04/15 Links Pt2: Abbas honors ‘pay-for-slay’ official on Yom Hashoah; Carlson’s antisemitic rhetoric: A dangerous echo of Father Coughlin; Attempted arson attack on Finchley synagogue

From Ian:

My grandfather, the Nazi: A German historian helps families unravel forebears’ crimes

When his grandfather died in 2006, Johannes Spohr began to delve into his wartime past.

The historian’s discoveries were grim. Rudolf Spohr was a member of the Nazi party, applied to join the SS, and, as a Wehrmacht officer, was aware of the gassing of Jews.

But the grandson’s revelations led him on a path to helping others research their families’ roles in the darkest chapter of German history.

Germany’s Erinnerungskultur — or “culture of remembrance” — is well-known. Over the past two decades, the country has sought to collectively confront its past with memorials and monuments, exhibitions, public commemorations, and, perhaps most visibly, the “stolpersteine” embedded in streets to mark the lives of individuals murdered and persecuted by the Third Reich.

Nonetheless, for many Germans, discovering how members of their own families may have been involved in the Holocaust is an altogether more unwelcome prospect and one to be avoided.

An increasing number of Germans, however, take a different view, wanting to know just what their uncles, grandfathers and other ancestors did during the war. Spohr’s “Present Past” workshops help those wanting to research their Nazi-era family history learn how to dig into records held by the country’s archives and institutions, as well as how to interpret their findings. The Berlin-based historian also undertakes bespoke research projects for individual clients.

Spohr, 43, admits that, when it came to his own grandfather, “the suspicion was always there.” A copy of “Mein Kampf” sat on the bookcase at his grandparents’ home, while a Wehrmacht uniform hung in the closet. National Socialism, he tells The Times of Israel, was “somehow present in my childhood,” but he also knew that, by and large, it was not a topic to be openly discussed.

“My grandmother would only say the war was a ‘very cruel time,’” says Spohr, “but she didn’t say for whom it was cruel or what she meant by it.”

Two or three stories about the war — one involving his grandfather accidentally meeting his brother in Italy and enjoying a day together on the beach — were frequently recycled. He later discovered that this use of a small number of oft-repeated anecdotes to fend off further discussion was common among many other families.

When Spohr occasionally pressed the subject, Rudolf would usually portray himself as an opponent of Hitler who had opposed the war and had reluctantly been forced into the Wehrmacht. He told others that his reaction to the unsuccessful attempt on Hitler’s life in July 1944 was to ask: “Did they get the pig?”

After his grandfather’s death, Spohr — spurred by the discovery of documents, photos and Nazi-era artifacts in Rudolf’s home — began his research. He was helped by an internship at a concentration camp memorial, where he learned how to make archival requests and interpret pictures.

Spohr’s investigations turned up his grandfather’s Nazi party membership — Rudolf and his father joined up on the same day soon after Hitler came to power — and an ultimately aborted attempt to join the SS in 1933.

Was Rudolf a true believer? Spohr says it is impossible to tell, but he suspects that he was more of a conservative nationalist who was neither an opponent of the regime nor a fanatical supporter. Instead, he believes, he was “an opportunist” who knew how to get on in society whatever the prevailing political winds.

Abbas honors ‘pay-for-slay’ official on Yom Hashoah

Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas on Monday evening awarded a medal posthumously to the late overseer of the P.A.'s so-called “pay-for-slay” program, through which Ramallah provides stipends to terrorists imprisoned in Israel and to the families of dead terrorists.

Abbas awarded the “Star of Merit of the Order of the State of Palestine” to relatives of the late Qadri Abu Bakr, according to WAFA, the Palestinian Authority’s official news agency.

Abu Bakr, who died in a car accident in Samaria in 2023, had been the director of the P.A.-funded PLO Commission of Prisoners’ Affairs, which was part of the system that the Palestinian Authority has used to pay out to terrorists and their families, according to the Israel Defense And Security Forum think tank.

Under international pressure, the Palestinian Authority has instituted several changes to the pay-for-slay system in an attempt to claim it has ended. Ramallah announced a change last year, claiming it meant that Palestinian prisoners would not receive money for their actions but solely based on their socioeconomic status.

Critics of the Palestinian Authority, including the Palestinian Media Watch organization, have presented evidence that the latest change was merely an attempt to mislead Western donors while continuing to funnel many millions of dollars to terrorists and or their families.

As it announced changes it said would end the remuneration of terrorists and their families, the Palestinian Authority has also sought to reassure those families and hardliners that the Palestinian Authority’s support for imprisoned terrorists and the families of dead ones was unwavering.

Holocaust Historian Rafael Medoff, the director of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, noted in an op-ed published on Tuesday that the ceremony took place just as Israel began observing Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Day. Yom Hashoah is commemorated on 27 of the Hebrew calendar month of Nissan, which this year began at sunset on April 13 and ended 24 hours later.

“Is it just a coincidence that Abbas chose to honor Abu Bakr on Holocaust Remembrance Day? Probably not, given Abbas’s own deep interest in the Holocaust,” wrote Medoff, referring to Abbas’s 1983 Ph.D. dissertation-turned-book, titled “The Other Side: The Secret Relations Between Nazism and the Leadership of the Zionist Movement.”

In it, Abbas asserted that David Ben-Gurion and other Zionist leaders “collaborated with Hitler” and wanted the Nazis to kill Jews, because “having more victims meant greater rights and stronger privilege to join the negotiating table for dividing the spoils of war once it was over.”

Read More

04/10 Links Pt1: The West’s fifth column; Iran war is huge success for Israel - but it is not a victory, yet; How the war struck Iran’s architecture of repression

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: The West’s fifth column

It’s been chilling to witness a media and political class—mainly on the left, but also on the right—from the start, willing America and Israel to lose this war. The ceasefire terms have thus been spun as a catastrophic defeat: “the disastrous defining act” of Trump’s presidency.

The stupendous military and intelligence achievements of Israel and America have been brushed aside. The decimation of Iran’s military power is dismissed as merely “tactical” gains with no strategic achievement.

Above all, this Greek chorus of doom (echoed by numerous Israeli commentators on the left, for whom the defeat of Iran is of far less importance than the defeat of Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu) assumes the war is now over, ignoring the negotiation that has yet to play out.

It’s hard to see how that negotiation can end in a deal at all. Trump’s terms require Iran’s total surrender. Iran’s published terms require its total victory. The area for compromise between these two maximalist positions is nonexistent.

As ever, reading Trump’s mind is a mug’s game. We can’t yet tell whether he’s being played for a sucker by a regime which—by Trump’s own account—has never won a war but never lost a negotiation; or whether he’s delivering a masterclass in geopolitical chess.

The concern is that he’s negotiating at all with religious fanatics, whose infernal agenda is totally non-negotiable and for whom negotiation merely demonstrates their opponent’s weak-minded refusal to go the military distance.

Maybe Trump is using these negotiations as a strategic feint. The suspicion is, however, that he believes that every conflict can be resolved through a deal. If so, that’s a disastrous category error. Iran has always wrong-footed negotiators because they believe that, like everyone else in the world, the regime is susceptible to appeals to personal or national self-interest.

Not so. The fanatics of Tehran would sacrifice the entire population of Iran if needs be, and they regard their own likely deaths as sanctified by the goal of producing Armageddon and the return to earth of the Shia messiah.

Government approves a record 34 new settlements, as it acts to deepen hold on West Bank

The security cabinet approved the establishment of 34 new West Bank settlements in a meeting two weeks ago, The Times of Israel has confirmed.

The approval of the new settlements — brand new settlements as well as illegal ones retroactively legalized — constitutes the largest number of settlements approved by any government at one time, the Peace Now organization said.

Security cabinet meetings and their decisions are classified, and there has been no official confirmation of the decision to approve the 34 new settlements by the government.

According to the i24 News site, which first reported the story earlier Thursday, some of the slated new settlements are located in areas of the northern West Bank isolated from other Israeli settlements but deep among Palestinian population centers, albeit still within Area C of the territory where Israel has full control.

The security cabinet decision brings the total number of settlements approved by the current government to 103 since it took office in 2022.

This amounts to a 78 percent increase in the total number of government-approved settlements in the three and a half years of the current government’s tenure, said Peace Now, which strongly opposes the settlement movement.

By comparison, only six new settlements were formally approved by Israel in the 30 years between the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993 and the establishment of the current government.

Only a handful of the 103 newly approved settlements have received approval through the Civil Administration’s planning processes, meaning that they have yet to be fully authorized.

PFLP-linked NGO closes Palestinian branch, citing Israel's red tape

The watchdog NGO Monitor delved deeper into DCIP’s ties to the PFLP. It found that several of DCIP’s board members are also PFLP members.

