09/11 Links Pt2: Israel celebrates first Rosh Hashanah in three years without hostages in Gaza; New boycott of West Bank Jews is based on lies; Hamas planned Berlin-Vienna attacks for Oct. 7 anniversary

From Ian:

Israel celebrates first Rosh Hashanah in three years without hostages in Gaza

Israeli Jews ushered in Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, at sunset on Friday, the first in three years without any hostages in Gaza or major fighting in the Strip or elsewhere, though conflicts on several fronts remain on a low boil, and the military was on alert in case of escalation in the war with Iran.

“Last Rosh Hashanah eve, we asked for a better year to come. But before any other requests, there was one simple, clear request above all: that all of our hostages would come home,” said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in a video published to his personal X account.

It was shortly after the Jewish New Year in 2025 that the US-brokered ceasefire deal secured the return home of the last 20 living hostages whom the Hamas terror group abducted in its October 7, 2023, invasion of Israel, and held captive in the Strip.

Netanyahu, with uplifting music in the background, surveyed Israel’s military accomplishments over the last year, declaring: “Do you know another nation that fights on seven fronts and wins on all of them?” – though the claim was sure to come under scrutiny, as Israel has not secured the promised “total victory” on its major fronts in Gaza, Lebanon and Iran.

Netanyahu’s boast also comes as Israel heads into an election next month, with the prime minister’s role in the failures of October 7 a key issue.

On Thursday, it was reported that Israel was preparing to counter the possibility of Iranian ballistic missile fire, as the Islamic Republic’s persistent attacks against Jordan and the success of the US economic blockade against Iran were both seen to point toward a potential escalation.

However, there was no concrete warning or specific plot uncovered ahead of the holiday.

Bruce Pearl: New boycott of West Bank Jews is based on lies

Much of the reporting relies on a United Nations database treated as a running scoreboard of settler crimes.

A 2025 study by Israeli security expert Gabi Siboni compared the UN’s count of roughly 1,800 settler-related incidents with Israeli law enforcement’s numbers for the same period.

Police opened 967 investigations; 61 led to indictments.

The Kohelet Policy Forum, examining an earlier version of the UN data, found it included confrontations with Israeli security forces and events involving no violence at all.

We saw the same rush to judgment last year when Jews were accused of torching a 5th-century church in the Christian village of Taybeh.

There was a fire nearby, but the church wasn’t touched. Israeli investigators found no damage, while video showed young Jewish men from a neighboring farm running toward the flames with firefighting equipment.

The fire was real, but the story built on top of it wasn’t.

So, yes, condemn violence and hooliganism. Arrest the perpetrators. Prosecute them.

But don’t turn the crimes of a few into an indictment of hundreds of thousands of Jews while treating vastly more numerous Palestinian attacks against those Jews as background noise.

False narratives have consequences.

Britain says its new policy isn’t a boycott of Israel, only of Jews and businesses in Judea and Samaria. So Jews can live and do business in certain places but not in others.

We’ve seen that in the past. That’s called a ghetto.

Florida Rep. Randy Fine has already warned that British companies complying with such a boycott could themselves face exclusion under Florida’s anti-boycott law.

Other states and the federal government should follow suit.

Europe has a long and ugly history of deciding where Jews may live and with whom people may do business.

Before Britain and its neighbors head down that road again, they ought to check both their own history and their facts.

American lawmakers ought to make them.

Hamas planned Berlin-Vienna attacks for Oct. 7 anniversary, indictment shows

Hamas planned coordinated terrorist attacks in Berlin and Vienna to mark the second anniversary of the Oct. 7 massacre in Israel, according to a 214-page indictment filed by Germany’s federal prosecutor.

The attacks were to take place simultaneously or in close succession around Oct. 7, 2025, targeting Israeli and Jewish interests in the two European capitals, according to the indictment, obtained by WELT, which — like POLITICO — is part of the Axel Springer Global Network.

The plot was supported by an international weapons-procurement network that moved pistols, an automatic rifle and hundreds of rounds of ammunition through Denmark, Germany and Austria.

Federal prosecutors said last year that they had arrested men linked to the Palestinian militant group who were suspected of planning attacks on Israeli and Jewish targets in Germany. The indictment, which has not been made public, reveals that Vienna was also an intended target — and that the attacks in the two capitals were to be coordinated. The principal targets included Israeli diplomats, Jewish community centers and pro-Israel demonstrations.

Seven men have been charged in connection with the plot and remain in pretrial detention, according to the indictment. One of the accused was working as a confidential informant for Germany’s domestic intelligence agency. The files show that the informant continued reporting to his intelligence handler while allegedly failing to disclose the full extent of his own involvement in obtaining ammunition for the group.

The indictment portrays the plot as part of a broader shift in Hamas’ operations in Europe. Intelligence assessments cited in the filing say plans existed even before the Oct. 7, 2023 attack to establish and train operational cells on the continent, using Turkey as a base and directing attacks remotely from abroad.

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09/11 Links Pt1: What 9/11 taught us about courage, unity and the price of freedom; If 9/11 happened today; Douglas Murray & Dan Senor; 25 Years After 9/11

From Ian:

John Ondrasik: What 9/11 taught us about courage, unity and the price of freedom

Twenty-five years after 9/11, America finds itself in another battle — this one for the soul of our nation and, more broadly, for the future of Western civilization. Remembering 9/11: How educators teach the tragedy 25 years later Video

The threats are not identical to those we faced in 2001. But they are real. Radical Islamism remains a global threat, while antisemitism and anti-American extremism increasingly find expression across the ideological spectrum. Ideas once confined to society’s fringes now travel instantly, and with little consequence, through universities, political movements and social media. The enemy is in the building, and time is not on our side.

That is why "Never Forget" cannot become merely a slogan printed on a bumper sticker or repeated once every September.

It is an obligation. It is our obligation.

We have a duty to teach our children what happened on September 11, 2001: about the evil fanatics who attacked us, why they attacked us, and the carnage of what unchecked extremism can produce.

But "Never Forget" means something more.

It means remembering the best of us.

It means telling our children about the firefighters who climbed stairwells while everyone else was running down. The police officers, paramedics and ordinary citizens who ran toward collapsing infernos to save people they had never met. The passengers of Flight 93 who understood what was happening and, knowing the probable cost, fought back.

