12/05 Links Pt2: Boycotting Fun to Own the Jews; The boycott of Eurovision exposes the racism of the Israel-bashers; Why Hamas Sympathizers Love Ms. Rachel

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: Boycotting Fun to Own the Jews

Which brings us back to the ridiculous meetings that took place yesterday among European broadcasters. The gathering voted to adopt a set of contest reforms rather than ban Israel from participation. It’s darkly funny that some of the reforms were aimed at quieting resentment toward Israel for its success—last year, Yuval Raphael finished second overall and won the public vote, leading to protests that the Jews somehow must have cheated. But it mollified enough of the Europeans that Eurovision avoided the nightmare scenario it most feared: having to ban Israel while Austria was hosting the competition.

Still, several countries have announced they will boycott the contest rather than share a stage with the Jewish state: Spain, the Netherlands, Ireland and Slovenia. Perhaps more will join them.

How should we judge the countries who stomped out of Eurovision over Israel’s participation? Harshly. A singing competition is not a diplomatic convention. Would you leave a karaoke bar because there was an Israeli Jew there? Will these folks boycott all establishments that serve Israeli Jews?

Aside from emitting a faint segregationist stink, these Europeans are politicizing every cell in their bodies in an attempt to enforce those same artistic limits on everyone else. If rare apolitical music gatherings are impossible, it has a stunting effect on the industry and on the minds and temperaments of the people participating in their own dumbing down.

And the soccer snobs are also—you just know it—coming for the Olympics at some point. Unhealthy people trying to make the planet an unhealthy world through a totalitarian-political mindset. I’d tell them to get a hobby, but they’d just ruin that too.

Andrew Pessin: Onward, ho!

Meteorological Discourse: How Language Erases Jewish Agency and Conceals Antizionist Actors

When Jews freeze under the antizionist gaze, they begin using a vocabulary of atmosphere rather than agency. Instead of identifying who is targeting Jews and why, they often describe anti-Jewish hate as though it were weather. We hear phrases like:
“It’s getting bad”
“Antisemitism is rising”
“This campus is terrifying.”

These are weather reports, not analyses. They lack actors, motives, structures, ideologies, and systems. And this linguistic pattern continues even in descriptions of violence. In an eerie way, events happen to Jews, yet no one causes them:
“Israeli women were raped”
“Nasrallah was lionized”
“A Jew was beaten in Montreal”
“Jewish businesses were vandalized”
“Jewish students were harassed”
“Sarah Milgrim was shot”

Such formulations render the harm without rendering the perpetrator. They mimic the structure of meteorological statements (“It rained,” “The streets flooded”) in which no actor exists and no intention is named. Violence becomes a condition rather than an action; Jews become a medium through which harm moves, not subjects whose safety is violated by identifiable agents.

Contrast this with what Jews should say—language that restores agency to those who commit, legitimize, or amplify anti-Jewish harm:
“Antizionists raped Israeli women”
“The New York Times lionized Nasrallah”
“Antizionists beat a Jew in Montreal”
“Antizionists vandalized Jewish businesses”
“Antizionists harassed Jewish students”
“Elias Rodriguez shot Sarah Milgrim”

This linguistic shift restores agency to the actors who commit, legitimize, or amplify anti-Jewish harm. It makes the ideology and its adherents visible. It generates accountability. And crucially, it reorients the public gaze away from Jewish victims and toward the structures targeting Jews.

'Antizionism Is a Hate Movement': A Conversation with Adam Louis-Klein

Something happened while I was writing a book about how to fight antisemitism. Forget internal arguments over hyphens or whether to call it “Jew-hate.” A new consensus is beginning to form around using the word “antizionism” instead. I always thought that, whatever you call it, this form of bigotry adapts to the times and, like a parasite, hitches a ride on whatever version of anti-Jewish hatred is socially acceptable. I’m beginning to understand that antizionism is different. It gives antisemites plausible deniability for their hatred, and we need a new set of tools to fight it.

At the forefront of this effort is anthropologist Adam Louis-Klein, who has led a push on social media to change the way we think about antizionism and to name it as a hate movement. He launched an organization, the Movement Against Antizionism to advocate for this shift.

I had many questions, so I interviewed Adam last month. I thought it best to let him speak for himself, so here is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.

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12/05 Links Pt1: How time ran out on Blinken’s plan for postwar Gaza; Hostages as leverage: Iran's secret demand aimed at crippling Israel's agriculture; Did the Red Cross do all it could for hostages in Gaza?

From Ian:

The day after that never came: How time ran out on Blinken’s plan for postwar Gaza

Had the world not been turned upside down, Antony Blinken would have been in Israel on October 10, 2023. Had Hamas terrorists not shaken the Middle East and pulverized plans for its future, the US secretary of state would have flown from Israel to Saudi Arabia a few days later as part of a multi-stop tour aimed at bridging some of the final gaps between the two countries on long-elusive normalization, a deal that could have been as positively transformative as the Hamas massacre and ensuing war were devastatingly destructive.

For months ahead of the scheduled trip, the US had been hard at work crafting a document with Saudi Arabia, laying out what Israel would need to do in exchange for Riyadh joining the Abraham Accords, namely a series of relatively minor concessions meant to assuage Palestinian aspirations for statehood. Blinken planned to bring that document to Jerusalem for approval, two senior Biden officials told The Times of Israel.

Israel was aware of where things stood and was comfortable enough with the modest steps discussed by Washington and Riyadh for the Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem to draft a normalization agreement with Saudi Arabia, according to the two former US officials and a current Israeli official.

Blinken did end up making it to Israel that week, but under very different circumstances, as then-US president Joe Biden’s administration rallied to support the Jewish state following the Hamas-led cross-border attack on October 7 that cut down some 1,200 people and saw 251 more taken hostage into Gaza.

Documents uncovered by the IDF from Gaza during the war revealed that one of the motivations of Hamas’s leaders in launching the attack was scuttling the US effort to broker that brewing normalization deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia.

To a great extent, the terror group succeeded. The Biden administration’s normalization push was shelved in favor of, first, providing Israel with the military and diplomatic support needed to restore deterrence against Iran and its proxies, and second, working to secure an end to the war through a hostage release deal. Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (L) meets with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken in Jeddah on June 7, 2023. (Amer Hilabi/Pool/AFP)

Many leading figures in the administration saw freeing the abductees as the key to ending the war and accordingly concentrated their attention on the indirect hostage negotiations between Israel and Hamas, which largely ran through Qatar and Egypt. But Blinken grew to believe that setting up the security and governing bodies to help administer Gaza the “day after” the war was no less critical.

“Israel needed the confidence to know that [its] security would not be threatened by withdrawing from Gaza, and Hamas needed the confidence to know that the war would end if it gave up the remaining hostages,” said a senior Biden aide, who was one of 10 government officials and well-placed regional sources interviewed for this story.

That logic was the basis for a “Transitional Mission” that Blinken worked to establish, which would steer the Strip after the war. The initiative, as laid out in a 14-point plan that would have been part of the ceasefire agreement, was aimed at “support[ing] the provision of governance, security and humanitarian assistance for Gaza” after the war, according to a never-before-reported US government document outlining the plan, which was obtained and verified by The Times of Israel.

The proposed mission was to involve civilian and military personnel, funding and other contributions from a handful of foreign governments, including Saudi Arabia, whose involvement Blinken hoped would provide an opening to revive the stalled normalization negotiations. Displaced Palestinians stand on a road after heavy rain in Jabalia, in the northern Gaza Strip, on November 25, 2025. (Omar Al-Qattaa / AFP)

To ensure strong Arab support, the proposal characterized the initiative as a “first step toward establishing an independent and sovereign Palestinian state.” That made the idea a hard sell to Jerusalem, but Blinken believed the prospect of Saudi normalization could be enough of a carrot to overcome Israel’s likely objections.

The result was a precarious house of cards, but one that Blinken thought could lay the foundation for not just a temporary halt in hostilities, but a durable, lasting peace and a truly transformed region.

The US held months of talks to advance the plan and Saudi normalization, but neither got off the ground by the time Biden left office in January 2025. A ceasefire between Israel and Hamas was brokered during the waning hours of the previous administration, helped by critical pressure from the incoming Trump team. But Israel still wasn’t interested in discussing postwar arrangements of the kind Blinken sought to finalize, and the Trump administration backed Jerusalem’s decision to resume the war in March.

Hostages as leverage: Iran's secret demand aimed at crippling Israel's agriculture - exclusive

Iran offered Thailand help in securing the release of Thai hostages held in Hamas captivity on the condition that Bangkok label Israel an “unsafe country” and instruct its tens of thousands of agricultural workers working there to leave immediately, two sources familiar with the matter told The Jerusalem Post on Thursday.

The Iranian message was clear: help us apply economic pressure on Israel, and we’ll help you bring your people home.

In the tense and chaotic weeks following the October 7 attacks, while Israel was still counting its dead and searching for missing civilians, a drama was unfolding thousands of kilometers away in Bangkok.

Thailand’s government, shocked by the scale of the massacre in which 39 Thai citizens were murdered and desperate to protect its citizens, began urgent diplomatic efforts to secure the release of the 31 Thai laborers abducted by Hamas and other terrorist groups.

It was a humanitarian crisis, not a political one; Thailand had no direct conflict with Hamas. But as often happens in the Middle East, even humanitarian crises can become bargaining chips.

