From Ian:
On Democracies and Death Cults
A terrible mutation afflicts American politics. A pathological hostility toward Israel has become a driver of political identity and debate. The genocide accusation is increasingly treated as settled truth; opposition to Zionism as evidence of virtue; and even Hamas and "armed resistance" can be romanticized or excused. Israel is being cast as such a singular evil that opposing it can seem almost a prerequisite for occupying the moral high ground.
Douglas Murray's recent book, On Democracies and Death Cults, confronts precisely this mutation. He argues that Hamas is a death cult, that Israel is confronting an enemy unlike any conventional military adversary, and that much of the West has become morally incapable of distinguishing between a liberal democracy and an organization that celebrates the murder of civilians.
His central proposition ought to be among the least controversial statements in modern politics: Hamas is evil. The fact that an accomplished writer felt compelled to devote an entire book to persuading educated Western readers of that proposition - and that this is controversial - says volumes about what our society has mutated into.
Hamas's objective is not a negotiated peace or a two-state solution. It has repeatedly opposed such outcomes because it does not seek coexistence with Israel but Israel's destruction. Hamas's own stated aims are impossible to misunderstand.
Murray also describes in excruciatingly graphic detail the evidence he collected of the murders on Oct. 7, in the rural communities invaded by Hamas and at the Nova music festivals - girls shot in the head as they begged for mercy, boys' heads bashed in with hammers, grenades lobbed at people cowering. It is unbearable and leaves no doubt about the evil at work.
Shai Davidai:
It’s Time to Stop Playing Defense
Rebutting the “genocide” libel without explaining how Hamas operates from densely populated civilian areas and uses civilian infrastructure for military purposes leaves people without an alternative explanation for the horrifying death and destruction they see in Gaza. Rebutting the “apartheid” libel without explaining how suicide bombings and other terrorist attacks led Israel to construct a security barrier and establish military checkpoints leaves people without an explanation for why those measures exist. Rebutting the “settler colonialism” libel without explaining the Jewish people’s millennia-old connection to the land and the historical circumstances that produced the modern State of Israel leaves people without an explanation for why millions of Jews live there at all. Asking people to abandon an explanation without giving them another through which to make sense of the world risks creating a hole in their story without offering anything with which to fill it.
None of this means lies should be ignored. Some accusations cause immediate harm and must be answered quickly, clearly, and forcefully. Falsehoods can destroy reputations, influence institutions, inspire violence, and become accepted wisdom if no one challenges them. Defense matters. Yet the moment adherents of American Intellectual Antisemitism force us to debate whether their accusation is true, they have already secured an important victory: dictating what everyone else must discuss.
Playing offense means doing something fundamentally different. It means choosing your own questions rather than merely answering theirs. It means deciding which ideas deserve attention, which values should frame the conversation, and which facts people encounter before someone else tells them what those facts mean. It means telling people who the Jewish people are, why we remained connected to our homeland through two thousand years of dispersion, and what happened during centuries in which we lacked the power to protect ourselves. It means explaining why Jewish self-determination emerged, how Israel became the national expression of an ancient people, and why Jewish sovereignty matters in the first place. Instead of spending all our time explaining what Israel is not, we must tell people what it is. We must stop letting our opponents choose the story and start telling the story we actually want people to understand.
On October 7, 2023, Israel’s defensive systems did what they were meant to do: they detected incoming rockets, calculated their trajectories, and destroyed those threatening populated areas before they reached their targets. Over the months that followed, they intercepted thousands more attacks and saved countless lives. Yet no general would confuse successful missile defense with victory.
What is true about the physical war against Hamas is equally true of the ideological war against American Intellectual Antisemitism. If all you ever do is shoot down whatever your opponent fires at you, your opponent still chooses the targets, timing, and tempo of the war. Correct the lies that must be corrected. Defend the truth that must be defended. Shoot down the attacks that cannot be allowed to land. But never confuse successfully intercepting your opponent’s attacks with defeating the ideology launching them.
Defense can keep you alive. Only offense can change the battlefield.
It is time to stop playing defense.
Ruthie Blum:
What’s the right way to beat the left?
Combating radicalization, which has creeped into the zeitgeist despite efforts to keep it at bay, is not simply the demand of the day; it’s an existential imperative for liberal Western democracy and civilization. And though the tendency to sound the alarm on individuals running for office is completely understandable, it doesn’t always achieve the desired results. On the contrary.
Greenwald offered a useful reminder of why. “The 2016 presidential election left no doubt about the exact nature of Donald Trump’s flaming outlandishness, and he stunned the world by becoming the GOP nominee and then president,” he wrote. “Starting years before the 2024 election, Democrats made a full-time job of repeating that Trump was a threat to democracy, a sexual predator, a grifter and a convicted felon, and then he was elected president by a greater margin than in 2016.”
The lesson here isn’t that it’s useless to impugn an opponent. It’s that doing so excessively can backfire badly.
Indeed, the irrational, obsessive maligning of Netanyahu by Israeli leftists and their fellow “anybody but Bibi” travelers didn’t succeed at their mission. Instead, they were pummeled at the ballot box in November 2022, ushering in the most right-wing coalition in the country’s history.
The right should take this into account today. It would also do well to consider another problem that Greenwald elucidated: “When a candidate makes his opponent’s unfitness the central message of his campaign, he also makes the race all about his opponent.”
Exactly.
If the right spends the next two and a half months explaining why Eisenkot, Golan and Abbas are the bogeymen, it will be turning them into the protagonists of the election. You don’t have to be an expert in advertising to grasp that this is a way to build, rather than dilute, their brand.
Greenwald’s prescription is worth noting. “Perhaps the best way to go after a radical opponent,” he suggested, “is to get a jump on offering a compelling vision of your own that competes with the dark one he’s peddling.”
That should be the Israeli right’s strategy. Not letting the left off the hook, but preventing it from becoming the centerpiece—and from disguising itself as the center.
