Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News: book review

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Monday, October 12, 2026

Book review: "Excuse Me, Is This Yours?" by Tuvia Tenenbom

A few weeks ago I wrote on my Substack about how the world seems to prefer to admire the emperor's new clothes than admit that the child who speaks the truth is right.

No one does as good a job at acting the child, asking simple questions, than Tuvia Tenenbom.

I've reviewed Tenenbom's books before. His methodology is deceptively simple: go to major hotspots that people are talking about, where experts opine on what is going on on national news shows, and see the truth for himself. Live among the people being discussed, ask them simple questions, describe their situations, and write about it. He also manages to get interviews with politicians and other leaders and asks them similar questions about their positions.

What he discovers rarely matches what the media says.

His latest book, "Excuse Me, Is This Yours?" has him living for a year in what he calls Biblical Israel: Judea and Samaria, or the West Bank, mostly among the Jews there. Yes, he goes himself to see the Hilltop Youth, the settler leaders, ordinary citizens, the Samaritan community, and to a smaller extent Palestinians.

The book is easily twice the size of his previous books, at over 470 pages. But he covers a lot of ground.

Most of his adventures are concentrated in Area C, which makes sense because that is the only area Jews are allowed to live in. And for much of the book, Tenenbom describes a giant geographical game of Go. Jews and Palestinians each try to grab land to surround their opponents land and stop them from expanding in any direction.

Starting in 2009, the Palestinian prime minister Salam Fayyad came up with a plan to work together with the Europeans to build as much as possible on Area C lands. Tenenbom sees huge, beautiful Palestinian houses, practically palaces, dotting the entire Area C, but he never sees any residents. We had seen how the EU builds schools and infrastructure, illegally, in Area C, but the PA apparently manages to convince wealthy Palestinians to build these houses, without permits, in strategic areas. So together with the Europeans they manage to encircle Jewish settlements.

The Jews, led by the hilltop youth and other ideological settlers, cannot build as easily as the Palestinians, because they have laws they still have to live under. Their strategy is to bring caravans on top of unclaimed hills, declare that a farm, and graze land with their cattle, and then the adventurous move on, building "farms" from hill to hill, and the grazed lands can then be claimed by them, supposedly, and in turn thwart Palestinian building in areas that their cattle go. This is all based on old Ottoman land codes that allow people, under some circumstances, to claim state lands after being cultivated or lived in for ten years.

So there is a strange situation where Palestinians still live in "refugee camps" under PA rule while mansions are left apparently empty. But plenty of Palestinians have moved into Area C, in recent decades. All part of their plan to expand into enemy areas.

You know, what the world accuses Israel alone of doing.

Tenenbom grew up a haredi in Israel, then became a religious Zionist, and then became non-religious himself. He is respectful to the religious Jews, as he is to everyone, but he clearly doesn't agree with their beliefs.

There is plenty here that Tenenbom reports that are not in any of the thousands of news articles about the "settlers." Like the constant terror attacks against Jews and how many of them have lost relatives to war. He also notes that there are many who follow Chabad and many who follow the very late Rabbi Nachman of Breslov.

There were also things I was not aware of. While the religious settlers say they want the entire land to belong to Israel, whenever there is a chance for a vote in Knesset to annex part or all of the land, they seem to get skittish. They worry about the American reaction to annexation. They love symbolic votes but not anything with teeth. And this includes the biggest monsters in Western media, Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir.

Another fact that amazed me was that it appears that a huge percentage of religious Zionists who grow up in the territories end up non-religious, perhaps 40%.

Speaking of secular Jews, there are plenty of them in the territories, perhaps 30% of the settlers, like the ones who live in the Jordan Valley, Shaked, and elsewhere. They are more hard core ideological in some ways than the payot and tzitzit-wearing religious settlers. Unlike them, they really want to see the land annexed to Israel.

Tenenbom being who he is finds a Palestinian who wishes that Israel would annex the entire West Bank as well. He despises the PA and Hamas wants to become an Israeli.

This is part of the whiplash one experiences when reading a Tuvia Tenenbom book. Nothing at all is as reported in the media, even the Israeli or religious settler media. And few people are immune from looking foolish trying to answer Tenenbom's deceptively childish questions.

In the second half of the book Tenenbom manages to hook up with s left-wing Israeli Jew, Robby, who willingly crosses the line into Area A, so Tuvia manages to get to the Arab areas he wanted to see. For example, the Palestinian Museum, a beautiful piece of architecture, seems to have no exhibits about anything outside the Gaza war.

He visits Rawabi, the planned Palestinian city, filled with beautiful buildings and almost no people. And then they visit Balata, a camp, where the graffiti is filled with images of Palestinian "martyrs" killed while trying to kill Jews and living Palestinians who suspect that they are Jewish and do not like it one bit. Robby gets nervous, and more nervous, and finally begs to leave Balata. When Tuvia asks why he got so upset with the Palestinians he loves so much, Robby answered, "I don't love them. Fuck all Palestinians. What I care about is that we, Jews, not mistreat them."

That's what the book is filled with. Idealistic people whose ideals often do not quite reach how they present themselves, from all political and religious stripes.

I cannot say whether the people Tenenbom interviews are representative; he obviously gravitates towards the nutty. But surveys do not tell the whole story either. Israelis, and perhaps even Palestinian Arabs, don't all fit in neat boxes and the boxes that Western media place them in are invariably oversimplifications. Tenenbom notes that the Jews of Area C were reluctant to open up to him simply because they had been treated badly by the media for so long, yet no journalist or writer - none - had ever decided to live with them for more than a day or two, let alone many months.

And this is why this book is so valuable. Even with the craziness, one fact shines through: most of the so-called settlers have a deep love of the land, a connection that goes back to Abraham, and a love that Tenenbom seems to share.

It is too bad that so many Jews cannot even fathom such an emotion.

The Road to October 7: A Conversation with Rafael Medoff (Judean Rose)

The October 7 massacre did not emerge from a vacuum—and historian Rafael Medoff’s new book traces the long ideological road that led to it.