They represent the best of humanity.

Twenty-five years later, their courage should still challenge and inspire us.

Their sacrifice should remind us that America is not sustained merely by institutions, elections or slogans. It survives because generation after generation chooses to defend the principles that make the country worth defending.

Memory fades. History becomes distant. Tuesdays come and go.

But some Tuesdays must never be forgotten.

May the memory of those we lost — and the example of the heroes of September 11, 2001 — give us the strength, courage and fortitude to fight for America every day, especially Tuesdays, for the next 250 years.

Let’s Roll…

Ayaan Hirsi Ali: What Mohamed Atta Was Trying to Tell Us

I began this essay with Mohamed Atta in a Hamburg apartment, calmly writing instructions for his burial while living inside one of the richest and freest societies in the world. That image matters because it strips away the comforting explanation the West preferred: that beneath the theological language there must always lie a more familiar material grievance waiting to be negotiated, subsidized, or therapeutically addressed.

Twenty-five years later, the more uncomfortable truth is that the West has become much better at finding, capturing, or killing men like Atta, but still hesitates to confront the milieu he emerged from: the institutions, networks, doctrines, funding streams, and civilizational ambitions that shape him long before he appears on a watchlist.

Civilizational resilience is not a vague confidence that democracies always muddle through. It is the hard capacity of a people to see its vulnerabilities clearly, repair them in time, and deny its enemies the use of its virtues as weapons. To do that, it is important for us to acknowledge that our virtues are real, and uniquely our own—so much so that millions of men have fought and died over centuries to make them real and widely shared. We did not fight those battles because all cultures are the same, or all values are equal. Rather, our ancestors, real and imagined, sacrificed on a civilization-wide scale, so that men and women of all races and backgrounds could think and live freely, according to the dictates of one’s own conscience. Those who share our foundational values belong among us; those who deny the primacy of those values have every right to pursue their own versions of happiness elsewhere.

It is high time that our elites understand that the primacy of the West is not an accidental gift of fate, nor was it largely unjust. Injustice is a feature of all societies and cultures. The West is unique because of its regard for the individual conscience and its ability to correct its mistakes. It is frankly insane to demand that the West recognize the right of our enemies to destroy and replace the civilization that we built according to the values of the Reformation and the Enlightenment with the values of other cultures distinguished by centuries of stagnation and decay. No such right of replacement exists in any society or culture.

To deny the radical and positive importance of Western culture to the human inheritance is more than a form of historical and individual blindness; it is a death wish that we can no longer afford to indulge. Tocqueville wrote that the greatness of America lay in her ability to repair her faults, not in being more enlightened than other nations, and that is still the right standard by which to judge the republic at 250. The question now is no longer whether America can kill terrorists faster than they regenerate. A resilient civilization would redesign its protections so that free information, migration rules, and associational liberty function as intended, to shelter citizens rather than adversaries. It would rebuild formative institutions, repair its leadership class, and recover enough constitutional confidence to resist civilizational subversion without abandoning liberty itself. It would also build a wall against people who do not share our culture and indeed actively wish to destroy it.

If America and Europe can still do that, 9/11/2026 will be remembered as the moment they chose survival with clarity. If they cannot, Mohamed Atta’s will and the quarter-century that followed will stand as evidence that a civilization can know its enemies, kill their foot soldiers, send mighty armies halfway around the world, and still fail to save itself.

If 9/11 happened today

Osama bin Laden himself would be reframed with remarkable speed. In 2001 he was correctly understood as the operational and ideological leader of the Islamist global insurgency that declared war on the United States and its allies, celebrating the slaughter of civilians and rooting its programme in a coherent reading of Islamic texts and history. Who knows – his image may even be held high by Australian celebrities or emblazoned on our iconic monuments. Elites, academia, politicians and activist networks would insist on ‘context’. So perhaps bin Laden’s oldest son, Hamza, was right when he said, ‘We are all Osama.’

Osama would be presented as a complex, charismatic figure shaped by Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, American support for the mujahedin, Saudi politics and legitimate grievances against the West. Mainstream politicians would still formally condemn the attacks, yet the surrounding conversation would soften the edges: ‘Bin Laden was wrong, but he had a point.’ Replaying the videos of his statements or the celebrations that followed 9/11 might risk ‘stigmatising’ communities and could see demands by our e-Safety Commissioner for further crackdowns on what we can say and who can say it.

One reason 9/11 today would be turned upside down is a deep strategic failure to understand the enemy. As retired US Marine Corps General Jim Mattis explains in Call Sign Chaos, anyone who has studied history knows that the enemy always moves against your perceived weakness. One of ours is allowing those who hate our way of life to migrate to our country believing eventually they will love us.

One of the least-known yet most strategically influential al-Qaeda figures was Abu Musab al-Suri, who was arrested in 2005 in Pakistan. No other individual did more to transform al-Qaeda’s strategy into a globalised umbrella. He saw how jihad could become mainstreamed into many aspects of Western society – not just physical terrorism, but merged with leftist grievances and victim-based struggles now highly visible in Western cities. Al-Suri recognised the opportunity for mass mobilisation. He saw the Palestinian intifada as the prototype, scaled up to reach the home of the American invaders and their infidel allies from every race and place. Al-Suri was a revolutionary mastermind.

Sadly this revolutionary movement will not be tamed by riding the four horses of weakness: apology, appeasement, acquiescence and acceptance. Nor will it be understood through conventional Western thinking and DEI workshops run by earnest facilitators who fear the consequences of offending others with realism. As explained by Richard Belfield in Terminate with Extreme Prejudice, the 12th-century commander Saladin found when he threatened the Ismaili Assassins that they welcomed violence. Their letter replied: ‘We have read the gist and details of your letter and taken note of its threats against us with words and deeds, and by God it is astonishing to find a fly buzzing in an elephant’s ear and a gnat biting statues. Others before you have said these things and we destroyed them and none could help them…. You know the outward aspect of our affairs and the quality of our men, what they can accomplish in an instant and how they seek the intimacy of death…. Prepare means for disaster… for I will defeat you from within your own ranks and take vengeance against you at your own place and you will be as one who encompasses his own destruction.’ This is just as we see it today.

