Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Wednesday, November 26, 2025

Albert Einstein on antisemitism and Zionism, 1921

The Jewish Chronicle published an essay by Albert Einstein in 1921 about antisemitism and Zionism. It is not so well known and has some interesting parts.

He discussed why right-wing antisemites proudly identify as such, but socialist antisemites do not, which is as true today as it was then:

In many instances anti-Semitism is a question capable of a political solvent. It often, in other words, depends on the political party to which a man belongs whether he becomes a professed anti-Semite. A Socialist, for instance, even if he is a convinced anti-Semite, would not make his creed known, or act up to it, because it is not in the programme of his party. Among Conservatives, however, it is different. Anti-Semitism in their case arises from a desire to exacerbate for their party purposes the ill-feeling inherent in the populace.

Since the socialist, progressive Left define themselves as being against bigotry, they must hide their bigotry behind other labels - nowadays, anti-Zionism.

he describes how antisemitism in Germany was more pronounced than in Switzerland or England, especially against Jews who fled Eastern Europe.

Until two years ago I lived in Switzerland, and during my stay there I did not realise my Judaism. There was nothing that called forth any Jewish sentiments in me. When I moved to Berlin all that changed. There I saw the trouble many young Jews were in. I saw how, amid anti-Semitic surroundings, a well-ordered study, and with it a way to a safe existence, was made impossible for them. This refers specially to the Eastern-born Jews living there, who were exposed continually to provocation. I do not believe that their number is a large one in Germany as a whole. Only in Berlin are they at all numerous. Nevertheless, their presence has become a public question. At meetings, conferences, and in newspapers there is a movement for the disposing of them quickly or for the interning of them. Housing difficulties and the economic depression are used as arguments for these harsh measures. Facts are being exaggerated intentionally, in order to influence public opinion. These Eastern-born Jews are made the scapegoat of all ailments of German political life of to-day, and for all the after effects of the war. Instigation against these unfortunate fugitives who only just saved themselves from that hell which Eastern Europe represents to-day, has become an effective political weapon which all demagogues successfully use. When the Government intended the expulsion of these Jews, I stood up for them, and pointed out in the “Berliner Tageblatt” the inhumanity and foolishness of such a measure.

Einstein then goes on to describe how his experience of German antisemitism turned him into a Zionist, noting that denying Jewish peoplehood is itself deplorable - a point I made recently when I wrote that today's anti-Zionism is indeed antisemitic for that very reason.

These and similar happenings have brought about in me the Jewish National sentiment.
I am a National Jew in the sense that I ask for the preservation of the Jewish, as of every other, nationality. I look upon Jewish nationality as a fact, and I think that every Jew ought to come to definite conclusions on Jewish matters based upon this fact. I look upon the rise of Jewish self-assertion to be, too, in the interest of non-Jews. That was the main motive of my joining the Zionist movement. For me Zionism is not merely a question of colonisation. The Jewish nation is a living thing, and the sentiment of Jewish Nationalism must be developed both in Palestine and everywhere else.

To deny the Jews nationality in the Diaspora is, indeed, deplorable. If one adopts the point of view of confining Jewish effort to nationalism to Palestine, then one, to all intents and purposes, denies the existence of a Jewish people. In that case one should have the courage to carry through, in the quickest and most complete manner, entire assimilation.

We live in a time of intense and perhaps exaggerated nationalism. But my Zionism does not exclude in me cosmopolitan views. I believe in the actuality of Jewish nationality, and I believe that every Jew has duties towards his co-religionists. The meaning of Zionism is thus many-sided. It opens out to Jews who are despairing in the Ukrainian hell or in Poland hopes for a more humane existence. Through the return of the Jews to Palestine, and so back to a normal and healthy economic life, Zionism means, too, a productive function, which should enrich mankind at large.

But the principal point is that Zionism must tend to strengthen the dignity and self-respect of the Jews in the Diaspora. I have always been annoyed by the undignified assimilationist cravings and strivings which I have observed in so many of my friends. Through the founding of a Jewish Commonwealth in Palestine, the Jewish people will again be in the position to bring their creative abilities into unhindered full play. Through the erection of the Hebrew University and similar institutions, the Jewish people will not only help their own national renaissance, but will enrich their moral culture and knowledge, and, as centuries ago, be directed to new and better ways than those which present world-conditions necessarily entail for them.

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

Sixty years ago, in 1965, the United Nations debated the text of what was to become the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD.)

The United States proposed that the Convention include three words:

The States Parties to this Convention undertake to adopt immediate and positive measures designed to eradicate all incitement to, or acts of, such discrimination and to declare and, to this end, to recognize as offences punishable by law all dissemination of ideas based on racial superiority or hatred, acts of violence or incitement to such acts against any group of persons or individuals of another race or of different colour or ethnic origin, including anti-Semitism, and also any assistance to racist activities, including the financing thereof.

The Soviet Union was very upset at including antisemitism in the text, as were the Arab countries. So it suggested its own language that compared Zionism with antisemitism, Nazism and apartheid:

The States Parties to the Convention condemn anti-Semitism, Zionism, Nazism, neo-Nazism, apartheid and racial discrimination in all its forms, and all ideologies and practices based on racial intolerance and hatred.

This upset Israel quite a bit, as well as most of the West, so the UN did what it normally does - it took out all language from both proposals as a compromise, meaning that the Soviet Union won by ICERD not including antisemitism as one of the things it is against.

In fact, the Israeli representative called it out in exactly those terms. The notes of the meeting says that he suggested that the "amendment had been put forward for reasons of political opportunism or in order so to complicate the work of the Committee as to achieve the elimination from the Convention of any reference to anti-Semitism.... it was an affront to Israel and to the Jewish people everywhere."

But the Soviet Union had also planted the weeds of the UN becoming doctrinally anti-Israel with that amendment. They grew quickly. In only ten years the UN associated Zionism with racism It took a little longer to associate it with the others - it linked Israel to racial discrimination 36 years before the Durban conference, and with apartheid some 55 years before major NGOs more or less simultaneously colluded to come up with the conclusion that Israel was practicing apartheid. (So far the only people I've seen try to equate Zionism with antisemitism are the haters at Electronic Intifada, although the number who blame Israel for antisemitism is increasing quickly. and equating Israel with the Nazis is the entire point of the "Gaza genocide" slander.)

