the clumsiest concession an American administration has made to a sworn enemy in a generation...

The regime in Tehran, which has waited out many American presidents and means to wait out another, is betting they are bluffing about everything except the check.

Iran: Did Trump Cave In?

[Iran] continues to execute opponents, confiscate the assets of critics, organize mass arrests across the nation, and funnel funds to proxies in the region.

The only change that has happened is that in the past few days it has raised a claim to the exclusive ownership of the Strait of Hormuz.

The Majlis of which Ghalibaf is speaker has passed at least three laws forbidding any negotiations with the American "Great Satan".

The Majlis also put a $50 million price on the US president's head.

What we have so far is a 60-day extension of a shaky ceasefire with a list of desiderata to haggle over.

Will the projected 60-days of talks produce anything resembling peace and stability in the region as many pray for? The outright answer I could give is a firm no.

Gorbachev and Deng could achieve a change of course because the USSR and the People's Republic of China had a deeply-rooted party structure plus highly centralized armed forces.

Neither of those two conditions exists in the Islamic Republic of Iran, which is a hodgepodge of political, economic and military baronies pulling in different directions while regarding the maintenance of the status quo as essential for their survival. Imagine a kaleidoscope that if turned this way or that produces different visuals and colors but remains fundamentally the same.

The tactic Tehran will use is clear: drag out the talks until we see the back of Trump and Netanyahu, as we did with six other US presidents and as many Israeli premiers.

If it actually happens, the 60-day stint may establish a roadmap pointing to several desired goals. The next phase would be labeled "confidence building easers" followed by a third named "modalities of implementation" -- in other words, a roadmap to lead Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner up the garden path.

Read More

06/20 Links: In two days of Hezbollah's 'ceasefire', five IDF soldiers killed, 13 injured; How to Understand the Memorandum of Undoing; Hamas terrorist doubling as Al Jazeera photojournalist killed in Gaza

From Ian:

Ben-Dror Yemini: Trump has handed the keys to Iran, and Tehran is in control

There is logic to Iran’s moves. It wants to drive a wedge between the United States and Israel through its Hezbollah proxy. It is succeeding. And Israel faces a dilemma. An Israeli response to Hezbollah’s provocations is exactly what Iran wants. Failure to respond, on the other hand, could whet the appetite of Iran and Hezbollah.

In this situation, Israel needs a diplomatic arm to present Hezbollah’s repeated ceasefire violations. To exercise restraint, so it will be clear that this is a deliberate provocation. Only after it is clear who is violating the cease-fire, and only after the headlines stop saying “Israel bombs Lebanon” and instead say “Hezbollah violates ceasefire,” will Israel be able to respond. The problem is that Israel has no diplomatic arm. And the headlines about the bombings receive far greater prominence than Hezbollah’s violations.

Under the circumstances, the prime minister’s statement Saturday, that Israel is holding its fire, is the correct response. It is meant to put the ball back in Iran’s court. Not that this will cancel the surrender agreement. Far from it. Even the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, and even the launch of ballistic missiles at Israel, will not move the United States.

Iran can torment it as much as it wants. Because the United States is deeply sunk in this agreement, and all the dubious explanations it has already offered for it amount to a total liquidation of assets. Oil prices, oh, the oil, Trump said. The global economy nearly entered a terrible crisis, he added. So now he is going to do something? It will not happen. “Even if I murder someone on Fifth Avenue,” Trump said in 2016, “they would still vote for me.” Now it is Iran. Even if it murders a few Americans, just because it feels like it, Trump will still bow his head and argue that it is Iran’s right.

We must hope the current crisis ends. But afterward, Israel must be pulled out of the terrible low point it has reached in the United States. Because without change, today’s problems will look like child’s play compared with tomorrow’s.

Lee Smith: Trump has fallen for the same false Iran promises as Obama

Opening door for Dems
It’s because of Donald Trump that Iran doesn’t have the bomb. Because of the president’s historic partnership with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the Iranian regime has been battered. But that doesn’t mean Trump won the war. Not yet, anyway.

Historical trends suggest that a Democrat will succeed Trump, but losing to Iran would virtually ensure it.

Then, Obama’s party will help rebuild the Iranians’ nuclear program, and all of Trump’s efforts, and all the battles won and sacrifices made by American armed forces to stop Iran, will amount to nothing because he didn’t win. Losing wars comes with serious consequences.

Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth made clear at the outset of the war that the central goal of the US government was to end Iran’s ability to project power beyond its own borders. Vance said in his briefing Friday that the United States has done that by eliminating Iran’s air force and navy.