Medoff, a prodigious scholar of Jewish history and a prolific writer, is the founding director of The David Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies and the author of more than twenty books on Jewish history, Zionism, and the Holocaust. His latest, The Road to October 7: Hamas, the Holocaust, and the Eternal War against the Jews, is a grim but important read—one that places the October 7, 2023 massacre within a wider historical context and shows how it echoes the long, tragic history of the oldest hatred: antisemitism.

The Road to October 7 is a two-part book. In Part 1, The Present: Understanding October 7 and Its Aftermath, Medoff offers a detailed account of that black day and what happened in its wake. He traces the rise of Hamas and the sickening ideology that underpins its hatred and bloodlust—including its affinity for Mein Kampf. Medoff shows how Arab children are taught to hate and kill Jews through what he describes as “jihad education.” He also examines the campus protests, along with the blind eye turned toward them by university boards, administrators, and presidents. The book explores the recent history of terror, and the ways in which anti-Jewish libels are propagated and mainstreamed.

Part 2, The Past: Tracing the Echoes of History, highlights unsettling similarities between the atrocities of October 7 and earlier pogroms in medieval Europe, Czarist Russia, and Ukraine. Medoff examines both the Holocaust and a century of Arab terror—and how each contributed to what happened on that black Sabbath: October 7, 2023. This section is particularly illuminating for its documentation of how American universities cultivated alliances with Nazi Germany during the 1930s—an echo of the same institutions that later tolerated pro-Hamas protests on campus.

In the interview that follows, Medoff discusses the long ideological road to October 7—how antisemitic education and radical Islamic theology shape violence, why so many Western institutions minimized or rationalized the massacre, and why the events of that day cannot be understood in isolation. He also reflects on the historical echoes that make October 7 so uniquely haunting—and on what compelled him to write this book now.

The Road to October 7: Hamas, the Holocaust, and the Eternal War against the Jews by Rafael Medoff (The Jewish Publication Society, October 1, 2025), 368 pages. ISBN-13: 978-0827615748.

Rafael Medoff

Varda Epstein: You mention the close cooperation and coordination between the Hamas terrorists and the Gaza civilians who infiltrated southern Israel on October 7, citing Kibbutz Nirim Security Chief Daniel Meir who saw 50 armed and uniformed Hamas terrorists along with “dozens of ordinary Gazans.” Meir described “complete cooperation between the two groups: Hamas did most of the fighting while “the civilians went into houses and turned them upside down. They took phones, computers, jewelry, whatever they could find. From what I know, they also took most of the hostages.”

How should we respond to claims that “most” Gaza civilians are peaceful in light of testimony like this? Why do you think this assertion continues to circulate so widely, often without close scrutiny or independent verification?

Rafael Medoff: There’s significant evidence of widespread support for Hamas among the population of Gaza. Remember that in the elections to the Palestinian Legislative Council in 2006, Hamas won 74 of the 132 seats. During the two decades that followed, there wasn’t a single uprising against the Hamas regime. There’s never even been a serious opposition party or movement of any kind there. You noted that thousands of Gazan civilians took part in the October 7 invasion. In addition, there’s no evidence that any Gazans tried to help any of the Israeli hostages escape. In fact, some of the hostages were kept as slaves by civilians. It stands to reason that there must be some Gazans who are dissatisfied with Hamas—not because they sympathize with Israel, but because Hamas has made their personal lives miserable. Unfortunately, those dissidents seem to be a very small minority.

Varda Epstein: You write: “Previous Palestinian Arab terrorist attacks had never triggered such reactions abroad. Nor had previous Arab-Israeli wars. The vehemence and in many instances, sheer irrationality, of the reactions to October 7 raised important questions. How could so many people accept as fact assertions about Israel and Gaza that were unsupported by evidence? What caused people who are sincerely concerned about sexual violence to consciously look away from sexual violence against Israeli Jewish women? What was it about this particular terrorist attack that induced such a uniquely massive and extreme response?”

Since your book was published, Prime Minister Netanyahu, in his most recent address to Congress, wore a lapel pin with a QR code linking to photos and footage from October 7. Yet there has been remarkably little visible public engagement with that material in mainstream media or public discourse. There have been no widespread claims that the images were fabricated, nor serious allegations of a false-flag operation—just an apparent absence of response.

How does this indifference to direct visual evidence fit into the pattern you describe? Why does proof itself seem to matter so little to so many?

Rafael Medoff: The same question often is asked about the international community’s response to news of the Holocaust—and the answer, sadly, is similar. Most of the world is indifferent to Jewish suffering. Some of that is because of antisemitism, some of it because of political or diplomatic considerations, and some of it because of simple, selfish apathy.

The response of many prominent feminist groups to the sexual violence perpetrated by the October 7 invaders has been particularly appalling because their hypocrisy is so blatant. They speak out against sexual atrocities committed everywhere else in the world—but when Palestinian Arabs are the perpetrators and Israeli Jews are the victims, many feminists choose to look away.

Varda Epstein: At Harvard, some three weeks after October 7, you write that “Board member Penny Pritzker wrote President Gay that a ‘river to the sea’ placard at a recent protest was ‘clearly an antisemitic sign which calls for the annihilation of the Jewish state and Jews.’ Pritzker added that she was ‘being asked by some why we would tolerate that and not signage calling for lynchings by the K.K.K.’ Gay consulted with Provost Garber, who commented that the slogan's ‘genocidal implications when used by Hamas supporters seem clear enough to me, but that's not always the same as saying that there is a consensus that the phrase itself is always "antisemitic."’ Gay, for her part, worried that calling the phrase ‘antisemitic’ would ‘prompt [people to ask] what we're doing about it, i.e. discipline.’”

What does this episode reveal about how university leaders understood the slogan—and, more importantly, about what they feared would follow if they named it as antisemitic? Why did something that seemed morally clear become such a bureaucratic and rhetorical minefield?

Rafael Medoff: The internal Harvard correspondence goes straight to the heart of the problem. Provost Garber knew the slogans were antisemitic, but he was worried about whether there was a “consensus” among his colleagues about it. He should have been able to tell right from wrong, whether or not others agreed with him. That’s one kind of timidity. For President Gay, the problem was that if she acknowledged the truth, she would have felt pressure to do something about it, and she didn’t want to do anything about it. That’s another kind of timidity. Both kinds are morally reckless. Would Garber or Gay ever have taken such positions if a different minority group was being targeted on their campus? I doubt it.