The facts haven't changed since 1965 when the world roundly rejected the idea that Zionism was something to be condemned. But propaganda works with the mindless repetition of falsehoods so that the association is burned into the brains of generations who don't even have the ability to think for themselves.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

11/25 Links Pt2: Why the Palestinians Are Famous According to Mahmoud Darwish; Nas Daily: I’m determined to show the real Israel; Understanding anti-Jewish immigrant roots behind Mamdani's progressive antisemitism

From Ian:

Gadi Taub: The Viral ‘Prison Rape’ That Never Happened

Many unanswered questions remain: While the court probably did not know it was being lied to, why did it accept arguments that were clearly implausible? Why did AG Baharav-Miara not order the arrest of Tomer-Yerushalmi or the confiscation of her phone and her computer immediately after she tendered her resignation? Did she not realize that Tomer-Yerushalmi, who had already done so much to cover her tracks, could use that time to destroy evidence and potentially coordinate testimonies? Baharav-Miara herself will be at least a witness, if not a suspect, in the case. Yet she still refused to recuse herself from overseeing the investigation into Tomer-Yerushalmi, and snubbed the Knesset’s joint session of the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee and the Constitution, Law and Justice Committee, before which she was summoned to appear.

All this prompted Justice Minister Yariv Levin, author of the now-defunct judicial reform, to announce that Baharav-Miara would be barred from the investigation. Her office retorted that the minister had no authority to bar her. To which Levin responded by appointing a special prosecutor—an institution hitherto unknown in Israel. This was a major vindication for Levin: The entire episode—the cover-up, the lack of transparency, the illicit intimacy between law enforcement and the judiciary (over which Israel has no oversight agencies), and the collective contempt for the normal legal process when these agencies investigate themselves—convincingly showed why his controversial legal reforms were necessary.

But Baharav-Miara was not about to relinquish control of the investigation in which she and her subordinates have been implicated, ever since she defended Tomer-Yerushalmi in court. The matter reached the Supreme Court, which decided to bar Baharav-Miara from overseeing the investigation. The judges were clearly not happy to discover they had been lied to by the people whose good name they were helping to protect. Although it ruled against Levin’s special prosecutor based on a technicality, the court authorized him to appoint another (however, it suspended the new appointment last Thursday, to Levin’s understandable chagrin).

When a prosecutor is finally agreed on, it is not clear whether the investigation will manage to get to the bottom of the affair—especially the involvement of Baharav-Miara and her allies in Israel’s various bureaucracies. Nevertheless, the foundations of Israel’s juristocracy have been shaken. Rifts have opened among the various branches of what the Israeli right calls the “deep state.”

Three other dramatic events also recently transpired: Tomer-Yerushalmi was hospitalized after overdosing on medication while under house arrest, in what appeared to be an attempted suicide. One of the Force 100 soldiers, with a distinguished career in combat service, suffered a heart attack. And the president of the military court has recommended that the IDF prosecution accept the request of the defense to halt all proceedings against the Force 100 accused soldiers—now that the alleged victim is no longer in Israeli custody.

There’s also a cultural aspect without which it is difficult to make sense of all this. Israel’s contemporary elites look at the masses with contempt, viewing them as deplorables. In the eyes of these elites and the mainstream press, the riot in Sde Teiman was an attack on the rule of law, which Tomer-Yerushalmi upheld. Here were the right-wing proto-fascists wielding their pitchforks against the gatekeepers of impartial justice. In this view, the Force 100 soldiers and the rioters belonged to the same crowd of tribal ethno-nationalists who share a common contempt for liberal values and human rights. The right saw it very differently: Unpatriotic globalist progressive elites were weaponizing the law in the middle of a war to show the world they are better than the rest of us. Indeed, Israel’s progressive elites have come to define themselves in opposition to those mostly non-Ashkenazi masses, whom they view as too Jewish, too provincial, and too nationalistic.

Tomer-Yerushalmi may argue that her leak was in the wider public interest: to show international jurists that Israel is willing to use force to apprehend its own soldiers and thereby deny international tribunals a legal reason to intervene. Implausible as it seems to most of us, she may well have believed that throwing Force 100 under the bus was a convincing demonstration of Israel’s high-minded moral standards.

Yet it seems that in this case, as in others, identity trumps ideology. To imagine themselves as members of the enlightened global elite, Israeli progressives must define themselves against the Israel that “right-thinking” people abhor. The beautiful people of Spain or the Netherlands or Berkeley, California, don’t particularly care what the facts of Israel’s conflicts with its neighbors are or whether the Israel they have constructed through sloganeering about “colonialism,” “apartheid,” and “genocide” is real or a malevolent fiction. Expressing their abhorrence of a brutal rape that never happened in Sde Teiman was an opportunity for Israel’s elites to show whose side they were on: their fellow elites or the deplorables. Nothing about their choice should be surprising.

300 pack London launch as UK Israel Alliance debuts with Douglas Murray conversation

Around 300 people attended the launch of the UK Israel Alliance (UKIA) in Central London last week, as the organisation – formerly UK Israel Future Projects – unveiled its new name and mission with a headline conversation featuring author and commentator Douglas Murray.

Interviewed on stage by Daily Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson, Murray reflected on reporting from Israel and Gaza after Hamas’s 7 October atrocities, the regional shifts shaped by the Abraham Accords, and the challenges and opportunities facing pro-Israel advocacy in Britain.

The evening opened with tributes from committee members Bernard Shapero and Sir William Shawcross to the late Martin Green, the 92-year-old founder of UK Israel Future Projects, remembered as a committed Zionist and a pillar of the UK pro-Israel community.

Guests included cross-party parliamentarians from both Houses, diplomats, journalists and long-standing supporters of the group. UKIA says its rebrand signals a renewed commitment to strengthening UK-Israel ties by bringing together activists and thought-leaders “from all political, religious and ethnic backgrounds”.

Chaired by Lord Bew, UKIA’s multi-faith committee includes Sir William Shawcross, Tim Vince, Simon Marks, Bernard Shapero and Dr Efrat Sopher. The organisation plans a rolling series of public events with international speakers addressing key issues affecting both countries.

Lord Bew said the launch demonstrated “the depth of support for Israel outside the Jewish community”, adding: “UKIA’s duty is to proactively reach Brits from all walks of life and proudly celebrate the fact that our two countries are stronger together. Israel has been subjected to an appalling smear campaign, but it is abundantly clear that many Brits cherish the shared values our great countries stand for.”

Nas Daily: I’m determined to show the real Israel

Israeli-Arab influencer Nuseir Yassin has described his mission to “show the Israel I want and like” and insisted he was now more hopeful about the future Middle East than at any time.

Known to 68 million social media followers as Nas Daily for his videos chronicling the lives of people in far-flung corners of the globe, he addressed more than 400 guests at Magen David Adom’s annual dinner last night.