But the fact that US allies are still under fire during the war that Trump chose and the cease-fire he imposed means the administration has failed to meet the very first benchmark it set for victory.

Perhaps, then, embarrassment was the source of the president’s anger, for when after America’s regional partners retaliated against attacks by Iran and its proxies during the cease-fire, the president chastised his friends.

Polls show that Trump voters still support his war aims. The catch is that it seems he no longer does. He says it’s always been his preference to take Kharg Island by force, but he chose against it because he didn’t think the American people had the stomach for it. But it’s the job of a wartime leader to steel the public and prepare them in the event American lives are lost.

The joint US-Israel campaign destroyed physical things that can’t be easily replaced, like nuclear facilities. Entering negotiations with Iran to secure physical things that yet remain — the remainder of the regime’s nuclear facilities and its stockpiled enriched uranium — is an acknowledgment that you are, at least at present, not capable of or willing to destroy or seize them.

Lost leverage
Shifting from war to talks tilts the balance of power in the other direction, away from the United States, which at war made no concessions, and toward Iran, to which Trump must now make concessions to make a deal.

And the deal, as Vance laid it out in his press briefing, only means surrender. No verification regime can hold Iran to the commitments he says Iran is willing to make. What happens when the Iranians invariably fail to uphold their pledges and then turn away inspectors? They typically do. They’ve never allowed inspectors access to military sites believed to house important parts of the nuclear weapons program.

And Trump’s decision to forgo military operations to achieve his aims means there is no mechanism to enforce any of the already feeble provisions Vance is promoting.

If Trump has already put aside force because he reckoned the cost for winning his objective was too dear, what reason does Iran have to fear that he’d return to tactics he discredited by abandoning them for negotiations after he failed to secure his aims through war?

The Iranians have the upper hand, and not because of any preternatural ability to negotiate for which they’re often, wrongly, credited. The plain truth is that what won’t be won by force cannot be taken through negotiations.

If Trump doesn’t get Iran right, there will be no time left for absolution or apologies. If he loses this war, generations of Americans will pay the price for a defeat that the 47th president of the United States brought on himself.

And future historians of the period are unlikely to have any clearer understanding of why than we do now.

How to Understand the Memorandum of Undoing

It took less than four months for a war of absolute demands to collapse into an agreement of postponed decisions. During the conflict, President Trump declared that there would be “no deal with Iran except UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER” and later warned that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” By June 17, the U.S. and Iran had signed an interim memorandum declaring an immediate and permanent end to military operations while opening a sixty-day window to negotiate a final agreement. The sixty-day limit governs the initial negotiation period, not the duration of the ceasefire.

The U.S. President signed it at Versailles, of all places, hosted by the French President he had mocked throughout the war, down to the jab that his wife “treats him extremely badly.” That Macron hosted him anyway tells you how eager Europe was to contain the conflict.

But nothing sat as strangely as the Vice President’s language. He wanted Iran to “behave like a normal country,” to rejoin the international community, to become, he hoped, “successful.” Touching language, if the same administration had not, weeks earlier, warned California law enforcement of unverified reporting that Iran had allegedly aspired to attack the state using drones, and if Iran had not, before the June 2025 U.S. strikes, messaged the President threatening “sleeper-cell terror inside the U.S.” if he attacked. Iran went, in the space of a season, from terror sponsor to fixer-upper.

Read against the administration’s own stated aims, the memorandum is a catalog of undoings. The MOU is, in the most literal sense, a Memorandum of Undoing: nearly everything the administration said the war was for. Every maximal promise the war made, the memorandum either narrowed, deferred, or abandoned, with the Vice President now granting that Iran, “like any state,” retains a right to self-defense and need not give up the missile capability the President had vowed to raze. A Memorandum of Undoing is, after all, the easiest kind of document to undo. And it came undone in pieces:

Read More

06/19 Links Pt2: Mamdani calls AIPAC ‘monsters’; The Guardian’s ‘Nazification’ of Jews; Sally Rooney blames Israel and US for rise of fascism in Europe

From Ian:

The Guardian’s ‘Nazification’ of Jews

It ran under the headline: “From Goop to ‘Gwynocide’: why is Gwyneth Paltrow starring in a luxury Israeli real estate ad?” Beneath it appeared the following summary: “Paltrow went viral this week for her commercial for 51 Park – a building just miles from where Palestinians are being killed and displaced.”