Tehran, which maintained influence over Hamas, signaled it might be able to facilitate the release of the Thai hostages; however, the offer was not unconditional. Possible damage to Israel's agriculture sector If Thailand complied, it would deliver a painful blow to Israel’s agricultural sector at the very moment it was struggling to recover from the shock of the attack.

Between 30,000 and 40,000 Thai laborers worked on Israeli farms and in greenhouses – some of them in the western Negev and near the border with Gaza, the area hardest hit on October 7.

Their sudden withdrawal would have crippled Israeli food production and inflicted long-term economic damage.

Joshua Namm: Et Tu America? For Israel, No Ally Is Forever

There has been a lot of serious discussion recently about America’s role in the recent agreement between Israel and Hamas. And while I wrote about that topic last month, this month contains my favorite holiday of the year: Chanukah. I wrote about the incredible importance of that holiday two years ago. This year, those two things are connected.

What’s the connection?

As Chanukah approaches there are two, seemingly different, but related reasons that “make this year different than all other years” (sorry about mixing two Jewish ideas in that way).

According to a story in the Jerusalem Post, the United States, obviously under Donald Trump, is planning to build a large military base in Israel along the Gaza border. The aim is purportedly to aid “stabilization efforts” in Gaza during the current conflict, and (more tellingly) to “serve future international stabilization efforts.”

At the same time, the acceptance of Trump’s plan, and the various ways the U.S. has been involved in shaping Israel’s policy during this war, under Biden and Trump, demonstrates an expansion of America’s influence on Israel, representing an increasing Israeli willingness to relinquish sovereignty – in much the same way it has given up land for a phantom “peace,” for decades.

That isn’t as threatening if we’re talking about the U.S./Israel relationship as it has existed for most of the last 50 years. But Israeli/American relations haven’t always been this friendly, and there is no reason, especially given the events of the last two years, to believe that they will remain so in the future.

It is no longer entirely in the realm of fantasy to believe that at some point America could be a significant opponent to Israel’s interests (and to wider Jewish interests). When I was growing up, I assumed that any conflict in which Israel and America found themselves on different sides, would be an America so different than the one I grew up in, that it would be unrecognizable as America. I also assumed this to be an almost entirely theoretical question, one which, if it did occur, could occur only after many, many generations.

That was naively idealistic.

Again, we aren’t there yet, but now we can easily see how things could get there. The rise of the antisemitic left (most recently embodied in the elections of not one, but two Jew hating socialist mayors in New York AND Seattle, with a newly declared socialist mayoral candidate in Los Angeles announcing on November 15), and the rise of the antisemitic right, embodied in the Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Thomas Massie, etc., is a wake up call that every Jew should heed.

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12/04 Links Pt2: Israel WILL participate in Eurovision 2026 – Netherlands, Spain and Ireland to boycott; I Want a Democratic Party that Believes Jewish Lives Matter; What the Celebrity Crusade for Barghouti Says about Our "Elites"

From Ian:

Prof. Gerald Steinberg and Anne Herzberg: UK Funding for Hamas-Linked Groups

Since 2007, Hamas has amassed power and resources in no small part by diverting international aid and developing an unprecedented terror infrastructure. Billions of dollars in Western taxpayer funding were funneled into Gaza ostensibly for humanitarian projects via 13 UN agencies and dozens of NGOs.

Internal British and Hamas documents reveal multiple ways in which London was aware of Hamas involvement in its aid pipeline, and in some instances even cooperated with that organization. In May 2025, NGO Monitor published a detailed report, using information and documents obtained through Freedom of Information proceedings, which demonstrated that UK Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) officials were fully aware of Hamas involvement in certain Gaza cash assistance programs they funded. As of mid-2025, UK and UN databases revealed that this support was still ongoing.

These programs were implemented through UNICEF in coordination with Gaza's Hamas-controlled Ministry of Social Development, which was responsible for providing the lists of aid beneficiaries for cash assistance. Hamas was able to determine just who would receive British taxpayer funds, and NGOs linked to other terrorist groups (such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine) would be among those recipients.

In addition, the evidence indicates that Hamas skims exorbitant sums from cash transfers in Gaza. According to Eyal Ofer, an expert on Gaza's economy, "People are getting aid via banking apps, but to turn that into real currency, they must go through brokers. They withdraw funds from these digital wallets and charge outrageous fees - anywhere between 20% and 40%. This is one of the ways Hamas is making a profit."

The events of Oct. 7 and the regional war it precipitated were made possible in large part due to the diversion of billions of dollars in aid by Hamas and its pressure campaign on UN agencies, international NGOs, and foreign diplomats to facilitate the terror organization's activity and control.

The detailed record discussed here demonstrates complicity, if not close cooperation, between the UK FCDO, officials of the NGOs that receive millions in taxpayer funds, and Hamas. It also shows how the humanitarian aid industry knowingly operates outside of and in contradiction to the legal conditions and requirements established by the British Parliament. In November 2021, London fully proscribed Hamas as a terror organization. Funding or supporting it is a crime.

The glaring absence of oversight and due diligence in British funding enabled the potential transfer of millions of pounds to Hamas terror infrastructure and personnel under the guise of humanitarian aid. When presented with concrete evidence, British government officials have thus far chosen to deflect and deny rather than reform the way in which aid pipelines operate, to ensure they help Gazans, not Hamas.

I Want a Democratic Party that Believes Jewish Lives Matter

I was an intern in the Clinton White House. I went on to work in senior positions for the campaigns of Sen. Chuck Schumer and Rep. Joseph P. Kennedy, and for President Joe Biden's Super PAC. I helped elect Democrats up and down the ballot, staunchly defending them in public and in private. I attended almost every Democratic National Convention, as a professional and as part of a community of friends who were my political family. In 2020 I proudly served as a delegate for Joe Biden.

For decades I championed women's rights, reproductive choice, civil rights and equality. As a Jew, I was especially drawn to the teachings of Martin Luther King Jr., for whom Zionism - the Jewish longing for self-determination - was inseparable from the universal struggle for human rights. That was the Democratic Party I believed in.

Then came Oct. 7, 2023, and the massacre of Israelis and Jewish Americans. It forced me to confront the reality that members of my own party responded not with grief or solidarity with the victims but with protests that framed the attack as "resistance." It horrified me. There was no denying that under the banner of a "big tent," Democratic leaders were making room to shelter and legitimize extremism. Voices once on the margin suddenly dominated the narrative.

Then came the breaking point. The term "genocide" - reserved for the worst crimes in human history, like the Holocaust - was weaponized as a political slogan and hurled at Israel and Jews with ease. It was suddenly applied to a nation defending itself after an actual genocidal terrorist organization slaughtered families in their beds and hunted down and killed teenagers at a music festival.

Genocide is a ruse, a malicious inversion of reality. Yet few Democrats pushed back. Many embraced it. In November, 20 Democratic lawmakers introduced a measure in the House accusing Israel of genocide. The North Carolina Democratic Party and the Young Democrats of America adopted official positions accusing Israel of genocide. What we're seeing among Democrats is a broad, networked, antisemitic movement with cultural power and political influence.

The Democratic Party has allowed and lately encouraged the normalization of rhetoric that dehumanizes Jews and distorts history. It has become acceptable to be an antisemite who hates Israel. I cannot be affiliated with a party that espouses that message. Democratic leaders must speak clearly: Terrorism is terrorism, Jewish lives matter, moral consistency matters. Only after my community's safety is secure, and the party recognizes it not as a favor but as a fundamental principle, will I consider coming home.

The non-Jewish Israel supporters who have lost friends over Gaza

GEOFF Baker was always rather proud that his dad helped fight against the fascists targeting Jews in the East End of London in the 1930s.

As a journalist, and then PR to Paul McCartney, he also had many Jewish friends. One of his abiding memories of post-Holocaust trauma was when the former Beatle discovered a German venue he was playing in had been a favourite of Hitler: Geoff witnessed the deep discomfort of Paul’s Jewish wife Linda.

And so when October 7 happened, he wrote of his shock on Facebook and put a “I stand with Israel” banner around his photograph.

Two of his friends in particular took objection to this. The online rows became ever more bitter. “I’d write about my horror after reading an article about a woman who was decapitated by Hamas after she tried to fight off being raped and they would be saying things like ‘What about 1948?’ or ‘Did you see what the settlers have done?’” says Geoff, 69. “And I’d argue, ‘If you don’t want Hiroshima, don’t do Pearl Harbor.’

“This went on for weeks, all the rows were happening on my Facebook page. I realised I was inadvertently giving a platform to their views. So I blocked them and we no longer speak. One of them had been my friend since we were at school. I look around and I fear this new normal where it has become acceptable to be antisemitic and I don’t understand why no one is doing anything about it.”

Geoff, an old friend, was one of scores of people to get in touch with me after I put a call out on Facebook asking if any non-Jews had fallen out with friends over the Israel-Hamas conflict. I’d seen it reported in a More in Common poll that around four out of every ten Brits who were either firmly pro-Israel or pro-Palestine would consider dropping a friendship because of the war.

While I barely know a Jew who hasn’t fallen out with at least one person over the war, I was curious about how this issue had become so toxic for people who had no skin in the game – as it were – that they would fall out with friends. This is a conflict that is 2,000 miles away but its impact on our lives, our politics, has taken on a life of its own.

My post attracted 350 comments and was shared dozens of times. The comments read like a confession of pain. Person after person described how they had fallen out with friends, siblings, children and how sometimes the damage might be irreparable.

The direct messages also came in from people too frightened to say how they were feeling publicly. For many, the pain is abiding, yet they are also terrified about being further cancelled in this world of binaries.