An example is Mahmoud Jiddah, who was elected to the DCIP board in May 2012, but was imprisoned by Israel for 17 years for carrying out grenade attacks against Israeli civilians in Jerusalem in 1968.

Another was Hassan Abed Aljawad, board member up to 2018, who has represented the PFLP at public events.

Shawan Jabarin, who was convicted in 1985 for recruiting members for the PFLP and arranging PFLP training outside Israel, was on the DCI-P’s board of directors from 2007 to 2014.

The former coordinator of DCI-P’s community mobilization unit, Hashem Abu Mari, was killed during a violent confrontation in Beit Ummar in 2014. Following his death, he was hailed by the PFLP as a “leader,” which issued an official mourning announcement. The PFLP announcement praised his work for DCI-P, stating “he was in the ranks of the national liberation struggle and the PFLP from an early age.”

In June 2018, UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI) succeeded in preventing DCIP from receiving foreign-currency donations via bank transfers from Citibank and Arab Bank PLC. It wrote to Citibank and to Arab Bank in May 2018, highlighting DCIP’s links to the PFLP, and requested that Citibank and Arab Bank withdraw their banking services.

Caroline Turner, director of UKLFI, said at the time that she was “extremely pleased that we are succeeding in shutting down the transfer of donations to this terror-linked NGO”.

Following the announcement of DCIP’s closure, NGO Monitor released a statement saying, “For decades, DCI-P defended terrorists under the guise of protecting children, and played a central role in systematically promoting heinous false accusations against Israel by portraying teens involved in terror attacks – child soldiers – as innocent victims.”

“The damage from DCI-P’s false allegations will take many years to undo,” it concluded.

Read More

04/06 Links Pt1: Myths of the Iran War; 5 Men Now Running Iran; Iran rejects Pakistan-mediated truce deal; Russia provided Iran with list of Israeli energy targets

From Ian:

Myths of the Iran War

One myth related to the war is that if enriched uranium remains in Iran, the war has failed. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reported that Iran possesses 441 kg. of uranium enriched up to 60%. Israel and the U.S. never intended to deploy thousands of troops deep inside Iran to seize nuclear facilities. Absent a comprehensive agreement to remove the uranium as part of a deal, the approach is to monitor suspected sites and, if necessary, act against them from the air.

In any case, Iran's enrichment facilities have been completely disabled, and it is doubtful they can be restored to operation anytime soon. Moreover, Iran has yet to achieve a breakthrough that would allow it to build an actual weapon system. Over the past year, many of the senior scientists involved in these efforts have been killed. Without the ability to develop a weapon, the uranium Iran possesses has no practical significance.

The claim that Trump was misled by Israel reflects a misunderstanding of U.S. decision-making culture. American presidents formulate policy based solely on their country's interests. The decisive consideration guiding the White House is what serves the American people. The notion that a U.S. president makes critical national security decisions based on assessments presented by Israeli leaders or Mossad officials runs counter to longstanding American practice.

Another myth is that it is possible to decisively defeat Hamas, Iran, Hizbullah or the Houthis once and for all. There is no way to guarantee that even a clear military defeat will end an adversary's motivation to pursue its objectives, recognizing that capabilities can be rebuilt. Phrases such as "once and for all" amount to speculation.

Even after Israel's decisive victory in the 1967 Six-Day War, when its military defeated the armies of Egypt, Syria and Jordan, within a few years, Egypt launched the War of Attrition and in 1973, together with Syria, carried out a large-scale surprise attack against Israel. So victories may have an expiration date. As we repeated at the Passover Seder, in every generation there are those who rise up to destroy us.

Winners and Losers in the Iran War

Iran, Israel, and the U.S. have not achieved the goals they set for themselves in their current war. On the Iranian side, the late Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, had hoped that by adopting the "Samson option," he would provoke a brief regional war with limited damage to his Islamic Republic because he would step in and offer another of his "heroic flexibility" tricks before things got out of hand. His "heroic flexibility" was designed to come after the first wave of attacks by Israeli and American bombers targeting part of Iran's military infrastructure.

However, as he wasn't there to do his part, Israel and the U.S. had to go for a second wave of bombings and then a third - this time targeting Iran's industrial infrastructure on a scale not known since World War II. Its weapons industry has been decimated, and its vast nuclear project put back by years if not decades.

Worse still, Iran's unprovoked ballistic missile and drone attacks on neighboring countries in no way involved in this war may have done lasting damage to the largely tolerant, not to say benevolent, attitude that many of them had of Iran even under the mullahs.

The outside world has been divided between those who, because they hate Trump or Netanyahu or even America and Israel as a whole, designate the mullahs as victors, and those who, translating their hatred of the Iranian regime into a wish for Iran's destruction as a nation-state, declare Trump and Netanyahu as winners.

Anti-U.S. and anti-Israel circles exaggerate the effect of Tehran's tactic of inflicting economic pain on the world by playing fast and loose with oil exports via the Strait of Hormuz and disrupting overall trade in a chunk of the region. That in turn intensifies the effects of the mullahs' mischief-making.

The U.S. and Israel may lose the Iranian people as one of the few nations known for their positive view of both countries. The theme of "you came and destroyed our industrial, economic and scientific infrastructure, but left our torturers in place" is gaining currency among Iranians both at home and abroad.

There is little doubt that although the Khomeinist regime is badly mauled, the biggest loser in this war will be the Iranian people. The war has destroyed thousands of jobs in Iran. A people facing mass unemployment and shortages of food, water and medicine would not be immediately ready for another attempt at regime change.

Telegraph Editorial: Iran Is Not a War of Choice

The U.S. and its enemies have learned from the last two decades that nuclear deterrence works. The ability of the West to intervene in the defense of Ukraine has been hampered by the existence of Russia's nuclear arsenal.

North Korea watched Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi disassemble his nuclear and chemical weapons programs in 2003, subsequently allowing NATO aircraft to topple his regime as the people he had tormented rose up against him. North Korean state media stated that "powerful nuclear deterrence serves as the strongest treasured sword for frustrating outsiders' aggression."

This same logic has underlaid Israel's approach to regional proliferation for decades. The Begin doctrine laid out after Israel's 1981 airstrike on Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor set out precisely why Israel would strike the al-Kibar site in Syria in 2007; it also explained why it struck Iranian nuclear facilities in 2025.

By achieving the full suite of capabilities necessary for a functioning nuclear deterrent - capabilities that it seemed well on the road to attaining - the Iranian regime hoped to build a nuclear shield. A regime built on a fundamentalist belief system devoted to the destruction of the West was not pursuing these weapons as a pathway to moderation.

Instead, a nation sponsoring terrorist militias, launching drone and missile strikes at its neighbors, attempting to hold the global economy to ransom by shutting the flow of trade through the Strait of Hormuz, was seeking to become effectively untouchable militarily.

While the 2025 airstrikes set back Tehran's nuclear program, it was clear early this year that efforts to rebuild its capabilities were well underway. The history of Iran's nuclear ambitions is of diplomacy, time and again, falling short. Faced with the necessity of putting a permanent end to them, it is hard to argue that Israel or America had any other choice.

Read More

03/26 Links Pt1: Herzog warns Europe ‘you’re next,’ blasts UK's Kier Starmer over Iran terror response; Trump delays Iran energy sector strikes another 10 days

From Ian:

Jake Wallis Simons: Bombs are the only form of diplomacy Iran understands

The truth is as tragic as it is disturbing: This is a zombie regime that can only be stopped by bombs. It doesn’t care for the welfare of its people and it doesn’t care for death. It cares only about its theology. To hear Keir Starmer and his ministers bleating on about how a “negotiated solution” was in the pipeline before Donald Trump went to war was to witness the final, preposterous gurgling of luxury pacifism. Very soon, Britain is going to be woken up good and hard. Alternatively, it will die in its sleep.

If Iran ever signs a meaningful deal that leads to regional and global stability, it will only be after its most fanatical and effective demagogues are dead; its armed forces, missile stockpiles and nuclear programme are destroyed; its ability to choke the Strait of Hormuz is eliminated; and its regime suffers the final humiliation. So much should be obvious: the West has been negotiating fruitlessly with this devious theocracy for decades. How long before we accept the conclusion?

It is high time we recognised that not all people are the same, not all cultures are like our own, and that the values of an open society are not universal. We hold precious things like democracy, freedom, tolerance and the rule of law because they are ours, which is to say, they were developed and defended by those who came before us and entrusted to the present generation. The Iranian regime is of a different, nihilistic tradition. They can no more abandon their mentality than we can abandon ours.

War is the worst thing mankind has invented. But we wage it out of necessity, not choice. For all Trump’s demonstrable failings and shortcomings, Britain’s fateful flaw has been exposed for the world to see: Our contemptible appetite for appeasement. How little we have learned since 1938!