Mahdawi's accusation of Paltrow's putative complicity in a (non-existent) genocide is based entirely on the fact that the commercial is for a building located "just miles" from where Palestinians are being killed:

“While the situation in the West Bank is terrible, it’s even worse in Gaza – which is only 50 or so miles away from the luxury pilates room at 51 Park,” she writes.

So, the logic would suggest, not only are all Israelis, even those living within pre-67 boundaries, guilty or complicit in genocide, but diaspora Jews – and, presumably, non-Jews – who visit, invest, or in any way associate with the state, within any borders, are genocidaire-adjacent.

Then, the Guardian columnist places an even large target on Israelis and Jews by evoking the Nazi analogy:

"Newborn babies are being gnawed on by rats in filthy camps in Gaza, while Paltrow shows off the wine rooms of a luxury tower development down the road,” Mahdawi writes. “It is some real The Zone of Interest stuff.”

The Zone of Interest is a film focusing on the life of German Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss and his wife Hedwig, who lived with their children in a home in the "Zone of Interest" next to the Auschwitz concentration camp.

So, for at least the fifth time since October 7, 2023, Guardian editors have promoted one of the most morally grotesque and cruel forms of antisemitism – the attempted “Nazification” of Jews.

"There is a sadistic triumphalism in charging Jews with genocide", wrote Howard Jacobson, "as though those making it feel they have their man at last". The sadism, he added, "resides, specifically, in attacking Jews where their memories of pain are keenest...by making them now the torturer and not the tortured, their assailants wrest their anguish from them, not only stealing their past but trampling on it."

Of course, the only party in the war that is guilty of genocide is Hamas, whose desire to rid the world of the Jewish state is codified in its founding charter, and who live-streamed to the world on October 7 what barbarism inspired by Nazi-like hatred of Jews looks like.

Turning again to Jacobson, who wrote that "morality changed on 7 October. Black became white, evil good, ugliness, beauty, the victim the culprit" and that "it was Hamas’s genius to have seen something to its advantage in the declining status of the Jews in the conscience of the west.” It realised, he added, "how the drip, drip, drip of unremitting revilement in the western media and on western campuses had worn away their humanity".

It is undoubtedly true that, both before and after October 7, no mainstream British outlet has done more to inspire the "revilement" of Jews than the Guardian.

The useful idiocy of Zack Polanski

To push back, he’s doubled and tripled down on his AsAJew status. He can barely utter a sentence without spitting out ‘the genocide’. He has constantly demanded that the UK should end arms sales to Israel and investigate the country for war crimes. He has backed sporting and cultural boycotts of Israeli football teams and supported the monitoring of UK-Israeli dual nationals who served in the IDF, saying they could be responsible for war crimes.

He didn’t even speak out against the Green party’s ‘Zionism is racism’ motion, even though it would mean labelling his own family – most of whom are Zionists and a few of whom made Aliyah – racists.

But still it isn’t enough for those who are really in control. Et tu, Mothin Ali? Because, yes, it is Zack’s trusty deputy who is on manoeuvres. Who could have guessed?

According to an article in the Spectator, Mothin is backing a new, powerful Greens affiliate called the Global Majority Greens (GMG), which has accused Polanski and other senior Greens in a new report of creating a “hierarchy of racism” with allegations of antisemitism taken more seriously than other complaints.

The report, which will be presented at the Green Party AGM later this month, accuses Zack of only “performing anti-racism” and condemns a “serious governance problem inseparable from institutional racism”. The problem is that too many Muslim members have been suspended for antisemitism. Apparently, that is racist because it “demonises migrants and Muslims”.

And even though Zack has really done everything he possibly could to disassociate himself from his own previous Zionism, it is not enough. It never would be. Because Zionism isn’t the problem.

It was inevitable that the Red/Green/Islamist alliance that now makes up the Greens would eventually break up. Their agendas are too separate, even if they can agree on hating Israel and the need for revolution. This glue won’t hold forever, as Jeremy Corbyn’s Your Party found when the far left fell out with conservative Islamists on the issue of trans rights.

Perhaps the Greens lasted just a little bit longer because they are an older, more established party; but the cracks are emerging.

So the battle for the Greens is on. Now we will see whether the party’s newfound popularity is genuinely the Zack effect (and I don’t doubt that some of it is) and how much it is sheer entryism from the hard left and Islamists.

I imagine that Zack will fight this, but he is already bloodied by the growing body of scandals surrounding him. How much longer can he last?