Varda Epstein: As you document in your book, the campus protests have died down to a large extent. What do you think accounts for that shift? Was it a matter of administrative pressure, waning public interest, internal fractures within the protest movement, or something else entirely?

Rafael Medoff: The protests fizzled out due to a combination of reasons. First, some universities feared they would lose federal funding or private donations, so they belatedly cracked down on illegal protests by imposing curfews and other steps that they should have taken from the start. Second, many of the protesters never were really committed—they were just hangers-on who knew little about the issue; they soon got bored with it and moved on to more interesting things. Third, some of the leaders of the protests were foreigners who were violating the conditions of their visas, and when they faced the prospect of deportation, they dropped out.

Varda Epstein: The Road to October 7 offers the reader historical precedent and context for the events of the October 7 massacre. To many of us, the horrors of October 7 seemed somehow worse than anything we’d heard about in the long, sad history of the Jewish people. Yet you document some obscene atrocities committed against Jews during, for example, the Crusader period—acts that in many ways rival those of Hamas on and in the wake of October 7.

Why isn’t rape and murder enough for terrorists? What explains the apparent investment of imagination and effort in devising ever more elaborate forms of cruelty, rather than channeling that same human capacity for creativity toward education, innovation, or improving life for their own people?

Rafael Medoff: Every human being has the capacity for good or evil. Some have the potential to take it to unusual extremes, depending on circumstances and opportunities—so why do they? What I show in The Road to October 7 is that the key factor is education—at home, at school, and in the public arena. If children hear at their breakfast table, and in their classrooms, and in their houses of worship, that Jews are evil and deserve to be killed, then some of them eventually will act on those beliefs. That has been the common denominator in antisemitic violence from the Crusades to the Czarist Russian pogroms, the Holocaust, and Palestinian Arab terrorism.

Varda Epstein: Much of the public and academic discussion of October 7 continues to frame the massacre primarily in political, territorial, or socioeconomic terms. Yet Hamas itself is explicit that its actions are rooted in radical Islamic theology and a religiously grounded hatred of Jews. Why do you think so many commentators persist in sidelining or denying the centrality of theology in explaining both the massacre itself and the moral worldview that celebrates or excuses it? And how does that same theological framework help explain the language and behavior of some of the protesters who have justified or minimized the violence?

Rafael Medoff: The reason apologists are so reluctant to acknowledge the Islamist theological dimension of Palestinian Arab terrorism is that it’s incredibly difficult to persuade religious fanatics to change their beliefs. So rather than admit that making peace with such people is impossible, it’s easier to blame Israel and to claim that Israeli territorial concessions are the answer to everything.

In this context, we shouldn’t ignore the Islamist component in some of the pro-Hamas rallies on campuses. We’ve heard demonstrators chanting slogans calling for “another Khaybar.” That’s a reference to a 7th century massacre of Jews by Muhammad, the founder of Islam. That’s not a historical event with which the average American college student is familiar; but the campus extremists who organized the rallies know it well because they learned it from their parents and their religious teachers.

Varda Epstein: Regarding the protesters and the violence, do you think some participants failed to grasp the full moral enormity of their actions—simply following the behavior of others rather than reflecting independently on what they were doing? Take, for example, those who tore down posters of Israeli hostages. Did some do this out of a kind of “monkey see, monkey do” conformity—seeing others do it and joining in without stopping to consider the implications?

But even allowing for ignorance or social pressure, how does a person arrive at a point where ripping down a poster of a beautiful red-haired infant like Kfir Bibas can be justified? What does it take, psychologically or ideologically, to see a baby as unworthy of notice or concern?

Rafael Medoff: Yes, that does require a certain level of moral degeneracy. But think of all the previous Palestinian Arab terrorist attacks in which Jewish babies and children were slaughtered—and yet for many years, legions of academics, pundits, and Jewish anti-Zionists have been demanding that the killers be given a sovereign state in Israel’s back yard. So in many ways, the responses to October 7 simply mirrored, on a larger scale, the depraved responses of apologists to earlier attacks.

Varda Epstein: You write that “President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris broke important new ground—on both sides of the debate. On the one hand, each made statements implying a measure of understanding for the anti-Israel extremists. President Biden, addressing a Democratic National Convention on August 19, 2024, said of the anti-Israel demonstrators outside the arena, ‘Those protesters out in the street, they have a point.’ The previous month, Vice President Harris told The Nation that the demonstrators were ‘showing exactly what the human emotion should be’ in response to Gaza. However, in what were arguably more consequential, albeit less publicized remarks, both Biden and Harris in effect labeled large sections of the protest movement antisemitic.”

In what ways—and for whom—were those less publicized remarks more consequential than the sympathetic ones? And politically speaking, did this attempt to balance moral clarity with electoral caution ultimately help or hurt Biden and Harris? In trying to please everyone, did they end up pleasing no one?

Rafael Medoff: President Biden and Vice President Harris both acknowledged that celebrating Hamas is antisemitic. Their words are a matter of record. But they made a political decision to refrain from making a big issue of it, most of the news media went along with that. This is where Jewish organizations need to step in. They have the funds, staff, and other resources to bring that important information to light. How many full-page ads have been placed in the New York Times or Washington Post by pro-Israel groups over the past two years? They can probably be counted on one’s hands.

Varda Epstein: Your book is about “Hamas, the Holocaust, and the Eternal War against the Jews.” In public discourse, October 7 is often described as the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust—a formulation that some readers struggle to understand given that more than six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust and “only” some 1,200 were murdered on October 7. Why do you think the Holocaust comparison arises so frequently, and what kind of comparison is actually being made? Is it primarily about scale, or about intent, symbolism, and historical continuity?

Rafael Medoff: The similarity lies in the intent, the ideology, and the methods. The intent of both the Nazis and the 10/7 perpetrators was to kill as many Jews as possible. As for ideology, the beliefs of Hamas and its allies are essentially religious, while the Nazis’ beliefs were essentially secular; but antisemitism is the core principle of both groups. There is a significant similarity in their methodology, as well. During the first nine months of the Holocaust, in 1941-1942, most of the killing was done up close—by bullets, not gas chambers. The same is true of October 7. The comparison is important because it illustrates the savagery and utter depravity of the perpetrators.