Jared Kushner says Iran wasn’t serious about negotiations prior to war

Jared Kushner, an informal Middle East envoy to the White House, said Thursday that Iran had not been serious about reaching a nuclear deal with the United States before President Donald Trump, his father-in-law, chose to attack the country in a joint military operation with Israel.

“We basically saw that there was no seriousness, and that they were trying to play different games to just get beyond President Trump in order to preserve their capabilities and pathway to get to a nuclear weapon in a way that would have been very, very hard to be stopped in the future,” Kushner said at Saudi Arabia’s exclusive FII Priority summit, held in Miami this week.

Kushner, whom Trump tapped alongside Special Envoy Steve Witkoff to help lead talks with Iran amid the ongoing conflict, told the crowd of political and financial leaders gathered in South Florida that the Iranians’ public statements on the war should not be trusted.

“The one thing with the Iranians, and we’re seeing this even now, is you have to just ignore a lot of what they say publicly, because I think that their statements are usually more for their domestic audiences,” explained Kushner, who had met for indirect negotiations with the Iranians in Geneva two days before the war began in late February.

Likening Iran’s military tactics to a player losing at backgammon, Kushner said the Islamic Republic is now seeking “to create as much chaos as possible” across the region, as it has fired “indiscriminately” at nearby Gulf states and beyond. “That basically describes what they’ve been trying to do there.”

“President Trump’s focus is to try and get to a good outcome with them,” Kushner added. “He wants to just be in a position where they act like a normal country.”

Uganda is willing to fight alongside Israel, military chief says

Uganda’s military chief tweeted on Wednesday that his country is willing to go to war on Israel’s side.

“We want the war in the Middle East to end now. The world is tired of it. But any talk of destroying or defeating Israel will bring us into the war. On the side of Israel!” wrote Gen. Muhoozi Kainerugaba, the chief of the Uganda People’s Defence Force and the son of the country’s President Yoweri Museveni.

The tweet went viral, generating more than 1.3 million engagements on the social media platform as of Thursday morning.

Elaborating on his stance the following day, Kainerugaba tweeted: “We stand with Israel because we are Christians. Saved by the Holy Son of God ... Jesus Christ the only One who can forgive sins. The Bible says ‘Blessed are you Israel! Who is like you, a people saved by the Lord? He is your shield and helper and your glorious sword.’ (Deuteronomy 33:29).”

In a separate tweet, he said, “Israel stood with us when we were nobodys in the 1980s and 1990s. Why wouldn’t we defend her now that our GDP is $100 billion? One of the largest in Africa.”

Last month, Kainerugaba revealed that his country was planning to erect a statue of IDF Lt. Col. Yonatan Netanyahu, the older brother of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was killed in action in Uganda during a counter-terrorism operation that rescued more than 100 hostages on July 4, 1976.

The statue is expected to be erected at Entebbe Airport, where Yonatan Netanyahu fell in battle, according to Kainerugaba.

Read More

Armies are not required to risk soldiers' lives to protect enemy civilians

Much of the legal debate about Israel's conduct in Gaza has focused on proportionality — whether the civilian harm caused by specific strikes was excessive relative to the military advantage gained. A War on the Rocks article by Orbach, Boxman, Henkin, and Braverman makes a crucial clarification that has been largely absent from that debate: under international law, proportionality is assessed strike by strike, not cumulatively across an entire campaign. The scale of destruction in Gaza cannot, by itself, constitute evidence of disproportionality. Each attack must be evaluated against its specific military objective and the foreseeable harm at the moment of decision.

But proportionality and distinction — the two principles that dominate public discourse about Gaza — are not the only ethical considerations governing how armies fight. There is a third, and it is the one Israel's critics most consistently ignore: the obligation to protect one's own forces, and the corresponding right to transfer risk away from soldiers when military necessity demands it.

The Law is Not a One-Way Street

Every major Western military manual incorporates force protection as a legitimate — and legally recognized — limiting factor on the obligation to minimize civilian harm. The operative concept is "feasibility." Additional Protocol I, Article 57, requires that precautions in attack be taken only insofar as they are "feasible," defined in authoritative commentary as "practicable or practically possible, taking into account all circumstances ruling at the time, including humanitarian and military considerations." Force protection is explicitly a military consideration. Precautions that would expose attacking forces to disproportionate risk are, by definition, not feasible — and therefore not required.

The British Army's Joint Service Publication 383, the authoritative UK manual on the law of armed conflict, states this plainly and goes further: it explicitly draws an operational lesson from the Second Battle of Fallujah, noting that commanders may accept greater incidental harm to civilians in order to reduce friendly casualties. The American DoD Law of War Manual establishes the same principle: precautions are required only when consistent with "mission accomplishment and the security of the force." The Australian, Canadian, and German military manuals adopt identical frameworks. No major democratic army has ever accepted the proposition that international law requires its soldiers to absorb unlimited casualties as the price of protecting enemy-controlled civilian populations.

It reflects a genuine ethical principle: military ethics does not operate on a single axis. It requires balancing competing obligations — to minimize civilian harm on one side, and to protect the lives of soldiers on the other. A commander who unnecessarily sacrifices his troops to reduce civilian casualties has made the less ethical choice, because he has spent real human lives on a calculation the law never required him to make.

What Gaza Actually Looked Like

To understand why the risk-transfer argument is not merely legally correct but operationally unavoidable, it is necessary to understand what Israeli forces actually faced in Gaza. Hamas did not simply hide among civilians. Over nearly two decades of governing the Strip, it transformed the entire urban environment into a prepared military battlespace. It constructed a subterranean tunnel network of extraordinary scale, depth, and redundancy, systematically integrated with civilian infrastructure — beneath homes, hospitals, schools, and mosques. Above ground, it embedded weapons caches, command nodes, and ambush positions throughout the residential fabric of Gaza's cities. Israeli forces reported approximately 14,000 booby-trapped structures in Rafah alone by September 2024.

The tactical consequence of this preparation is that in Gaza, almost any building may conceal a tunnel shaft, a weapons cache, a command node, or an ambush — and fighters cleared from one area can reappear behind advancing units through the tunnel network and re-contest or booby-trap previously secured ground. Classical infantry tactics — clear, hold, move forward — become a mechanism for feeding soldiers into prepared kill zones. An army that insists on dismounted infantry operations without standoff firepower in this environment is not making a more ethical choice. It is using its soldiers as human mine-clearance, advancing them into booby-trapped buildings and tunnel systems so that the rubble is produced by their bodies rather than by munitions. The law of armed conflict does not require this. No military manual endorses it. 

The scale of destruction in Gaza that critics treat as self-evident proof of disproportionality is, in large part, the physical signature of Hamas's own military architecture. Preserving those structures was incompatible with neutralizing the threat they contained. This is why the Orbach et al. analysis notes that comparable urban battles — Mosul, Raqqa, Marawi, Nahr el-Bared — produced destruction rates of 65 to 95 percent in their core combat areas, under military forces no one has accused of war crimes for the rubble they left behind.

The Covenant Between Army and Soldier

There is a dimension to this that goes beyond legal doctrine. Every democratic society that maintains an army enters into an implicit covenant with the men and women it asks to risk their lives: the state will send them into danger only for legitimate purposes of national defense, and will do everything within its power to bring them home. This covenant is functional as well as moral. Armies that squander their soldiers' lives unnecessarily destroy the trust that makes military effectiveness possible. Recruitment, morale, unit cohesion, the willingness of soldiers to follow orders under fire, all depend on soldiers believing that their commanders and their government regard their lives as precious.

To risk soldiers' lives not because the mission requires it, but to satisfy the demands of foreign critics or to generate more favorable headlines, is a perversion of this covenant. It treats soldiers as a moral currency to be spent on optics. The argument that Israel should have sent more infantry into Gaza's 14,000 booby-trapped structures — should have accepted more dead soldiers — to reduce civilian casualties and harm to civilian facilities caused by Hamas's deliberate human shielding is a demand that Israel spend its soldiers' lives on a reputational calculation. That is theater, not ethics.

Jenin: The Controlled Experiment

Israel already ran this experiment. In the 2002 Battle of Jenin, the IDF made a deliberate choice to fight building by building rather than use air power, specifically to minimize civilian casualties. The cost was severe: 23 Israeli soldiers killed, including 13 in a single devastating ambush on Salah ad-Din Street when fighters detonated a building they had lured troops into. By any objective measure, this was an extraordinary act of military self-sacrifice. No army was required to fight this way. Israel chose to.