The eerie and evil manipulation by the Islamist global insurgency is the implied threat of further Bondi-style attacks if we do not accept their demands. Yet if this trajectory continues, future generations will inherit a West that has already conceded the decisive terrain – its own population, its own language and its right to name the enemy.

The price of continued denial is not theoretical. It is the slow, irreversible loss of a commitment, and a diminishing courage to fight for something greater than ourselves that is the bright light of Western civilisation.

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09/10 Links Pt2: We are still failing the moral test of 9/11; How ‘Made in Israel’ is powering European security; Error-Riddled Harvard Law School Report Demonizes Israel as ‘Inhumane’

From Ian:

How ‘Made in Israel’ is powering European security

On the last day of August, a group of Greek military officials arrived in Tel Aviv, led by Major General Ioannis Bouras, to sign what would become one of the largest defense export deals in both countries’ histories.

The €3 billion agreement — called Achilles Shield — will provide a suite of Israeli tech to protect Greece against a wide range of threats, including missiles, aircraft and drones.

The deal is the latest installment in a growing relationship between European governments and the Israeli defense sector. As the continent races to rearm, it has largely relied on the United States for guns, tanks and aircraft. For many of the less-visible systems now at the center of modern security — sensors, interceptors, surveillance technology — governments are increasingly turning to Israel.

That dependence is deepening even as Europe’s political relationship with Israel grows more strained. The wars in Gaza and Lebanon have fueled tensions between the European Union and Israel, even as the bloc’s governments have become increasingly dependent on the country for critical systems — but those disputes have done little to slow cooperation between Israel’s defense sector and individual countries.

“Looking right now on our relations with the EU, yes, there are challenges,” said Avi Nir-Feldklein, Israel’s ambassador to the bloc. “But when you look at what we’re doing on the bilateral level with EU member states, the constructive, practical cooperation is intensive and flourishing.”

Israel’s advantage begins with its military. Young engineers serve in elite intelligence and cyber units, where they work on real-world security threats. After leaving the Israel Defense Forces, many join defense companies or launch security start-ups. The result is a conveyor belt between the battlefield and commercial product development. Multicopter drones hang on display at the Elbit exhibition stand at the 2026 ILA Berlin Air Show on June 11, 2026. | Sean Gallup/Getty Images

Israel’s top three defense companies — Israel Aerospace Industries, Rafael Advanced Defense Systems and Elbit Systems — are either state-owned or maintain deep institutional links to the Israeli defense establishment, with senior military figures embedded in their governance structures.

“Israel is an excellent example of how defense or private companies are so well integrated,” said Kaupo Rosin, the head of Estonia’s foreign intelligence service. “And that makes them very capable.”

Israel’s broader security sector has also become a magnet for investment: Its firms attract nearly a quarter of global cyber investment, according to the Israel Innovation Authority 2025 High-Tech Report, with Google’s $32 billion purchase of Israeli start-up Wiz this year underscoring the sector’s attractiveness.

Hiba Tareef, spokesperson for Israel’s Mission to the EU and NATO, said the appeal lay in the close integration of government, academia and the private sector — and in technology shaped by real-world operations.

“By leveraging our real-time operational experience, we enable our partners to shift from a reactive to a proactive posture, significantly bolstering our collective resilience and defense,” she said. Deepening dependence

A complete picture of Israel’s role in European defense is difficult to establish. Many contracts are undisclosed on national-security grounds, and some Israeli companies operate through European subsidiaries. But dozens of entries in the European tender database reviewed by POLITICO show Israeli firms becoming go-to suppliers for military communications, surveillance and electronic warfare.

Many of the public contracts — including the €3 billion Greek deal — were awarded directly to Israeli firms without opening the work to competing bids as is preferred by EU law, according to the tender notices.

European procurement rules treat competition as the default, even in defense and security. Direct awards are allowed only in narrow circumstances — for instance, in cases of genuine technical exclusivity or narrowly defined national-security concerns.

London bookshop that sold Mein Kampf stocks book calling Jews ‘evil’ and promoting Protocols conspiracy

The central London bookshop at the centre of controversy last month after selling copies of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf has now also been found to be selling a book that accuses Jews of possessing “evil qualities” and reproduces excerpts from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the JC can reveal.

Aafaq Bookstore in Westminster has been found to be selling copies of So That We Do Not Forget: Jewish Crimes - Zionist Resentment, an Arabic-language book dedicated to “every martyr whose blood was shed on the land of Palestine, Jerusalem, and Al Aqsa”.

The book’s first chapter describes Jews as a “people who committed great sins and possess evil qualities, thus deserving the wrath of [God]. God Almighty has mentioned their characteristics and actions in the Holy Quran, and how He punished them, yet they did not learn a lesson. Therefore, we must know their history so that we may be wary of them… God’s victory for the believers over the Jews is inevitable.”

The latest discovery comes just weeks after the bookshop, which is close to West Central London Synagogue, was found to be selling Arabic-language copies of Mein Kampf, with Nazi Germany’s dictator depicted performing a Nazi salute on the front cover.

The store subsequently removed the book from its shelves, saying its presence “should not be interpreted as an endorsement of its content or ideology”. It added that the bookshop rejects “Nazi ideology, antisemitism, racism and all forms of hatred”.

The Community Security Trust (CST) said the latest find merits an investigation by police and Westminster Council.

The book describes “Jewish Zionism” as the “embodiment of the worst characteristics and morals of the Jews, reflected in policies and protocols that demonstrate the evil and deviation that Jews believe toward [non-Jews], with audacity and extreme arrogance, using control of money and economic, and military power.”

It continues: “Today, we are in urgent need of studying the history of the Jews and Zionism, and the history of what happened in Palestine, and what confrontations we have experienced with the Zionist entity in Palestine, in order to rebuild awareness among the nation regarding hidden conspiracies and ongoing measures aimed at implementing the project of establishing a Jewish Zionist state from the Nile to the Euphrates.”

The reference to the Nile and the Euphrates reflects a conspiracy theory that the Zionist movement seeks to establish a single state stretching from Egypt’s Nile to the Euphrates, which runs through Iraq, Syria and Turkey.

The book calls for increased vigilance “across the generations” in confronting Zionism.