You do have to wonder how he really thought that a Jewish man with a history of Zionism could survive as leader of a party obsessed with Israel. Idiot.

Read More

06/19 Links Pt1: 4 IDF soldiers were killed in a Hezbollah attack; Melanie Phillips: Trump’s surrender; ‘Unconditional support’ for Israel doesn’t exist; Vance Drops the Pretense; How Doha captured the ICC

From Ian:

Melanie Phillip: Trump’s surrender

Trump signed the agreement because he found himself in a trap from which all escape options were bad. But that was because he had refused to accept Israel’s assessment that the Tehran regime needed to be brought down and that it would take a year of attrition to do so.

Having embarked on a different, shorter war, he then proceeded to undermine Israel’s carefully thought-out plan for victory, calling off its most decisive attacks at the last moment.

Looking for an off-ramp from the war to avoid political or economic collapse is rational, if regrettable. Dressing up a tactical retreat as victory to obscure the disaster caused by Trump’s own incompetence is also rational, if deplorable.

But the enormity of his capitulation to Iran, the ludicrous absurdity of his remarks and the venom against his great ally, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, suggest that something else is at work here.

It was always assumed that Trump would be careful never to go down in history as a second Barack Obama, replicating the former president’s disastrous 2015 Iran deal; nor would he ever tolerate being thought of as a sucker.

But what if Trump’s chronic narcissism makes him unable to see that’s what he’s actually become? We know from long experience that he often frames events to correspond with what he wants them to be, rather than what they actually are. What if, accordingly, he really has turned surrender into victory against Iran in his mind? What if he really believes that America has won this war?

There are possibly even darker explanations for this debacle. There are the financial connections between Iran’s ally Qatar and people in the Trump administration—not to mention the $1 trillion that Qatar has now pledged to invest in the United States, in addition to the vast sums with which it has already bought up America.

And in Tablet last April, Lee Smith suggested that the Iranian regime’s “echo chamber” influence operation in Washington, D.C., to sell Obama’s 2015 nuclear deal was actively working once again during the current war to safeguard Iran’s nuclear program. This time, however, it had a man on the inside of the Trump administration: Vice President JD Vance.

Israel now faces a hideous choice between abandoning its military defense against Hezbollah’s unceasing attacks—another Israeli soldier was killed in Lebanon this week, and several others were injured—or risking the vindictive wrath of Trump.

The longtime opponents of this war may be gloating, but America’s national interest demanded—and still demands—that the Iranian regime be neutralized.

Iran’s war against the West hasn’t ended. Trump’s surrender has produced a crisis not just for Israel but America as well.

Rowan Dean: Peace offering

Last week the world looked on in horror at the footage of a beautiful young 21-year-old girl, Maria Eduarda Rodrigues de Freitas, being callously tossed to her death at a Brazilian bungee jump, as the safety rope lay uselessly unattached to one side. To add to the tragedy, it has also been reported that Maria was still alive when a nurse got to her, but she died shortly afterwards.

It’s hard not to draw a comparison with the other horror show this week, as President Donald Trump and his sidekick J.D. Vance announced a so-called ‘peace deal’ with Iran, or rather a ‘memorandum of understanding’, that appears to throw Israeli Prime Minister and the security of Israel off a cliff, with no safety rope.

This betrayal of Israel comes as a profound shock to all those who supported Mr Trump’s war against Iran not only in the hope that it would defang the world’s most evil regime, but would also provide the impetus for the Iranian people to rise up and overthrow their murderous and oppressive government.

This magazine believes it was a mistake for the Americans to halt the bombing campaign at the very point where the Iranian regime was at its most vulnerable. It is impossible to know what may have been, but any student of military history knows that when you are winning against a bloodthirsty foe, the wisest course of action is to finish off your enemy when they are down. Giving them the opportunity to re-build, re-organise and ultimately fight another day is a very grave error.

‘Unconditional support’ for Israel doesn’t exist

It has become axiomatic, on both the Left and the Right, to claim that America has always given Israel “unconditional support.” Tucker Carlson has said as much. So has Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), among many, many others.

But there’s a problem with this narrative: It’s not true. And one only needs to read a history book to find out why.

As historians such as Walter Russell Mead have documented, America has long had a special relationship with Zionism, the belief in Jewish self-determination in the Jewish people’s ancestral homeland. America has become, over time, Israel’s greatest ally.

But it is historically inaccurate to portray that support as either unwavering or one-sided.