From Ian:
Want Peace with Israel? Lift the Siege
One accusation repeated again and again is that Israel is aggressive. But the opposite is true. Israel is denied a peace it has pursued since its establishment in 1948.
The truth is that Israel is surrounded by an explicit desire to erase it, and remaining constantly on guard is what it must do to survive.
On Friday, a defense pact was signed among Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan, champions of Sunni Islam.
It may appear that they want to defend themselves against Shi'ite Iran, but no. Pakistan's defense minister, Khawaja Asif, said: "In the context of Israel, all Muslim countries must unite," describing Israel as "a threat to the entire Muslim world" and calling for a "united military front" against it.
Turkish President Erdogan has made hatred of Israel - and the ambition to take control of Jerusalem - a banner of his politics.
Benny Morris:
A Mid-War Assessment
The Islamist war on the Jewish state, which began with the Palestinian Hamas assault from Gaza on Oct. 7, 2023, is still with us, with no end in sight. That assault was followed the next day by rocketing by Lebanese Hizbullah, and the Yemeni Houthi rebels and assorted Islamist militias in Iraq joined in a few weeks later. On April 13-14, 2024, the Islamic Republic of Iran directly attacked Israel with ballistic missiles and suicide drones, initiating a frontal confrontation with the Jewish state.
Since then, bouts of intensive fighting have been interspersed with ceasefires, with the halts in warfare invariably imposed on Israel by U.S. President Trump and acceded to by the Islamist belligerents happy to enjoy breathers.
The present stalemate leaves Iran controlling passage through the Strait of Hormuz and Iran's proxies - Hamas, Hizbullah, Iraqi militias and the Houthis - recovering and still in the fight. Iran's periodic rocketing and droning of America's regional Sunni allies - Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Jordan - and U.S. military bases in these countries have severely undermined American power and prestige and have underwritten Iran's current hegemony in the Gulf. Trump is palpably reluctant to resume the war with Iran, and the Iranians are exploiting this weakness to the hilt.
As Israelis see it, the war is far from over, and most assume that the Islamists, once ready, will resume their war-making against the Jewish state and a very revenge-minded Iran will press ahead with its nuclear program. Iran's Islamist leaders have consistently declared that their goal is Israel's destruction.
Israeli observers expect Iran to move as quickly as possible to acquire nuclear weapons in the hope that these will shield it from future American and Israeli attack (and provide it with the means to flatten Israel). But while Iranian intentions are crystal clear, its capacity to rapidly progress toward nuclear weaponry is unknown after its major nuclear enrichment facilities were devastated in 2025-26.
Lebanon Lacks the Will and the Power to Confront Hizbullah
There is a contradiction at the heart of Western policy toward Lebanon. The forces in the country that are willing to negotiate with Israel don't have the power to influence those who are at war with it. The Iran-backed forces responsible for the violence openly reject the talks and make clear that they will not consider themselves obligated by any agreements reached. This contradiction shows no signs of being resolved any time soon.
There is little optimism on the Israeli side that the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) performance this time will differ from past experience. Two UN Security Council resolutions, 1559 from 2004 and 1701, which ended the war of 2006, already called for the disarmament of all non-state military groups in Lebanon. Past Lebanese governments accepted these resolutions. Yet Iran's proxy Hizbullah continued to prosecute its long war against Israel from Lebanese soil, without suffering serious hindrance from the forces of the state.
The current government uses sharper tones in its criticisms of Hizbullah. But the Lebanese state lacks both the will and the capacity to force the non-state element to obey. Moreover, the LAF is believed to consist of 50% Shia among its rank and file and 30% in its officer corps.
So the U.S.-brokered Israel-Lebanon diplomatic process rests on a series of fictions. Israel is aware of these fictions and is not in a position to endlessly indulge this illusion, given its responsibility for the residents of Israel's border communities.
From Ian:
Bethany Mandel:
Foreign money is flooding US politics — but AIPAC’s is American
If Americans are actually concerned about foreign money influencing American politics and policy, there is plenty to investigate. And unlike AIPAC, much of it is actually foreign.
Americans for Public Trust has just launched a new database, FollowForeignMoney.org, attempting to track the enormous sums flowing from foreign sources into American nonprofit groups and advocacy organizations. At launch, APT says it has identified more than $5 billion in spending across more than 500 groups, documented in more than 12,000 records.
The scale is remarkable, but so is the loophole that makes much of it possible. Federal law prohibits foreign entities from contributing to candidates, political committees, and super PACs, or participating in a campaign’s decision-making process. But elections are hardly the only way to influence American politics, and there are far fewer restrictions on foreign money once it moves outside the narrow confines of electoral activity.
Foreign dollars can finance nonpartisan get-out-the-vote campaigns, voter registration, issue advertising, and various policy and lobbying efforts, all of which can help shape the political environment in which Americans eventually cast their ballots. As APT explains, the line between regulated electoral activity, where foreign money is prohibited, and unregulated issue activity, where it is typically permitted, is “nearly indistinguishable to the average American.”
For some perspective, AIPAC, which again is funded by American donors, spent $29 million in 2022, $46 million in 2024, and $67 million in 2026, much of it in Democratic primaries. Those are substantial sums, and Americans are perfectly entitled to debate whether they like AIPAC’s political priorities, its tactics, or the candidates it supports.
But there is something deeply unserious about treating money donated by Americans to an American organization advocating an issue they care about as a sinister form of foreign influence, while billions of dollars originating overseas can flow into American organizations seeking to shape our laws, institutions, and political culture with comparatively little scrutiny.
In a conversation with the Washington Examiner, Caitlin Sutherland, executive director of Americans for Public Trust, explained what her organization found when it began following the money.
“Foreign money is flowing through the nonprofit sector to implement an extremist climate agenda and bankroll radical left-wing causes and policies,” Sutherland said, including organizations supporting political causes such as radical ballot measures. “And it’s all propped up by foreign money.”