In some ways, the messages were a balm: it has felt lonely being a Jew in this increasingly hostile atmosphere. These are people, strangers, who have our backs and have paid the price for their conviction in the most awful of ways. Sometimes that conviction has even involved them arguing with anti-Zionist Jews.

But also, they exposed me to a world of antisemitism that lingers beneath the surface – the way that non-Jews talk to each other when Jews aren’t in the room.

Let’s start with the left.

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12/04 Links Pt1: Why Trump's Gaza Plan is Not a Peace Deal; Trump to announce transition to Phase II of Gaza deal, 'Board of Peace' by Christmas; The World Will Not Help Israel with Hamas;

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: No, Americans Don’t Really Think Israel Is Guilty of Genocide

The key here is that genocide requires intent to destroy not just civilians but the specific population, and to judge something as genocidal requires one to determine that genocide is “the only inference that could reasonably be drawn from the acts in question.”

This is part of why the claim that Israel committed genocide was so unserious: Definitionally, a genocide did not take place. There are plenty of other words that can be used to describe the war, but “genocide” has been indisputably ruled out unless one changes the definition of the word, as some NGOs tried to do. But again, that would also be an admission that Israel was innocent of the charge.

Israel’s civilian-to-combatant fatality rate was unprecedentedly low for urban warfare, and the intent issue becomes absurd when you remember that Israel sent its military into Gaza to rescue hostages that Hamas refused to return.

But back to the poll. Even the response that Israel intentionally harms civilians doesn’t necessarily meet the definition of genocide. So if about 8 in 10 don’t think Israel is intentionally harming civilians, it’s likely that about 9 out of 10 don’t think Israel committed genocide.

That doesn’t mean there aren’t warning signs for Israel and its supporters, even in the IGC poll. Just because respondents don’t believe Israel committed genocide doesn’t mean they approve of Israel’s actions. As one can see, the poll shows plenty of criticism of Israel’s prosecution of the war.

Moreover, in the IGC poll—as in virtually every such survey—the trend is clear: Younger Americans of either party are tougher on Israel than their elders. But there is still a wide partisan gap: The farther left one goes on the spectrum, the more likely are respondents to assume ill intent on Israel’s part.

Another notable aspect of the poll is that there is a ton of uncertainty among respondents, so presumably a fair number are persuadable in one direction or another. Uncertainty regarding Israel’s intent is incompatible with a finding of genocide.

Two lessons. One, by definition the people who accuse Israel of genocide are feigning a certainty they almost surely don’t or can’t possess, at least from afar and during the war. As a rule, beware such people, especially when they are rewarded professionally for their dishonesty.

Two, anti-Israel activists have killed the concept of genocide. They have turned it into just another descriptive term meaning one side lost the war badly. There will continue to be victims of actual genocide in the world, and they will all be harmed by the “genocide” fraud perpetrated by professional anti-Zionists.

Khaled Abu Toameh: Why Trump's Gaza Plan is Not a Peace Deal

In the eyes of Hamas and other Palestinian terror groups, the plan is nothing but another temporary ceasefire, not different than previous ones reached between Israel and Hamas over the past two decades.

Those who think that Hamas, by agreeing to Trump's "peace plan," has abandoned its desire to eliminate Israel or has softened its position toward Israel are unfortunately dead wrong.

Hamas leaders have stressed their opposition to the involvement of any non-Palestinians in the future administration of the Gaza Strip.

Hamas has also made it clear that the role of any international troops should be limited to monitoring the ceasefire and safeguarding the borders of the Gaza Strip, not to disarming the terror groups and their military infrastructure.

Hamas's remarks are a not-so-veiled threat that they intend to launch terrorist attacks against members of any international force that tries to disarm the terror groups in the Gaza Strip.

That is doubtless the major reason most Arabs and Muslims appear reluctant to dispatch soldiers to the Gaza Strip: they do not want a direct confrontation with Hamas and the other terror groups operating there.

To understand the mindset and intentions of Hamas, it is crucial that one pay attention to what the terror group says in Arabic, not what some of its leaders tell US envoys in meetings behind closed doors.

Regrettably, there can be no peace, security, or stability in the area if Hamas and its allies are left standing on their feet and preparing for more massacres against Israel.

Is Gaza Peace Plan on the Verge of Crumbling?

"Everything is stuck," a senior Israeli defense official told me this week. Because diplomats have failed to capitalize on the disarray of Iran and its allies, "all the fronts in the Middle East are still open," he warned.

Most of Gaza's population is still controlled by Hamas, Lebanon hasn't fully regained its sovereignty from Hizbullah, and Iran is rebuilding its battered military.

The Middle East is still waiting for a stable "day after." Other than the release of all living Israeli hostages from Gaza, most of the goals of Trump's peace plan appear stillborn.

Nations that had volunteered to join the international force have been backing away, and donor countries are refusing to begin reconstruction projects until there's security in Gaza.

Prof. Efraim Inbar: The World Will Not Help Israel with Hamas

Hamas is tightening its grip on the half of Gaza that it controls and rebuilding its military infrastructure. It is difficult to imagine Hamas voluntarily disarming or relinquishing control. Israel must be prepared to "do the dirty work" for the civilized world and finish off what remains of Hamas's evil in Gaza. This is not a boxing match that can be won on points. Israel must win by a knockout.

Israel cannot claim victory while Hamas remains in Gaza. Israel must therefore seek American backing to resume fighting in order to implement the Trump plan. Repeated military defeats have not altered the Palestinians' fundamental opposition to the existence of the Jewish state. There is no "day after" if Hamas remains as an armed presence in Gaza.

Every regime that has a peace agreement with Israel - Egypt, Jordan, the UAE, Bahrain, and Morocco - despises Hamas. All of these states, as well as Saudi Arabia, view the Muslim Brotherhood and its financial patron Qatar as a threat to their regimes and a destabilizing force in the region.

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12/03 Links Pt2: NGO Monitor: Hamas' Coercive Grip on Aid and NGO Operations in Gaza; Dublin City Council Members Blame ‘Zionist Lobby’ and ‘Israeli Intelligence’; Antisemitism ‘scourge’ continues to wreak havoc in Australia

From Ian:

Dublin City Council Members Blame ‘Zionist Lobby’ and ‘Israeli Intelligence’ for Thwarting Proposal To Rename Herzog Park

Dublin City Council members accused Israel of wielding its lobbying power to interfere in Irish politics during a heated debate over postponing a vote to strip an Irish-born Israeli president’s name from a city park.

The Monday night meeting concluded with a 35-to-25 vote to send the renaming proposal back to a planning committee after the council’s chief executive noted a procedural error in the renaming process. Footage from the preceding hour-long discussion, however, is sparking outrage among Ireland’s Jewish community.

“Deranged conspiracy theories were rife at the Dublin City Council meeting last night,” a native Dubliner and doctoral student at Trinity College Dublin, Rachel Moiselle, remarked on X. Ms. Moiselle, an Irish writer of Jewish heritage who has been outspoken in defending Ireland’s Jewish population, has helped lead the effort against renaming Herzog Park.

“The hatred is visceral and frightening,” she continued in a separate post. “There is a real evil here and the people who embody it have positions of political power. We will need international support to fight it.”

Clips from the live-streamed session show council members suggesting that pushback against the proposal reflected a coordinated campaign by “Zionist” or “Israeli” influences.

“This was a full-court press by the Zionist lobby and they think they will win it,” stated councillor Ciarán Ó Meachair. “They will not win this.” Earlier in the session Mr. Meachair accused Herzog of having “raped, murdered and pillaged innocent civilians.” He vowed to continue to push for a renaming, offering instead a British Jewish communist politician, Max Levitas.

Another council member, Pat Dunne, of the United Left party, went even further, claiming that the Israel Defense Forces were somehow involved in the effort. “I’m further convinced that whatever phone calls were made to our CEO and to other officials probably emanated from Israeli intelligence attached to the Israeli Defence Forces because they’re active in every issue in relation to Palestine,” Mr. Dunne said. “Trace it all the way back, Richard, and you’ll find that’s the source.”

Alex Hearn: The comforting myth of Britain as a safe haven for Jews clouds our immigration debate

This notion of Jewish impurity polluting the nation remained, even when it was being popularised in Nazi propaganda a few decades later. In 1933 the conservative MP for Tottenham asked the Home Secretary what measures he was taking to prevent “alien Jews from Germany entering England”.

The 1938 Evian Conference saw Britain refuse to take significant numbers of Jewish refugees. Prioritising Arab sensibilities, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain refused to help 10,000 Jewish children emigrate from Nazi Germany into British mandate Palestine, which became official policy in 1939 with The White Paper. After Kristallnacht the situation became impossible to ignore and children were grudgingly allowed into Britain itself on Kindertransport.

It was largely a private rescue effort by Jewish organisations such as Central British Fund for German Jewry (CBF), while the initiative came from German Jews such as Wilfrid Israel, who saved about 15 times more lives than Oskar Schindler yet his name is largely unknown. Heroic individuals like Trevor Chadwick did agonising selection work because British guarantors often wanted “girls aged seven to 10 and, if possible, fair-haired”. Fuelled by eugenics thinking, the Home Office excluded children with disabilities or sickness.

The British government restricted Kindertransport. They created Jewish orphans by barring parents, and imposed a £50 guarantee per child, limiting the number of children who could be saved. Kindertransport symbolised British hostility to Jewish immigration.

In 1939 when the MS St Louis returned to Europe after being rejected by the US, Canada and Cuba, Britain accepted a minority essentially saving their lives, but most were returned to be murdered by the Nazis.