The United States was the first nation to recognize the State of Israel. President Harry Truman, defying many of his advisers, supported U.N. General Assembly Resolution 181, which called to create two states out of British-ruled Mandate Palestine.

Zionist leaders in pre-state Israel supported Resolution 181, although it fell far short of the territories promised to them after World War I. By contrast, Arab states rejected the proposal and chose war instead.

In Israel’s 1948 War of Independence, five Arab armies and multiple militias, some led by former Nazi officers and collaborators, massed to destroy the fledgling Jewish state.

Israel won by the skin of its teeth, losing as much as 1% of its population. Israelis fought and bled for their freedom. And they did so on their own.

Many of those who fought and died were Holocaust survivors, some fresh off the boats from Displaced Persons camps in Europe.

They did not use American arms. The Israelis relied on a hodgepodge of weapons, many from the Czech Republic.

In fact, the U.S. government instituted an arms embargo and prosecuted those who violated it. By its very nature, the arms embargo favored the Arab states, who had an overwhelming numerical advantage.

Transjordan, known today as Jordan, even fielded British-led and trained troops, meaning that, mere years after World War II, some British officers were quite literally on the same side as the Nazi officers who were advising Syria and other Arab nations.

Opposition to the world’s sole Jewish state can make for strange bedfellows.

Read More

06/18 Links Pt2: Jewish leaders mark America’s 250th with open letter; The Left-Wing Case Against Anti-Zionism; Hillary Clinton: No alternative to Trump’s Gaza plan

From Ian:

‘The single best diaspora experience’: Jewish leaders mark America’s 250th with open letter

As the U.S. approaches its 250th anniversary, American Jewish leaders have signed an open letter expressing gratitude to a nation “unlike so many others through Jewish history [that] did not merely tolerate Jewish life, but made possible its flourishing,” while also highlighting Jewish contributions to the country’s founding.

“From the earliest days of the American experiment, Jews were drawn to the promise of a nation founded not on bloodline, monarchy, or established religion, but on liberty, covenant, and the dignity of the individual,” the letter reads. “Having known the weight of persecution and exclusion, Jews recognized in America’s founding ideals something rare in human history: the possibility of belonging without surrendering our identity.”

The letter continues, “Here, Jewish immigrants arrived with little and built lives of dignity. Here, Jewish communities established synagogues, schools, charities, businesses, and institutions of civic life. Here, Jews rose not because success was guaranteed, but because freedom made striving possible.”

The letter was spearheaded by David Bernstein, CEO of the North American Values Institute, and Phil Darivoff, chairman emeritus of the Weitzman National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia, to increase American Jewish involvement in America 250 celebrations.

“America 250 is an opportunity to express gratitude to America, the country that’s been the single best diaspora experience that Jews have ever had,” Bernstein told Jewish Insider. “American Jews have been an integral part of this country and its story from the very beginning and we want to remind our fellow Americans of that.”

“It’s also an opportunity to ensure that America lives up to its founding ideal,” continued Bernstein. He asserted that America’s core civic values, such as freedom of conscience and the rule of law, “are the best defense against antisemitism,” which reached historic levels in America following Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attacks in Israel and the ensuing war in Gaza.

“It’s incumbent on the American Jewish community to double down on those values, both because they protect us and because they allow America to live up to its highest potential,” said Bernstein.

The letter also acknowledges America’s shortcomings, noting, “America has not always lived up to its own ideals. Its history is marked by acts and periods of injustice, exclusion and failures that wounded many communities, including at times our own.”

It concludes with a call to action for American Jews.

Adam Louis-Klein: The Left-Wing Case Against Anti-Zionism

Anti-Zionism recoded the left’s concern with abuses of state power and the rights of minorities into a hatred of the Jewish state, just as the classical anti-Semitism of the 19th century recoded right-wing concern with the integrity of the nation and foreign influence into a hatred of Jews as a dispersed, stateless minority. But the internationalism that transformed Israel into a beacon of “ultranationalism” and “fascism”—the Soviets reveled in Holocaust inversion and in the depiction of Israelis as Nazis—would itself become a global system of oppression, subjecting one small state to an endless trial of elimination.

Discussions of whether anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism obscure the fact that anti-Zionism, as it actually exists, remains genocidal in intent, demanding the erasure of a national group that is protected under international law. The Genocide Convention protects all national groups, including those based on shared citizenship. Discrimination against Israelis qua Israelis—and the “Zionists” who appear as their proxies—is a moral wrong.