It says “Zionist hatreds” is directed “on the colonisation of Palestine, [through] the theft of the land from its owners, the killing, displacement, and extermination of its people to replace it with an expansionist, borderless Jewish Zionist state”.

The book also presents the notorious antisemitic forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion as fact. Produced in the Russian Empire in the early 20th century, the fabricated text was created to propagate the false claim that Jews were conspiring to achieve world domination by controlling governments, economies and society.

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09/10 Links Pt1: The ethnic cleansers of Whitehall; Shame on Ed Miliband, appeaser of Islamists; Europe Joins the Boycott Israel Crowd; Natasha Hausdorff: The Israeli settlements lie

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: The ethnic cleansers of Whitehall

The madness that has engulfed so much of the West since the Oct. 7, 2023 pogrom in Israel has now consumed Britain.

Anxious to reset government policy to turn public outrage at politicians into adoration of the Labour Party, the United Kingdom’s rookie prime minister, Andy Burnham, decided to reset relations with the State of Israel by sending them into the deep freeze.

Declaring that an economic boycott of the Israeli “settlements” would enable Britain to “stand up for its values,” Burnham has instead defined the values of the Labour Party as the promotion of lies, defamation and Jew-hate.

Announcing the boycott to a chilling chorus of cheering members of parliament, the foreign secretary, Ed Miliband, proceeded to misstate international law, defame Israeli Jews living in the disputed “West Bank” territories of Judea and Samaria as committing “rampant settler terrorism” and “ethnic cleansing,” and libel Israel as causing the “totally avoidable humanitarian catastrophe” in the Gaza Strip.

This was a tissue of wicked falsehoods and distortions. Neither the Israeli settlements nor the “occupation” are illegal under international law, whatever the kangaroo court run by the systemically anti-Israel United Nations may say.

It was obviously an outrageous inversion of reality to blame Israel for Gaza’s humanitarian catastrophe rather than Hamas, which used civilians as cannon fodder while Israel went to unprecedented lengths to supply them with aid that Hamas then stole.

As for “settler violence,” this is the latest libel to delegitimize Israel as a prelude to its destruction. There is a problem of unprovoked Jewish violence against Arabs in the “West Bank” territories of Judea and Samaria, but this is committed by at most a few hundred delinquent and nihilistic youths who hate both Arabs and the State of Israel.

They are a tiny minority of the half million Jews living in these areas, the vast majority of whom are law-abiding, upstanding people.

Far from being “settler terrorists,” as Miliband claimed, they’re under constant attack by local Arabs. Rocks are thrown at Israelis in their cars; Jewish farmers are having their fields torched and their flocks stolen; Jewish shepherds are finding their goats have been poisoned to death.

In the past few days, a Jewish “settler” was stabbed on a farm and seriously wounded. Over the years, dozens of Israelis in these areas have been murdered.

None of this is reported in Britain. The government’s response to this institutionalized terrorism against Jewish residents of Judea and Samaria is to trash their good name and then subject them all to collective punishment.

The charge that they are perpetrating ethnic cleansing of the Arabs is grotesque. In fact, it’s the Burnham government that’s demanding the ethnic cleansing of every Jew from their own land to create a fantasy state of Palestine that wouldn’t have a single Jew in it.

These sanctions will do no significant damage to Israel’s economy. But they’re certainly not “just symbolic,” as Britain told the Trump administration to head off any possible blowback.

Allister Heath: Shame on Ed Miliband, appeaser of Islamists

Britain's Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband's decision to sanction Israel, the Middle East's only true democracy, the West's praetorian guard against jihad, all to win votes from Islamist sympathizers at next month's by-election, will go down in infamy.

Miliband is engaging in grotesque victim-blaming. He is making British Jews feel even less safe as they head into Rosh Hashanah. As we commemorate the 25th anniversary of 9/11, he is confirming that Britain's answer to Islamism is appeasement. Our Foreign Secretary has sent a clear message to our enemies, to those who seek to destroy our way of life: violence works, threats work, relentless propaganda and blood libels work, delegitimization works, the weaponizing and perversion of international law works.

The double-standards are monstrous: Labour continued to court Qatar this week, a dictatorship that hosts Hamas. Britain remains friends with Turkey, a NATO member which, in addition to occupying northern Cyprus, has seized vast amounts of northern Syria, shifting people into these occupied territories and turning the local Kurds into a minority. Why do so few care about these settlements? Is it because no Jews are involved?

Britain recognizes and effusively supports a Palestinian "state" that fuels hate, operates a pay-for-slay rewards for terror scheme, and bars Jews from buying land (Arabs who sell face a death sentence). Yet it is imperfect but freedom-loving Israel that is being turned into a pariah. Britain's sanctions are being welcomed as a first step towards ultimate victory by the anti-Zionist and boycott movements seeking the destruction of Israel and its replacement by an Arab-dominated state.

Miliband assumes the barrier to peace is Israeli intransigence, while in fact it has always been Palestinian rejectionism: its elites have always chosen war over accepting a Jewish polity and a two-state solution. They define the Palestinian project as thwarting the Jewish one, rather than working towards coexistence. They have rejected every single partition plan since the Peel Commission's in 1937; Israel has accepted many.

Amb. Alan Baker: Britain's Misguided and Ill-Informed Betrayal of Israel

How far does the British government intend to go to damage Britain's traditional interests and its relationship with Israel in order to placate and appease a group of extreme politicians and an increasingly powerful lobby of Islamist influencers intent on taking Britain's government and its policies hostage?

Ed Miliband's rehashing of the "two-state solution" cliche displays amazing ignorance for a foreign secretary. Anyone familiar with the Middle East is fully aware that the term "two-state solution" has never been agreed to in the agreements between the Palestinians and Israel. It was never part of the 1993-5 Oslo Accords between Israel and the Palestinians.

To the contrary, the parties agreed that the permanent status of the territories would be determined only by agreement between them in permanent status negotiations. There was certainly no intention that any third party, whether this be the UN, the EU, or even the British government, would prejudge and predetermine the outcome of the negotiations and dictate a political outcome.