In conversation with broadcaster Rob Rinder, he described how he left a safe job in tech almost a decade ago to create videos showing the “exact opposite” of the stories that tend to dominate discourse around the Middle East. Or, as Rinder put it, to “turn the toxicity of social media into something positive”.

“Twenty percent of Israel is Arab,” he said. “One force says you’re Palestinian and you shouldn’t have anything to do with Israel. Another force says we need to share the land and build up the land together. To escape the first force is hard. To call myself Israeli means I love Israel. It means freedom of speech. It’s the work that organisations like MDA are trying to do. This is what we should all be trying to promote, whatever the cost.”

“The most controversial topic in the world today is Israel and Palestine. Each time you talk about it, you pay a price. But you’ve got to humanise Israelis and Jewish people around the world and humanise Arabs as well. If you get to know someone, it’s very hard to hate them.”

He describes this as the safest time to land in Tel Aviv and paints a picture of a time when you could have lunch in Beirut, dinner in Damascus and then head back to Jerusalem in one taxi ride.

As for the two million Israeli Arabs within Israel, he said, they had a decision to make after the horrors of 7 October. “I think a large proportion have decided – including me – that we belong in Israel,” the former Harvard student told the audience. “That is the shock it takes to be able to see clearly. We don’t want to live under a Palestinian or Jordanian government. Despite the hardships, we are all Israelis.”

Oscar-winning filmmaker moves to Israel and trains his lens on October 7 survivors

Oscar-winning filmmaker Richard Trank has been making documentaries about Israel for decades. Today, he finally lives here.

“I wish I had made this decision earlier,” Trank told The Times of Israel about his aliyah to Israel last month, after a lifetime living and working in Los Angeles. “But I can’t change that.”

One of the first films Trank is working on under his brand-new production company, Sea Point Films and Media, aims to tell the story of Israelis recovering from the October 7 attacks and their rehabilitation journeys.

“I started thinking about really a post-October 7 project, because we all know what happened on October 7. We’ve all heard the stories, and it’s important to tell those stories,” Trank said during a recent video interview from his new home in Herzliya. “But I started thinking about, how do you come out of that? How do you rebuild your life?”

That film, titled “The Road Home,” is part of a fresh start for Trank, who spent more than 40 years at the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, spearheading its Moriah Films production branch, helping to create an impressive slate of award-winning documentary films on Jewish and Israeli themes.

Trank left the Wiesenthal Center at the beginning of this year, around a year after its founder, Rabbi Marvin Hier, retired from the helm.

“At the end of 2023, new leadership came in, and they made a decision to move Moriah into a different direction, away from documentaries,” Trank said. “And there really wasn’t a place for me.”

The departure marks a major shift for Trank, who wrote and directed 16 documentary films for Moriah, telling stories of Jewish and Israeli life and working with some of the biggest names in Hollywood. His most recent film, “Never Stop Dreaming: The Life and Legacy of Shimon Peres” – narrated by George Clooney – is currently streaming on Netflix.

Prior to that, he adapted Yehuda Avner’s book “The Prime Ministers” into a series of two films that included Sandra Bullock, Michael Douglas, and Christoph Waltz, in voice acting roles. Trank’s film on Theodor Herzl was narrated by Ben Kingsley, and past documentaries also featured Nicole Kidman, Michael Douglas, Dustin Hoffman, and Morgan Freeman.

The last project he completed before leaving the Wiesenthal Center was a long-in-the-making documentary about David Ben Gurion, narrated by Julianna Margulies, which has yet to be released by Moriah.

“It’s really up to Wiesenthal about what they ultimately do with that film,” said Trank. “But I’m proud of it.”

Trank won the Academy Award for best documentary for co-producing 1997’s “The Long Way Home,” about the journeys of Holocaust survivors in the aftermath of World War II.

In many ways, he said, “The Road Home” — exploring the journey of October 7 survivors — mirrors that film’s exploration of how Holocaust survivors started over and rebuilt their lives in the wake of World War II.

11/25 Links Pt1: Israel receives body said to be hostage held in Gaza; You Cannot Build a Stable Peace with a Partner that Openly Prepares for the Next Massacre

From Ian:

You Cannot Build a Stable Peace with a Partner that Openly Prepares for the Next Massacre

Kobi Michael, a senior researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies and the Misgav Institute, said that Washington's basic assumption that Hamas can be induced into a demilitarized political arrangement is flawed.

"The Americans still believe they can implement the [ceasefire] plan by having the Turks, Qataris, and Egyptians pressure Hamas. They are convinced that with an international force and Arab involvement, Hamas will eventually comply. I think this is naive and wrong. Hamas does not intend to comply."

For Michael, Hamas's behavior during and after the fighting shows that it sees any ceasefire not as an end state, but as a tactical pause. "They continued recruiting people, training them, rebuilding tunnels, and reconstructing their capacities from the first day of the ceasefire."

"They butchered opponents in the streets, they appointed new governors, and they operated ministries. They are reconstituting their governmental and military capacities since day one. This is not the behavior of a movement preparing for demilitarization."

"As long as Hamas remains in control and is committed to another Oct. 7, the American ceasefire framework will not get anywhere. You cannot build a stable peace with a partner that openly prepares for the next massacre. At some point, the United States will have to recognize that Hamas is the obstacle, not part of the solution."

"Israel has to give the Americans the time and space to try their way, so that the responsibility for the failure of the plan falls on Hamas. But in the end, I believe they will move to Plan B, securing eastern Gaza under IDF oversight, expanding it gradually to the west while crushing and dismantling Hamas if it continues to violate the agreement."

"Hamas will regroup simultaneously in Gaza, the West Bank, and other countries, rebuild its capacities, and look for the second opportunity for another Oct. 7. This is exactly the reason we have to crush them and dismantle them. As long as they hold on to their weapons and ideology, no ceasefire framework, American or UN, will produce real peace."

The World's Been Too Rough with Israel

Israel's response to the October 2023 Hamas-led massacres and kidnappings of over one thousand civilians, as well as to missile and drone attacks from Iran and its regional militias, has been vigorous.

Pursuing victory - ending the threats to Israeli towns and cities from Hamas in Gaza, Hizbullah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, and the regime in Tehran - requires the application of determined, and at times overwhelming, military force.

In Gaza, Israel's army has been operating in some of the most difficult urban warfare conditions in history.

Tragically, thousands of Palestinian civilians have died during the fighting over the past two years. But here is a simple truth: Hamas's leaders could have released the hostages and ordered their men to lay down their arms at any point.