The database allows users to trace that money through the complicated network of foundations, nonprofit groups, and advocacy organizations through which it often travels. An organization spending millions of dollars trying to change public opinion, influence legislation, register voters, or pass a ballot measure is participating in American political life, whether its name ever appears on a candidate’s campaign-finance report.
Congress was beginning to take notice of the problem even before APT released its database. At a hearing this year, House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jason Smith (R-MO) focused on how nonprofit organizations can exploit gaps in American law to bring foreign money into domestic political and policy fights.
Smith later put the problem plainly: “Tax-exempt status … exists to support legitimate charitable and educational work that strengthens our communities, not to serve as cover for foreign propaganda, election interference, or activities that undermine our national interest.”
There is a legitimate debate to be had about how far Congress should go in restricting foreign donations to American nonprofits, particularly because any new law would have to avoid inadvertently ensnaring legitimate charitable, educational, or religious organizations that receive support from abroad. But it is difficult to have that debate honestly when our political and media class applies the label “foreign influence” so selectively.
AIPAC’s donors are Americans exercising the same right every other American has to pool their money around an issue they consider important and support or oppose candidates accordingly. The fact that the issue is Israel does not transform those Americans into agents of Israel any more than Cuban Americans advocating policy toward Cuba or Ukrainian Americans lobbying for aid to Ukraine become agents of foreign governments.
That is what made Axelrod’s calculation so revealing. He was not simply complaining about the amount AIPAC spent, or making the familiar argument that there is too much money sloshing around American politics. He described an organization funded by Americans as “essentially an agent” of a foreign government because those Americans are politically engaged on behalf of the Jewish state.
My husband, Seth Mandel, identified the more disturbing implication in Commentary after watching the exchange. “Why would Axelrod, who has worked so hard to position himself as a moderate in temperament and a card-carrying member of the mainstream, go on CNN and slap American Jews across the face?” he asked.
“And that’s when I realized it. Axelrod is positioning himself in the party’s mainstream. Accusing AIPAC of being a foreign agent isn’t relegated to the fever swamps anymore. And Axelrod, a very smart observer of Democratic Party politics, saw El-Sayed’s victory over Stevens as confirmation that this is what the party is now. And that might be the most dispiriting part of it all.”
That observation makes the timing of APT’s database particularly useful because it offers a remarkably simple test of what this debate is actually about. If Axelrod and others are genuinely alarmed by foreign money influencing American politics, they have just been handed a database documenting more than $5 billion of it, spread across thousands of records and hundreds of organizations. There is enough there to keep journalists, lawmakers, and cable-news panels occupied for quite some time examining whether American law adequately protects our political system from money originating overseas.
Yet that wasn’t the money Axelrod was talking about on CNN. The $30 million that concerned him was raised and spent by Americans, and calling it foreign required treating the political interests of those Americans as somehow foreign themselves.
AIPAC’s supporters are not just Jews; they include evangelical Christians and millions of other Americans who believe, for religious, moral, or strategic reasons, that the United States should maintain a strong relationship with Israel. Americans organize politically around all sorts of foreign-policy questions, and we generally understand that doing so is an expression of their American political rights rather than evidence that they are acting on behalf of another government.
Something peculiar happens, however, when the country in question is Israel and a substantial number of the Americans doing the organizing are Jews.
Ireland’s fog of prejudice
It is striking that at a time when the Torah just commanded us to learn how to see, we are also confronted with examples of what happens when prejudice prevents people from seeing clearly.
Ireland has a long and painful history of living under British rule. The memory of oppression, struggle for national self-determination and resistance to a powerful empire is deeply embedded in the Irish consciousness.
Logically, that history should create a natural sympathy for the Jewish people and for Israel.
The Jewish people, too, have experienced centuries of foreign domination, persecution and exile. Israel has emerged from a history in which Jews were repeatedly denied security, sovereignty and the ability to determine their own destiny. Israel itself was also governed under the British Mandate before its independence in 1948.
One might therefore expect Ireland, of all countries, to understand the complexity of a people seeking security and self-determination after generations of suffering. Yet sometimes, history teaches the opposite lesson. People can remember their own oppression while becoming blind or indifferent to the experiences of others.
Last week exposed a particularly striking example in the debate over Israeli technology in Ireland.
Elbit Systems, an Israeli defense company, has developed a sophisticated aviation navigation technology that helps aircraft operate and land safely in difficult weather conditions, including conditions of poor visibility. This navigation system has become a near standard on military and state jets in countries across the world.
Ireland, a country famously familiar with fog, should be especially capable of appreciating the value of technology that helps pilots navigate safely when they cannot rely on their eyes alone.
And yet, headlines were made last week when it was reported that the Irish government refused to install this advanced landing system in official state aircraft—the Irish “Air Force One”—due to its Israeli origin. The twisted irony is so difficult to miss. A nation accustomed to physical fog is allowing the ideological fog that clouds its moral vision to imperil the safety of its leaders.
This is not just a hypothetical risk. In 2011, an airplane attempting to land in Cork, Ireland, crashed in dense fog after three failed attempts to land, killing a relative of the Irish president and five other people.
When a technology that can improve aviation is judged not according to what it does, but according to the nationality of the people who developed it, something has gone seriously wrong.
Made in India: Inside the India-Israel weapons alliance Amnesty wants dismantled
AMNESTY IS asking New Delhi to go considerably further than imposing additional checks on exports.
It called for an immediate halt to arms transfers to Israel and a comprehensive embargo covering weapons, components, technologies, technical assistance and training. It also recommended that Indian companies terminate business relationships, including joint research and development, with Elbit Systems, Rafael and Israel Aerospace Industries.
“Israeli systems currently form the technological backbone of India’s security architecture along its sensitive borders with China and Pakistan,” Birvadker told the Post, on what possible consequences implementation would have for India’s own military.