The world accused Israel of a massacre anyway. Palestinian spokesmen falsely claimed hundreds of civilians had been killed. Amnesty International and major media outlets amplified the charge. The United Nations eventually concluded that roughly 52 people died in Jenin, the majority of them combatants.

Israel did not receive any credit for going beyond the law in risking soldiers' lives to reduce civilian harm. 

A standard that cannot be met no matter what Israel does is a constraint whose purpose is condemnation, not protection. Israel fighting with maximum infantry exposure and minimum firepower produced accusations of a massacre. Israel fighting with standoff firepower in Gaza produced accusations of genocide. The variable that produces the accusation is not Israeli conduct. It is the fact that Israel is fighting at all.

Israel should therefore optimize for the actual law — which requires balancing civilian protection against force protection, not sacrificing the latter entirely on the altar of the former. Jenin was arguably the less ethical choice, not the more ethical one. Israel exceeded every legal obligation, spent soldiers' lives it was not required to spend, and gained nothing — on the contrary.

Where the Law Places Responsibility

There is a final consideration the "risk transfer" critique systematically elides. Additional Protocol I, Article 51(8) establishes that the defending party bears responsibility for harm caused by its own violations of international humanitarian law. Hamas's use of human shields — embedding military command nodes under hospitals, storing weapons in schools, running tunnel shafts through residential buildings including children's bedrooms, refusing to construct civilian shelters or grant civilians access to its own tunnels — is a grave violation of international humanitarian law, and the civilian casualties that result from it fall on Hamas under Article 51(8).

An attacking force that takes all feasible precautions, warns civilians, adjusts and cancels strikes when civilian presence is detected, and fights within the bounds of proportionality — as the available evidence indicates Israel did, achieving fewer than one death per munition deployed during the war's most intense aerial phase — has discharged its legal obligations. The deaths that result from a defender's deliberate strategy of shielding military assets with civilian bodies fall on the defender. Hamas built its entire military doctrine around the expectation that the world would assign those deaths to Israel instead. The world largely obliged. This is a failure of moral reasoning, not a failure of Israeli conduct.

The risk transfer critique, properly understood, demands that Israel alone among the world's armies accept unlimited liability for an enemy's war crimes. Every military manual says that is not required. The law of armed conflict places responsibility with Hamas. Jenin proved that meeting the critics' demands produces only more demands. 

When choosing how to attack, military planners must chose the method that minimizes civilian casualties, all else being equal. But risking lives of soldiers in favor of civilian lives is not international law under any interpretation. And the responsibility for the lives of civilians killed belong squarely with the defending force that uses them as human shields.

The conclusion is not cynicism about civilian harm — the manuals, the law, and Israeli practice all demonstrate otherwise.  The conclusion is that the critics' framework was never about civilian harm to begin with.

(h/t Irene)

---

---

Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon! "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

 

Read More

03/05 Links Pt2: Hamas's Oct. 7 Attack Launched a Historic Reordering in the Middle East; Trump kicks Tucker Carlson out of MAGA movement; Israel’s Unfinished Business in Lebanon

From Ian:

Palestine’s draft constitution is a manifesto for permanent war

In a sane world, human-rights organisations would be incandescent. A constitution that makes Sharia a primary legislative source, sidelines women’s genuine equality, erases gay rights and rewards terrorism ought to trigger every alarm bell. But these NGOs have long ago abandoned moral principles in favour of a hierarchy of oppression. To them, Palestinians are sacred victims and Israel is the eternal villain. They are blind to the authoritarianism and festering anti-Semitism of Palestinian society, reserving their outrage instead for the Jewish State, which dares to defend itself against this. Peace and human dignity come secondary to the goal of seeing the Middle East’s only democracy dismantled.

Put simply, the PA’s constitution is a manifesto for permanent war. By codifying the total rejection of Israeli legitimacy, it has ensured that a peace deal based on mutual recognition is an impossibility. For any future Palestinian leader, recognising Israel would now be, quite literally, a violation of the state’s supreme law.

The silence from the British government following the release of this document is a tacit endorsement of its principles. If Starmer is so determined to recognise Palestine, he should at least have the courage to tell the public what kind of state he is backing. Why is he prepared to endorse a framework that prioritises Sharia over secular rights, canonises martyrdom, erases Jewish history and perpetuates the conflict by legal means? Is this really the ‘better future’ he was hoping for in the Middle East?

If Britain continues to recognise Palestinian statehood without demanding fundamental constitutional change, it can no longer do so under the pretence of advancing peace. The PA does not care about peace. For the UK to endorse it is not diplomacy, but a moral abdication.

Hamas's Oct. 7 Attack Launched a Historic Reordering in the Middle East

In 2023, from a tunnel beneath Gaza, Yahya Sinwar gave an order that sent thousands of Hamas fighters through the fence separating the territory from Israel. That green light has reordered the Middle East on a scale comparable to the Arab Spring or the carving up of the Ottoman Empire in the early 20th century - but not remotely in the ways Sinwar had in mind. 29 months later, the Middle East is almost unrecognizable. Israel stands indisputably as the military hegemon, its enemies demolished or decapitated. Sinwar is dead and the network he hoped would ride to his rescue is in ruins.

Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was blown up in a joint U.S.-Israeli airstrike on Saturday. The regime that bankrolled and armed the "axis of resistance" for four decades is on the edge of collapse - perhaps taking with it Hamas, Hizbullah and the Houthis. Tehran is making enemies of the entire region - firing drones and missiles haphazardly, and often including civilian targets.

On Oct. 6, 2023, it was all different. Iran's proxy network was at the peak of its power. Hamas governed Gaza. Hizbullah held Lebanon hostage with 100,000 rockets. Assad sat in Damascus, reintegrating into the Arab League after years of isolation. The Houthis controlled the Yemeni coast and menaced shipping lanes with near-impunity.

Behind them all stood Iran, with a nuclear program viewed as an imminent threat in Jerusalem and the West, backed by a missile arsenal regarded as a strong deterrent against direct Israeli or American attack. Gulf nations were quietly reestablishing ties with the Islamic republic. "Two years later, none of those pillars are standing, and the Islamic republic is never going to be the same," said Ali Vaez, director of the Iran Project at the International Crisis Group.

What Sinwar set off was an unraveling of everything he and his sponsors yearned for - a defeated Israel, Palestinian hopes for statehood, a Middle East rid of Western influence. "Talk about a colossal miscalculation leading to catastrophic consequences," said Bilal Saab, a Chatham House fellow and former Pentagon official. "That cataclysmic event single-handedly changed the face of the Middle East."

Since Oct. 7, 2023, Israel has neutralized every major threat on its borders. A former senior Israel Defense Forces official said, "There is still war, but I can tell you that no one but the biggest dreamers ever thought we would be in the position we are in now. Israel is not untouchable, but we have made it very expensive to touch us."

AIJAC welcomes decision to list Hizb ut-Tahrir as a prohibited hate group

The Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC) welcomes the decision to list Hizb ut-Tahrir as a prohibited hate group under the new legislation introduced following the Bondi terror attack. AIJAC has long called for Hizb ut-Tahrir to be formally proscribed, given its well-documented record of extreme Islamist ideology, antisemitic incitement and hostility to Australia’s democratic values.

This designation, the first of its kind under the new hate group legislation, is an important and necessary step in confronting the spread of extremist ideology that threatens social cohesion, public safety and the fundamental values of Australian society. Under the listing, individuals who are members of Hizb ut-Tahrir, recruit for it, or provide training, funding or material support to the organisation, will now be in breach of the law.

By formally designating Hizb ut-Tahrir as a prohibited hate group, authorities are sending a clear message that organisations which promote intolerance, division and extremism have no place in Australia.

AIJAC commends the Government and law-enforcement authorities for taking this important step and urges continued vigilance to ensure that extremist groups and those who support them are held fully accountable under the law.

Actress asks 'where are the college campuses' protesting Iranian regime

British Iranian actress Nazanin Boniadi called out progressive activists for their lack of outrage over the regime's human rights violations before President Donald Trump conducted military strikes against the nation.

The "Rings of Power" actress appeared on CNN's "The Lead with Jake Tapper" Wednesday to discuss the ongoing war against Iran and concerns over the vacuum of leadership in the nation after the U.S. eliminated its leaders.

She agreed with concerns that an ISIS-level threat could take over the country but noted that several human rights activists and organizations did not acknowledge civilian deaths until after the U.S. targeted Iran.

"For people who care about international law as I do, I'm getting plenty of messages from colleagues in entertainment and saying, ‘I’m so sorry in this moment, what's happening to your people.' Thank you, but where were you a few weeks ago, when tens of thousands of Iranians were being killed by their own regime?" Boniadi asked. "This is a regime that has been violating international law for decades."