Varda Epstein: Did you write “The Road to October 7” for a particular audience? Who do you imagine reading your book? Do you have hopes that your work will persuade some of those who continue to deny the truth of what happened on that black day?

Rafael Medoff: October 7 deniers can never be persuaded, just as Holocaust-deniers can never be persuaded, because they’re not motivated by the search for truth. They’re motivated by hatred of Jews. No matter how many facts are presented, they will try to explain them away or distort them to fit their preconceived narrative. So I don’t expect them to read The Road to October 7. It needs to be read by those who care about the subject but aren’t familiar with the historical precedents. It’s especially important to get this book into the hands of college students. On campuses across the country, anti-Israel forces are trying to win over the hearts and minds of young Jews. This book will help them fight back with the one weapon that matters most—the truth.

Varda Epstein: What compelled you to write The Road to October 7—and what did you hope readers would take away from it?

Rafael Medoff: As the details of the October 7 atrocities emerged, I was struck by how similar they were to descriptions of antisemitic violence going all the way back to the Middle Ages. I realized this information needs to reach a wider audience. October 7 was the product of the same kinds of educational and religious forces that have incited violence against Jews for more than 1,500 years. A very long road led to October 7.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

Balancing Freedom and Safety: Alan Dershowitz on The Preventive State and the Cost of Speaking Out (Judean Rose)

The famed legal scholar discusses his magnum opus, The Preventive State, why he wrote it now, and why it may never reach the audience it deserves.

Alan Dershowitz calls The Preventive State his magnum opus—and for someone as prolific as he is, that’s saying something. Often referred to as “the world’s best-known lawyer,” Dershowitz has authored more than 50 books and over a thousand articles. But it’s clear why this latest work stands apart. In The Preventive State, he proposes a visionary jurisprudence designed not just to respond to harm, but to anticipate and avert it—be it something on the scale of World War II or the October 7 massacre.

At the heart of the book is an elegant and accessible framework: a four-quadrant matrix of true and false positives and negatives. With this structure, Dershowitz gives readers—experts and laypeople alike—a practical vocabulary for assessing risk and reimagining how the law might operate proactively rather than reactively. It’s a slim volume, yet it delivers a substantial punch, opening the door to a future where justice is not only fair but also preventative.

“You cannot prevent harm if you cannot predict it.” —Alan Dershowitz

Of course, any system that emphasizes prevention carries the risk of overreach—of stifling freedoms in the name of safety. The Preventive State doesn’t shy away from that danger. Instead, it makes the case for a jurisprudence that allows people to be both secure and free. But here’s the catch: the very person who authored this powerful and timely work has, to a large extent, been canceled.

As Dershowitz explains in the interview below, he doesn’t expect The Preventive State—his most important book to date—to receive a review in The New York Times. Why? Because the Times severed ties with him after he served on President Donald Trump’s legal team during the first impeachment trial in 2020. Since then, the once-reliable platform has ceased interviewing him and no longer covers his books.

“The New York Times will not review my most important book—because I defended Donald Trump.”

It’s a bitter irony: a book devoted to safeguarding democracy and civil liberties may be denied the public attention it deserves because its author remains unapologetically committed to due process—and to being, in his own words, an “outspoken Jewish Zionist.” That, perhaps more than anything, ensures his exclusion from today’s mainstream platforms.

More’s the pity.

***

Varda Epstein: Your book is titled The Preventive State, which to some might sound authoritarian. How do you define it—and how would you distinguish it from totalitarian systems?

Alan Dershowitz: Well, prevention is good and authoritarianism is bad, and there’s the risk that trying to prevent will create authoritarianism. There's no way of the state engaging in preventive actions without diminishing certain liberties. Benjamin Franklin said those who would give up essential liberties for a little security deserved neither. But every government has always given up some liberties to assure great security. If any of us could have prevented 9/11, or October 7th, by arresting some people, even if we made some mistakes, we would have done it. You know, we went much too far after the Second World War began when President Roosevelt confined 110,000 Americans in detention centers in order to prevent one or two acts of treason, and none of them occurred. So, it’s the question of balancing, but if the balance is struck improperly, there is the potential for authoritarianism, of course. That’s why I worry about the preventive state. On the other hand, we’re always going to try to prevent. We’re never going to wait until cataclysmic harm occurs. Every country has to confront those issues. Israel’s confronting it right now with Iran. Should Israel go and prevent, as they did Iraq and Syria, from developing weapons? And the United States probably has a different view on that. So these are always the kind of balancing decisions that we have to make.

Varda Epstein: You described Abraham as the first lawyer. He pleaded with God to spare the innocent. Why would he choose to plead for the innocent over eradicating evil?

Alan Dershowitz: Because I think he understood that God could easily have come back and said, look, Abraham, I’m God. I know who’s guilty and who’s innocent. I’ll kill only the guilty and not the innocent. But God said he was going to kill everybody because there were so many guilty people, and Abraham was the first one to challenge authority by saying, no, you can’t overdo it. If you can’t separate the innocent from the guilty, you have to spare everybody. And then God comes back and basically says, yeah, but it depends how many innocent there are. And then that’s when the negotiation begins—50, 40, 30, 20, 10, stops at 10. And that’s been the number that we focus on in Anglo-American jurisprudence also, better ten guilty go free than one innocent be wrongly confined. So, you know, there are various concepts in the Bible that are instrumental in the preventive state. Obviously, Abraham’s argument with God; the idea of punishing recalcitrant children to make sure they don’t become dangerous adults; taking people who have contagious diseases and putting them in isolation; the concept of exile goes back thousands of years, and that’s what we’re doing now with deportation. Deportation is simply a form of exile.

Varda Epstein: I’d argue that it’s just following the law. I mean, if people are somewhere illegally, shouldn’t they be deported?

