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

From Ian:

A Jew Among Jews By Abe Greenwald

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From Ian:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There is one final instrument that every administration has neglected.

The Iranian people.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From Ian:

Eugene Kontorovich: A Judge's Verdict on Israel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pierre Rehov: Trump's Iran 'Deal'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Iran: Did Trump Cave In?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From Ian:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to Understand the Memorandum of Undoing

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

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

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

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

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

From Ian:

The Guardian’s ‘Nazification’ of Jews

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The useful idiocy of Zack Polanski

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From Ian:

Melanie Phillip: Trump’s surrender

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rowan Dean: Peace offering

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

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

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

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

‘Unconditional support’ for Israel doesn’t exist

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From Ian:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It concludes with a call to action for American Jews.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jewish Statehood and American Tribal Law

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

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

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

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

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

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