Tapper remarked that he also hadn't "really heard a ton" from international progressive activists regarding Iran's human rights violations, even after the nation launched hundreds of missile and drone strikes against other Muslim-majority countries in retaliation.

"I mean, if any other country did that, I think there'd be a huge hue and cry and huge marches in the streets. Iran does it, and there really isn't that result in the progressive community. What do you make of that?" Tapper asked.

"Look, in 1979, progressives world over, including in Iran, were all too willing to sacrifice women‘s rights, LGBTQ+ rights and every other basic human rights at the altar of anti-imperialism. Are we going to do the same in this moment? Are we really caring more about whose hands are on the trigger, or are we going to care about human lives, civilian lives?" Boniadi answered.

"This is a regime that has violated human rights," she continued. "International law has wreaked havoc on the region, domestic oppression, transnational repression, hostage diplomacy, destabilizing the region. And now, it's killing fellow Muslims in neighboring countries. Where is your outrage? Where are the college campuses?"

Boniadi, whose family fled Tehran for England following the 1979 Islamic Revolution, has been a longtime supporter of Iranian protesters and has previously used her career to highlight atrocities conducted by the Iranian regime.

Read More

02/23 Links Pt2: What’s wrong with Zionism, Hugh Laurie?; Media Fall Silent on Palestinian Draft Constitution; Former Hamas hostage turns ordeal into music

From Ian:

Jonathan Sacerdoti: What’s wrong with Zionism, Hugh Laurie?

If Zionism is defined minimally as support for the existence of Israel as a Jewish state, then opposition to Zionism entails opposition to that principle. Israel is home to roughly eight million Jewish citizens. To advocate dismantling the state as a Jewish polity is to propose a fundamental restructuring of sovereignty in a region where minority protection has always ended badly for us Jews.

Judea Pearl, the Israeli-American computer scientist and philosopher and father of the murdered journalist Daniel Pearl, has argued that one should ‘shock the anti-Zionist out of his pompous self-righteousness’. He is right.

His challenge is uncomfortable. If anti-Zionism involves dissolving Jewish self-determination in the only state where it currently exists, what becomes of its population? Are they to entrust their security to political arrangements that have yet to demonstrate durability? Are they to accept permanent exposure as the price of ideological consistency?

Those who identify as anti-Zionist often insist that their position targets a political ideology rather than a people. They frame it as opposition to nationalism, or to specific Israeli policies. Criticism of a government is ordinary political speech. Advocacy for the eradication of a state’s defining national character carries different consequences.

Laurie has not articulated a doctrine. He mourned a colleague and resisted being labelled. Others supplied the ideological frame around his words. But he took the bait and seemed at least to imply his rejection of Zionism by pointedly responding to critics that he had never said he supports it.

When celebrities feel compelled to signal distance from Zionism, even defensively, clarity becomes essential. If the objection concerns government policy, say so. If it concerns the legitimacy of Jewish nationhood in Israel, confront the implications directly and own the full genocidal implications of your beliefs.

Dana Eden’s tragic death remains under investigation. The argument that followed reveals how quickly grief is conscripted into ideological struggle. A tribute became a test of political identity. Before adopting or repudiating a word as freighted as Zionism, one ought to ask what world that choice implies. And whether one is prepared to defend it.

Report: Inside Hamas's Sophisticated Media Empire Waging Psychological Warfare

A recent report by the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center (ITIC), based on Hamas documents seized by the IDF in Gaza, argues that Hamas maintains centralized managerial, financial, and strategic control over a broad media ecosystem, including outlets presented publicly as “independent.”

The report, published on February 22, 2026, draws from documents captured during military operations in Gaza and provides an unprecedented window into how the Palestinian terrorist organization coordinates its information warfare against Israel and the broader international community.

The Hybrid Media Model
At the heart of Hamas’s strategy lies what Israeli analysts term a “hybrid” media ecosystem—a deliberately constructed system designed to create the appearance of press diversity while maintaining absolute editorial control. According to the report, Hamas operates both official outlets like the Al-Resala media institution, the Al-Aqsa television network, and the Palestine newspaper, alongside news agencies Shehab and SAFA that publicly present themselves as independent journalistic organizations.

“This hybrid media system is not accidental,” the report states. “It is designed to allow Hamas to appear to advocate for media pluralism, while in fact it fully controls the media discourse.” This arrangement also provides the organization with diplomatic and operational flexibility, including the ability to circumvent sanctions and deny association with extreme content by attributing it to “independent” outlets.

The information department, led by Ali Al-Amoudi, maintains oversight of the entire ecosystem through regular inspections and coordination meetings designed to ensure all media activity aligns with Hamas’s broader strategic messaging and tactical objectives.

"The new acting head of Hamas’ political bureau in Gaza."
*released as part of the Gilad Shalit "prisoner deal" in 2011 - was among those very close to Sinwar during their imprisonment and after their release, accompanying him frequently to meetings and events. v The report adds that unofficial reports in late 2025 claimed al-Amoudi was appointed acting head of Hamas’s political bureau in Gaza and was being discussed as a potential successor to Yahya Sinwar.

It traces his proximity to Sinwar back to their time in Israeli prison: al-Amoudi was arrested in 2004, released in the 2011 Gilad Shalit exchange, and, according to the report, developed a close relationship with Sinwar while incarcerated. The report says al-Amoudi later served as Sinwar’s office manager during Sinwar’s first term leading Hamas’s political bureau in Gaza (2017–2021).

CAIR-Ohio Director Invokes Blood Libel at Ohio Senate Antisemitism Hearing

Khalid Turaani, Executive Director of the Ohio branch of the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), appeared before the Ohio Senate Judiciary Committee on February 18, 2026 to testify against Senate Bill 87, which would codify the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) Working Definition of Antisemitism into Ohio state law.

During his testimony, Turaani alleged that Israel operates the world's largest human skin bank and that the skin is harvested from the bodies of dead Palestinians. CAIR’s lobbying arm, CAIR Action, and a coalition of other anti-Israel Ohio-based organizations also testified in opposition to SB 87 at the same hearing.

A Modern Blood Libel Before a State Legislature
The Anti-Defamation League has explicitly catalogued claims of this type — that Israel systematically harvests body parts from Palestinians — as a modern iteration of the medieval blood libel: the centuries-old antisemitic conspiracy theory alleging that Jews murder non-Jews to harvest their bodily matter. The ADL notes that in the current Israeli-Palestinian context, organs and tissue are substituted for blood, and that in some cases activists have gone further, alleging Israel deliberately kills Palestinians in order to harvest their remains. The ADL has found no credible evidentiary basis for these claims.

The specific “skin bank” framing Turaani deployed before Ohio state senators has circulated in anti-Israel activist circles since at least late 2023, traceable to social media accounts and pro-Palestinian advocacy networks. The ADL has directly addressed these claims, finding that they lack documented factual support and function as vehicles for antisemitic conspiracy narratives rather than substantiated reporting.

The context in which Turaani made this claim adds a significant dimension. SB 87, which he was testifying to defeat, would codify the IHRA definition of antisemitism into Ohio law. The IHRA definition, which has been used by the U.S. State Department and endorsed by over 40 countries, explicitly lists as an illustrative example of antisemitism: “Using the symbols and images associated with classic antisemitism (e.g., claims of Jews killing Jesus or blood libel) to characterize Israel or Israelis.”

Turaani’s testimony did not remain confined to the hearing room. Ramy Abdu, the founder and chairman of the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor (EuroMed), amplified the clip on X, stating: “Israel is skinning dead bodies of Palestinians.”

Abdu’s promotion of the claim is notable given EuroMed’s documented record and his own background. Abdu, along with EuroMed’s former chairman Dr. Mazen Kahel, were both named in a 2013 list released by the Israeli government identifying Hamas operatives and affiliated institutions in Europe. The watchdog group HonestReporting has described EuroMed as a “Hamas front org.”

EuroMed’s track record of unverified atrocity claims extends well beyond the Turaani clip. The organization has previously accused the Israeli army of organ theft from Palestinians and of “systematically” using police dogs to “brutally attack, rape Palestinian civilians” — claims that HonestReporting has characterized as part of a pattern of fake news, conspiracy theories, and blood libels the group has championed since the October 7, 2023 attacks.

Read More

02/13 Links Pt1: The Economic Case for the US-Israel Partnership; Palestine’s Anti-Constitution; MSF now admits Nasser Hospital was a terrorist base; How an Indian Researcher Exposed the Nazi–Palestinian Alliance

From Ian:

The Economic Case for the US-Israel Partnership

Recommendations
Washington should treat the US-Israel partnership as strategic industrial architecture and act accordingly. Below are four concrete steps to do so.