Alan Dershowitz: No, not necessarily. Some of my relatives came into this country to escape Nazism, and had false affidavits in order to get in because they couldn’t get in lawfully. So sometimes you have to understand, it depends on the circumstances. If you’re escaping from absolute brutality, the way they were escaping from Castro, you have a different rule than if they’re trying to just get some economic benefits. So, you know, the Torah has said, “Tzedek tzedek tirdof,” “Justice, justice” and why two justices? Well, you know, one is justice with compassion, and you have to have a little bit of compassion. But there’s a big difference between people who sneak in in order to commit crimes or in order to evade justice and people who come to save their lives.

Varda Epstein: You spoke in your book about how Great Britain and France could have prevented World War II had they enforced the Versailles Treaty early on, but you posited that perhaps they feared being seen as warmongers. Do you think that’s the main reason they didn’t act?

Alan Dershowitz: Yeah. I think they . . . first, I’m not sure they believed that Hitler would actually do these things. So this was an example of a false negative where there was evidence and information; they didn’t believe it, and they made a horrible mistake. They could have saved 50 million lives. And, you know, we may be making the same mistake now with Iran. If we believe that Iran is trying to develop nuclear weapons . . .

Varda Epstein: Do you think democratic leaders today still face this dilemma of being seen as warmongers, facing backlash for acting, so they hesitate, and they hesitate too long?

Alan Dershowitz: Well, I think some, it depends. You know, Israel would like to move preventively, as it has. Much of my book, The Preventive State, is based on what I call, or what has been called, the Begin Doctrine, that sometimes you just can’t wait to be attacked. You have to take preemptive and preventive action. Israel’s been a leader in that because it’s a tiny country; it’s very vulnerable; and it won’t kill innocent civilians needlessly; whereas other countries are less protective in their approach. So, I think there is the fear that the world would condemn them. There’s this idiotic International Criminal Court that selectively condemns only democracies, and I don’t think anybody should take seriously the International Criminal Court. I think it should be ignored and ended, but there are countries that, you know, England and France and others care about that.

Varda Epstein: At first after 9/11, Americans were pretty accepting of the extreme security measures that were taken, such as in airports with the creation of the TSA. You talked about society turning preventive to prevent terror, right? Then, as time goes on, the fear slips away, people forget, go back to normal, and no longer want these measures, resulting in pushback. Do you think October 7th produced a similar kind of shift among the Israeli left, rendering preventive measures more acceptable?

Alan Dershowitz: For a while, but many, many in the Israeli left have “BDS,” Bibi Derangement Syndrome. So, if Bibi’s doing it, it must be wrong, and many in the Israeli left are making terrible mistakes about how they deal with this issue. So, you know, the same thing is true in the United States with Trump Derangement Syndrome, and so there’s too much of personal issues involved, both in Israel and in the United States. Both have very controversial leaders, and the left can’t believe that they would do anything for positive reasons.

Varda Epstein: Yeah. I always think that the fact that American Jews voted for Kamala shows they hate Donald Trump more than they love Israel. That’s how I felt about that.

Alan Dershowitz: I would feel differently about that. I think they want to be more liberal than they want to be Jewish, and they’re willing to vote, not their Jewish values or their Jewish defense, but they want their friends to like them, and they want to be seen as progressive and liberal. And they vote against their own interests.

“They were killed because of Harvard. Because of Columbia. Because of the way antisemitism is taught.”

Varda Epstein: Let’s talk about the couple that was murdered last week, targeted because the attacker assumed they were Jewish. That’s antisemitic no matter their religion, right?

Alan Dershowitz: So, one was Jewish, the other was not. But it doesn’t matter. They were killed because, whether they were Jews or not, they were killed because they were Jews. And they were killed because of Harvard, and they were killed because of Columbia, and they were killed because of the way in which the Ivy League schools and many schools have been teaching, not just tolerating, but teaching antisemitism. When you teach intersectionality, when you teach DEI, when you teach critical race theory, you’re teaching antisemitism. And when you encourage people, the way Kamala Harris and Walz, the vice presidential candidate, encourage people to call for “Palestine will be free” and
“globalize the intifada,” you’re inciting murder. And so there’s a lot of blood on the hands of university administrators and politicians.

“I’m an outspoken Jewish Zionist, and that will never change.”

Varda Epstein: When should we limit speech? How far do we allow it to go? Do we allow them to say “from the river to the sea”? Do we punish it? Because maybe it would have prevented this?

Alan Dershowitz: No, in my book The Preventive State, I have a whole chapter on free speech and when it should be limited. I think the limitation has to be incitement towards speech. And when you stand in front of a large crowd and you yell, “Globalize the intifada,” that could be incitement. When you, however, just talk abstractly about Israel not existing, that’s hate speech, but it’s free speech. Hate speech is protected by the Constitution today. That may change. We may experience over the next years with this current Supreme Court, a cutting back a little bit of incitement and advocacy of violence. As we see more and more violence, look, I predicted in my writings, I predicted what happened in D.C. I predicted that, based on my experience in representing radical violent protesters back in the 1960s and 70s, and some of them went on to become terrorists. Kathy Boudin, who I helped represent, became a murderer and spent many years in prison. The Weathermen became murderers. They also became friends of Barack Obama. But these are people who Barack Obama befriended. These were people who were regarded as legitimate. But they turned into terrorists. And I think that’s going to happen here, too. I think supporters of Hamas, people who support Hamas and who advocate the end of Israel, which is what “from the river to the sea” and “globalize the intifada” means, there’s a risk that they may start killing Americans. You know, Jews are always the first, they’re the canary in the mine shaft, but as we see, it’s not always Jews that get killed, but there’s going to be more of that. I’ve had to redouble my own personal security.

Varda Epstein: Yeah. I saw you on Hannity.

Alan Dershowitz: It’s true. I’ve always had some threats on my life, so I’ve been concerned about security. But when I spoke just the other day at a college in Florida, I got an honorary doctorate, and they had to have armed guards around me. They had to have a whole process in place for what happens if somebody tried to attack me. They gave me instructions of how do I leave, and will there be bulletproof glass in front of me, and all of that. So, as a result of what happened in this group at Columbia, I’ve had to redouble my own personal security because I’m an outspoken Jewish Zionist, and that will never change.