By 1942 with the full knowledge of Jews being systematically mass-murdered, Labour Home Secretary Herbert Morrison didn't want to grant entry to 350 children from Vichy France, citing fears of provoking “anti-foreign and antisemitic feelings”. In Parliament he was asked about German Jewish refugees who had been stripped of their nationality and facing certain death. His chilling answer was that they were not considered stateless, but were instead viewed as “aliens of enemy nationality”.

Comparisons with Jewish immigration ignore another critical distinction: when Jewish refugees arrived in Britain, the Board of Guardians and other Jewish charities ensured they wouldn't be a drain on the state. No such self-sustaining community network exists for today's asylum seekers — there are professional charities, not community organisations.

The “Britain as sanctuary” narrative obscures historical reality. With the current system — even with Mahmoud's proposed policies — many more Jews would have been saved in the 19th and 20th centuries than Britain actually admitted.

There are legitimate concerns about whether asylum policies are too harsh, and the Jewish community is right to care about the treatment of refugees. But the comparison is fundamentally ahistorical, and the argument of Britain being a safe haven to a thriving Jewish community ignores present realities: record levels of antisemitic incidents and substantial Jewish emigration, with applications for Israeli citizenship spiking dramatically.

If we're going to invoke Jewish history in these debates, we owe it to those who were turned away to get that history right — and to face present realities rather than comforting myths.

British pro-Palestine protesters ‘more at risk of radicalisation than I was,’ claims former jihadi

A former jihadist turned anti-extremism educator has claimed that British pro-Palestinian protesters are at an even greater risk of being radicalised than he was when he joined a terror group in the 1990s.

Speaking exclusively to the JC at an event organised by pro-Israeli campaign group Stop The Hate, Noor Dahri, originally from Pakistan and a former member of Lashkar e Tayyaba (LT), said that he sees an undeniable likeness in his own descent into extremism and the rhetoric of some British activists.

LT, which was proscribed in the UK in 2001, aimed to “liberate” the disputed province of Kashmir from India and annex it to Pakistan, creating a unified Islamic state. It gained wider infamy when it perpetrated a series of 12 coordinated attacks in Mumbai over three days in November 2008, killing 166 people.

But Dahri sees parallels between the group’s espousal of Islamist ultra-nationalism and the propaganda pushed by Hamas.

"[To the protesters], the Palestinians are like heroes," he said. "For Muslims [when he became a jihadist], Kashmiri people were the heroes. We wanted to liberate them. We wanted to be like them."

He explained that he ultimately left the group when he realised the reality of what he was part of, saying he was "hurt" by what he saw and that people were "losing their lives because of the [group's] goals".

"[It is] exactly the same," he went on. "The ideology and grievances which [Hamas] have created are exactly the same as [those LeT created]."

"We were [poorly] educated in [Pakistan] because we had a jihadist surrounding, but in Western countries, especially the UK, the atmosphere isn't jihadist - the state doesn't support it. This is a Western democratic country...

"There are three types of people who are radicalised: those who have absolutely no knowledge, those who have very limited knowledge, and those who have knowledge but who deny the truth.

"People here are more radicalised than in Pakistan because there they don't have options [to see the truth for themselves], here they have options - they have a British passport, they can travel to Israel, they can see a democratic life where Jews and Muslims are living side by side. [They can see] everyone there executing their rights without persecution.

"But [British pro-Palestine protesters] don't want to know. They are [further along in being of being] radicalised because they are able to know something and still [chose not to] and deny it.

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12/03 Links Pt1: The World After Israel’s Longest War; Over 300 rabbis and Jewish leaders call for removal of UN official who denied Oct. 7 rapes; Casket with apparent hostage’s body returned to Israel, as final 2 families await ID

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: The World After Israel’s Longest War

The famous story about Lot’s wife being turned into a pillar of salt has a particular lesson, according to the late British Chief Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks. It’s fine to look back—even at Sodom—but not while you’re walking out of it. When entering a better future, keep your eyes forward. It ensures you’ll go in the right direction.

I’ve been thinking about this during my time in Israel this week. For most of the October 7 war, Jews had two stock responses to questions like “How are you?” There was the normal polite response to those in our professional lives and then there was the response when Jews asked each other this question: “Well, you know.”

That second response is starting to go out of style. Since the cease-fire deal returned nearly all hostages or their remains to their loved ones and IDF reservists to their everyday lives, “How are you?” has once again become a legitimate question. That is especially palpable here in Israel, for all the obvious reasons.

Israelis are looking forward, but that doesn’t mean the recent past is forgotten. Quite the opposite: Here former hostages speak to reporters regularly to make clear the whole truth of the war and its toll. Nova festival survivors have banded together to heal as a community and to educate the rest of the country on what they have discovered about themselves in the process. Faces of Hamas’s victims are still visible on walls and windows. The political and military echelons are daily facing calls for accountability, and steps in that direction have begun.

But this is all in the service of looking forward. Israelis are deciding what shape their national future will take, who they will be as they emerge from their longest war. This country is always building, always clearing its own path ahead.

You know who isn’t moving on? Israel’s enemies, specifically those who have made Gaza their personality. And I don’t mean the people of Gaza, who are prevented from rebuilding by Hamas. I mean the Western politicians, activists, donors. and others who have nothing to motivate them to get out of bed in the morning without the hope of a Hamas resurgence and permanent war in Gaza.

The best current example of this is the crackup of the British left. The Labour Party governs the country (for the moment) and yet is in a zombie-like state. Other parties to its left are gaining, and new parties are forming, none more perfectly Gaza-obsessed than former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn’s party, named Your Party. (The name was a placeholder but is now official. The jokes tell themselves.)

UNRWA in Gaza Has Been Replaced; It’s Time to Shutter the Agency

The UN Relief and Works Agency — or UNRWA — in Gaza has been replaced by over a dozen other aid organizations. UNRWA’s decades-long monopoly on aid and services has finally been broken, presenting a rare opportunity for deradicalization and, eventually, peace.

What’s more, the international community now has a model for how to replace UNRWA everywhere it operates, not just in Gaza.

The UN Security Council approved President Donald Trump’s proposal to build a “Board of Peace” on November 17 that will oversee the deradicalization of Gaza and the dismantlement of Hamas’ terror state. But Trump’s vision will not succeed until UNRWA is shuttered.

UNRWA was created with a temporary mandate after Israel’s 1947-1948 War of Independence to provide aid and services to approximately 750,000 Palestinian Arabs displaced by the war.

Over the past 75 years, UNRWA’s mandate has ballooned. Not only does UNRWA continue to provide a myriad of services in the jurisdictions where Arab refugees from 1948 immigrated, but refugee status has been passed from generation to generation. As a result, what was a relatively small refugee population in 1948 (compared to other 20th century refugee populations) is today a large and growing 21st century refugee population with no end in sight. UNRWA counts 5.9 million Palestinian refugees and has an annual budget of over a billion and half dollars.

UNRWA schools teach the belief that Palestinian refugees and their millions of descendants would all return to the modern state of Israel — an outcome that would immediately erase Israel’s Jewish majority.

The focus on “return,” coupled with the well-documented glorification of terror and incitement — including arithmetic problems involving numbers of Palestinian “martyrs,” antisemitic tropes, and naming schools and soccer fields after suicide bombers — has produced generations of indoctrinated and radicalized Palestinian children.

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12/02 Links Pt2: Ireland should venerate Chaim Herzog; FM Sa’ar to Irish ambassador: ‘You cannot deceive the world’; UK police used fake evidence to justify ban on Maccabi Tel Aviv fans

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: Let Anti-Semites Dig Themselves Out of Trouble

Chaim Herzog was also the father of current Israeli President Isaac Herzog. During the Gaza war, anti-Israel activists spurred on a campaign to get the Dublin city council to rename the park. The undisguised hatefulness of the petition inspired disgust even from Ireland’s prime minister. Amid the Jewish community’s uproar, a social media campaign to quash the name change from Irish Jewish activist Rachel Moiselle took off. Israel weighed in. Dublin backed off, pulling the petition at least for now.

It was a victory for the Jewish community’s determination to make its voice heard even amid the atmosphere of anti-Semitic intimidation prevailing in Ireland.

In other words, this was decidedly not what anti-Jewish activists wanted, in contrast to Aladwan’s case. Yet the reaction was the same. “The optics will appear to show these senior Irish politicians carrying out the instructions of the Israeli lobby, and it’s very hard to argue with a view when we see the actual result,” one council member said, according to JTA. Another added: “This was a full court press by the Zionist lobby, and they think they will win it. They will not win this.” A third: “I’m further convinced that whatever phone calls was made to our CEO and to other officials probably emanated from Israeli intelligence attached to the Israeli Defense Force.”

Should it matter to the Jewish community that pro-Palestinian Dubliners are angry about this result and claiming that it confirms the truth of popular anti-Semitic conspiracy theories?

This is a question American Jews were asking themselves during the uproar over remarks made by Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts: If Roberts was forced to resign, would that make it look like there really was a “venomous coalition” of “globalists” pulling the strings and setting their own rules?

Taken together, the three preceding examples give us the answer. The first and second cases tell us that anti-Semites will respond to any successful assertion of Jewish rights and dignity in identical ways, raising the specter of a powerful Jewish puppeteering cabal. The third case shows us that those inclined to scapegoat Jews or to paint them as disloyal will do so as a first, not as a last, line of defense. And no one who complained of Jewish influence will change their mind when the person under fire—in this case Roberts—suffers no professional consequences.