They knew Palestinian women and children would be collateral damage as they fired missiles and launched attacks from apartment buildings, inviting airstrikes.

Preeminent news outlets routinely accept Hamas's allegations and lies at face value and downplay or overlook the group's actions, whether its use of human shields that have caused thousands of civilian deaths or its vicious tyranny and misogyny.

The coverage and political gesturing in the West have been, at best, disproportionate and prejudiced, and, at worst, dishonest, malicious, and likely to extend the war and the suffering.

In October 2025, UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese issued a report containing a statement so sweeping, and so apparently absurd, that it merits careful examination. In Paragraph 41, she writes:

Given that the occupation of Palestinian territory is an ongoing unlawful use of force in violation of the UN Charter, nothing Israel does there can be understood as 'defensive' in nature.

This formulation, presented as a straightforward application of international law, in fact creates a logical and legal framework that applies to no other nation on Earth. By following its implications to their logical conclusions, we can see that Albanese has constructed an argument that effectively strips Israel - and Israel alone - of the inherent right to self-defense recognized under the UN Charter.

Albanese's position rests on two interconnected claims. First, she maintains that Gaza remains "occupied" despite Israel's complete withdrawal of military forces and civilian settlers in 2005. In her view, and that of the International Court of Justice's 2024 advisory opinion, Israel exercises "effective control" over Gaza through its blockade of land, sea, and air access. I believe that this is absurd for reasons I have discussed many times before.

Second, she argues that Article 51 of the UN Charter, which preserves every state's "inherent right of individual or collective self-defence if an armed attack occurs", does not apply to threats emanating from territory a state occupies. When you occupy territory, she contends, threats from within that territory are internal security matters to be handled through law enforcement mechanisms, not military self-defense.

Applied to October 7, 2023, this reasoning produces a remarkable conclusion: Hamas's attack, which killed approximately 1,200 people and resulted in 250 hostages, did not trigger Israel's right to self-defense under international law. In Albanese's framework, this was not an armed attack by a foreign actor but rather an internal security breach within occupied territory. Israel's response - even airstrikes launched from Israeli soil before any ground forces entered Gaza - therefore cannot be characterized as defensive, according to Albanese.

The first problem with Albanese's framework is that it contradicts itself. The entire legal edifice of occupation law presumes that an occupier exercises actual authority over the occupied territory. The 1907 Hague Regulations, the foundational text of occupation law, state that territory is occupied when it is "actually placed under the authority of the hostile army." The Fourth Geneva Convention imposes extensive duties on occupying powers precisely because they exercise effective control: they must maintain public order, ensure the welfare of the civilian population, and administer the territory responsibly.

If Gaza is occupied, then Israel has both the right and the duty to maintain security within it. An occupying power that cannot lawfully respond to armed attacks emanating from territory it supposedly controls is not an occupying power in any real sense. . Albanese's framework asks us to accept that Israel bears all the legal obligations of occupation while being denied the most basic prerogative any occupier must possess: the ability to maintain order.

More fundamentally, her insistence on Gaza's occupied status inadvertently undermines the occupation claim itself. Prior to October 7, Israel had no military or civilian presence inside Gaza. Hamas governed the territory, collected taxes, ran schools and hospitals, maintained its own security forces, and - crucially - built and deployed military capabilities without any Israeli interference. If Israel could not exercise routine administrative authority inside Gaza, in what meaningful sense did it "occupy" the territory?

I propose a simple, common-sense test for whether territory is truly occupied: Can the alleged occupier fire a public sanitation worker in that territory?

This test cuts through abstract legal theorizing to ask a practical question about who actually exercises governmental authority.

In Gaza before October 7, the answer was emphatically no. Israel could not fire a Gaza municipality sanitation worker without launching a military operation that would be treated - by Hamas, by the population, and by most of the world - as an invasion of foreign territory. Israel could not collect taxes, regulate businesses, appoint officials, or enforce its criminal law against Gaza's population. To do any of these things, it would have to fight its way in.

This practical test reveals what the abstract legal category of "effective control through blockade" obscures: Gaza was not occupied in any meaningful sense. Hamas exercised sovereign authority within the territory, and Israel's control of some borders, maritime access and all airspace did not substitute Israeli administration for Hamas governance.

Notably, this test also reveals the complexity of the West Bank itself. In Area A, where the Palestinian Authority exercises full civil and security control, Israel similarly cannot fire a sanitation worker without mounting an incursion. This suggests that even critics of Israeli policy should acknowledge that the West Bank is not a single legal unit, and that Area A functions more like an autonomous enclave than occupied territory.

The deeper problem with Albanese's framework is that it creates a standard applied to no other country. Consider how international law has treated analogous situations:

When the United States invaded Afghanistan after September 11, 2001, the action was widely accepted as lawful self-defense against al-Qaeda, even though U.S. forces were now operating on Afghan soil.

When coalition forces entered Syria to fight ISIS without Syrian government consent - an arguably illegal intervention - they retained the right to defend themselves against attacks. The legality of their presence did not extinguish their inherent right to self-preservation.

Article 51 of the UN Charter contains no clause stating "unless your forces are already on someone else's land." The right to self-defense is territorial-agnostic. A soldier under fire can return fire regardless of whether his presence in a given location is lawful. This is not merely a principle of international law; it is a recognition of basic human reality.

Albanese's framework would change this, but only for Israel. Taken literally, her position means that Israeli troops in the West Bank cannot return fire if attacked, and that Israel cannot intercept rockets launched from Gaza until they are physically over Israeli territory. No other country faces such a constraint. No other country is told that because it disputes territory with a neighbor, or because it maintains a military presence in contested areas, it has forfeited the right to defend its citizens.

Albanese attempts to soften her position by acknowledging that Israel has a "right to protect" its territory and citizens. But this narrow concession, limited to targeted, law-enforcement-style operations, is worlds away from the robust self-defense rights that Article 51 provides. When 3,000 armed fighters breach your border, massacre civilians, and take hundreds of hostages, the response is not a police action. It is war. Every other nation on Earth would be permitted to treat it as such.

The ICJ's own 2004 advisory opinion on Israel's security barrier, which Albanese frequently cites, did not go as far as she does. The Court held that Israel cannot invoke Article 51 against threats from within occupied territory, but its reasoning was specific: because Israel is the occupying power, it must use occupation law frameworks rather than the law of inter-state armed conflict. The Court never said that Israel loses all defensive rights because its presence is illegal. Albanese's rhetorical escalation to "nothing Israel does there can be understood as defensive" is advocacy language, not a mainstream statement of international law.