Varda Epstein: I wanted to talk about the false positive that was your swatting incident that happened to you and your wife. It was a horrible thing, obviously traumatic, but you said it was the right thing. They made the right move.

Alan Dershowitz: Oh, of course. They got a call. They said that there was violence going on in my house. It was, you know, middle of the night, banging on the door, “If you don’t open the door, we’ll break it down.” And they came in with their guns drawn, and they could have easily shot somebody if I had made the wrong move. I was half asleep, I was getting up, and it was a very, very dangerous situation. It was quite deliberate, and we’re going to see more of that. We’re going to see much, much more violence. That, of course, is illegal, but you have to catch the person. And in my case, they haven’t caught the person who did this because it’s very easy to place an anonymous 911 call, and thankfully, the police respond to all these calls. Soon they’ll stop, because they’ll say they’re false alarms, and that will hurt the people who are really in trouble. I have a friend, a policeman who was killed in a domestic violence shootout, because he wouldn’t take the first shot to kill the person who was holding the woman hostage, because he was afraid he would kill her. And then he was shot and was killed. These kinds of situations, swats and everything, are very, very dangerous and have to be taken much more seriously than they’ve been taken.

Varda Epstein: And we need to make some kind of protocol according to your book. Okay, so on the other side of that, then, would be a false negative and preventable harm. So, what’s an example of one that stands out to you as a devastating false negative, what should have been caught?

Alan Dershowitz: The worst, of course, was World War II, the greatest example in history of a false negative. I would say after that, probably 9/11, October 7th, they could have been caught. October 7th was a disaster because Israel had a lot of the information that should have led them to take preventive actions. And because some of the information was provided to them by these women who were serving in the front line, some of them with emotional issues, the men who were in charge didn’t take these women seriously, and I think this was a situation where sexism contributed to this disaster.

Varda Epstein: Absolutely, absolutely, I’m with you on that.

Alan Dershowitz: By the way, let me add something. I met these women. I went there before this happened, and I sat with them, and they were absolutely incredible. They would be sitting with their television screens, and if they saw a rabbit, they would notice it, if they saw anything, they would notice it. And these were our front line defenses against terrorism, and the men in charge of the very macho Israeli army didn’t take them seriously, and that was kind of a disaster.

Varda Epstein: How do you see the role of AI playing in predicting or preventing harm, especially in legal or national security contexts?

Alan Dershowitz: It’s a double-edged sword. It can help prevent crime because it has this incredible predictive ability based on putting together enormous amounts of information to anticipate what might happen. But AI is itself a potential danger. It can intrude on people’s privacy, it can create its own problems. So I think, on balance, AI is helpful in preventing, but one has to constrain and control every scientific development, including AI.

Varda Epstein: You say that you’ve been thinking about prevention since the 1960s? So, why did you write The Preventive State, now?

Alan Dershowitz: Well, you know, I’ve written articles about it, and I never had, in my own mind, the answers. I had the questions, but I didn’t have the answers, and it took me a long time to think through how to create a jurisprudence. And finally, you know, at age 86, with the benefit of a lot of experience and a little bit of chutzpah, I decided to set out my answers, and so here it is, my magnum opus, my 57th book, for those of us old enough to remember Heinz 57 flavors. So, finally, I was ready, and I think this is my most important book, but of course, the New York Times will not review it because once I defended Donald Trump, they stopped reviewing my books, and they stopped interviewing me mostly. And then they tried to cancel me because they don’t like who my clients are, and so I hope people will read the book on Amazon and learn from it. Even though you can disagree with some of its conclusions, I think you can’t argue with the fact that we live in an increasingly preventive state, and so we have to deal with those issues in a moral and calculated and balanced way.

Varda Epstein: You have an appendix. But it’s the end of your book. Why did you end with a critique of rabbinic law?

Alan Dershowitz: Well it’s not a critique. It’s that rabbinic law goes too far, and so did much classic law, much of which was based on rabbinic law. Went too far, but it asks the right questions. I’m a big fan of rabbinic law, because almost every issue that I taught in my 50 years of teaching at Harvard, the questions had been raised by rabbis and by those who wrote the Torah. But they didn’t always get the answers right. And so I just thought it would be interesting to put in the book ancient sources that gave rise to some of the modern approaches. And I, you know, when I taught at Harvard, I would always introduce rabbinic law and Torah law into my classes, because almost every issue was addressed, which is amazing because they weren’t really in control of an active society. They were writing more in the abstract or for their own community, because, you know, until 1948, there was no country to which to apply Jewish law, that was just a community, but they did a remarkable job in raising these unbelievably complex problems and resolving them.

Varda Epstein: You own a letter from George Washington about urging smallpox inoculation. So, what drew you to that artifact?

Alan Dershowitz: Two things. One, I was writing about this issue, and I wanted to own a piece of history in which Washington not only urges everybody to get inoculated, but as commander-in-chief of the Revolutionary Armed Forces, he commands that, he says, basically, you have to do it, you have to do it quickly, otherwise we can lose the war based on smallpox. Second, the letter is fascinating because it’s signed by George Washington and dictated by George Washington, but the three pages are written by Alexander Hamilton, his secretary. So it has the three things in it. I love the writings of Alexander Hamilton, I’m a great admirer of George Washington, and the concept of prevention is in there, so it worked perfectly.

Varda Epstein: What’s next for Alan Dershowitz? Do you have any other momentous topics to write about?

Alan Dershowitz: Of course, I always do, you know, on the way to being buried, I will probably try to be dictating a final op-ed. I write every single day. I’m writing a book now tentatively entitled Trump to Harvard, Go Fund Yourself. It’s a cute title, and it tries to strike the appropriate balance. I don’t think that the government should be cutting off research funds or funds from scientific, medical, but they should be cutting off funds from the Divinity School, Public Health School, the Carr Center for Human Rights, all of which are incubators for antisemitism. So I want to see targeted defunding and targeted denial of visas. For example, in the 1930s, Harvard loved Nazis, the president of Harvard, Conant, was a Nazi lover, he loved Germany. He brought professors from Nazi Germany and students, and of course the United States said, no, we’re cutting off the visas. Many, many liberals would have applauded that, but they don’t applaud it now, and it’s too broad. We shouldn’t be cutting back on all the visas for all students, but only for the ones that are fomenting dangerous activities on campus and contributing to an atmosphere that led to the death of these two young, wonderful people.

