Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Sunday, November 30, 2025

11/30 Links: UNSC Resolution 2803 and the ‘Comprehensive Plan to End the Gaza Conflict’; Yom HaPlitim: How one day honors a million displaced Jews; The BBC’s staggering hypocrisy on anti-Semitism

From Ian:

Alan Baker: UNSC Resolution 2803 and the ‘Comprehensive Plan to End the Gaza Conflict’

United Nations Security Council Resolution 2803 (2025), adopted on Nov. 17, 2025, represents a serious attempt to restructure governance, security and reconstruction mechanisms in the Gaza Strip.

Presented alongside, and built upon, President Donald J. Trump’s “Comprehensive Plan to End the Gaza Conflict” of Sept. 29, 2025, the resolution endorses a multilayered framework involving an unprecedented Board of Peace (BoP), an International Stabilization Force (ISF) and a transitional technocratic Palestinian administrative structure.

1. The resolution’s legal character and Chapter VII elements
Although Resolution 2803 does not invoke Chapter VII of the U.N. Charter, its wording adopts components associated with Chapter VII determinations. The operative clause stating that the situation in Gaza “threatens regional peace and security” reflects the terminology of Article 39, signaling that the Security Council perceives a threat to international peace.

However, by refraining from expressly stating that the resolution was adopted under Chapter VII, the council avoids establishing binding enforcement measures. Key operative verbs—such as endorses and calls on—further demonstrate that the resolution’s obligations are largely recommendatory rather than mandatory.

Legally, this carefully calibrated language creates a gray zone:
It strengthens the political authority of the plan.
It provides Security Council endorsement of it.
Yet it withholds the coercive weight of Chapter VII.

This ambiguity allows states to claim U.N. legitimacy for participation, while simultaneously preventing the council and the U.N. from assuming direct responsibility for implementation or oversight.

2. Endorsement of the Comprehensive Plan: Scope and limitations
The council “endorses” the Comprehensive Plan rather than “adopting” it. This distinction is essential. Endorsement acknowledges the plan’s existence and supports its aims, but:
It does not transform the plan into a U.N. instrument.
It does not give the U.N. operational control over implementation.

The Comprehensive Plan is thus validated politically but not incorporated legally into the UN’s institutional architecture. The United States, in some form of loose coordination with Qatar, Egypt and Turkey remains the principal diplomatic driver.

This distinction directly affects:
the legal authority of the Board of Peace
the status and obligations of U.N. agencies operating in Gaza
the status of future political negotiations

The Board of Peace: A novel international governance mechanism
The resolution welcomes the establishment of the Board of Peace, assigning it “international legal personality”—a term commonly associated with international organizations but undefined within the resolution itself.

Questions arise:
Is the BoP envisioned as an independent international organization?
What treaties or instruments grant it legal personality?
What “relevant international legal principles” govern its operations?

The BoP is empowered to oversee:
a transitional civil administration in Gaza
reconstruction and economic initiatives
coordination of humanitarian aid
establishment of operational entities (including bodies with their own international legal personality)

Importantly, the BoP is not a U.N. body, nor does it operate under U.N. authority or financing. Its legitimacy stems solely from the political endorsement of the Security Council and the states participating in its creation.

Gazans' Stark Choice: Either Hamas or Reconstruction

It will be many years before the great majority of Gaza residents are living in anything more than makeshift or temporary housing. The future of Gaza hinges entirely on the willingness of the world to take an active role in reconstruction. But for that to happen, Hamas has to step out of the way by disarming and ceding any role in governing Gaza.

Allowing Hamas to continue as a fighting force means that its war with Israel will resume, and with it will come another round of death and destruction. Understandably, the Gulf governments that are expected to foot the bill for reconstruction costs don't want to see their investment go up in flames.

Allowing Hamas a significant role in governance also risks undermining the reconstruction effort. In its years in power, Hamas never showed any particular interest in the welfare of the Gazans under its rule, leaving basic services like education and health to the care of others; it had even less of an interest in economic development. Hamas would almost certainly use the civilian institutions of reconstruction as a cover to rearm.