At the same time that Albanese denies Israel the basic right of self defense, she gives Hamas and other terror groups carte blanche to attack Israel as "legitimate resistance." The only thing she opposes is attacking Jewish civilians directly, for now.

Francesca Albanese's framework relies on a definition of "occupation" so elastic that it can encompass territory Israel does not control, while simultaneously denying Israel any means of asserting control. It creates obligations without corresponding rights. It demands that Israel behave as an occupier selectively while maintaining that some even mandatory actions of occupiers are illegal in Israel's case.

The sanitation worker test reveals what this abstraction conceals: occupation is about who actually governs a territory, who can hire and fire its workers, who collects its taxes and runs its schools. By that practical measure, Gaza was not occupied before October 7, which means October 7 was an armed attack from external territory triggering full Article 51 self-defense rights.

International law should be applied consistently to all nations. Frameworks that single out one country for a unique disability - stripping it of rights afforded to everyone else -a re not law at all. They are politics dressed in legal language.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

The Washington Post wrote an extended piece on Iran's water crisis, Taps are running dry in Iran. Decades of bad decisions are to blame. It listed things like over-extraction of groundwater, building too many dams that disrupt water flows, and subsidizing farmers who then plant water-thirsty crops.

Even in this article, Iranian officials can't stop themselves from somehow mentioning Israel:

Peyman Falsafi, vice-chairman of the parliament’s agriculture, water, and natural resources commission... pointed to the Israeli bombing of Iran during the 12-day war earlier this year and Palestinian starvation caused by Israel’s siege of Gaza as evidence for why Iran must provide its own food. “Today, farming and food are used as weapons,” he said.

Yet somehow unmentioned is the basic fact that Iran has poured billions of dollars into building its "axis of resistance" against Israel, funding weapons and terrorist groups in Gaza, Lebanon, Iraq and Yemen as well as the previous Syrian government. As Falsafi's statement shows, Iran's obsession with destroying Israel outweighs its concerns for its own citizens. Those billions could have funded desalination and pipeline projects. Iran relies on desalination for only a tiny percentage of its water usage as opposed to other nations in the (Persian!) Gulf.

The best estimate I could come up with is that Iran has been spending about $2 billion annually on the "axis of resistance" - more during the Syrian civil war. This is more than it has spent on water management for its own people.

Similar articles about Tehran's water crisis in CNN, The Guardian and the New York Times also fail to mention Iran's historic budget priorities of countering Israel over caring for its citizens when discussing the looming catastrophe.

The only outlet I saw that mentions this obvious fact was The Arab News, which said a solution "will not be possible without a complete change in Tehran’s foreign policy, starting with bringing an end to any support for nonstate armed groups, such as in Lebanon or Iraq. It should think of its people and the future generations in the entire Middle East."

The problem is man-made. Iran's rabid antisemitism causes its own citizens to suffer.

(h/t Brad)

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

On November 23, Israel killed prominent Hezbollah leader Haytham Ali Tabatabai in a Beirut suburb. Israel targeted Tabatabai due to his role in planning and orchestrating terror attacks against Israel, as well as rebuilding Hezbollah's military capabilities in violation of the ceasefire and UN Security Council Resolution 1701 (which requires Hezbollah's disarmament south of the Litani River).

But Iranian reports of his death - across the board, including sites associated with the Iranian Revolutionary Guards - add a detail in Farsi that is missing from both Western and Israeli reports.

As one Iranian linked outlet translated it to English, "This resistance commander was martyred on November 23, 2025, while carrying out a field mission, in an Israeli airstrike on the Haret Harik area in the southern suburbs of Beirut, along with a number of his comrades."

That means he was not just merely a leader of Hezbollah that Israel was targeting. He was a ticking bomb, planning a specific terror attack - maybe in Israel, maybe in Europe or another country, where hezbolah has orchestrated attacks on Jews before.

It is possible that Iranian media added this detail just to make him look better to their audience. But Hezbollah is essentially a branch of the IRGC, so Iran would know if he was planning a terror attack. Hezbollah wouldn't necessarily brag about his preparing a new terror attack in their obituary for Tabatabai, because there would be backlash in Lebanon - but Iran might..

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

Miss Palestine is a scam

Nadeen Ayoub, the Miss Palestine contestant who was previously married to the son of a convicted terrorist, is in Thailand for the Miss Universe pageant.

She made a truly mt-see video whining that she lost the Most Beautiful Contestant award, voted by the public, to Miss Tanzania.

She was in first place until the last hour, she says. It is impossible that Miss Tanzania could have gotten so many votes in so short a time!

I've never seen a pageant contestant act so childishly and with such a sense of entitlement.

Now, compare the Ayoub with Miss Tazania. Ayoub is literally cross-eyed. Can anyone believe that she is legitimately the most beautiful contestant?

The only reason she was in the top fifty was an online campaign on her behalf. Which is how anyone wins these people's awards anyway. Her whining is about losing an award that she was only in the running for because her people got lots of Israel-haters to vote for her.

If an Israeli or American contestant would make a similar video denouncing the Black winner of the competition, immediately they would be accused of racism. But the very white-skinned Miss Palestine cannot possibly be a racist, can she?

The bigger question is, how did Nadeen Ayoub win the Miss Palestine competition anyway? She is not objectively very beautiful compared to other contestants. Palestinian TV would never broadcast any such competition, and none could be held in the territories without is being firebombed by Islamists. . Someone appointed her - but who?

She was appointed by the "Miss Palestine Organization." And guess who founded it?

Nadeen Ayoub herself!

As The New Arab reported in September:

Speaking about her shift towards beauty competitions, Nadeen explains that while working in Palestine, she saw an opportunity to establish the Miss Palestine organisation.

“I felt like this was what I was meant to do — it felt like an alignment. I was meant to use this international platform and beauty competitions to create a positive impact, to do something meaningful for my people and the world," Nadeen tells The New Arab.

But founding the Miss Palestine organisation was not without its challenges. “It took me time, honestly, to build the Miss Palestine organisation with a small team, and that’s why, despite Palestine not always having the resources, we were finally able to get the support we needed to build the organisation and start going to international competitions,” she says.

She never won Miss Palestine - she created it for herself and scammed the world into believing that she is a legitimate pageant contestant!

All the other contestants worked hard to win regional and national competitions. Ayoub simply declared herself the winner.

It's all a scam.