***
📚 Book Information

Dershowitz, Alan. The Preventive State: Preempting Cataclysmic Harm while Preserving Fundamental Liberties. New York: Encounter Books, 2024. ISBN: 9781641774401.

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"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

Book review: "Mindless: What happened to universities?" by Cary Nelson

"Mindless: What happened to universities?", by Cary Nelson, is the March issue of Jewish Quarterly, which dedicates each issue to a single essay.

The 120-page book is essentially both a distillation and an update of Nelson's last book, Hate Speech and Academic Freedom: The Antisemitic Assault on Basic Principles. it covers much of the same ground as to the deterioration and subversion of the academy largely at the hands of the anti-Israel crowd.

This has huge ramifications on the future of the university. As Nelson describes it, the very places that are meant for free enquiry have betrayed their core values.

Nelson is a previous president of the American Association of University Professors, and he looks on with dismay how the AAUP has been hijacked by anti-Israel leaders and is now passing resolutions that go against the basics of academic freedom.

His last book was completed right before October 7, and this one centers on everything that has happened since. It is a very ugly picture. The attacks on Zionist faculty, students and ideas are relentless, and they are succeeding in ridding entire academic fields of proud Jews. Students used to study fields, now too many of the fields have become nothing more than advocacy and the only things that are studied are what is acceptable to say.

What used to be anomalous, like a professor refusing to write a letter of recommendation to a student who wants to join an academic program in Israel, is now widespread and largely unreported: Israeli universities are reporting a silent boycott, where papers are rejected unread and no one wants to partner with them. It isn't s principled BDs stance, rather it is a result of no one wanting the hassle of dealing with campus agitators.

The overwhelming feeling one gets is that while many fields in many universities have been completely subverted, a great deal more have been notable for their cowardice.

Nelson makes an excellent point about how identity has become a minefield for students who enter college and are trying to define themselves. They may have their own personal identity already defined by the time they enter a university, but there are also social identity (who they identify with,) identity ascribed to them by others, and identity as formulated in identity politics. These latter types threaten to hurt students psychologically when they are slotted in categories that they do not see themselves as belonging to. Worse, in today's charged environment, everyone is encouraged to identify as victims to gain sympathy - students do not have any identity they can be proud of, only competing to who can be the most oppressed. Who knows the long term effects that this does to teenagers?

Nelson also has horror stories, both on his own campus and outside. He knows one person who had good reviews and was on track to reach tenure. His speaking out against Hamas actions on October 7 destroyed any chance he may have had to gain tenure. Colleagues who privately supported him now urged he be fired.

Nelson has some recommendations, but they feel like too little, too late. I'm afraid that soon Jews will have to respond to antisemitism in the university the way that they responded to antisemitism in the medical and other fields over a century ago: Create their own parallel system.

I don't think we are there yet. Nelson doesn't mention it but there are several excellent schools, mostly in the Midwestern US, that have reputations of being very welcoming to Jewish students. If the smartest Jewish students abandon the universities with active Students for Justice in Palestine chapters, this may become a self-correcting problem over time as recruiters will look elsewhere for the best and the brightest.

Mindless is a sobering but important book.

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"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

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Book review: "Young Zionist Voices"

Young Zionist Voices: A New Generation Speaks Out is a collection of 31 essays that make one hopeful for the future.

Similar to his previous book, Jewish Priorities: Sixty-Five Proposals for the Future of Our People, David Hazony found a diverse group of writers to each write about a specific topic, in this case Zionism.

While the writers have different colors, nationalities, politics and opinions, they all share a love of Israel and they are all unapologetically and proudly Zionist.

This is not a book that makes the case for Zionism. It is a book that shows the passion and challenges that young people today - all seemingly under 30 - have in living in a world where antisemitism and its twin anti-Zionism have become mainstream. Virtually all of them have chosen to respond to the recent tsunami of hate, especially after October 7, by leaning in to their love of Israel.

The essays are all smart and forceful. A few of the writers go beyond intelligence into wisdom.

They also make me feel old. I started my Israel advocacy when I was already more than a decade older than every one of these writers, and the ones who were born after I started this site were not yet in first grade. I am ashamed to say that I was not familiar with most of them and I need to expand the circle of people I follow on social media to include many of them.

To be sure, there are occasional passages that show that a few of the thinkers do not have the experience or historical knowledge to properly put today's events in context of the past two millennia of Jew hatred. That's okay - they will learn, and they are eager to learn.

The target audience seems to be people who are already committed Zionists, to make use feel better about the future. That's fine - we all need chizuk. However, I think that there is another audience that really needs to read this: the young Jewish adults just entering college or those who find themselves confused by seeing their friends turn against their spiritual homeland.

I recently wrote about "permission structures," the concept behind J-Street and JVP to allow Jews to become anti-Israel while pretending to remain committed to Judaism. If Jews see their fellow Jews turn against Israel it gives them "permission" to do the same.

Young Zionist Voices can and should be used to give a permission structure for young Jews to become proud Zionists. The modern "permission structure" gives a false pretense of "human rights" to smear their people, parents and ancestors. Young Zionist Voices gives a permission structure to be proud of who they are and to stand up for their own people. It shows that the most admirable Jews are the ones who fully and unapologetically support their own.

Young Zionist Voices represents the Jewish and Zionist leaders of tomorrow, and the future is a lot brighter than we thought.

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"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

Book review of my new cartoon book "He's an Anti-Zionist, Too!" (Daled Amos)

By Daled Amos, to be published in The Jewish Press

When I wrote a review in 2022 of Elder of Ziyon's first book Protocols: Exposing Modern Antisemitism, I noted that beyond his clarity and conciseness in debunking anti-Israel claims, there was an element of innovation in his blog.