Anti-Semitism is a matryoshka doll of conspiracy theories, and conspiracy theories are famously resistant to facts that would otherwise undermine their animating assumptions. Jews should stand up for themselves because it’s the right thing to do. Conspiracy theorists deserve no veto power. It is not the Jewish community’s obligation to save anti-Semites from the consequences of their own actions.

Stephen Daisley: Ireland should venerate Chaim Herzog

Ireland is a case study in the futility of trying to distinguish anti-Zionism from anti-Semitism. Discussions about Israel aren’t marked by criticism of the contemptible Netanyahu government nor philosophical dispute with the moral claims of Zionism. It’s unhinged fixation, righteous fury, and an invincible credulity towards even the most dubious accusations, provided the finger is being pointed Zionwards. Some of the discourse wouldn’t be out of place at Friday prayers in Tehran.

It’s wild. They’ve thrown off every yoke of state Catholicism except the keen interest in perfidis Judaeis. Israel is the ultimate malefactor of the Irish imagination, the bogeyman of Dublin politics and Dublin media, and a national myth posits the republic as a modern-day David taking on Goliath, when most Israelis would struggle to locate Ireland on a map and the rest think it’s still part of Britain. Mind you, the tendency of its activists and ideologues to declare themselves ‘Paddystinians’ makes sense. Palestine is the only occupation the Irish left shows an interest in anymore.

The thing is, though, there are about three Jews in all of Ireland. (Okay, two to three thousand.) It’s like being obsessed with the scourge of ninjas, dedicating your life to documenting the crimes of ninjas, convinced that ninjas control the world, organising boycotts of ninja-owned businesses, but you live in Sweden and there are no ninja-owned shops and not enough ninjas to fill a Volvo hatchback, let alone form a local chapter of the international ninja conspiracy.

Should Britain stage an intervention? Take Ireland out for a pint and subtly work anti-Semitism into the conversation? We’re not making any accusations, mate; we’re just wondering if everything’s okay at home. Wife all right? Kids doing well at school? You still handing out those Protocols of the Elders of Zion pamphlets down Grafton Street every Saturday? You know, maybe it’s time to move on because the Jews don’t actually run the world, the Mossad isn’t monitoring you, there’s no genocide in Gaza, and I’m almost certain the profits from Medjool dates don’t go directly to AIPAC.

Oh, and drop the Chaim Herzog thing. People are starting to talk. The fella was an Irish Jew who made history. A park is the least we can do.

JPost Editorial: The Jerusalem Post marks 93 years as a link to Israel and the Jewish world

Ninety-three years after its first issue, The Jerusalem Post is still, at heart, a letter from home for Jews and friends of Israel across the world.

What began in 1932 as The Palestine Post, a modest English-language paper printed in a small Jerusalem office, has grown into something far larger than its founders could have imagined: a global conversation, a daily heartbeat of the Jewish world.

In its early years, the paper served a small community of diplomats, journalists, and new immigrants who needed reliable news in English from Mandatory Palestine.

It reported on the struggles of a people seeking self-determination and on the painful battles that marked Israel’s birth. For those who arrived from London, New York, Johannesburg, or Melbourne, unfolding the paper was a way of understanding their new home.

After 1948, The Palestine Post became The Jerusalem Post, reflecting the transformation of the Yishuv into the sovereign State of Israel. That change of name signaled that the paper saw itself as an institution bound up with the story of the Jewish state.

Today, most of our readers are not in Israel at all. They are Jews and friends of Israel in Los Angeles and London, Paris and Panama, Johannesburg, Sydney, Buenos Aires, and small communities where there is no longer a robust local Jewish press.

For them, The Jerusalem Post has become not only an Israeli newspaper in English but a kind of global town square, a place where the arguments, anxieties, hopes, and achievements of the Jewish people are reported, debated, and preserved.

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12/02 Links Pt1: Hamas is Failing to Rebuild Its Iron Rule; A Response to Ben Rhodes' New York Times Piece on Gaza; Islamic Socialism Takes on the West

From Ian:

Hamas is Failing to Rebuild Its Iron Rule

Why Hamas Can’t Rebuild Its Rule
Frozen funding, escalating extortion, and growing public scorn have pushed the group into a self-defeating spiral
Gaza watchers generally hold that the more time goes by, the more Hamas will be able to retrench and reestablish control in the western half of the Strip, from which Israel withdrew in October. They see a “Tale of Two Gazas,” in which an authoritarian Hamas statelet, west of the so-called yellow line that now divides the Strip, achieves dominance on par with the iron grip that communist East Germany had on its citizens during the Cold War.

This widespread view has frightened foreign governments who are being asked to contribute troops to an International Stabilization Force (ISF) for the territory. Their reluctance to commit soldiers may eventually strengthen calls within Israel to abrogate the October 10 ceasefire and try to finish off Hamas without a multilateral framework. But is the fear well-founded?

The armed group is indeed applying new levels of violence and intimidation in a bid for authority. In just the first days and weeks following the ceasefire, it murdered at least 80 alleged “collaborators” in ISIS-style public executions. It is premature, however, to view Hamas’s retrenchment as a foregone conclusion.

To establish a viable new regime, Hamas needs to achieve what Hezbollah did after the 2006 Second Lebanon War — namely, a massive commitment of assistance from a foreign patron to rebuild its destroyed territory. But the equivalent monies aren’t coming. As a result, Hamas must employ ever-increasing levels of brutality against its own civilians in order to extract funds. The heavy-handed measures it has taken are enraging civilians, most of whom already blame the armed group for triggering the destruction of their territory by launching the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel that sparked the war.

The consequence, for Hamas, is a vicious cycle in which the more aggressively it tries to reassert its authority, the more it isolates itself from the population and even some of its own recruits.

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This predicament crystallized for Hamas on October 20, when White House advisor Jared Kushner told reporters that while the U.S. and its allies will be raising money for Gaza’s rehabilitation, “no reconstruction funds will be going into areas that Hamas controls.” Longtime Hamas supporters Qatar and Turkey, which the U.S. considers key players in post-war planning, appear to have fallen in line with Kushner’s position for now.

John Spencer: A Response to Ben Rhodes' New York Times Piece on Gaza

The New York Times Dec. 1 opinion piece, "This Is the Story of How the Democrats Blew It on Gaza," by Ben Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser under President Obama, is appalling for anyone who cares about the truth. This feature-length essay repeats misinformation, inserts falsehoods, and advances a moral narrative that bears no resemblance to the laws of war or the realities of modern conflict. If these arguments are taken seriously inside Washington, they threaten not only Israel's security but America's.

An explicit condition of the rules-based order since 1945 is that sovereign nations may defend themselves after an armed attack. It is the most basic tenet of the UN Charter. Israel did not choose this war. It was launched against Israel on Oct. 7 when Hamas killed more than 1,200 people and kidnapped more than 250. Any democratic state, including the U.S., would have responded with immediate and overwhelming military force to achieve their goals as quickly as possible. That is the standard the author refuses to apply to Israel.

Only the uninformed or the deeply biased believe Israel intentionally targets civilians. These accusations are false, and to pretend the facts are ambiguous is not analysis. It is distortion. The argument that President Biden gave Israel unconditional support is also false. The administration held up key arms shipments. Israeli soldiers were forced to adapt operations in real time because of delayed or restricted U.S. support.

The laws of war do not judge outcomes alone. They judge intent, precautions, proportionality, distinction, and military necessity. Israel has taken more measures to reduce civilian harm than any military in history and often put its own soldiers at greater risk to protect civilians.

The author also invokes the biggest lie of this war, the claim that Israel is committing genocide. There is no genocide in Gaza. Israel has no intent to destroy in whole or in part the civilian population of Gaza. It sought to destroy Hamas as a military and political organization while doing more to feed, house, vaccinate, provide medical care, and prevent harm to the civilian population than any nation in history.

Wanting to destroy your enemy is not genocide. It is war. War is not illegal, and in some cases it is necessary. Every nation, including the U.S., has faced the moral dilemma of civilian deaths in a legitimate war of self-defense. Nations must prioritize their own citizens and their own survival. That is a foundation of the laws of armed conflict. Supporting an ally in a lawful war of self-defense is not a betrayal of our values. It is an expression of them.

Islamic Socialism Takes on the West

When New York City mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani met President Trump at the White House in November, the cordial encounter between the self-described Muslim socialist and the former president puzzled many observers. How should Americans understand Mamdani’s blend of Islamic identity and Democratic Socialist activism? Is he, as Congresswoman Elise Stefanik claimed, a “jihadist,” or as Trump suggested, “rational”?

The answer lies in understanding a century-old ideological tradition that melds Islamic theology with socialist revolutionary theory in ways that produce unpredictable and often dangerous outcomes. This fusion operates according to a logic articulated by neo-Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse, who argued for destroying the liberal democratic order by creating a “new sensibility”—one that would demolish existing social structures to create something unprecedented, unpredictable, and radically different from Western civilization’s foundations.

Islamic socialism is not merely an intellectual curiosity. It represents a systematic challenge to Western democratic values, one that emerged from the Bolshevik Revolution and continues to shape American politics today.

The Origins: Soviet Islamic Communism
Islamic socialism was born in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, when Vladimir Lenin successfully courted Muslim constituents of the Russian empire. Though their alliance may have been a marriage of convenience, both groups saw symmetry between their ideologies. For socialists, philosophy ruled, and the end goal was societal transformation. Muslims saw their faith similarly—as a comprehensive system for remaking society.