The left’s internationalism—once the calling card of progress—has hardened into hostility to Israel, across academia, NGOs, mainstream-media outlets, and the United Nations. The constant accusations that circulate across these networks of authority are not normal critiques of a state, but claims that cast Israel as the exemplar of the three great sins of the postwar international order—colonialism, apartheid, and genocide—a “rogue state” said to violate the very fabric of the world.

The progressive case against anti-Zionism recognizes the freedom of Israelis to choose the nature of the society they want to live under. It recognizes that Israel may be becoming more like other Middle Eastern countries—that its increased religiosity in recent years is partially driven by the Mizrahi segment of its population, those who were expelled from other countries in the region. And it seeks to extend to Israel the same allowance that progressives extend to other nations in the region, an acknowledgment that societies can differ from secular Western ideals.

Since the Six-Day War in 1967, which resulted in the emergence of the messianic Gush Emunim movement and the planting of settlements in the West Bank, changes within Israeli society have alienated many American Jews, as well as secular, left-wing Israelis. Religiosity and nationalism have fused, displacing cosmopolitanism. The language of leftist universalism now seems ever more remote from Israel’s reality.

But the left must adhere to its own standards, irrespective of changes within Israel. It needs to acknowledge the harms caused by anti-Zionism—the forced exodus of Mizrahi Jews across the Middle East, the cultural erasure of Jews under the Soviet Union, and the anti-Jewish violence and purging happening in the West today. And it needs to address them.

The brokenness that anti-Zionism sees in the world, as a vast oppressive conspiracy that sustains the existence of Israel—the system that Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, claimed is “the enemy of humanity”—is a brokenness that anti-Zionism brings into the world. The oppressive system is anti-Zionism itself. It’s a brokenness that, it just so happens, Jewish tradition tasks the Jewish people—and all of humanity—to repair.

Jewish Statehood and American Tribal Law

The United States pursued a one-state solution to the American-Indian conflict between 1887 and 1934. Treaty promises were ignored. Tribal governments were dismissed. Territorial boundaries were erased. Native peoples were no longer classified as members of foreign nations and instead given allotments of land to build private farms and ranches. Many of their children were placed in federal boarding schools where they were taught to assimilate into the culture of the newly unified nation. Known by historians as the Allotment Era in U.S.-Native American relations, these assimilationist policies were championed in part by idealistic reformers who believed that Indian poverty would be alleviated when native peoples abandoned tribal ways for the universalist principles of American citizenship. Their intention was good; their one-state experiment, a tragedy.

The project of “civilizing” native children in boarding schools became notoriously abusive. Many allotted lands proved unfit for small-scale agriculture while others required costly equipment most families could not afford. Thousands of impoverished Indians were left with no choice but to sell their property or lose it through foreclosure. Tribal landholdings plummeted from nearly 138 million acres in 1887 to 48 million acres by the time the allotment policy was repealed in 1934. It was a loss whose “devastation and trauma to tribal communities…cannot be overstated,” to quote the textbook Mastering Native American Law.

It was into this climate of anti-tribal reform, now largely forgotten, that Theodor Herzl’s The Jewish State first entered the public debate in the United States. Various reform rabbis and Jewish intellectuals, who had absorbed the anti-tribal zeitgeist, opposed Herzl’s “tribal” assumptions. Prominent among them was the distinguished philosopher Morris Raphael Cohen who in 1919 published an influential essay in The New Republic entitled “Zionism: Tribalism or Liberalism?”

Cohen argued that Zionism and Americanism are irreconcilable. “A national Jewish Palestine must necessarily mean a state founded on a peculiar religion, a tribal religion, and a mystic belief in a peculiar soil,” he wrote, “whereas liberal America has traditionally stood for separation of Church and State, the free mixing of races, and the fact that men can change their habitation and language and still advance the process of civilization.” When Cohen reissued the essay in his 1945 book The Faith of a Liberal, he likened Zionism to Nazi Aryanism, declaring that “tribalism is a creed that leads to grief and massacre.”

Against Herzl, Cohen insisted that “the Jewish problem is one that must be settled in each country separately” through assimilation and individual freedom. He maintained that as the world’s nations became ever more liberal, antisemitism would wither away. Though global Jewry’s faith in such promises mostly evaporated after the traumas of the Holocaust and the mass expulsion of Jews from Arab countries, Cohen’s portrayal of Zionism as inherently illiberal and backward nevertheless reverberated down the decades, giving birth in our time to a school of anti-Israel thinkers whom this paper calls anti-tribalists.

Read More