Milliband's reference to Israel's tender for construction in the 12-sq.-km. E1 area between Jerusalem and the town of Ma'ale Adumim as an "unacceptable and destructive act" appears to ignore that this tiny piece of land is located in what was agreed between the Palestinians and Israel in the Oslo Accords to be Area C of the West Bank territory, under Israel's complete jurisdiction and control.

According to the Accords, Israel has the right and prerogative to conduct planning, zoning and construction in this area, in the same manner in which the Palestinians, pursuant to the Accords, are entitled to do in the Areas A and B, under their own control and jurisdiction.

Stephen Daisley: Britain's Turn Against Israel Is No Accident

With the British government preparing sanctions against Israel, this is a victory for the pro-Palestinian lobby and their anti-Zionist worldview. The context is a highly effective (and handsomely funded) campaign since Oct. 7 to demonize Israel so thoroughly in the minds of Western populations that many formerly sympathetic to the Jewish state would turned skeptical, if not hostile.

Much of it is the result of a propaganda war funded by Qatar and Iran, Islamic states suspiciously eager to separate Western nations from a country known for its advanced defense technology, unparalleled intelligence, and expertise in identifying and breaking up Islamist terror cells. Ask yourself why Islamic regimes are so keen for you to feel frustration towards Israel.

While the UK government's Palestine pivot is largely motivated by domestic concerns, the campaign to bring it about was orchestrated overseas with the aim of driving a wedge between Israel and the West. Amplify genuine civilian suffering in Gaza, mix in a whole lot of falsehoods, distortions and propaganda, and Britons across the board would soon shed whatever sympathy they felt for Israel after Oct. 7.

Palestine is simply not a big issue for the bulk of British voters. But there was a demographic with insatiable appetites for a diet of Jewish perfidy in Muslim lands, as the results of the 2024 election showed. Labour reckons that Muslim voters would be reassured by the sight of the party distancing itself from the Jewish boogeyman.

It appreciates that taking up a pitchfork against Israel could well exacerbate hostility and violence towards visibly Jewish Britons, their businesses and their places of worship, but it figures it can always bung in an extra few quid to the fund that gives Jewish children self-defense training for their walk to and from school, because Jewish children in Britain need to be trained in self-defense just to go to school.

All this is terrible. Terrible for Britain's trade with a nation that produces cutting-edge technology and life-extending medicines. Terrible for Britain's Jews who will have to watch over their shoulders even more than usual when they go to pray, pick up their children from school, or walk around in Jewish-populated areas. Terrible for any and all Britons who preferred it when the focus of British politics was Britain and elections won based on factors other than ethno-religious kinship.

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09/09 Links Pt2: The Genocide Claim in Gaza Has Collapsed. Hamas Supplied the Evidence; New exhibit explores what Britain knew about the Holocaust

From Ian:

The Genocide Claim in Gaza Has Collapsed. Hamas Supplied the Evidence.

This distinction is critical. Civilian deaths alone do not establish genocide, which requires specific intent to destroy a protected group, in whole or in part, as such. When attacks presented as evidence of deliberate civilian targeting are later shown to have killed identified combatants, the inference of genocidal intent is directly undermined. As the evidence accumulates, the claim that these strikes demonstrate a systematic policy of targeting Palestinians because they are Palestinians becomes unsustainable.

Perhaps the most important implication is methodological. Many investigators reached conclusions without knowing who was actually killed. They declared particular strikes war crimes, or even evidence of genocide, without knowing that Hamas commanders had been present. That missing information is critical to assessing whether the IDF was targeting civilians or legitimate military objectives, and whether the attacks complied with the laws of war.

The starkest example is Amnesty International’s “genocide report,” which highlighted 15 airstrikes as evidence that Israel intentionally targeted civilians. Amnesty reported finding no military targets and identified all the victims as civilians. Yet subsequent Hamas and PIJ publications have revealed combatants, mostly commander-level, killed in five of those strikes (thus far). These discoveries demolish Amnesty’s analysis of those incidents: its central factual premise, that no military targets were present, was false. They also expose a fundamental flaw in the report’s broader methodology, which treated the absence of publicly identified combatants as evidence that none existed. When the factual foundation of an investigation collapses, its conclusions cannot simply be left standing. Amnesty’s genocide analysis must be withdrawn in light of the evidence it failed to uncover.

Ironically, organizations that spent nearly two years dismissing Israeli claims are being contradicted by Hamas itself. The evidence reshaping the historical record is no longer coming primarily from Israel. It comes from the Gaza military organizations that fought the war and are now publicly commemorating and lauding their own dead.

The genocide allegation has always depended heavily on the claim that Israel systematically targeted Palestinian civilians in Gaza because they were Palestinians. With approximately 2,500 identified Hamas and PIJ operatives now linking more than 600 allegedly civilian only incidents to acknowledged military personnel, the factual foundation of that narrative has been fundamentally undermined. The claim that these incidents demonstrate a systematic policy of destroying Palestinians as such is no longer sustainable.

In the end, the most consequential witnesses against the genocide allegation may not be Israel or its defenders. They may be Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad themselves.

New book ‘In the War Room’ offers candid look at Netanyahu’s wartime decisionmaking

As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu heads toward what could be one of the most consequential elections of his career next month, a new book is offering an unusually candid look at the decision-making that will define how history — and Israeli voters — judge him.

In the War Room: The Inside Story of Israel’s Fight Against Hamas and the Iranian Axis, by Jerusalem Post military correspondent Yonah Jeremy Bob and Wall Street Journal editorial writer Elliot Kaufman, draws on two years of interviews with Israel’s political, military and intelligence leadership to reconstruct the internal battles that shaped the war — battles that often pitted Netanyahu against his own defense establishment.

Both Bob and Kaufman criticize some of Netanyahu’s choices, from the delayed ground invasion of Gaza to the “unforced error” of the 2025 aid blockade, though each credits him with historic gains against Hezbollah, Iran and Syria.

The authors sat down with Jewish Insider on Tuesday, the book’s publication day, to talk about what their reporting reveals about Netanyahu’s wartime leadership, and what it might mean for how he’s remembered at the ballot box.

Jewish Insider: In your view, what is the most impactful revelation in your book that has not previously been reported on?