The Marxist dialectic promised that contradictions between Islam and socialism would resolve themselves over time through social discourse. Opposing ideas would clash, then synthesize into something new and unpredictable. This was not a bug but a feature of the ideology.

Two foundational theorists exemplified this synthesis: Azerbaijani Misaid Sultan Galiev and Muslim reformist Nariman Narimanov, both Shia Muslims. Narimanov depicted Lenin as a prophet and defender of the oppressed. In Soviet propaganda posters, the Muslim revolutionary communist appeared as an Orientalist hero wielding a sword and straddling a horse, combining spiritual and communist themes under slogans like “Gather in love! Under the light of the Red star!”

This Soviet Islamic communism became foundational for Third World Marxism and postcolonial thought, including the theoretical framework behind the Palestinian cause. Years before Frantz Fanon wrote The Wretched of the Earth, Soviet Muslim socialists were theorizing about the psychology of the oppressed and the necessity of revolutionary violence.

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12/01 Links Pt2: When journalism becomes the engine of antisemitism; Tuvia Tenenbom: Oscar-Winning ‘No Other Land’ EXPOSED; Joseph Cohen: Islamism Forced Me to Flee Britain

From Ian:

When journalism becomes the engine of antisemitism

Italy is uniquely afflicted. It is the only Western country where a national labor union called a general strike for Palestine. It is the only one where leaders of the far-left Rifondazione Comunista accuse the media of supporting “genocide.” Public spaces are now saturated with Hamas flags and chants that recast Zionism as colonialism, erasing its true meaning as the national rebirth of the only indigenous people who never abandoned Jerusalem.

The attack on La Stampa rightly provokes outrage. But outrage alone is not enough.

According to research by demographer Sergio Della Pergola presented at a major antisemitism conference hosted by CNEL and the Unione delle Comunità Ebraiche Italiane, La Stampa emerged as the Italian newspaper most consistently engaged in anti-Israel propaganda between Oct. 7 and Sept. 19, 2025.

Prominent voices such as Vito Mancuso, Anna Foa, Ilan Pappé and Rula Jebreal shaped a steady narrative of demonization. Despite its historic reputation for moderation, La Stampa has portrayed Israel as violent, punitive and malevolent, while Hamas’s savagery faded into the background of a simplified story of victimhood framed as genocide, apartheid and war crimes.

Della Pergola documented how the historical and political context vanished almost entirely. The Oct. 7, 2023, massacre was swiftly detached from Hamas’s declared goal of destroying Israel and from its systematic use of human shields. Headlines such as “Israel blocks even births,” “Israel tightens the noose,” and repeated claims that massacring civilians is a “standard practice” of the Israeli army became routine.

Editor Andrea Malaguti defended his newsroom with fierce conviction, asserting professional integrity. But professionalism cannot survive when truth is sacrificed to ideology. What happened at La Stampa should serve as a warning to every journalist who believes that a single, morally flattened version of reality can sustain itself without consequences.

Even Mahatma Gandhi, whom the editor cited in self-defense, means nothing to vandals driven by hatred. What must concern us is the collapse of knowledge that has turned young people into instruments of violence, hollowed out their understanding of reality, and produced a moral degeneration fed by ignorance.

Journalism must return to its duty of truth. Not to plant Palestinian flags across Europe. Not to indulge fashionable guilt toward the “Third World,” revolutionary romanticism, jihadist apologetics or antisemitic reflexes. These forces now shape not only the attackers in the streets, but—tragically—the readers formed by years of informational distortion.

The lesson of La Stampa is not only about an attack on a newspaper. It is about the corrosion of conscience that made such an attack imaginable.

Harvard Hires Divinity School Graduate Who Assaulted Israeli Classmate

The Harvard University student who faced criminal charges for assaulting an Israeli classmate during an anti-Israel "die-in" protest, Elom Tettey-Tamaklo, has a new job: He is a teaching fellow at… Harvard.

Tettey-Tamaklo, who was removed from his position as a proctor overseeing freshmen in the wake of the incident, began work as a "Graduate Teaching Fellow" at Harvard in August, according to his LinkedIn profile. He says he works to "advise faculty on curriculum design."

Tettey-Tamaklo was the subject of intense scrutiny after he was caught on camera accosting a first-year Israeli business school student at an October 2023 "die-in" protest held outside of Harvard Business School. He was slapped with a misdemeanor assault and battery charge last May and ordered by a Suffolk County judge to take an anger management class and perform 80 hours of community service roughly a year later.

As that legal process played out, the Trump administration demanded Harvard expel Tettey-Tamaklo over the assault. Instead, Harvard hired him. Throughout the ordeal, the school never disciplined Tettey-Tamaklo or his compadre, Ibrahim Bharmal, and refused to cooperate with prosecutors in the case.

Teaching fellows at Harvard are typically paid a minimum salary that ranges from $3,400 to $11,040, according to Harvard's graduate student union. They assist with courses, leading "sections," grading exams, and offering office hours. The positions are generally awarded to Harvard-enrolled graduate students, meaning Tettey-Tamaklo may be pursuing a Ph.D. Tettey-Tamaklo graduated with a master's degree from the divinity school in May, just weeks after he agreed to the pretrial diversion program in his assault case.

It's unclear in which school Tettey-Tamaklo is serving as a teaching fellow; his LinkedIn profile only says the job is a "full-time" and "on-site" position at Harvard. It's also unclear if he's pursuing a Ph.D. at the divinity school.

Khaled Abu Toameh: Why Qatar Should Have No Role in Gaza

The meeting underscores Qatar's apparent eagerness to play a central role in post-war Gaza. As a long-time supporter and funder of the Muslim Brotherhood organization, the Qatari regime's main goal seems to be ensuring that Hamas remains in power in the Gaza Strip. Hamas describes itself as "one of the wings of the Muslim Brotherhood in Palestine."

One does not need to be an "expert" to understand that Qatar, despite its attempt to present itself as a neutral mediator between Israel and Hamas over the past two years, continues to be affiliated with the extremist ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas. Unfortunately, this ideology considers non-Muslims (and Israel) as Enemy No. 1.

In his October 19 column in the Qatari government daily Al-Sharq, Ahmad al-Muhammadi, an imam and preacher in Qatar's Waqf Ministry, explained that the enmity between the Muslims and the Jews and Christians is existential and deeply rooted, and presented Islam as the truth and Christianity and Judaism as falsehood and heresy.

He went on to call on Muslims to beware of slogans of tolerance that are aimed at uprooting belief in Islam, and asserted that Islam is "a religion that neither compromises nor reconciles."

"Qatari Shura Council member Essa Al-Nassr said that October 7 was the beginning of the end of the Zionist state, presenting this as a divine promise mentioned in the Quran. He added that there can be no peace with the Jews, because their faith condones 'deception, the violation of agreements and lies' and they are 'slayers of the prophets.'" — MEMRI, September 15, 2025.

Researcher and political analyst Eitan Fischberger recently uncovered a series of posts in which Majed al-Ansari, advisor to the Qatari prime minister and spokesman for Qatar's Foreign Ministry, openly praised suicide bombings and called for Tel Aviv to burn.

In a recent speech, the Emir of Qatar, Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, said that the five Hamas members Israel killed in an airstrike in Doha last September were "our brothers."

Qatari Education Minister Lowlah al-Khater has called Israel and the West an "ugly, racist, and vile civilization" She described Israel and its Western backers as a "mixture of ugliness, entrenched racism, and vile materialistic civilization."

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12/01 Links Pt1: Israel Is Where Theory Stops and Reality Begins; The NYT's Claims Fighting Hezbollah Is Israeli ‘Imperialism’; Pardoning Netanyahu is wrong – and exactly what Israel needs right now

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: Israel Is Where Theory Stops and Reality Begins

One can grant the claim that there is no theological imperative for Christians to support Israel at all, but that is not the same as saying that there is a theological imperative to be hostile to Jewish Israelis.

As the theologian Brian G. Mattson asks, “what has Israel to do with a modern Christian heresy? Has the state of Israel ever embraced or promoted or associated itself with Christian Zionism, other than to accept enthusiastic support wherever it can be found, particularly when in short supply? The modern Jewish state no doubt has its own notions of its origins, essence, and purpose … and they are unlikely to have been cribbed from modern evangelical Christian sensibilities, making it strange to hold Israel responsible for ideas held by some of its American supporters.”

Again, the theological discussion looks interesting from the outside. But the discussion the rest of us can more easily weigh in on is the political one, and here is the political reality. The Christian population of Israel is still growing, some years even as a percentage of the total population, and that is not the norm in the rest of the region. But this time of year, the issue tends to focus on one place more than others: Bethlehem.

The answer to why the Christian population is struggling in this historical Christian city is the same, however, regarding the question of Christian struggles in the Palestinian territories. The Christian population of Gaza has plummeted since Hamas’s 2007 takeover. The community’s population in Bethlehem has deteriorated since the Palestinian Authority took control of the city in 1994.

Hamas’s activities both in Gaza and in places like Bethlehem (Hamas exists in the West Bank, as well) have made the Christian population unsafe and also forced into a second-class citizenship status. As Eness Elias notes, it has become increasingly difficult for Christians to buy land in places under Palestinian control. Elias also recounts a story in which “Sanaa Razi Nashash from Beit Jala described how she went to the police to file a complaint against a Muslim man who assaulted her—only to find the assailant wearing a police uniform.”