Anyone familiar with Elder of Ziyon's earlier articles is familiar with his "Apartheid" posters, debunking claims of Israeli apartheid by revealing the wide acceptance of Arabs in the Israeli army, judiciary, and news programs as well as across the spectrum of Israeli society. Before that, Elder of Ziyon often quoted old articles from the original Palestine Post (which later became the Jerusalem Post) to refute anti-Israel claims. He also searched through online Arabic websites and uncovered stories no one else was reporting, such as when he revealed that on their website, Hanan Ashrawi's group Independent Commission for Human Rights (Miftah) claimed that the Passover blood libels were actually true.

To defend Israel, we need to approach the lies and the hate from new and different angles.

Now, Elder of Ziyon has been adding his own political cartoons to his blog to make his point. This month, he is coming out with a collection of those cartoons. He explains in the introduction to his new book, He's An Anti-Zionist Too!:

Let’s face it, in today’s world people want bite-sized information. Anything longer than a couple of paragraphs is only read by us old fogies.

He points out that in addition to being more concise than articles, another advantage of cartoons is their ability to ridicule their targets.

Many of the cartoons are re-drawings of the original copyrighted cartoons, others are taken from public domain comic books, and for the last couple of years, Elder of Ziyon has been using AI tools.

Elder of Ziyon's cartoons lampoon a variety of targets:

o Antizionism/antisemitism o BDS
o  College Protests
o  Democratic Party
o  European Union
o  Human Rights Groups
o  Iran Deal
o  J Street
o  Jewish Progressives
o  Jewish Voice for Peace
o  Media Bias
o  United Nations

There are 2 basic styles of political cartoons. One relies on visual metaphors and caricatures. Think of Thomas Nast, the famous political cartoonist who originated the donkey as the symbol of the Democratic Party and the elephant as the symbol of the Republican Party.

Nast's cartoons were instrumental in the arrest and conviction of Boss Tweed.

The other cartoon style gets its point across with the addition of text. Think of Yaakov Kirschen's Dry Bones.

Elder of Ziyon's cartoons use text, not metaphor, to make his point. They are reminiscent of Ami Horowitz's films, showing up and mocking the worldview and claims of Israel's adversaries themselves.

An article on the history of editorial cartoons notes that political cartoons "have the power to deflate hubris, uncover deceit, incite revolution, dethrone a bully."

And Elder of Ziyon is just getting started.

(Link to the book on Amazon)

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

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Book Review: "Deceit of an Ally"

"Deceit of an Ally" is a memoir of sorts by Bruce Brill, who worked at the NSA 50 years ago as an Arabic translator.

The main point of the book is that Brill, who was Jewish, was urged by his boss not to travel home for Yom Kippur in 1973 because he had absolutely positive information that a war was going to break out that day.

The rest of the book is mostly Brill's attempts to find out why NSA didn't tell the Israelis about this intelligence ahead of time. After he left the military and the NSA, Brill moved to Israel and over the decades interviewed many of the decision makers and wrote about his experience (once cleared to do so); he eventually realized that not only didn't the Americans warn the Israelis but they misled them, saying that Egypt was not going to attack that day. Newly release d archives support this contention. This is one reason the Israelis were caught flat-footed on that terrible Saturday morning.

However, Brill does not address the other evidence that the IDF ignored at the time. Assuming he is right, the American deceit was a factor, but not the only factor.

Brill fills out the book with some other anecdotes and unproven theories; after all he was a fairly junior member of the NSA and everyone there is only told what they have a need to know. He writes about the secret "Jew Room" at the NSA as reported in "The Secret War Against the Jews," by John Loftus and Mark Aarons, where they intercept and decode Israeli communications and don't allow Jews to enter. Brill believes he saw a glimpse of the "Jew Room" he was not allowed to enter without escort when he worked at the agency - the door was opened and he saw a map of Israel and settlements that wasn't behind its usual curtain. But he has no proof.

There is a lot of paranoia in this book. Brill talks about his fears that he will be assassinated for his work to expose this conspiracy. For example, he thinks a character named "Brill" in the Gene Hackman movie "Enemy of the State" was named after himself.

When he writes letters to everyone he can think of asking what they know about the US misleading the Israelis and the "Jew Room," most of them ignore him. He thinks that is evidence of a coverup, but it is more likely they think he is a flake.

In the end, the only thing he proves is the NSA knew about the Yom Kippur War ahead of time. He corroborated that with other translators who worked at the NSA at the time. Brill fills up the book with copies of original letters and documents; he submitted the book to the NSA to be vetted and he left the blacked-out parts as part of the book.

One of his paranoid-sounding theories does make one wonder, though.

When Brill's miliary time was up, he had an option to "convert" to become a civilian employee at the NSA. He decided to apply - not because he really wanted to stay there but because the process happened during working hours and he was bored. One of the steps was a polygraph test, and when they asked if he would ever pass information to a foreign country he said no - but the polygraph said he was lying. That uis usually enough to disqualify anyone from working there, but not only did they then invite him to negotiate a salary, they offered him a much higher pay grade than his job would normally receive. Since he wasn't interested, he declined anyway.

The NSA, of course, knew Brill was Jewish and was studying Hebrew. Why did they want him so badly? Brill wonders if they were trying to set him up - this is before Jonathan Pollard - as someone to whom they would leak critical secret information about Israel's enemies and then try to entrap him when they assumed Brill would tell it to Israeli agents.

Could it be that this was a plan, and this was done to Pollard? It seems far-fetched, but antisemitism at the NSA in those days seems certain, and Brill describes some that he had to endure.

Some parts of the book - like details about working at the Agency - are fun to read. I was surprised to find out that satellite imagery in the 1970s was already good enough that Brill could read the Hebrew on the knit kippah of an Israeli soldier embroidered with his name from space. If that was true in the 70s, it is mind boggling to think how today's intelligence agencies could do orders of magnitude more.

But it is not a very well written or edited book.

It is nearly impossible to read Deceit of an Ally and not think of analogies between Israel's intelligence failure in 1973 -whatever the true reasons were - and its equally devastating failure on October 7. In both cases, the data was there; the people whose job is to interpret the firehose of data and make correct decisions, or at the very least hedge their bets and make contingency plans in case their assumptions were wrong, were the ones who failed.

Bruce Brill sounds like a fun person to talk to, but once you know the gist of his book, there isn't much more to learn.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!