Yonah Jeremy Bob: This is the first book that’s an inside story about the war. There are a lot of books about Oct. 7. There hasn’t been a book that’s covered the full war from the inside. We really got deeply into the beepers and walkie talkies [Israeli operation against Hezbollah] of September 2024. There had been coverage of these issues but in terms of the depth, IDF sources, Mossad sources in Israel, in the U.S., we tell the story — there was actually a debate, should they go first with the beepers or should they go first with the walkie talkies? The things that we learned were stunning: what could have been done differently, how they accomplished it.

Elliot Kaufman: I would point to just how much it took to convince Prime Minister Netanyahu to launch a ground invasion of Gaza at all. You’d think after Oct. 7, of course, Israeli troops are going to roll into Gaza, but in fact Netanyahu was very hesitant, worrying — with good reason, by the way — that Israeli troops could be walking into a death trap. More than that, he had certain Israeli generals telling him, “Don’t do it, the IDF isn’t ready.” He had all the top American generals, sent by President [Joe] Biden, telling him the same thing. He really had to gain confidence in the plan. We tell that story, which I think most people, the way they think about it, would rush right over. But it did take Israel 20 days from the Oct. 7 attack until Oct. 27 to be able to invade Gaza.

Secret 1993 Peres-Hussein meeting helped pave way for Israel-Jordan peace, revealed documents show

Newly revealed documents from a secret November 1993 meeting between then-foreign minister Shimon Peres and Jordan's King Hussein show how the two leaders helped lay some of the early groundwork for the Israel-Jordan peace treaty, the Peres Center for Peace and Innovation revealed on Tuesday, marking the 10th anniversary of Peres's death.

The documents were released on the day of the state memorial ceremony for Peres and the naming of the Jerusalem International Convention Center in his honor. They include excerpts from the minutes of the meeting, which was held at the king's palace in Amman under strict secrecy.

According to the records, Peres's appearance was even altered to prevent identification.

The Peres Center now describes the exchange as a kind of "testament for peace" by two leaders who sought to change the region. During the meeting, Hussein spoke candidly about the urgency he felt and his desire to use the time he believed he had left to advance an agreement.

"Perhaps I have only a year or two left; I will put everything on the line," the king said.

According to the documents, the Jordanian royal palace received a message on October 26, 1993, saying that King Hussein wished to meet with then-foreign minister Shimon Peres. According to the record, Hussein viewed Peres as a creative thinker and was willing to hold a secret meeting as part of the preliminary contacts that ultimately led to the peace agreement signed in 1994.

The meeting did not emerge in a vacuum. It followed years of secret contacts and ties between Israel and King Hussein, including Peres's attempt to advance an agreement with Jordan under the 1987 London Agreement.

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09/09 Links Pt1: The UK government has swallowed the Great Lie of Israelophobia; What if the Palestinians Don’t Want Two States, Mr. Miliband?; IAEA board refers Iran to UN SC for nuclear ‘non-compliance,’ a first in 2 decades

From Ian:

Brendan O'Neill: The UK government has swallowed the Great Lie of Israelophobia

If it wasn’t for Israel, if it wasn’t for that monstrous, marauding state, there’d be peace in the Middle East. This is the Great Lie of Israelophobia. It’s the truthless, venomous current powering the global loathing for the Jewish State. You hear it on the street, on campuses, in mosques: that peace demands the muzzling, if not the outright destruction, of the bloodthirsty Jewish nation. Yesterday, staggeringly, we heard a version of this lie from the foreign secretary of the United Kingdom.

For me, this was the most striking thing about Ed Miliband’s statement to parliament: his propagation of the falsehood that the Jewish State is the prime barrier to a two-state solution and something like peace. With its war in Gaza, which Miliband said was unjustified in its barbarity, and its green-lighting of yet more settlements in the West Bank / Judea and Samaria, Israel has nuked the possibility of peace, he said. It has created ‘a set of facts on the ground’ that have made ‘the two-state solution unviable’. MPs giddily murmured their approval.

Contrast this with how he spoke about Hamas. He condemned Hamas, of course. All politicians engage in a spot of anti-Hamas throat-clearing before piling on the real monster of the Middle East: Israel. Hamas is a ‘terrorist’ outfit, he said. It caused Israel and Jews great ‘trauma’ with its attacks of 7 October 2023. The violence of that day was ‘vile’. And it must now ‘decommission its weapons’.

Spot the difference? Hamas is a pain in the arse, but Israel is the true menace to future peace. Hamas causes trauma, but Israel creates ‘facts on the ground’ that make peace and equality all but impossible. Hamas, in this twisted telling, becomes a bit-part player, albeit a ‘vile’ one, in a horror story authored by a murderous, expansionist Jewish State that is well and truly off its leash. And that’s why, said Miliband, we are rolling out a stringent package of sanctions against the Israeli settlements: to tame Israel’s ‘expansionist’ lunacy that creates ‘facts’ which torch all hopes of peace.

What Miliband said wasn’t only untrue – it was the public execution of truth. He didn’t only spread misinformation – he also inverted reality itself, depicting the seekers of peace as the destroyers of peace, and the Islamofascists who truly jeopardise our civilisation as mere causers of trauma. Like the keffiyeh mob, only in more moderate language, he infantilised Hamas and monstered Israel, presenting the former as a pest but the latter as a threat to all that is decent. It is one of the most misleading speeches a modern politician has given.

The very war that Miliband so stingingly condemned – the Israel-Hamas War – was born not from Israel’s hatred of peace but from Hamas’s. It is well established that Hamas’s carnival of Nazi-like violence on 7 October was designed to destroy not only Jewish life but also the Abraham Accords. These are the accords initiated by Donald Trump and signed in Washington, DC, in September 2020, with the aim of bringing about ‘normalisation’ between Arab states and Israel. The UAE and Bahrain recognised Israel for the first time. Sudan and Morocco followed. Then something extraordinary was reported: Saudi Arabia was considering signing up, too.

It would have been a region-changing development. More than that: a global quake. But it infuriated Hamas’s masters in Tehran, the theocratic freaks devoted to the fascistic annihilation of the Jewish homeland. Internal Hamas documents confirm that the October pogrom was in part designed to ‘thwart the Saudi kingdom’s process of normalisation’. Other documents gloat that Hamas’s savagery during the Second Intifada – when a thousand Jews were shot, stabbed and burnt to death – had helped to stall the Arab Peace Initiative, which Iran also hated.