1. Enforce against boycott spillover. Use trade law, financial authorities, and anti-boycott statutes to deter measures that disrupt US-Israel technology integration. European restrictions affecting American firms should be treated as trade barriers and addressed through bilateral leverage and multilateral channels. Indeed, Washington can respond with targeted tariffs, procurement exclusions, export-control adjustments, investment-screening scrutiny, or the suspension of sector-specific cooperation agreements. The point is to raise the cost of discriminatory treatment until reciprocity becomes the rational choice. In parallel, Washington should also offer a structured US-Israel-EU technology framework to align procurement, defense, and digital policies within a coherent allied system.

2. Modernize the free trade framework. The White House should update the 1985 US-Israel Free Trade Agreement to reflect a digital- and services-driven economy. The administration should also incorporate binding provisions on data flows, AI and cybersecurity standards alignment, facilitation of joint ventures in critical technologies, and protections against third-party coercion. Regulatory certainty is a competitive asset in technology ecosystems.

3. Institutionalize coproduction in critical technologies. The US should seek to shift its procurement deals with Israel to structured coproduction in sectors where Israeli capabilities complement US capacity gaps. This effort should seek to embed advanced defense, cyber, and emerging technology systems into American production lines to increase America’s industrial depth.

4. Build a bilateral industrial integration platform. America should establish a federal industrial matching mechanism linking Israeli firms to US manufacturing clusters. The mechanism should tie incentives to physical production, workforce development, and supply chain integration on American soil to bolster shared production capacity.

Collectively, these steps would secure the US-Israel partnership at the level that matters in strategic competition: capital control, production ecosystems, and institutional alignment.

Conclusion
Critics of the US-Israel partnership present it as a legacy arrangement sustained by habit and the idiosyncratic preferences of special interest groups. In fact, it is a prototype of allied codevelopment under conditions of strategic competition. The central challenge facing the United States is constructing an international economic order capable of outperforming authoritarian alternatives over time. The US-Israel relationship demonstrates what that order looks like when it matures: integrated innovation, institutional trust, and resilience verified under stress.

Alliances built on codevelopment and shared industrial capacity generate compounding returns. The United States possesses one that works. Washington now needs to protect it and scale it as part of a broader allied economic architecture for the next generation.

Seth Mandel: Palestine’s Anti-Constitution

The original Hamas charter, it’s worth noting, was straightforward in its “struggle against the Jews.” The Palestinian Authority’s own proposed constitution doesn’t mention Jews at all. This is the problem when dealing with each of the Palestinian national movement’s leaders in its century-old existence: Jews are either excluded entirely or they are mentioned only as the object of a genocidal raison d’etre. To these Palestinian nationalists, Jews either don’t exist or else they must be made to not exist.

This should take some of the pressure off of Israel. After all, if the Palestinians don’t want self-determination then it shouldn’t be forced on them. This document is an anti-constitution—it is intended to prevent the need for a Palestinian constitution in perpetuity.

No one should be surprised by this: Israel tried to give the Palestinians their own state multiple times, and each time the Palestinians responded with outrage and violence. The world cannot make the Palestinian leadership want a state.

But outside of whether the Palestinians want this state, the world should also ask itself whether it wants this Palestinian state—not some theoretical state that European leaders imagine, but this state that is on offer.

As the Jerusalem Post reports:
“Article XXIV described how the state would ‘work to provide protection and care for the families of martyrs, wounded, and prisoners, and those released from the occupation prisons and the victims of genocide.’

“This article is drafted into the constitution, appearing to formalize the continuation of the PA’s controversial ‘pay-for-slay’ policy, which provides financial stipends to families of convicted terrorists and terror suspects.”

In addition to the grotesque display of bloodlust here, this should also be taken as a slap in the face to the “State of Palestine’s” biggest boosters.

“The ‘pay for slay’ has ended,” crowed French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot in September. When it was reported two months later that the Palestinians had merely hidden such payments, French President Emmanuel Macron was right back at square one, pleading with Mahmoud Abbas to end what Macron had been fooled into believing had already ended.

Macron then offered France’s help in writing the Palestinian constitution. The Palestinians went forward without such input and came up with a constitution that enshrines pay-for-slay. How many times will France allow itself to be humiliated this way?

A few months ago Keir Starmer, who is somehow still the prime minister of the United Kingdom, was reported to “insist that the Palestinian Authority ends its ‘pay to slay’ policy of handing out stipends to the families of ‘martyrs’ killed or detained for attacks on Israelis,” according to the Telegraph. This would be required “before any two-state solution is finalized.”

Isn’t this all getting so very tiresome? Those who want a Palestinian state are either going to have to convince the Palestinians to want one too, or move on with their lives.

Read More

01/28 Links Pt2: Islamists have been given a veto over public life; Hundreds at funeral of Ran Gvili, Israel’s final hostage; A Hospital’s Shocking Treatment of a Bondi Beach Survivor

From Ian:

20 Jews murdered, 815 severe antisemitic attacks took place worldwide in 2025

Twenty Jews were murdered worldwide and some 815 severe antisemitic incidents were documented in 2025, according to a report released Tuesday by the Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism Ministry.

The total number of attacks was down from 2024, the ministry said without elaborating, while the number of deaths rose significantly from the one confirmed antisemitic murder in 2024, of Chabad Rabbi Zvi Kogan.

The report also recorded approximately 124 million antisemitic posts on X, formerly Twitter, and over 4,000 anti-Israel demonstrations, of which 365 were classified as posing a high or extreme risk to Jewish communities.

Antisemitic activity and rhetoric skyrocketed after Hamas launched its war against Israel on October 7, 2023. The data was presented during the International Conference on Combating Antisemitism, held in Jerusalem on International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

The highest numbers of incidents were recorded in the United States (273), the United Kingdom (121), Australia (45), France (44), and Canada (37), the ministry said.

The murders included 15 killed in the Hannukah terror attack at Bondi Beach in December, two killed in a Yom Kippur attack in Manchester, two Israeli embassy staff members killed outside the Jewish Museum in Washington, DC, in May, and a woman killed at a pro-Israel vigil in Boulder, Colorado, in June.

Other noteworthy incidents included an Israeli tourist hospitalized in Greece after a pro-Palestinian attacker bit off part of his ear in July; an elderly Jewish woman stabbed in a grocery store in Canada in August; the torching of a Sydney childcare center in January; the beating and attempted kidnapping of an Israeli in Wales in March; and the torching of a Melbourne synagogue with 20 people inside in July.

Belongings of members of the Jewish community are seen at the scene of a terror shooting at Bondi Beach in Sydney on December 15, 2025. (DAVID GRAY / AFP)

The data showed a clear correlation between spikes in violence and incitement and international security developments related to Israel’s war in Gaza, the report said without elaborating.

Brendan O'Neill: Islamists have been given a veto over public life

The Met imposed severe conditions on the UKIP march. No one, they decreed, is permitted to take part in a UKIP gathering anywhere in Tower Hamlets on 31 January. Their reasoning is truly scandalous. ‘We are not saying that the UKIP protest, in isolation, will be disorderly’, they said. But ‘we reasonably believe’ that ‘groups who are hostile’ will ‘find it provocative’. That means there could be ‘an adverse local reaction’ that might include ‘violence and serious disorder’. Strip away all the euphemistic cop-speak and what is being said here is that a right-wing, pro-Jesus rally is likely to piss off Islamists and thus it is forbidden.

If this doesn’t shock you, I don’t know what to say. The dictionary definition of appeasement is ‘giving in to hostile demands’ in order to maintain some kind of peace. That’s what happened here. The Met cravenly bowed to the belligerence of local bigots. They sacrificed freedom of assembly at the altar of ideological menace.

It matters not one iota what you think of UKIP. To prevent anyone from holding a ‘Walk with Jesus’ because you fear a ‘local adverse reaction’ is to play a dangerously divisive game. What the Met should have done is police those that they suspect will commit violence (local Islamists), not punish those who, by their own admission, are unlikely to be ‘disorderly’ (UKIP). In doing the opposite, the Met have made themselves the footsoldiers of Islamism and the enemies of freedom.

Who will now deny there is an Islamist veto over much of our public life? Courtesy of the moral cowardice of our institutions, Islamists enjoy staggering power over who is allowed to assemble in public, where, for how long, and for what reasons. The Met’s capitulation to Whitechapel extremists comes hot on the heels of the Maccabi Tel Aviv scandal, when West Midlands Police banned Jews from Israel from attending a game at Villa Park because they caught wind of the fact that local elements were planning to arm themselves to attack those Jews. West Midlands Police had earlier banned Birmingham’s 2025 Diwali celebrations, again out of ‘concerns for public safety’.