“Companies like Elbit, Rafael, and IAI are not standard import suppliers,” she said. “They are India’s premier partners in building a domestic defense industry.”
Birvadker went further, arguing that severing the relationship could set back India’s objective of technological self-reliance “by decades.”
“India would once again find itself dependent on other global powers, a resurgence of defense colonialism,” Bivadker stated. “Who benefits from such an outcome?”
The legal argument: The controversy lies in what is not publicly visible
Amnesty’s challenge is also directed at India’s export-control system itself.
India is not a party to the Arms Trade Treaty, although it is a party to the Geneva Conventions and Genocide Convention. Amnesty argues that those existing obligations are sufficient to require India to halt transfers where there is a clear risk that weapons could contribute to serious violations.
Indian arms exports are not unregulated. Military and dual-use goods are controlled through the SCOMET system and require authorization from the Directorate General of Foreign Trade. Applications are reviewed through an inter-ministerial process involving the foreign, defense, and home ministries, and official guidelines require consideration of the end user, declared end use, chain of transmission, and whether an export could conflict with Indian national security or foreign policy.
The controversy, according to Amnesty, lies in what is not publicly visible.
The inter-ministerial deliberations are confidential, leaving no public record showing whether international humanitarian law or India’s treaty obligations were specifically assessed when licenses for exports to Israel were approved.
Amnesty filed a Right to Information request seeking details of specific export licenses and any human rights assessments undertaken by the government, but said it had received no reply before publication.
Birvadker’s position is that New Delhi should resist external pressure rather than allow NGOs to determine its strategic relationships.
“New Delhi must categorically reject the pressure to suspend defense exports, fiercely guarding its principle of strategic autonomy and its sovereign right to conduct relations in alignment with its national interests,” she said.
“Yielding to Amnesty’s demands would severely undermine India’s credibility as a reliable defense partner on the global stage,” she told the Post.
India’s concept of strategic autonomy predates the Israel controversy. It was visible, for example, when New Delhi resisted Western pressure over Russian oil purchases following the invasion of Ukraine, prioritizing energy security and its freedom to maintain relationships across competing geopolitical blocs.
The relationship with Israel increasingly fits into that same model. India remains a major purchaser of Israeli technology while becoming a supplier in its own right. Israeli companies gain an enormous manufacturing base and access to Indian industry; India acquires technology, domestic production and exposure to global defense markets. The greater the integration, the harder it becomes to describe the partnership simply as one country selling weapons to another.
That is another revealing aspect of Amnesty’s report. Its authors see the hundreds of thousands of Indian-made components flowing to Israeli companies as evidence that the relationship should be curtailed. Birvadker cites the same supply chains as evidence that the relationship has become strategically indispensable.
The argument over Gaza will remain bitter and unresolved, particularly when the charge of genocide is treated as settled despite the substantial legal arguments against it. The industrial shift beneath that debate, however, is already taking shape.
India is no longer merely buying Israeli weapons. Increasingly, some of Israel’s weapons begin their journey in India.
From Ian:
Jonathan Conricus:
Disarm, verify, withdraw. The only path forward for Gaza
Nikolai Mladenov’s newly announced Gaza agreement offers a rare glimmer of hope amid years of bloodshed and despair. At its core is a straightforward proposition: the phased disarmament of Hamas and other Palestinian terror organizations in exchange for the eventual withdrawal of Israeli forces from the Strip. Israelis and Gazans alike desperately want Hamas’s weapons taken away, Gaza demilitarized, and a new form of leadership to take root—one rooted in respectful coexistence rather than endless jihad.
The desire for this outcome runs deep. Many Israelis, stil reeling from the horrors of October 7, when Hamas invaders massacred civilians in border communities, see demilitarization as the only reliable way to restore security to the kibbutzim and towns that face Gaza. They have no appetite for indefinite military operations. Popular rhetoric aside, neither the Israeli public nor the military wants to remain in Gaza indefinitely. What they want is simple: the absence of a genocidal terror organization on the other side of the fence, armed with rockets, tunnels, and an ideology of annihilation.
Gazans, too, have every reason to support this. Years of rule by a mafia that prioritizes tunnels and rockets over schools, hospitals, and prosperity have exacted a terrible tol. A Gaza free of Hamas’s military apparatus could finally begin to rebuild and choose life over perpetual conflict.
Yet history teaches caution. Hamas has a well-documented record of tactical pauses. The Islamic concept of ‘Hudna’—a temporary cessation of hostilities—has been invoked when jihadi forces find themselves at a disadvantage, only to be broken once strength is regained. If the current peace deal amounts to nothing more than another Hudna, it wil fail.
What is required instead is genuine, complete disarmament: every long-range rocket, every AK-47, maps of the entire tunnel network, and the locations of weapons manufacturing sites, all handed over under independent international verification. Only then does the plan become something more than a ruse. Only then does it become a foundation for lasting change.
Israel’s actions wil hinge entirely on whether that verification occurs. The absence of an immediate official Israeli endorsement is understandable in the current political climate. With elections approaching, any government is wary of appearing to accept international dictates that place civilians at risk. No responsible leadership wil sign onto an arrangement that leaves the core threat intact. But once Hamas’s arsenal is demonstrably gone and the Strip is verifiably demilitarized, Israel has every incentive to withdraw. There is no strategic or public desire to remain. The moment the threat disappears, the justification for military action disappears with it.
Before October 7, Israel was not conducting operations inside Gaza. The pattern of cause and effect is clear: rockets, tunnels, and invasions produce defensive responses. Remove the cause, and the response ends.
Keep the gas on the counterterrorism pedal
In Gaza and Lebanon, Israel is compelled to play the diplomatic game being led by Washington in order to continue enjoying its support and avoid being portrayed as the recalcitrant party. But Israel must not allow that game to constrain its freedom of action to destroy terrorist infrastructure and eliminate terrorists wherever they may be.