When you think about it, this makes her the perfect representative of Palestine, an Arab political entity that was created only in recent decades but that pretends to be a legitimate, ancient country.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

11/24 Links Pt2: Oct. 7 victim families sue Binance over $1B in secret funding for Hamas; How the police used ‘fake claims’ to justify the ban on Maccabi Tel Aviv

From Ian:

Professors Need to Diversify What They Teach

Teaching of Israel and Palestine fits the same pattern. Staunchly anti-Zionist texts—those that question the moral legitimacy of the Israeli state—are commonly assigned. Rashid Khalidi, the just-retired Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia, is the most popular author on this topic in the database. A Palestinian-American and member of the Palestine Liberation Organization delegation in the 1990s, Khalidi places the blame on Israel for failing to resolve the conflict and sees the country’s existence as a consequence of settler-colonialism.

The problem is not the teaching of Khalidi itself, as some on the American right might insist. To the contrary, it is important for students to encounter voices like Khalidi’s. The problem is who he is usually taught with. Generally, Khalidi is taught with other critics of Israel, such as Charles D. Smith, Ilan Pappe, and James Gelvin.

Not only is Khalidi’s work rarely assigned alongside prominent critics; those critics seem to hardly get taught at all. They include Israel: A Concise History by Daniel Gordis, a professor at Shalem College in Israel. Despite winning the National Jewish Book Award, Gordis’s book appears only 22 times in the syllabus database. Another example is the work of Efraim Karsh, a prominent historian. His widely-cited classic, Fabricating Israeli History, appears just 24 times.

For most students, though, any exposure to the conflict begins and ends with Edward Said’s Orientalism, first published in 1978. Said is the intellectual godfather of so many of today’s scholars of the Middle East, thanks in no small part to this classic book. In Orientalism, Said claimed to be the first scholar to “culturally and politically” identify “wholeheartedly with the Arabs,” and he faulted the West for not recognizing the “Zionist invasion and colonization of Palestine.”

Orientalism is among the most popular books assigned in the United States, showing up in nearly four thousand courses in the syllabus database. But although it was a major source of controversy, both then and now, it is rarely assigned with any of the critics he sparred with, like Bernard Lewis, Ian Buruma, or Samuel Huntington. Instead, it’s most often taught with books by fellow luminaries of the postmodern left, such as Frantz Fanon, Judith Butler, and Michel Foucault.

Oct. 7 victim families sue Binance over $1B in secret funding for Hamas, Palestinian terror groups

Families of victims of Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel sued Binance Monday, claiming that the world’s largest cryptocurrency trading platform — and its recently pardoned founder and former CEO Changpeng Zhao — helped smooth the transfer of more than $1 billion to the accounts of terror groups responsible for the atrocity.

The lawsuit was filed on 306 plaintiffs and their family members who were murdered, maimed, or taken hostage on Oct. 7 in Israel or in various terrorist acts afterwards. They brought their claims against Binance, Zhao and senior executive Gunagying “Heina” Chen in Fargo, ND federal court.

The crypto platform had already been subject to criminal enforcement actions by the Department of Justice in 2023, resulting in Binance admitting to charges of money laundering and paying more than $4 billion in fines — as well as a four-month prison sentence for Zhao.

But the nearly 300-page complaint stated that Binance’s conduct was “far more serious and pervasive than what the US government disclosed” during those proceedings — and that the company “knowingly sent and received the equivalent of more than $1 billion to and from accounts and wallets controlled by the [foreign terror organizations] responsible for the October 7 Attacks.”

Those include Hamas, Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, according to the suit brought by attorneys at Willkie Farr & Gallagher LLP, Osen LLC, Stein Mitchell Beato & Missner LLP, and Motley Rice LLC.

“To this day, there is no indication that Binance has meaningfully altered its core business model,” the attorneys said in the suit, alleging the crypto platform was “intentionally designed as a criminal enterprise to facilitate money laundering on a global scale.”

Ali Mohammad Alawieh, the son of Hezbollah commander Muhammad Abd al-Rasul Alawieh, is the holder of one of the Binance accounts identified in the lawsuit.

Former Israeli hostage credits faith for survival in Gaza

A former Israeli Hamas hostage last week said it was his faith that allowed him to survive more than two years in captivity in Gaza.

The remarks by Segev Kalfon mirrored other hostages’ experiences. Whether from secular, traditional or religious backgrounds, many have said they clung to Judaism during their captivity.

“I had one percent chance of surviving—and I did,” Kalfon, 27, said in an interview with @LouderCreators posted on X by the Israeli Embassy in the United States.

“A person in this situation has nothing around them,” he added. “All that’s left is to believe. That’s it. Faith. When you believe in something you have something to lean on.”

Kalfon, who was released from Gaza last month as part of a ceasefire deal, said that he witnessed many miracles during his time in captivity. He said he was repeatedly beaten and tortured by his Hamas captors, who tried to convert him to Islam.

“In my darkest moments I knew I was facing a great test,” he said. “And if I survived every single day—and every day there was hell—there was a reason.”

Other former hostages have recounted how they prayed silently in captivity, recited the Sabbath benediction over water on Friday nights, tried to keep the Passover holiday and read from a book of Psalms that was found lying around.

Kalfon was among a group of former Israeli hostages who met with U.S. President Donald Trump at the White House on Thursday.

“In the most difficult moments, when hope faded away, the thought of big America and of your leadership helped me believe that one day, I will be able to leave Hamas captivity,” he wrote to Trump in a personal letter, Israel’s Channel 12 News reported on Saturday. “You, Mr. President, were the light for me in the darkest moments in the dark tunnels.”

11/24 Links Pt1: Should Jews Be Alarmed Yet? - with Ben Shapiro, Bari Weiss, and Dan Senor; Douglas Murray: Saving the West from Its Death Wish

From Ian:

David Harsanyi: Israel should phase out US aid for its own good

These days, Israel has no territorial ambitions. It’s been trying to get rid of Gaza for 30 years, at least. Moreover, American presidents have often pressured Israel to act in ways that undermine its security. Before Donald Trump became president, every successive administration constrained Israel in its battle with the Islamists in Iran, hoping to strike a deal with the mullahs. This isn’t new. Henry Kissinger bailed out the defeated Egyptians in 1973. Back in 1981, Ronald Reagan rebuked and penalized Israel for bombing Saddam Hussein’s Osirak nuclear facility, which was being built with the help of the French government. The Biden administration helped to prolong the Gaza war by continually undermining Israel due to domestic political pressures.

Worse, before Trump, every president in memory has exerted pressure on Israel to accept deals that would have created a terrorist state on two of its borders, even though a Palestinian state doesn’t further American interests in any conceivable way. Each effort only sparked more terrorism, suffering, and radicalization.