Chasing Christians out while preventing them from buying property is a pretty airtight strategy to ensure the population only goes one way: down. And it’s the prevailing policy in places under Palestinian governance. Others report that the Palestinian Authority “is erasing” Christians from education curricula as Muslim students become the majority in previously Christian schools.

Walk around Israel and instantly understand that is the opposite of the case for Christians governed by the Jewish state. Ideological and theological debates over Zionism (of any flavor) are beside the point here, because it is where theory ends and reality reigns.

Seth Mandel: There’s No Such Thing As a Time-Bound Path to a Palestinian State

Pope Leo made his much-anticipated trip to Lebanon, and of course coming that close to Israel makes questions about the peace process unavoidable. Leo got the question from the press before his plane was halfway to Beirut. His response was unremarkable.

“We all know that at this time Israel still does not accept that solution, but we see it as the only solution,” the pope said, adding that “we are also friends with Israel and we are seeking to be a mediating voice between the two parties that might help them close in on a solution with justice for everyone.”

That formulation has become routine: As soon as Israel pushes the “Palestinian State Poof” button Bibi Netanyahu apparently keeps on his desk, there will be a fully functioning state living in peace and security alongside the State of Israel. There are no prerequisites for the Palestinians as far as the world is concerned.

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s version of this demand reportedly includes a shot clock: Israel must initiate a “time-bound path” to such a denouement.

This is the sort of demand that sounds reasonable—“time-bound” evokes calendars and deadlines and commitments. But in fact there is no such thing as a time-bound path to a Palestinian state. The reason there is a peace process is because there are actions that must be taken, building blocks put in position and in the right order. If a construction crew agrees to a time-bound path to a new apartment building but doesn’t get all the walls finished by the deadline, does the building receive its certificate of occupancy anyway? This new State of Palestine sounds uninsurable.

At the same time, the fact that we’re even having this conversation is the fruit of a genuine diplomatic success: the Trump administration’s triumph in getting the United Nations Security Council to vote to endorse his plan for the end of the war and the reconstruction of Gaza. Some of Netanyahu’s coalition partners didn’t like that the resolution on the plan mentioned a path toward a Palestinian state. But they should take the win: France and the United Kingdom voted to essentially annul their own previous recognition of a Palestinian state by signing on to a document that made clear no such state exists.

No, Gaza Is Not the Worst or Deadliest War by Any Measure

True Statistic: Gaza has a Comparatively Low Civilian-Combatant Ratio
Based on available data, the civilian to combatant ratio in Gaza is roughly 1.8 to 1 (and probably even lower), using Hamas’ claim of 70,000 total fatalities and an estimated 25,000 combatants killed. This ratio is far lower than in recent Western-led urban battles. In Mosul, an estimated 10,000 civilians were killed compared to about 2,000 to 3,000 ISIS fighters, a ratio of 3 to 1 at the low end. Broader operations in Iraq and Afghanistan have produced ratios in the range of 3 to 1 up to 5 to 1. The Gaza ratio therefore contradicts accusations of genocide or indiscriminate targeting.

Critics who cannot accept this reality have attempted to manipulate both sides of the ratio to fabricate a higher figure. On the denominator, they undercount combatants by relying only on the number of fighters the IDF can literally identify by first and last name and match to a pre-war roster. By this absurd standard, any combatant the IDF could not fully identify in the midst of battle, combatants remaining in tunnels or beneath rubble, or any individual recruited by Hamas after the war began, is automatically labeled a civilian. This is how the false claim of “83% civilians killed” is manufactured.

On the numerator, these same critics assert, without evidence, that total fatalities are undercounted by some 40%. They never explain how this is possible when Gazans could and did report thousands of deaths without needing to present bodies, and given the compensation incentives to do so. Two years into the conflict, the notion that thirty thousand or more deaths remain unreported by their families has no evidentiary basis.

Taken together, the credible data leaves Gaza’s civilian combatant ratio well under 2 to 1, low for high-intensity urban warfare. And tellingly, when this metric contradicts their genocide narrative, the same critics who inflated every other statistic suddenly work to discredit it, proving that accurate numbers were never the point; the manipulation exists solely to promote an anti-Israel agenda.

Conclusion
When the facts invalidate the claims, the predictable response is to move the goalposts. After portraying Gaza as an unprecedented, genocidal conflict, critics suddenly dismiss all comparative evidence, insisting that previous catastrophic wars are too terrible to cite as data points. The impulse to portray Israel as uniquely criminal, rather than any commitment to truth, drives this constant reframing. It exposes the ideological goal driving the narrative: to cast Israel as uniquely criminal, even when the evidence shows otherwise. In the end, tragedy does not prove genocide, and facts still matter, even to those determined to ignore them.

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11/30 Links: UNSC Resolution 2803 and the ‘Comprehensive Plan to End the Gaza Conflict’; Yom HaPlitim: How one day honors a million displaced Jews; The BBC’s staggering hypocrisy on anti-Semitism

From Ian:

Alan Baker: UNSC Resolution 2803 and the ‘Comprehensive Plan to End the Gaza Conflict’

United Nations Security Council Resolution 2803 (2025), adopted on Nov. 17, 2025, represents a serious attempt to restructure governance, security and reconstruction mechanisms in the Gaza Strip.

Presented alongside, and built upon, President Donald J. Trump’s “Comprehensive Plan to End the Gaza Conflict” of Sept. 29, 2025, the resolution endorses a multilayered framework involving an unprecedented Board of Peace (BoP), an International Stabilization Force (ISF) and a transitional technocratic Palestinian administrative structure.

1. The resolution’s legal character and Chapter VII elements
Although Resolution 2803 does not invoke Chapter VII of the U.N. Charter, its wording adopts components associated with Chapter VII determinations. The operative clause stating that the situation in Gaza “threatens regional peace and security” reflects the terminology of Article 39, signaling that the Security Council perceives a threat to international peace.

However, by refraining from expressly stating that the resolution was adopted under Chapter VII, the council avoids establishing binding enforcement measures. Key operative verbs—such as endorses and calls on—further demonstrate that the resolution’s obligations are largely recommendatory rather than mandatory.

Legally, this carefully calibrated language creates a gray zone:
It strengthens the political authority of the plan.
It provides Security Council endorsement of it.
Yet it withholds the coercive weight of Chapter VII.

This ambiguity allows states to claim U.N. legitimacy for participation, while simultaneously preventing the council and the U.N. from assuming direct responsibility for implementation or oversight.

2. Endorsement of the Comprehensive Plan: Scope and limitations
The council “endorses” the Comprehensive Plan rather than “adopting” it. This distinction is essential. Endorsement acknowledges the plan’s existence and supports its aims, but:
It does not transform the plan into a U.N. instrument.
It does not give the U.N. operational control over implementation.

The Comprehensive Plan is thus validated politically but not incorporated legally into the UN’s institutional architecture. The United States, in some form of loose coordination with Qatar, Egypt and Turkey remains the principal diplomatic driver.

This distinction directly affects:
the legal authority of the Board of Peace
the status and obligations of U.N. agencies operating in Gaza
the status of future political negotiations

The Board of Peace: A novel international governance mechanism
The resolution welcomes the establishment of the Board of Peace, assigning it “international legal personality”—a term commonly associated with international organizations but undefined within the resolution itself.

Questions arise:
Is the BoP envisioned as an independent international organization?
What treaties or instruments grant it legal personality?
What “relevant international legal principles” govern its operations?

The BoP is empowered to oversee:
a transitional civil administration in Gaza
reconstruction and economic initiatives
coordination of humanitarian aid
establishment of operational entities (including bodies with their own international legal personality)

Importantly, the BoP is not a U.N. body, nor does it operate under U.N. authority or financing. Its legitimacy stems solely from the political endorsement of the Security Council and the states participating in its creation.

Gazans' Stark Choice: Either Hamas or Reconstruction

It will be many years before the great majority of Gaza residents are living in anything more than makeshift or temporary housing. The future of Gaza hinges entirely on the willingness of the world to take an active role in reconstruction. But for that to happen, Hamas has to step out of the way by disarming and ceding any role in governing Gaza.

Allowing Hamas to continue as a fighting force means that its war with Israel will resume, and with it will come another round of death and destruction. Understandably, the Gulf governments that are expected to foot the bill for reconstruction costs don't want to see their investment go up in flames.

Allowing Hamas a significant role in governance also risks undermining the reconstruction effort. In its years in power, Hamas never showed any particular interest in the welfare of the Gazans under its rule, leaving basic services like education and health to the care of others; it had even less of an interest in economic development. Hamas would almost certainly use the civilian institutions of reconstruction as a cover to rearm.

Gaza thus faces a stark choice of an armed Hamas preparing for the next round of war with Israel, or reconstruction and a functioning economy. Given how desperate the situation is, you would think the gun option would be a non-starter for Gazans. But it seems that Gazans want to have both, according to a recent poll.

A demilitarized Gaza means, in effect, raising the white flag and acknowledging that the most audacious and sustained act of "armed resistance" in Palestinian history was a failure. Yet however steadfast Palestinians may want to be in the fight with Israel, living in a tent amid rubble, with minimal access to basic services and no means to support a family, is not a long-term option.

Yom HaPlitim: How one day honors a million displaced Jews

Yom HaPlitim, meaning “Day of the Refugees,” is the Israeli national day honoring the 850,000+ Jewish refugees who were expelled from or forced to flee Arab and Muslim majority countries and Iran from the 1940s to the 1970s. In Israeli law, the day is officially called “The Day to Mark the Departure and Expulsion of Jews from the Arab Countries and Iran,” and is sometimes referred to as Yom HaPlitim (“Day of the Refugee”) or Yom HaGirush (“Day of the Expulsion”). The first official Yom HaPlitim was commemorated on Nov. 30, 2014, after the Knesset resolution adopting the day was adopted in June of that year.