Over the weekend, Israel rejected current plans to disarm Hamas. Its reasons were clear: Despite the efforts of the United States, the terrorist organization has no intent to do so.
While the CEO of the Board of Peace, Nikolay Mladenov, has maneuvered between the intricacies of the “20-point plan” and the “15-point framework” to reassure Israel, Hamas has made its intentions regarding the commitments contained in these agreements perfectly clear.
“We do not intend to hand over the weapons to Israel,” says senior Hamas official Ghazi Hamad. “No disarmament process will take place before Israel completes its withdrawal from the Strip.”
For those who may have difficulty remembering, this is the same Ghazi Hamad who, just days after the massacre of 1,200 people in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, explained in media interviews that Israel is “a state that we want to bring down” and promised that the “‘Al-Aqsa Flood’ is only the first time. There will be a second, third and fourth time. We have the resilience and the ability to fight and pay the price.”
This is also the same Ghazi Hamad who, in an interview last week with English broadcaster Piers Morgan, insisted that Hamas had never intended to kill civilians on Oct. 7, attempting to blur—and even deny—the seminal event that ignited the ensuing war.
The long arm of Israel’s security services has not yet reached him, but the score will yet be settled.
Either way, if anyone had any doubts, Hamad’s words make clear that Hamas views the diplomatic talks merely as leverage to drive the Israel Defense Forces out of Gaza, without relinquishing either its military power or its ruling infrastructure.
Meanwhile, with the assistance of the Board of Peace, Gaza terrorists have received, free of charge, a 14-day respite from the blitz of Israeli targeted counterterrorism strikes that had been hitting them until a week ago.
Khaled Abu Toameh:
The Arab-Islamic Formula for 'Peace': Ignore Hamas, Blame Israel
The foreign ministers of Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, Indonesia, Pakistan, Turkey, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt accused Israel of "violating" international law and undermining efforts to implement the Board of Peace's recently published "Roadmap for Completing the Implementation of President Trump's Comprehensive Peace Plan in Gaza." They also called for those responsible for "grave violations" to be held accountable.
The ministers forgot to mention that Hamas, by refusing to disarm and continuing to hold on to power in the Gaza Strip, is the party committing "grave violations."
If accountability is important, why does it apply only to Israel?
Where is the demand that Hamas be held accountable for bringing death and destruction upon the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip by launching its invasion of Israel?
Why not issue a clear demand that Hamas surrender all its weapons? The omission is especially disturbing because three of the countries represented in the statement – Turkey, Qatar and Pakistan – are members of Trump's Board of Peace and are supposedly helping to bring security and stability to the Gaza Strip.
Do the Arabs and Muslims — or the Europeans — really believe that creating a Palestinian state would automatically produce peace? Who would prevent Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad from taking over such a state? Who would confiscate their weapons? Who would prevent Iran or Turkey from supplying Palestinian proxies with weapons, money and training? Who would guarantee that a future Palestinian state would not be used to launch more October 7-style attacks against Israel?
Israel withdrew every soldier and expelled every Jewish resident from the Gaza Strip in 2005. Palestinians subsequently had an opportunity to demonstrate what self-rule could look like. Hamas won the 2006 Palestinian Authority parliamentary election and seized full control of the Gaza Strip the following year.
Instead of turning the Gaza Strip into a model of prosperity and coexistence, Hamas transformed it into a base for terrorism against Israel. Why should Israel be expected to repeat this "experiment" on a much larger and more dangerous scale — either in Gaza or in the West Bank, overlooking major Israeli population centers?
Peace will not come from ignoring Hamas, demonizing Israel and Jews, or repeating slogans about a "two-state solution" as though October 7 had never happened. It will come only when the international community — including Arab and Islamic countries — makes it clear that armed jihadist organizations cannot be allowed to control Palestinian territory, possess private armies, or determine the future of Israelis and Palestinians through terrorism. That would be a far more useful message for Arab and Islamic governments to deliver than yet another communique condemning Israel.
From Ian:
Has "Never Again" Blinded Us?
I am a grandchild of Holocaust survivors - barely survivors - who stepped out of the camps into a world emptied of everyone they had ever loved. In the last three years, atrocities beyond imagination have been inflicted on us. Again and again we have watched parents bury their children. They tried to erase our entire nation. They tried to kill our faith and everything we bring to the world. And yet we rose again. We flourished, and we carried our dead forward by naming our sons and daughters after them and by making the world a better place.
"Never Again" rests on a hope. We believed the world would learn, that no one could confront the piles of shoes, the children's faces, the naked corpses, and remain unchanged. But only those who already felt some bond to Jews were capable of caring. Millions did not. Billions did not. The world walked through our museums and remained largely unmoved, or moved only briefly, never long enough to restrain antisemitism.
We wanted to believe morality could be taught. But not for the Jewish question. Pain does not create affinity; affinity must already exist for empathy to take root. And without that affinity, without some prior sense of connection to Jews as a living people, whatever response we think we see is not empathy, it is a grimace.
We spent decades in the belief that if we exposed everything, if we spared nothing, truth itself would end antisemitism. It would compel compassion. It never did. Antisemitism was not waiting for enlightenment. It was waiting for permission. For years now, the world has behaved as if there were a statute of limitations on the moral freeze that followed the Holocaust, as if the restraint purchased by our six million dead had quietly expired. After the Oct. 7 pogrom, there was no pause in Jew-hatred, not even for one day.
Antisemitism does not respond to evidence. It does not submit to reason. Hitler did not murder Jews because of what they believed, how they lived, or what they owned. He murdered the poor and the rich, the pious and the secular, the assimilated and the insular, the newborn and the elderly. There was no argument that could have saved them. There never is.
The rubicon of antisemitism crossed in the West - Israel will face new dangers, too
The current wave of antisemitism will – and already is – fundamentally altering Jewish life in the countries with the largest communities outside of Israel: the United States, France, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and Germany.