Anyone who’s thinking of gloating at the fact that a UKIP assembly has been forbidden should think again. For the Islamist veto, this trump card of violent menace, has also led to a prohibition on Jews from Israel and the brute prevention of Brummie Hindus from marking the most joyous festival in their religion. No one is safe from the extra-legal powers that our spineless rulers have gifted to noisy Islamists.

Recent history makes it clear where such kowtowing can lead. For what was England’s rape-gang scandal if not a vile byproduct of the elites’ fear of rocking the ‘multicultural’ boat? That industrial-scale abuse of mostly white working-class girls by men who considered them little more than ‘slags’, as police, councils and politicians looked the other way, was a testament to the horrors that can flow from official cowardice. And how does the Labour government respond to all of this? By obsessing over a new definition of ‘Islamophobia’, which will make it even harder for decent Brits – Muslims and non-Muslims alike – to discuss the Islamist scourge.

Tearing up the Islamist veto, shoving it in the shredding machine of history, is one of the pressing tasks of our time. Everyone who values secularism, liberty and equality should balk at the elevation of Islamist feeling over everyday freedom. This is how you respond when Islamists say a UKIP march, Jewish football fans or a Diwali celebration will cause them offence: So fucking what? Get over it. Stop being a baby.

When hate becomes a business: The monetization of antisemitism

Antisemitism has always adapted to its surroundings. Today, it has adapted to the digital economy.

What once circulated through fringe pamphlets or isolated gatherings now thrives online, in an environment where outrage is rewarded, provocation is amplified and attention can be monetized. Antisemitism is no longer just spreading. In many cases, it is being incentivized.

In the modern attention economy, clicks equal currency. Algorithms are designed to reward engagement, not accuracy or morality. Content that shocks or enrages travels farther and faster, and antisemitic material, unfortunately, performs well in that system. The result is not only broader exposure to hate, but a set of financial incentives that sustain and accelerate it.

We saw this dynamic recently in Miami Beach, where videos circulated online of influencers singing Nazi slogans and performing salutes, first in a limousine and later inside a nightclub. They laughed, played to the cameras, fully aware they were being recorded and without a hint of shame.

The episode spread widely because it was inflammatory. In today’s digital ecosystem, outrage fuels visibility. Visibility drives traffic. Traffic brings revenue. Antisemitism becomes content and content becomes cash.

Extremist figures understand this well. For some, antisemitism is strategic. Provocation drives attention. Attention drives donations, subscriptions, merchandise sales and influence. In these cases, hate is not just ideology. It is a business model.

What once existed on the fringes now operates openly on mainstream platforms, supported by systems that reward engagement without evaluating consequences.

When hate becomes profitable, behavior changes.

Repetition normalizes rhetoric that once would have triggered immediate alarm. Over time, the presence of money dulls moral resistance. If content is rewarded, it can begin to feel acceptable, or at least tolerable.

This is where the danger lies, not only for Jewish communities but for society more broadly. Antisemitism has become embedded in a digital economy that prioritizes virality over responsibility and profit over principle.

Read More

01/22 Links Pt2: Australia marks day of mourning for Bondi terror attack victims; Anti-Semitism on the Couch; Syria was never one country, and Israel knows it

From Ian:

‘She’ll Be Right’ Is Not a Strategy: How Australia Sleepwalked into a Crisis of Antisemitism

Slogans matter in this context, not because words are inherently violence, but because words can be permission structures. They can normalize contempt. They can be recruitment tools. They can teach people which targets are legitimate. After October 7, Australians watched a pattern take hold: open hostility toward Jews, moral inversion, and rhetoric that did not aim for peace but for escalation. Chants such as “Globalize the intifada” were tolerated in protests and on campuses, even though they function as a call to export violence into Western streets. In the wake of subsequent events, commentators and security analysts have repeatedly warned that hate speech does not stay in the realm of slogans: it translates into intimidation, harassment, and sometimes violence, with the deliberate purpose of making communities afraid. Australia was warned in real time. Too many people chose to treat those warnings as exaggeration, or as an inconvenience to the national self-image.

Then it happened here.

On Sunday, 14 December 2025, Jews celebrating Chanukah at Bondi Beach were attacked. It is difficult to overstate what that meant. Bondi is iconic Australia, the postcard version of our national story. The target was not an abstraction. It was Jews gathered openly, publicly, celebrating their identity. The Commonwealth later recognised the national impact with formal reflection and commemoration. A royal commission was announced to examine the circumstances and failures around the massacre.

But here is the part that should make every decent Australian pause. A commission, however necessary, is not a substitute for cultural and civic accountability. And the most chilling detail is not only that this attack occurred, but that our public debate still struggled to speak plainly about the conditions that made it possible.

Because even after Bondi, the line kept moving. The instinct to rationalize, to relativize, to insist that “it’s complicated,” to reach for euphemisms rather than speak plainly, remained. If a society cannot draw a clear boundary after a mass casualty attack targeting Jews at a religious celebration, then the problem is not confusion. It is moral failure, and it is institutional cowardice.

This is where the “she’ll be right” mentality becomes dangerous. It tells decent people the adults will handle it, the institutions will self-correct, the extremists will burn out, the country will naturally return to balance. But extremists do not burn out when they are rewarded with attention, tolerance, and platform. They escalate when they learn there is no meaningful cost.

The media conversation, too often, has been trapped in a false binary: free speech versus censorship. That frame is convenient for those who want to avoid doing the difficult work of distinguishing legitimate political expression from incitement and harassment. It also obscures the cumulative reality. One sermon becomes a “controversy.” One rally becomes “passionate activism.” One antisemitic incident becomes “unfortunate.” One campus campaign becomes “student politics.” And then people act shocked when Jewish Australians say they no longer feel safe, when security becomes normalized around synagogues and schools, when families reassess what it means to live openly as Jews in a country that once felt uncomplicated.

Australia did not “suddenly” change. We were watching it change. We just did what we often do best.

We shrugged.

So where to from here? Australia has a choice. We can keep treating antisemitism as episodic, or we can confront it as systemic. That requires more than statements. It requires enforceable standards and the willingness to apply them consistently. It means drawing bright lines around incitement and vilification, and acting when those lines are crossed. It means refusing to launder hate through the language of “debate,” and being honest that dehumanization, intimidation, and calls to violence are not contributions to a pluralist society. It means treating Jewish safety as a national issue, not a niche concern, because Bondi was not only a Jewish tragedy. It was an Australian one.

And it means demanding institutional courage from universities, cultural institutions, and community leaders, rather than watching them outsource moral judgement to PR teams and crisis committees. A liberal democracy cannot function if it has no confidence in its own moral boundaries. Multiculturalism cannot survive if it becomes a cover for tolerating extremism. Social cohesion is not maintained by pretending the problem is smaller than it is. It is maintained by confronting what threatens it, early, clearly, and consistently.

Australians are proud of being laid-back. But there is a difference between being laid-back and being asleep.

“She’ll be right” might be fine when you are talking about a dented car door, a late train, or a rainy weekend. It is not fine when hatred is organizing, recruiting, preaching, marching, and escalating.

We got here because too many good people assumed someone else would stop it.

If Australia wants to be the country it says it is, then the next cultural reflex cannot be a shrug.

It must be resolve.

Anti-Semitism on the Couch

Congress has taken notice. Last December, the House Committee on Education and Workforce sent a letter to Debra Kawahara, the president of the APA. “The Committee is gravely concerned about antisemitism at the APA, which represents more than 172,000 researchers, clinical professionals, professors, and students across the country in the field of psychology,” wrote Chairman Tim Walberg (R-Mich). Walberg cited as evidence the letter from Psychologists Against Antisemitism and a new report from the Anti-Defamation League on professional organizations that identified the APA as an entity about which it had “major concerns” requiring “substantial action.”

Walberg’s committee requested all APA documents, communications, publications, programming materials, complaints, and actions related to anti-Semitism since the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack. Upon review, it will then consider “whether potential legislative changes are needed.” The association’s millions in federal funding for training programs and contracts could be at risk.

This moment is fraught with paradox. It was Jews who pioneered psychotherapy and psychoanalysis (once called “the Jewish science” by Nazi critics but later resurrected by some admirers and practitioners, including Freud’s daughter, Anna). All but one of the early members of Freud’s inner circle of 13 were Jewish. The anti-Semitism waged against Austrian physicians had constrained their professional opportunities but left open the unexplored territory of the mind, regarded as a marginal area at the time. The original psychotherapy patients were mostly Jewish, too, reflecting the value placed by Jews on introspection, intellectual life, and the ethic of repair.

Surely, there remain therapists who are emotionally mature—they may even represent the majority of seasoned professionals. Trust has nonetheless been resoundingly damaged on several fronts: among colleagues in the field, among colleagues and their professional organizations, and between patients and therapists. Today, Jewish and Zionist individuals who seek psychological care must search carefully for an experienced therapist who, no matter his or her politics, will regard the patient, foremost, as a fellow human who is suffering.