To Britain: Peace requires recognizing Jewish rights, not destroying them

If Jews do not have the right to live, then ipso facto, Palestinian Arabs have the right to kill them, and it is not murder to do so.

If Jews do not have the right to their holy or archaeological sites such as the Cave of the Patriarchs or Joshua’s Altar, than ipso facto, Palestinian Arabs have the right to destroy those sites.

Declaring all Israeli and Jewish presence over the “green line" illegal extends to Jerusalem as well. It means that, despite Miliband's protestations, it is illegal for Jews to live in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City, giving the Jordanian ethnic cleansing of the ancient Jewish community the British stamp of approval. It makes it illegal for Jews to pray at the Western Wall, where they have prayed for millennia.

All Ed Miliband has accomplished is to lend support to those who seek to erase the right of Jews to live anywhere. Once it is illegal for Jews to live in Judea and Jerusalem, it is not much of a stretch to say that it is illegal for Jews to live in Tel Aviv and Haifa. After all, to the typical anti-Zionist, all Jews are “settlers" no matter where they live, and the mandate applied to Gush Etzion no less than it did to Tel Aviv. Should the attempt to ethnically cleanse Judea and Samaria of Jews once again succeed - an ethnic cleansing the British government seems to support enthusiastically - then the next step will be to attempt to ethnically cleanse of all of Israel. This is exactly what happened after Gaza was ethnically cleansed of Jews in 2005 - Hamas attempted to ethnically cleanse all of southern Israel on October 7. And the nukhba terrorists called the Israeli Gaza Envelope communities "settlements" and their victims "settlers."

And once the precedent of it being illegal for Jews to live is established, that precedent will be applied by “anti-Zionists" to Jews around the world. If Jews can be barred from living in Jerusalem and praying at the Western Wall, then the obvious next step is making it illegal for Jews to live in London or New York or to pray in synagogues. Many are already trying to create this reality by targeting Jews at their synagogues and their schools in the British capital, the same people Miliband is pandering to. When Jews merely living where someone doesn’t want them is justification for sanctions, boycotts, and murder, it is a short jump to violence against Jews in the “enlightened" West.

Mahmoud Abbas has less reason to make peace now than he did yesterday. He has just seen over a dozen governments endorse his intransigence, his pay for slay program, and his laws imposing the death penalty for selling property to Jews. Why should he moderate, why should he acknowledge that Jews have any rights whatsoever, when his extremism, genocidal hatred, and demand for ethnic cleansing meets with such international approval?

If peace - real peace, not ethnic cleansing of Jews followed by a repeat of October 7 - is the goal, then the British government and its co-conspirators need to start acknowledging Jewish rights instead of destroying them. They should insist that Jews be allowed to live in Abbas' dream Palestinian State instead of endorsing the demand that the state be completely Judenrein. They should demand the end of pay for slay, the repeal of the racist law imposing execution for selling land to Jews, and the acknowledgement of the rights of Jews. Only when the other side starts acknowledging and treating Jews as human beings with rights can there be any hope of peace.

Jonathan Sacerdoti: What if the Palestinians Don’t Want Two States, Mr. Miliband?

If a Palestinian state is ever to exist, there is exactly one design for it that survives contact with the evidence, and it was set out by the man Miliband treats as the villain of the piece. In his Bar-Ilan speech of 2009, Benjamin Netanyahu publicly accepted a demilitarized Palestinian state, on terms he summarized simply: all the powers to govern themselves, none of the powers to threaten Israel. No army. No control of airspace. No military alliances with Israel’s adversaries. An Israeli presence along the Jordan Valley as a security buffer. Palestinian refugees resettled in a future Palestine rather than inside Israel. And a binding, unambiguous recognition of Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people.

Each one of those conditions exists because its absence has already been tested to destruction. Borders and airspace left unsupervised produce smuggled rockets — not a prediction but Gaza’s history, many times over. A right of return exercised into Israel rather than into Palestine does not produce two states; it dissolves one, which is rather the point of proposing it. And recognition of Israel as a Jewish state is demanded precisely because 90 years of refusal have demonstrated that the quarrel was never really about where the line goes. Self-government yes; sovereign war-making no.

Anyone who finds those terms intolerable is not arguing for a Palestinian state. They are arguing for a rematch. And a people who will consent to exist only if they are also permitted to threaten the existence of their neighbor have not made the case for a state; they have made the case against one. A country whose animating purpose is the unmaking of another country is not a nation waiting to be born. It is a war with a flag — and not worth one more drop of blood, or one more decade of diplomacy, to deliver.

So let us put the uncomfortable proposition plainly. Statehood, everywhere else on earth, is something a people demonstrates a capacity for: the ability to govern, to hold elections, to keep agreements, to refrain from massacring their neighbors. Here alone, in the Palestinian territories, it is treated as an entitlement that no amount of conduct can forfeit and no amount of conduct is required to earn. Ninety years of refusals, three wars of annihilation, two intifadas, the largest slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust — and the British position is not merely unchanged but hardened, with the sanctions falling on the people who were invaded.

Keir Starmer, remember, already recognized the ‘State of Palestine,’ waving it into existence with the flourish of a man opening a garden center. There are, then, already two states for Britain’s Labour Party. What did Britain receive in exchange? Nothing was asked for and nothing was given. No disarmament, no election, no end to pay-for-slay. Recognition was handed over as a reward for Oct. 7 and produced precisely the improvement you would expect. Miliband’s answer to that failure is a larger version of it.

A policy which has failed continuously since 1937 is not made viable by British anger. A solution requiring the enthusiastic participation of a party which has refused it at every opportunity is not a solution at all. It is a wish, dressed as a plan, enforced against the only participant who ever said yes. In reality, there is no two-state solution to this problem because there is no solution at all to a problem which nobody will even have the courage to describe accurately. People who want solutions should stick to crossword puzzles.

You can’t navigate in a new world with an old map. Miliband chose his metaphor better than he knew. A North Star is a fine thing to steer by, but something by definition you never reach. It gives you your latitude and never your longitude. It is invisible from half the planet. And it disappears altogether under cloud.