Almost three years since October 7, and the wave of antisemitism is not receding; it is becoming more pervasive and more commonplace. In the US, for example, one in three individuals said they were targets of antisemitism, and over half of Jews have changed their behavior out of fear of antisemitism, according to a recent survey.
The antisemitism genie will not go back into the bottle on its own. Political and social polarization, the convergence of left-wing and right-wing hatred, hostility toward Jews in academia, greater proclivity towards antisemitism among younger adults, well-funded Israel-defamation campaigns by state actors, and growing immigration from Arab countries with high rates of religious extremism – all signal that we have likely crossed a point of no return.
This doesn’t bode ill only for Jews in the West; there are major repercussions for Israel as well. Foremost, its strategic alliance with the United States is in jeopardy, as public sentiment turns increasingly anti-Israel and somewhat anti-Jewish. Israel will need to reassess its strategic situation and act.
First, Israel must continue to pursue military self-sufficiency. It must have the capacity to fight an extended war without dependency on the US (or any other country) for arms, munitions, and spare parts. After all, a future American president may simply refuse to provide them.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu compared Israel’s new situation to the ancient isolationist Greek city-state of Sparta, which successfully fought its wars alone. The analogy was useful but flawed: in a global world, Israel should not aspire to Spartan isolation.
Rather, Israel should redouble efforts to build robust alliances with non-Western countries that don’t fall along the trend-lines of rising antisemitism – including India, former Soviet Republics, countries in South America, the Far East, and Africa, including moderate Muslim nations.
Among Western allies, Israel should foster mechanisms of co-dependence, so that there will be a real cost for such countries should they choose to abandon their partnerships with Israel.
Israel Is Making Plans for a Post-America Middle East
Israeli Consul General in New York Ofir Akunis says what worries him most is not the bouts of conflict in the Middle East. It's a drift in American politics that could one day spell the end of the historic U.S.-Israel alliance. Citing recent electoral victories by candidates espousing criticism of Israel, Akunis argued that "the reality is that some people here, for sure, prefer the ayatollahs rather than the American administration....To prefer your enemies rather than your political opponents, this is something new."
While it was his "hope that the United States of America will always be with us, we will need to prepare ourselves to be more independent than we used to be," given the trends he was witnessing.
It's not just Iran and its predominantly Shiite Muslim Axis of Resistance that Israel sees on its threat radar. An emerging "quartet" comprising the leading Sunni Muslim powers of Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt and Pakistan is also viewed with deep suspicion. "The ayatollahs are still in Iran. So, we need to solve this problem, and then we'll talk about the next challenge," Akunis said.
It's those in the West who direct their outrage not toward Iran but Israel that he blames most. "Those people do not say even one word about the ayatollahs, not even one word about their slogan 'Death to America,' and not even one word about the Iran massacre [of civilians]. What is it? Gaza, Gaza, Gaza."
"I can give you an answer about Gaza. Gaza can be like the Emirates, or Bahrain, or Singapore of the Middle East. No Hamas? Gaza can be prosperous. By the way, like in Lebanon. No Hizbullah? Lebanon can be prosperous."
From Ian:
Omer Bartov is whitewashing Israel’s enemies
‘When someone says to you that he wants to kill you – believe him.’ Israeli novelist Roni Gelbfish was quoting her grandmother, a Holocaust survivor, during a radio interview shortly after Hamas’s pogrom on 7 October 2023. Most people would empathise with Gelbfish’s grandmother in the aftermath of the atrocities of that terrible day. Hamas had once again shown, in the most horrific way imaginable, that it should be believed when it says it wants to slaughter Jews.
But if Omer Bartov feels any empathy with Gelbfish’s grandmother, he hides it well. In his new book, Israel: What Went Wrong, the American-Israeli professor at Brown University cites the quote as an example of Shoatiyut, which he translates from Hebrew as ‘Holocaustism’. This is the tendency, he argues, to interpret and exaggerate the threats facing Israel through the prism of the Holocaust and anti-Semitism more broadly.
Although Bartov offers a cursory criticism of the Hamas pogrom, he is really interested in condemning the Israeli reaction. He claims that framing 7 October as a Nazi-like attack on Jews is little more than an attempt to justify what he calls the ‘genocidal’ assault on Gaza.
Bartov’s argument is of a piece with that of Israel’s enemies in the Middle East and beyond. They view the Jewish State as evil incarnate, a prime representative of a malign West. They claim that Israel cynically weaponises the Holocaust and the charge of anti-Semitism to deflect what they call ‘legitimate criticism’ of its actions – in this case, the ‘genocide’ in Gaza.
To make this argument, Israel’s enemies deny and downplay the very real anti-Semitic threats it faces, from the assorted Islamist groups like Hamas, hell-bent on its destruction, to their nation-state supporters, Iran, Pakistan, Qatar and Turkey. By minimising and erasing these formidable threats, Israel can be portrayed as a singularly malevolent nation, killing for killing’s sake. Anyone who has followed the conflict in Gaza and the broader Middle East – and not just on the Qatar-funded Al-Jazeera but also on the BBC and Sky – should be familiar with this portrayal. Israel appears to be fighting a war for no good reason, rather than what it’s actually doing – defending itself against an all too real, annihilationist threat.
In What Went Wrong, Bartov lends credibility to this anti-Israel case, from the denial of the anti-Semitic threat to the accusation of genocide. After all, he’s a professor of Holocaust studies at an Ivy League university and he served as a company commander in an Israel Defence Forces (IDF) combat unit in the 1970s. His credentials have turned him into a valued guest on anti-Israel media. He’s written articles for the Guardian and the New York Times and has appeared on the virulent anti-Israel podcasts of Owen Jones and Mehdi Hasan.
But What Went Wrong is no dispassionate academic analysis. It is the work of a professor-activist who, at the very least, is willing to omit key facts to make his case.