New documentary depicts the lawsuit that humbled Henry Ford – and revved up US Jewry

After years of spreading antisemitic conspiracy theories in his Dearborn Independent newspaper, Henry Ford was finally called to account for it. In 1927, the billionaire American auto magnate, famed for the assembly line and the Model T, was sued for libel by Aaron Sapiro, a Jewish American lawyer and a cooperative farm organizer in the United States and Canada. The ensuing trial in a Detroit federal courthouse — and subsequent apology by Ford — had repercussions for the American Jewish community and its relations with wider society.

This drama is retold in a new documentary film, “Sapiro v. Ford: The Jew Who Sued Henry Ford.” Directed by New York-based Gaylen Ross and produced by Detroit native Carol King, the film made its world premiere at the Miami Jewish Film Festival on January 18, and is available locally to stream through the festival’s website. It was also screened on January 21 at the New York Jewish Film Festival, which will show it again on January 28. Additional upcoming screenings include the Atlanta Jewish Film Festival and the Boca International Jewish Film Festival.

“I think it’s an unknown story,” King said in a joint Zoom interview between the filmmakers and The Times of Israel. “People are curious. So many people have not heard of it. They know about Henry Ford, but they did not realize the extent of what happened — with the libel suit against him by Sapiro and the resultant apology.”

“Our goal,” she added, “was to really introduce people to this hero [Sapiro], a man who risked so much, because he believed so passionately in the cause.”

Beyond amplifying Sapiro, the film looks at the ever-present debate between balancing First Amendment protections for free speech with defending minority rights in America.

“We definitely support freedom of speech,” Ross said, while noting “the concern we have for when hate speech often turns to hate crime. That’s the difficulty of protecting rights and freedom of speech at the same time… and also protecting the vulnerable.”

The Miami festival is billed as the largest showcase of Jewish and Israeli films; this year’s lineup features over 100 selections. After Miami, “Sapiro v. Ford” makes its way to the New York Jewish Film Festival, then it’s back to Florida for the Palm Beach Jewish Film Festival. Its first three in-person screenings — one in Miami, and two in New York — have all sold out.

Within the film’s length of an hour and 10 minutes, the filmmakers have found creative ways to tell the story. Contemporaneous cartoons about the trial come to life through Garry Waller’s animation. Descendants of Canadian farmers whom Sapiro organized give perspectives on how he transformed their families’ lives for the better. And the post-trial euphoria among American Jews was humorously captured in a catchy 1927 Yiddish dialect song, “Since Henry Ford Apologized to Me,” which gets played twice. The filmmakers also used the well-known documentary approach of interviews with experts, including Brandeis University American Jewish history professor Jonathan Sarna and Indiana University adjunct law professor Victoria Saker Woeste, who is the author of “Henry Ford’s War on Jews and the Legal Battle Against Hate Speech.”

Read More

01/15 Links Pt1: Yes, Israel Can Apply Israeli Law to the West Bank; The Promise and Peril of Phase 2 in Gaza; Do Iranian lives matter?; Court Rules: Mahmoud Khalil Can Be Rearrested

From Ian:

Eugene Kontorovich: Yes, Israel Can Apply Israeli Law to the West Bank

Israel’s sovereign rights over all of Judea and Samaria do not dictate the form of governance there. Indeed, since the Oslo process of the early ’90s, Israel has not governed the Palestinians of Judea and Samaria, who are instead misruled by the Palestinian Authority. Israel neither taxes them nor conscripts them; it does not write their schoolbooks or make their welfare policies or clean their streets. Israel’s current interactions with the Palestinian population focus almost entirely on hard security issues. Given that all nations enjoy an inherent right to self-defense, this would be the case whether the Palestinian areas were technically an independent sovereign or not.

President Trump’s 2020 peace plan, recently reaffirmed in his 20-point plan for peace, contemplated Israel extending its civil law to roughly half of Judea and Samaria, where the Jewish population is concentrated, and leaving the other half for a potential Arab state. This helps explain his comments about “annexation of the West Bank.” However, while Trump does not support Israel applying its law to those areas under Palestinian Authority control, that is not inconsistent with the proposals being discussed in the Knesset.

The so-called annexation plans being discussed in Israel are thus not about the incorporation of foreign territory into Israel proper. Rather, they are about ending the anomalous military administration that has applied in this area since 1967. After the Six-Day War, Israel never fully applied its domestic laws to the territory because it always expected the Arab states to sue for peace, and it was always prepared to transfer to them at least some part of the territory. Until the late 1980s, many Israelis assumed that the party for such negotiations would be Jordan. With the Oslo process, Israel’s “peace partner” became the Palestine Liberation Organization. In both cases, there was no point in hurriedly applying Israeli law to territory that might not remain Israeli because of a negotiated peace settlement.

Israel’s system of military governance in Judea and Samaria was always intended to be temporary. In retaining that system through decades of negotiations with the Palestinians, all of which resulted in their rejection of internationally backed statehood offers, Israel seems to have both severely misjudged the preferences and intentions of its Arab neighbors while also injuring its own citizens, creating a new problem of its own making.

Today, roughly 700,000 Jewish Israelis live in Judea and Samaria—where they have every legal and historical right to live and buy property. Yet Israelis and Arabs alike continue to find themselves governed by an odd patchwork of military regulations that has deliberately never been normalized or transparent to anyone and, over time, has become increasingly unwieldy. Property law is based on obscure Ottoman statutes, permitting for infrastructure projects is difficult and burdensome, and environmental regulations don’t exist for either Jews or Arabs. Clearly, this ad hoc situation is being sustained by a combination of official Israeli delusion and sloth and by external actors whose goal is to make life in these areas as practically unpleasant as possible for everyone.

Five decades of Arab rejectionism interspersed with violent terrorist assaults has made it untenable to continue to hold the legal regulation of Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria in limbo. And neither international law nor Western principles of democracy stand in the way of Israel finally applying its own civil law to its own citizens in those areas.

Seth Mandel: The Promise and Peril of Phase 2 in Gaza

The decision to move to the second phase without a clear Hamas disarmament plan in place was not a mistake. As I argued last month, any extensive delay helps Hamas, which is gearing up for another round of fighting at some point. Also, the cease-fire deal pretty much locks any progress in place, since the IDF is in charge of security for any territory under reconstruction. Hamas can dig in, but it won’t advance.

The challenge that Hamas still presents, however, is significant. The scenario that Trump’s team expects to play out is the following: Life for Gazans improves exponentially in the half of the enclave stewarded by the Israelis and a supplemental international force, and pressure on Hamas increases while the humanitarian crisis abates.

But here’s another scenario: The moment shovels get put in the ground on the Israeli-controlled side, Hamas begins firing rockets and challenging the troops along the Yellow Line with skirmishes and attempted incursions. In this environment, the stabilization force never materializes and the technocrats wait for the skies to clear. With rebuilding frozen, Israel has no choice but to go into Hamas-controlled Gaza and disarm the terror group by force. But the renewed fighting takes a toll on the civilians left in Hamas’s half of the enclave, and scenes from the two years of war start replaying themselves.

Trump will obviously support the forced disarmament of Hamas even (or especially) if Israel is the one to do it. But will the Europeans fold? Will the stabilization force dissolve before it’s even on the ground?

There are only two reliable actors in this saga: the U.S. and Israel. Hamas is going to attempt to make it so that the U.S. and Israel are the only actors in the saga at all. As long as the U.S. and Israel are committed to victory, they’ll succeed. Because the enemy always gets a vote, and Hamas always votes for war.

John Ondrasik: The "Free Palestine" Crowd Seems to Have Zero Interest in Freeing Iran

In recent days the tyrannical Iranian regime has conducted mass arrests and massacred thousands of protesters. Yet American college campuses, so recently the site of passionate encampments in support of the Palestinian people, are eerily quiet about what's happening in Iran. The congressional microcaucus known as the Squad are oddly mum about the suffering of women and children in Iran.

What's happening in Iran is a human rights nightmare. The UN Human Rights Council in recent years has been a merry-go-round of "genocide" accusations against Israel. Yet it has issued zero resolutions and held no inquiries about Iran. There is no global demand for humanitarian aid for the Iranian protesters, or even a ceasefire, from the people and institutions who don't hesitate to weigh in on Israel and Gaza.

Tahmineh Dehbozorgi, an attorney with the Institute for Justice in Washington who spent her childhood in Iran, says the millions risking their lives in Iran don't fit neatly into "the lazy moral categories that dominate modern discourse: oppressor and oppressed, colonizer and colonized, white and non-white."

Read More