Ironically, pro-Palestinian activists advocating that the U.S. drop aid to Israel don’t seem to comprehend that their efforts only make a Palestinian state far less likely. No sane Western nation would create an Islamic state brimming with a radicalized population next door. The end of American aid would likely mean the end of any two-state solution. Which is good news. There is already a 23-state solution in place.

Anyway, with the rise of the pro-intifada progressive faction in the U.S., Israel shouldn’t expect Democrats to be allies for very long. And with the prospects of paleo-isolationists such as Vice President JD Vance being nominated by the GOP, American aid might be on its last legs anyway. Even if I’m wrong about the parties, Israel would do best to be autonomous, relying on the mutual military benefits and merits of its cause to continue its relationship with the U.S.

Finally, I know it might be difficult to believe that with all its space lasers and Rothschild cash, Israel could only extract a lousy $3.8 billion for its troubles. So, rest assured, cutting aid won’t stop paranoiacs from obsessing about Jews. But one of the most popular accusations of the Israel-hater is that tax-funded aid makes the U.S. complicit in the imagined genocides perpetrated by the Israeli military. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a modest and milquetoast bipartisan American lobbying concern, has become the rallying cry for most conspiracists who claim Israel has a grip on American politicians. They have it backward, of course. AIPAC only exists because millions of Americans support Israel and want American foreign policy to reflect their views. Paranoiacs focus on the strawman of AIPAC rather than American Jews or Christian Zionists for the same reasons leftists focus on the National Rifle Association rather than gun owners: They’re too cowardly to say what they mean.

In the end, Israel is a small nation of 10 million people, the size of New Jersey, so it will always need allies. For instance, it lacked the heavy bombers to hit Iranian nuclear sites buried deep in the earth. Only China, Russia, and the U.S. have them. But Israel is also a nuclear power with a high-tech economy and world-class armed forces. “Anti-Zionists” are just spinning their wheels. Israel would be fine standing completely on its own ingenuity and toughness.

Douglas Murray: Saving the West from Its Death Wish

The facts are raw, documented – and unbearable. On the morning of October 7, 2023, while some were just waking up, others were recording – and live-streaming – the glee they took in the massacre. One world watched. Another rejoiced. In New York, Douglas Murray absorbed the words and images, then immediately set off for Israel. From that journey – and the abyss it laid bare – the British journalist and intellectual drew a furious yet lucid essay, On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel, Hamas and the Future of the West. But the book is not merely a cry of anger; it is also a meditation on what it means to defend the West when it no longer knows what it stands for – or whether it still deserves to be defended, let alone saved.

Le Point - From your neoconservative beginnings to your current reflections on civilisation's decline, your thinking has shifted gradually from a strategic defence of the West to a cultural and symbolic one. Does 7 October 2023 represent a new phase in this intellectual evolution ?
Douglas Murray – Yes, I think so. I felt on October 7th the same way as Evelyn Waugh, in Unconditional Surrender, depicts one of his characters feeling at the moment of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact: "The enemy at last was plain in view; huge and hateful, all disguise cast off.” The moment I saw what Hamas was doing on the morning of the 7th, thousands of terrorists raping and slaughtering and kidnapping their way through the south of Israel, live-streaming it all for the world, glorying in death, expressing such ecstasy for death that is something of how I felt.

In your new book, the role of the image is central, and the iconography of horror is considered not as a consequence of violence, but as a driver of it. In your opinion, is this the hallmark of our era: aesthetic terrorism ?
No - that is (in the worst way) such a French way to look at something. The horror of Hamas is not principally about aesthetics or interpretation. It is about evil. Evil in its purest form – from a cult that literally worships death. The challenge for us is not just whether we can recognize and call out evil where we see it, but to dwell on what its opposite might be. What the good is. I met a couple in Canada the other week whose son was at the Nova party on the morning of October 7th. He protected a group of party-goers who were hiding from the terrorists in a shelter. He threw back grenade after grenade before being murdered himself. But as I told his parents, their son exemplified perhaps one of the greatest goods any human being can perform – he gave his life protecting life.

But you refer to images disseminated by terrorists themselves in a paradoxical gesture of exhibitionism. How does this 'perverse modernity' — 'barbarism 2.0' — make democracies even more vulnerable ?
As after Charlie Hebdo, the Bataclan, Samuel Paty and many other attacks, we have to decide whether we will indeed be terrorized by the terrorists: people who use the power of modern technology to broadcast their pre-medieval barbarism. I understand why many people feel fear, but I believe we should raise ourselves to the moment and not show fear but heroism.

Trump signs order to advance labeling Muslim Brotherhood as terrorists

US President Donald Trump on Monday began the process of designating certain Muslim Brotherhood chapters as foreign terrorist organizations and specially designated global terrorists, a move that would bring sanctions against one of the Arab world's oldest and most influential Islamist movements.

Trump signed an executive order directing Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to submit a report on whether to designate any Muslim Brotherhood chapters, such as those in Lebanon, Egypt, and Jordan, according to a White House fact sheet.

It orders the secretaries to move forward with any designations within 45 days of the report.

The Trump administration has accused Muslim Brotherhood factions in those countries of supporting or encouraging violent attacks against Israel and US partners, or of providing material support to Palestinian militant group Hamas.

"President Trump is confronting the Muslim Brotherhood’s transnational network, which fuels terrorism and destabilization campaigns against US interests and allies in the Middle East," according to the fact sheet.

The National Review reports:

Last month, over a thousand educators gathered together for the Northwest Teaching for Social Justice conference, which was sponsored by the Portland Association of Teachers, the Seattle Education Association, and Rethinking Schools (an educational magazine and a frequent partner with the NEA to promote activist classroom materials).

What do teachers learn at such a conference?

The available sessions betray the most extreme obsessions of activists:

A movement to oust the Anti-Defamation League from schools for being too Jewish
Four other presentations in support of Palestine
Sessions on how to queer history and math
An exploration of the “Power Rainbow”
Discussions of how to deal with parents who contest objectionable materials
A workshop to advance climate justice and decolonize science education
Example lessons for how to teach second graders about the evils of capitalism
Variations of “Palestine” and “Palestinian” appear 22 times across the agenda. Phonics appears not once.

This is, of course, distressing. But there is a danger that any criticism of ideological indoctrination will be viewed as just a demand to indoctrinate children in a different political agenda.

There is merit to that.

We need to take politics out of the classroom while still teaching children how to be good citizens of their country and of the planet.

There is one simple rule that can be applied to any subject at school that cuts through all ideologies:

Students must be taught how to think, not what to think.

Any topic that might be considered controversial or that parents might object to is fine as long as it is based on facts, everyone discussed is respected and students can disagree without penalty.