Nov. 30 was chosen particularly because the day before marks the anniversary of the UN Partition Plan vote on Nov. 29, 1947, a day that also sparked violence and persecution against Jewish communities in many Arab countries.

Why did Jewish refugees flee Arab countries and Iran?
Before 1948, around 850,000–900,000 Jews lived across the Arab world and Iran, in places like Iraq, Egypt, Yemen and Aden, Libya, Syria, Lebanon, Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, and Iran. After the partition vote and especially after Israel’s establishment, many of these communities faced anti-Jewish riots and pogroms, mass arrests, and laws stripping Jews of citizenship, jobs, and property. Within a generation, most of these ancient communities had been emptied; today, only a small fraction of the Jews who once lived across the region remain.

Yom HaPlitim was created to acknowledge the trauma, loss, and displacement of Jews in Arab and Muslim countries; preserve the history of ancient Jewish communities, many thousands of years old, which were declining and then destroyed in the mid-20th century; to promote awareness of confiscated and revoked property; and to correct the historical gap in which Jewish refugees from Arab lands received very little recognition and delegitimization of their Middle Eastern identities. By the 1970s, over 95% of Jews from Arab countries had left, many never allowed to return. In some cases, entire communities were moved in dramatic rescue operations, like Operation Magic Carpet (airlifting Yemenite Jews to Israel) and Operation Ezra and Nehemiah (airlifting Iraqi Jews).

Some advocates frame Yom HaPlitim as a way to highlight a “second” refugee population alongside Palestinian refugees. Others caution against using one community’s trauma to negate another’s. At its best, Yom HaPlitim is about adding a missing chapter to the story of the 20th century, not erasing or minimizing anyone else’s suffering.

Today is Jewish Refugees Day. We remember 850,000 Jews forced out of Arab states and Iran in the 20th century. Communities 2,500 years old were destroyed.

At the United Nations, I asked Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, and the others: “Where are your Jews?”

Still waiting for an answer. pic.twitter.com/s6gsyuZvGP

— Hillel Neuer (@HillelNeuer) November 30, 2025

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11/29 Links: Israeli president: Move to rename Dublin’s Herzog Park ‘disgraceful’; Tom Stoppard, acclaimed playwright of ‘Rosencrantz and Guildenstern,’ dies at 87

From Ian:

John Podhoretz: Tom Stoppard, 1937-2025

That essay, “On Turning Out to Be Jewish,” was about all Stoppard had to say about his relation to Jewishness and Judaism over the course of the following two decades. But then, according to his official biographer Hermione Lee, he read a novel by a Croatian writer named Dasa Drndic called Trieste. A character in the novel, writes Lee, “lacerates real historical figures whom she describes as ‘bystanders’ or ‘blind observers.’ They include Herbert von Karajan, Madeleine Albright, and Tom Stoppard: people who discover their family history, but turn a blind eye to it. Her ‘blind observers’ are ‘ordinary people’ who “play it safe. They live their lives unimpeded.'”

This hit Stoppard hard. Writes Lee: “He thought: yes, actually, she’s right. He felt that Drndic was justifiably blaming him for excluding from this ‘charmed life’ all those others who had ‘disappeared.’ He took it as an intelligible rebuke. He felt regret and guilt….He went back over his family history, and his Jewishness. It began to seem to him that he had been in denial about his own past. He increasingly felt that he should have been rueing his good fortune in escaping from those events, rather than congratulating himself. As a playwright, he needed to inhabit those lives he never lived, in his imagination. He started to think about a play which would answer the rebuke.”

That play is Leopoldstadt, and in every way, it is a miracle. It is the greatest play of our time, and the greatest play Stoppard ever wrote, and perhaps the greatest literary work written by an octogenarian. It is set not in Czechoslovakia but in an apartment in Vienna we see at four moments in time—1899, 1924, 1938, and 1955. Over the course of the first three scenes we meet 20 members of the extended Marz-Jacobowicz family. In the final scene, only three remain; all the others are dead, either directly or indirectly, due to the Holocaust. One of them is Stoppard’s stand-in, a young British writer who has no memory of his youth in Vienna from which he was removed by his widowed mother’s fiancee until he is reminded of a scar on his hand. He cut it as a little boy and had it stitched up by a now-dead uncle in that very apartment. He dissolves into tears. His cousin, a survivor of the camps, says to him, “You live as if without history, as if you throw no shadow behind you.”

The richness of the assimilated existences of the Jews of turn-of-the-century Vienna whose Christmas celebration (!) we witness at the play’s beginning is revealed in all its fragility almost immediately; success for the family’s richest member comes in part from his converting to Christianity, but the converted man is soon humiliated for his Jewishness by his wife’s Austrian military-officer lover. The first act features a passionate argument about Zionism and Herzl’s The Jewish State, and the great shadow cast over the rest of the proceedings is if the people in that apartment had heeded Herzl’s call and understood his ideas, they would have moved to Palestine and lived.

Leopoldstadt is a great work of art, and not a tract, but it is the most explicitly Zionist work of art of our time—though the point seems to have sailed over the heads of most of the people who wrote about it in words of extravagant praise. Its celebration and success capped Stoppard’s career not a moment too soon. Because, of course, had he written it three years later and had it been staged in London and New York after October 7th, its Zionism would have been unavoidable to all who saw it, and there would have been protests against it outside the theaters that showed it.

Tom Stoppard chose to stop “living as without history” by writing Leopoldstadt, and in so doing, he brought his career to its apogee with an earnest and passionate piece of work in which he played none of the linguistic games that had made him famous. He wanted to make it known that we must all live with history, with the knowledge of history, with the lessons of history, and not have them erased—either by parents whose journeys were too painful to share with their children and grandchildren or by those who seem determined to forget so that they can commit the same crimes anew, the crimes their grandparents and great-grandparents committed. Tom Stoppard did not live the life of a Jew, but in writing Leopoldstadt, he contributed to the treasure-house of civilization, and for that, he deserves eternal honor. He did good for his people and for the West. May Tom Stoppard’s memory be for a blessing.

Tom Stoppard, acclaimed playwright of ‘Rosencrantz and Guildenstern,’ dies at 87

Stoppard was born Tomas Straussler on July 3, 1937 in what was then Czechoslovakia, the son of Eugen Straussler, a doctor, and Marta (or Martha), née Beckova, who had trained as a nurse.

The Jewish family fled the Nazis and moved to Singapore when he was an infant.

Singapore in turn became unsafe. With his mother and elder brother Peter, he escaped to India. His father stayed behind and died while fleeing after Singapore fell to the Japanese.

In India, Marta Straussler married a British army major, Kenneth Stoppard, and the family moved to England.

Boarding school followed at Pocklington in Yorkshire, northern England, where Tom Stoppard loved cricket more than drama and learned how to be British, which Major Stoppard considered the ultimate nationality.

The adult Stoppard, who rediscovered decades later the Jewish roots that he explored in his final play, would accuse his stepfather of "an innate antisemitism."

He eventually learnt from Czech relatives that all four of his grandparents had been Jewish, and that they had died in Nazi concentration camps.

"I feel incredibly lucky not to have had to survive or die. It's a conspicuous part of what might be termed a charmed life," he wrote in Talk, a US magazine, in 1999, reflecting on returning with his brother to their birthplace Zlin in what is now the Czech Republic.

Scarlett Johansson: I was asked not to make a film about the Holocaust

In Scarlett Johansson’s first film as director, an elderly Jewish woman falsely claims to be a Holocaust survivor after an innocent misunderstanding spins out of control. A month before filming was due to begin, one of Johansson’s financial backers got in touch with a stipulation regarding the script. The gist of it? Love the film, Scarlett, but we’re not so keen on the whole Holocaust thing. Can we have the character lie about something else?

The demand came “after months of preparatory work”, Johansson recalls, despairingly. “I mean, if they’d said ‘I’ll only back this if you shoot in New Jersey,’ or ‘We need to get this done by the spring’, then that would have been one thing. But they were objecting to what the film actually was. It had to be about what happens when someone gets caught in the worst lie imaginable; if not the Holocaust, then what could it be? They offered no alternative. It was just, ‘This is an issue.’”

The Avengers and Marriage Story star stuck to her guns. So the backer pulled out and, with just weeks to go, a significant portion of the $9m (£6.8m) budget disappeared overnight. “We’d been talking about the film for so many months, and then this was the outcome?” she says. “It was really shocking, and I was so disappointed.” Fortunately, an emergency ring-round soon brought Sony Pictures Classics on board as distributors – the studio made up the shortfall, and filming went ahead as planned. tmg.video.placeholder.alt wZ6l2ue--KA

Time was of the essence – not least because Johansson’s leading lady, June Squibb, who had recently celebrated her 94th birthday, was only available for a few weeks. (The redoubtable star of Nebraska and Thelma turned 96 earlier this month.)

Today the two women are sitting side by side in a mirrored salon overlooking the Boulevard de la Croisette in Cannes. Squibb is wearing a colourful silk kimono; Johansson, a white cotton tea dress. Their film, Eleanor the Great, had its world premiere at the town’s festival the previous day, which Johansson attended with her husband, the Saturday Night Live comedian Colin Jost. She and Squibb have just had lunch together, and I’m joining them for coffee and chocolates.

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