UNESCO joins Palestinians in rewriting Jewish history in Judea and Samaria
Three shocking examples pertain to the Temple Mount, Joshua’s Altar on Mount Ebal, and Solomon’s Pools.
In 1999, the PA-led Wakf conducted vast, illegal construction projects on the Temple Mount and beneath it, willfully destroying centuries of Jewish archaeological treasures.
The Wakf unceremoniously dumped 400 trucks full of archaeologically rich soil into the Kidron Valley. Thousands of artifacts from the Temple periods have since been found through careful sifting of the debris by Israeli archaeologists.
On Mount Ebal near Nablus, a large archaeological site identified by the late Prof. Adam Zartal as the altar of Joshua has been imperiled.
The PA drew up plans to pave over the site with roads and 24 high-rise housing units, and in 2001, Palestinian contractors ground part of the ancient stone fencing at the site to make gravel for roads.
Recently, Israel halted renewed Palestinian attempts to vandalize the spot, and has approved the establishment of a yeshiva and a settlement nearby that will also protect the archaeological site.
Another infuriating episode relates to the incredible aqueduct identified as King Solomon’s magnificent water system for Jerusalem. This runs from Hebron through Bethlehem to Jerusalem, including what is today termed Solomon’s Pools southwest of Bethlehem.
This marvel of ancient engineering, 40 km. long, is described in detail in the Bible, and the description matches the archaeological findings precisely.
The pools and aqueducts survived 2,000 years of summers, winters, and many invaders and predators – until the arrival of the PA.
In 2022, the PA dug an enormous 1,500 dunam quarry pit at Beit Fajar right through a section of the aqueduct. The quarrying caused irreversible damage to the aqueducts, with some 100 meters of tunnel and approximately 2,000 meters of the aqueduct on either side of the tunnel reduced to rubble.
Only recently has the government of Israel (finally!) stepped in to prevent further damage to the relics and to develop the site for organized biblical tourism.
The Israeli cabinet has just approved NIS 113 million in government funding for protection and development of 70 Judea and Samaria heritage sites.
Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu advanced this budget allocation.
While insufficient given the scale of the challenge, this funding signals a shift in policy. Enforcement has increased, site development and public access have begun, and after decades of neglect and looting, long-buried historical treasures are being uncovered.
The discoveries are significant, with the potential to reshape global scholarship on entire historical periods of importance to world heritage.
Some examples: at Hyrcania, near the Jerusalem-Dead Sea highway, a fortress marking the fall of the Hasmonean Kingdom is being revealed as a “mini-Masada,” complete with siege systems, underground chambers, inscriptions, and ritual baths.
At the Alexandrian fortress on Mount Sartaba, mentioned in the mishna in connection with signal fires that inspired today’s Independence Day torch-lighting ceremony, excavations are producing dramatic new findings too.
Every such archaeological excavation is a victory over Palestinian denialism and UNESCO’s ISIS-like efforts at Jewish erasure.
She lost everything after supporting Israel: 'To be a good Arab and a good Muslim, part of it is to hate the Jews'
Within just five hours, Dalia Ziada managed to leave Egypt, abandoning her entire life and everyone she knew. In that brief span of time, she packed what she could, received help from friends in Israel and the US, and fled the country where she had been born, raised and educated, and where she had built a career and become a prominent public figure. It happened just two weeks after the Oct. 7 massacre.
Until the final moment, she refused to believe she would have to flee. Ziada was already well acquainted with incitement campaigns, abuse and online threats. As an activist for liberal democracy, a fierce opponent of the Muslim Brotherhood and an outspoken supporter of Israel's right to exist, she had paid a public price for years. This time, however, another threshold had been crossed.
"It came to the point that they were using a verse from the Quran to justify my killing," she says. "A local group in my family's neighborhood went to my family's house looking for me. Thank God I was not there that night." At the same time, she says, lawyers affiliated with the Egyptian government began pursuing legal action against her on serious charges. "These two combined made me feel trapped," she says. "I could have ended up in jail waiting to be executed on treason accusations, or being immediately killed by some Salafists. And then the government would come out and say, 'Oh, we're sorry,' and that's it. It was a matter of life or death."
The trigger for all this, she says, was her public declaration that Hamas was a terrorist organization and that Israel, like any other country, had the right to defend itself. But that was only the beginning.
Ziada, 44, was born and raised in Egypt in a Muslim family. Her father, who died when she was 19, was drawn to Sufism, a more spiritual and moderate tradition within Islam. She describes him as a liberal, open-minded man who deeply influenced her worldview. After his death, in a conservative society where her mother was left alone with two teenage daughters, Ziada began wearing the hijab. She emphasizes that this was not a purely religious decision, but a response to social pressure and her mother's need to protect her and her sister. Over the years, the head covering became part of her identity, as well as the focus of an unresolved internal crisis.
She studied international relations at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University in Massachusetts and devoted her career to researching Middle East geopolitics, advancing democracy and working for regional peace. For her, "peace" was never limited to an agreement between Israel and the Arab world.
"By peace, I'm speaking not only about Arab-Israeli peace, but peace between all the factions of the Middle East," she says. "You have Muslims, Jews, Druze, Christians. You have people from different religious and ethnic backgrounds, the Kurds and others, who have spent, I would say, thousands of years fighting with each other. My hope and my fight, and still my fight, is to get to a point where they understand that we are all human, regardless of where we belong. At the end of the day, we all want to live good lives. We all want to live in peace."
From that standpoint, she says, she had always supported Israel's right to exist. "This is unfortunately not very common among people with my background, Muslims, Arabs, Egyptians and so on," she says. "This caused me a lot of problems and a lot of trouble in the past, but it did not get to the point that it really threatened my life."