Sailors understood these limits, which is why they built chronometers, then radio beacons, then satellites, and stopped betting the ship on a single point of light. Only in the Foreign Office is a man still on deck at midnight, rejecting the progress of modern developments and staring up into the overcast, insisting the star is there somewhere and that this amounts to knowing where he is.

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09/08 Links Pt2: Terrorism’s Western Welcome; UN Sought to ‘Cover-Up’ UNRWA Staff’s Role in Oct 7 Attack; Portuguese artists pull out of Jerry Seinfeld-headlined festival

From Ian:

Terrorism’s Western Welcome By Abe Greenwald

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A quarter-century ago, in September of 2001, the chief aim of jihadist terrorism in the West was to horrify free populations and intimidate their leaders into submitting to Islamist demands. Coercion was the blunt logic behind terrorism for decades, if not centuries. But over the past three years, jihadists have been furnished with a very different incentive to draw blood. Among a segment of the free world, terrorism no longer primarily horrifies but thrills and inspires. Acts of murderous violence, therefore, have also become a means of gaining support for jihad in certain enclaves in the West.

In America, terrorism now has the additional power to seduce. This is the single most dangerous development of the 21st century.

Terrorism has long been used as a rallying cry or recruitment tool in the Muslim world and in countries with no tradition of individual liberty or classical liberal thought. That it increasingly functions the same way in the West is the clearest sign that those traditions are in extremis among much of Gen Z and the entire activist class.

Within one day of Hamas’s October 7 massacre, organizations including National Students for Justice in Palestine, Black Lives Matter Chicago, Detroit IfNotNow, and others began not only rallying behind Hamas but incorporating the group’s imagery into their own promotional materials. They slapped the Hamas paraglider on their pamphlets, social media accounts, and protest posters. Supporters of jihad gathered at once in a slew of American cities, including New York, wrapped in keffiyehs and chanting genocidal slogans.

Were they horrified? Frightened? No, not this crowd. In the words of Cornell University associate professor Russell Rickford, October 7 “was exhilarating, it was energizing.” Naturally, this craze went on to overtake campus after campus, where terrorist slogans and imagery were as ubiquitous as tie-dyes at Woodstock.

“Globalize the intifada,” a blatant call to mass murder, became a staple of the public square.

Funding plummets for US nonprofit that funnels donations to anti-Israel groups

A US nonprofit that had served as a financial hub for leading anti-Israel activist groups has seen its funding plummet after a series of lawsuits and pressure from the federal government, according to tax filings posted last month.

The Westchester People’s Action Coalition Foundation, known as Wespac, is a low-profile, progressive nonprofit in Westchester County, north of New York City.

Wespac’s stated mission is to support “work toward peace, justice, and a sustainable environment.”

The group, founded in 1974, had served as a financial linchpin for some of the most prominent anti-Israel groups in the US, including National Students for Justice in Palestine, Within Our Lifetime and the Palestinian Youth Movement.

Wespac had handled donations to the groups through an arrangement called a fiscal sponsorship, in which a nonprofit collects donations on behalf of other groups that do not have nonprofit status themselves.

Its revenue had surged in recent years — from $139,901 in 2019-2020 to nearly $4 million in 2023-2024, including a spike after the start of the Gaza war, according to tax filings.

A majority of Wespac’s spending appeared to be for other groups. Its previous tax filing showed that its own expenses were $142,539, while reporting grants of over $1.7 million, including for “custodial responsibility for funds granted to various organizations.”

The group has only one paid employee who has a salary of $62,500.

Extremist anti-Israel activism after Hamas’s October 2023 invasion of Israel and the ensuing war in Gaza put a spotlight on Wespac’s involvement in the protest movement.

Motley crew of extremism
Groups affiliated with Wespac hailed the Hamas attack, hosted events that supported terror groups, and targeted cancer patients, museums, memorials, transportation hubs and holiday events.

Following disruptive protests by its affiliates, Wespac was sued in at least five courts across the US.

Republican members of Congress also put heavy pressure on Wespac, demanding investigations by the IRS and the New York attorney general’s office, alleging support for terrorism.

Federal law prohibits tax-exempt organizations from supporting terrorism.

Portuguese artists pull out of Jerry Seinfeld-headlined festival

Several Portuguese artists have dropped out of a comedy festival in Lisbon headlined by Jerry Seinfeld, citing their support for Palestinians and implying opposition to Seinfeld’s support for Israel.

At least six acts over recent days have canceled their appearances at the MEO Commedia a La Carte Fest, a new international comedy festival in the Portuguese capital. The event from Oct. 29 to Nov. 1 has advertised that it will host Seinfeld’s first live appearance in Portugal.

Though none of the artists who withdrew mentioned Seinfeld by name, some hinted at a boycott against his pro-Israel views. The Jewish comedian has become one of Hollywood’s most prominent advocates for Israel since October 2023.

Actress and comedian Inês Aires Pereira announced on Instagram on Saturday that “one of the names” featured at the festival “persistently defends ideas and acts that I consider indefensible,” adding, “We cannot relativize or normalize a genocide.”

The comedy duo Cebola Mol posted a graphic of themselves with a watermelon, widely recognized as a symbol of solidarity with Palestinians. “We will celebrate justice, freedom and joy with you on another occasion,” they said on Instagram.

The festival announced on Friday that performances by the groups Tributo Pop and Conjunto Cuca Monga were also canceled, but did not provide reasons. Two other acts, comedian Pedro Tochas and visual artist Vhils, shared their cancellations on Instagram without further details.

Seinfeld breaks decades of political avoidance
Seinfeld has aligned himself with Israel during its current conflict in Gaza, following decades of largely avoiding commenting on political issues. He visited Israel in December 2023 to meet with the families of hostages seized by Hamas on Oct. 7 of that year. Since then, he has attracted attention for a series of dismissive remarks toward pro-Palestinian advocates.

During an appearance last year at Duke University, Seinfeld compared pro-Palestinian activists with the Ku Klux Klan, saying, “The Klan is actually a little better here because they can come right out and say, ‘We don’t like Blacks, we don’t like Jews.’ OK, that’s honest.”

Representatives of Seinfeld and producers of the MEO Commedia a La Carte Fest did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

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