Already, this simple rule has been trampled at the university level, and the same people who succeeded at that are trying to do the same at K-12 schools. Instead of teaching, schools are being turned into propaganda factories for the next generation.

Students can and should be taught to appreciate their nation - they have obligations as citizens and the nation in turn has obligations towards them. Beyond that everything can be discussed and debated. But instead of concentrating on what is wrong with the nation, the emphasis should be on how it can be improved.

Because on both the Left and the Right, a subtext is being taught to tear it all down. And that is not acceptable.

Private schools can teach ideology as long as the parents all agree. But public schools have a special obligation to keep partisan politics out of the classroom and to respectfully discuss the issues.

The top priority must be teaching respect for all people, that humans have inherent dignity, that we are responsible to make the world a better place. All opinions, even immoral ones, are based on a value system and those values and their priorities must be debated. ("Why did the South believe that slavery was not immoral?")

Every topic can fit within those rules, and anyone who disagrees has no business creating curricula.

Don't make education into a partisan issue, because then everyone loses.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

New Zealand antisemitic incidents went up nearly sevenfold after October 7 2023

New Zealand's Stuff reports that the number of antisemitic incidents in that country went up nearly sevenfold in the 12 months after October 7 2023.

In the two years before then, there were 20 incidents each year. From September 2023-2024, that went up to 133, and for the 12 months following it was 97.

There are only 10,000 Jews in New Zealand.

Stuff adds:

Anti-Semitic offences that “harm or endanger persons” rose from four in the two years before the Hamas attacks to 43 and 45 in the two years since.

And property damage has spiked too. The numbers rose from four in the year to September 2022, to 11 in the year to September 2023, to 57 to September 2024 and 30 to September 2025.

Of course, Stuff must interview an anti-Zionist Jew - born in Haifa - to blame Israel for the rise in antisemitism, saying “No-one should be attacked for their views, but if you stand with Israel and you’re OK with Israel using you as an excuse for what it’s doing, that will put you in danger.” She has a Middle Eastern restaurant. If she thinks that her anti-Zionism will shield her from antisemitic attacks, she is delusional.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

11/23 Links: 700 Million Zionists and the Battle for the Free World; How Israel's Victory Strengthens America's Hand; Trump to designate the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization

From Ian:

700 Million Zionists and the Battle for the Free World

The phenomenon of non-Jewish leaders and influencers, predominantly Christian evangelicals, openly declaring themselves Zionists is expanding. Against the backdrop of eroding values, intergenerational division, and a culture war on the West, there is a need to establish a global Zionist alliance to protect the foundations of Western civilization's bedrock principles of collective freedom and security and personal liberty.

For Christians who define themselves as Zionists, this is a declaration of resistance to Islamist, anti-Western domination and an identification of Zionism as a force leading the global struggle against the collapse of the Free World. Islamists have understood that the path to conquering the Free World would not be achieved through force, but through a systematic, long-term, and heavily-funded perception war for strategic influence. In this war of perception and influence, Zionism is marked as the West's original sin.

In this war, the West has one clear pathway to victory: to use precisely the same tools being deployed against it - building public consciousness, asserting constant aggressive presence on social media and campuses, building new grassroots organizations, and investing in education.

Some 600 to 700 million Evangelical Christians across the globe support the state and people of Israel. They are joined by other groups who identify with Zionist values. They are not merely "pro-Israel" in opinion; they are active partners in the understanding that strengthening Israel means empowering the West.

How Israel's Victory Strengthens America's Hand

The calculations of Middle Eastern regimes are based on concrete questions: who commands intelligence superiority, who can blunt Iranian power, and who remains anchored in the American security system. By those measures, Israel has become indispensable. Its performance on the battlefield and its record in covert operations have only reinforced its value to governments that prioritize their own survival and long-term modernization.

Israel's military successes against Hamas, Hizbullah, and Iran have made it a more valuable strategic partner. States that face Iranian pressure or seek technological and security upgrades are not distancing themselves from Israel, but moving closer.

CENTCOM, which coordinates U.S. military activity in the Middle East, is deepening operational coordination between the IDF and Arab armies - including those of countries that don't have formal relations with Israel. Regional leaders saw the disruption of Iranian assets in five countries, and concluded that Israeli hard power mattered much more than the opinions of Islamist preachers or Western university students.

Israel has shown itself to be the one power both capable of rolling back Iran and willing to do so. Even the American strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities were made possible by Israeli intelligence and by attacks that neutralized Iran's air defenses and decapitated its military. Israel's actions matter for America, too, which needs Israel more than ever to help it keep Iran in check and to anchor its efforts to counter China in the region.

Seth Frantzman: How Israel’s 12-day war on Iran achieved remarkable military success

Another important point was how Israel’s friends helped the state during the war. Fox noted that “a consortium of like-minded nations came together and defended Israel a couple of times; once, the earlier piece: France, UK, Jordan.”

“There’s an indication that there was cooperation with some other nations in the region, and, of course, the United States. That would have been, I think, impossible without the touches within the region of Israel’s Defense Force staffers working with the US Central Command, but also becoming more integrated in the region,” he said.

“It’s just impossible, I think, to describe how remarkable that is. For those of us who spent time in the region, that might not have come out the way that it did,” Fox continued.

This means Israel’s integration into the US Central Command and joint training has been vital. Israeli F-35s, F-15s, and F-16s fighter jets, along with other platforms, were also key to the war.

One issue for Israel is that its refueler fleet is aging. “It’s been a long-standing recommendation of JINSA that the KC-46, the new tanker, be expedited to Israel. They’re on the books to get those tankers. They need them now. The ones they were using, the 707 (the RAM), are old and in need of repair and just not up to the mission,” Wald said.

Ashley agreed, “One of the challenges they did have is really an older fleet of air refuel capability. So that is a challenge that we hit in recommendations. In the way ahead, that’s something that they’re going to need to bolster as they’re going forward.”

He noted, however, that a large portion of Iran’s ballistic missiles were destroyed. “Probably more than half of the launchers were eliminated.”

The report illustrated key aspects and successes of Operation Rising Lion. Iran is weakened, but it could continue to pursue a nuclear program or try to revive its ballistic missiles.

Moving forward, many questions remain. The success of the war demonstrates what Israel can accomplish when it plans for a decisive campaign.

This is in contrast to the challenges in Gaza, where Israel has not had a clear plan and Hamas continues to run half of Gaza. And, as for Lebanon, Hezbollah has not been disarmed yet. The Houthis also remain a threat. Israel has had some tactical success, but overall strategic wins still elude Jerusalem.