At the same time, she was waging an ideological campaign against the Muslim Brotherhood. In her view, the organization is not merely a political rival, but the bearer of an ideology that rejects the very principle of human equality. "The ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood removes this concept that all of us are human and equal," she says. "It tries to divide the world into Muslims, who are good and superior to everyone else, and non-Muslims, who should be submissive to Muslims. This is exactly the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood, which is something I totally rejected as a Muslim myself."
Then came Oct. 7.
According to Ziada, she was one of only three people in all of Egypt who dared to say publicly that Hamas was a terrorist organization. The claim illustrates the extent of the isolation she felt. "We are speaking about the most populous country in the Middle East," she says. "We are over 110 million people now, maybe more. It is really dangerous to think that this massive population could be radicalized."
What shocked her was not only the terrorists' actions, but the response on the Arab street. "We saw how horrible it was, how brutal Hamas and its followers were toward Israelis, including innocent people who were literally in their pajamas in their own homes," she says. "Unfortunately, people in Egypt and in so many Arab countries were celebrating what happened as a victory."
She stresses that these were not merely members of the Muslim Brotherhood, Salafists or extremist activists. "They were mainstream Egyptians, people who look like me," she says. "So I had to speak up. I had to tell them exactly what happened on that day. It is not acceptable to celebrate such brutality. Then they turned against me."
From Ian:
David Collier:
The Synagogue Standing With a Terrorist Supporter
A synagogue holds a fundraiser. No big deal, right?
A synagogue holds a fundraiser for someone with a history of supporting Islamic terrorists? That’s a red flag.
The synagogue leadership shuts down discussion of the terrorist supporter in advance of the fundraiser?
That’s gatekeeping on a suicidal level.
The Mohsen Mahdawi Video
Ever since the U.S. administration arrested Mohsen Mahdawi in April 2025, I have been investigating his background. Working alongside Vermont researcher Rachel Feldman, we uncovered evidence that much of the narrative Mahdawi had used to build support within progressive circles was misleading. He had portrayed terrorist relatives as innocent victims and, over many years, repeatedly glorified and honoured Palestinian terrorists.
What we lacked was a recent piece of evidence showing that these views were not confined to the past. Then, a few weeks ago, we found it.
In a video Mahdawi posted in December 2024, he spoke in Arabic to a restricted audience, making it unlikely that most of his American supporters would ever see – or understand – what he was saying.
In the video, Mahdawi describes himself as part of a unified “resistance” movement and his words identify him with the same terrorist movements responsible for the October 7 atrocities.
Taken together with our earlier findings, the video completed a consistent picture of support for violent Palestinian militancy stretching back more than fifteen years.
The evidence was no longer ambiguous. Those presenting Mahdawi as a peace activist now had to explain how that claim could be reconciled with his own words.
The Synagogue That Did
Just as news of the video began to spread, Mahdawi’s supporters were preparing a major fundraising event to finance his legal campaign against deportation:
I knew Mahdawi enjoyed a substantial support network and had become something of a cause célèbre for anti-Trump activists. But it had never occurred to me that a Jewish organisation would help raise money on his behalf. Mahdawi is a man who has repeatedly praised and honoured leaders of terrorist organisations committed to murdering Jews. I had assumed that, whatever the political divisions within the American Jewish community, that would remain a clear red line.
But I was wrong.
I learned that one of the principal organisers of the August 9 fundraising event was Beth Jacob, a synagogue in Montpelier, Vermont:
Worse still, Mahdawi had even been personally invited to the synagogue for a discussion to take place prior to the main fundraising event.
That a Jewish congregation would lend its name and credibility to a fundraiser for a man with Mahdawi’s record was something I found almost impossible to comprehend.
The Internal Division
There was some pushback.
Beth Jacob has a members’ email discussion list, and after some members saw our research – including the recently uncovered December 2024 video – they began questioning the synagogue’s support for both the pre-event discussion with Mahdawi and the fundraising event itself.
What followed should serve as a case study. It is not simply that parts of the diaspora Jewish community are willing to embrace people who support organisations committed to murdering Jews. It is that some within those communities act as gatekeepers, introducing conspiracy theories and extremist thinking into the discussion while attempting to silence those who challenge their narrative.
Israel’s New York consul cancels ‘NY Times’ subscription over ‘false blood libels’
Ofir Akunis, Israel’s consul general in New York, ordered the Israeli Consulate to cancel its subscription to The New York Times on Friday, accusing the newspaper of publishing “false blood libels” against the Jewish state.
“I have ordered the Israeli Consulate in New York to cancel its subscription to The New York Times, a newspaper that consistently demonizes and delegitimizes the Jewish State,” he stated.
The newspaper has faced heightened criticism from Jewish groups and Israeli officials in recent months over its coverage of the Jewish state.
In May, Times columnist Nicholas Kristof published an opinion piece on May 11 titled “The Silence that Meets the Rape of Palestinians,” in which he accused Israeli guards of sexually assaulting Palestinian prisoners. The column also included allegations that Israeli guards trained dogs to rape male prisoners.
Israel’s Foreign Ministry accused the newspaper of publishing “one of the worst blood libels ever to appear in the modern press,” adding that the column was part of what it described as a coordinated anti-Israel campaign.
Three days later, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar announced that Israel would initiate legal action against the Times over the column, calling its allegations “one of the most hideous and distorted lies ever published against the State of Israel.”
The controversy also prompted Jewish leaders to call for a boycott of the paper after a spokesman publicly rejected rumors that editors would retract Kristof’s column.
“The New York Times is a newspaper that consistently publishes false blood libels against the State of Israel, often based on ‘anonymous’ sources,” Akunis stated. “When citing named sources, the paper conveniently turns to anti-Israel activists, and even Hamas terrorists who seek Israel’s destruction, to reinforce the narrative they want to promote.”
His office did not clarify why the subscription was canceled this month as opposed to back in May, when the controversial Kristof op-ed was published.
Wednesday, August 12, 2026
.png)