Gaza thus faces a stark choice of an armed Hamas preparing for the next round of war with Israel, or reconstruction and a functioning economy. Given how desperate the situation is, you would think the gun option would be a non-starter for Gazans. But it seems that Gazans want to have both, according to a recent poll.

A demilitarized Gaza means, in effect, raising the white flag and acknowledging that the most audacious and sustained act of "armed resistance" in Palestinian history was a failure. Yet however steadfast Palestinians may want to be in the fight with Israel, living in a tent amid rubble, with minimal access to basic services and no means to support a family, is not a long-term option.

Yom HaPlitim: How one day honors a million displaced Jews

Yom HaPlitim, meaning “Day of the Refugees,” is the Israeli national day honoring the 850,000+ Jewish refugees who were expelled from or forced to flee Arab and Muslim majority countries and Iran from the 1940s to the 1970s. In Israeli law, the day is officially called “The Day to Mark the Departure and Expulsion of Jews from the Arab Countries and Iran,” and is sometimes referred to as Yom HaPlitim (“Day of the Refugee”) or Yom HaGirush (“Day of the Expulsion”). The first official Yom HaPlitim was commemorated on Nov. 30, 2014, after the Knesset resolution adopting the day was adopted in June of that year.

Nov. 30 was chosen particularly because the day before marks the anniversary of the UN Partition Plan vote on Nov. 29, 1947, a day that also sparked violence and persecution against Jewish communities in many Arab countries.

Why did Jewish refugees flee Arab countries and Iran?
Before 1948, around 850,000–900,000 Jews lived across the Arab world and Iran, in places like Iraq, Egypt, Yemen and Aden, Libya, Syria, Lebanon, Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, and Iran. After the partition vote and especially after Israel’s establishment, many of these communities faced anti-Jewish riots and pogroms, mass arrests, and laws stripping Jews of citizenship, jobs, and property. Within a generation, most of these ancient communities had been emptied; today, only a small fraction of the Jews who once lived across the region remain.

Yom HaPlitim was created to acknowledge the trauma, loss, and displacement of Jews in Arab and Muslim countries; preserve the history of ancient Jewish communities, many thousands of years old, which were declining and then destroyed in the mid-20th century; to promote awareness of confiscated and revoked property; and to correct the historical gap in which Jewish refugees from Arab lands received very little recognition and delegitimization of their Middle Eastern identities. By the 1970s, over 95% of Jews from Arab countries had left, many never allowed to return. In some cases, entire communities were moved in dramatic rescue operations, like Operation Magic Carpet (airlifting Yemenite Jews to Israel) and Operation Ezra and Nehemiah (airlifting Iraqi Jews).

Some advocates frame Yom HaPlitim as a way to highlight a “second” refugee population alongside Palestinian refugees. Others caution against using one community’s trauma to negate another’s. At its best, Yom HaPlitim is about adding a missing chapter to the story of the 20th century, not erasing or minimizing anyone else’s suffering.

Today is Jewish Refugees Day. We remember 850,000 Jews forced out of Arab states and Iran in the 20th century. Communities 2,500 years old were destroyed.

At the United Nations, I asked Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, and the others: “Where are your Jews?”

Still waiting for an answer. pic.twitter.com/s6gsyuZvGP
— Hillel Neuer (@HillelNeuer) November 30, 2025

The 1947 UN partition plan was a lot more generous to Arabs than the Israel haters claim

I just came across a Substack by "The Progressive Jew" in which he pretends to debunk 17 of "The Biggest Zionist Lies of All Time."

It is, frankly, an embarrassing list. Either the "lies" are true (Jews really did make the desert bloom) or they are things that no informed Zionist ever says ("the conflict between Jews and Arabs is thousands of years old". ) It is meant for the echo chamber of anti-Zionists; it doesn't hold up under 30 seconds of actual scrutiny.

But one thing he mentions made me want to look at history a little further:

The 1947 UN Partition Plan was drafted by a committee of 11 countries with no Arab representation and proposed turning roughly 55% of historic Palestine into a “Jewish state” at a time when Jews were about a third of the population and owned less than 7% of the land.

I've looked at how Israel haters misuse the second half of this statement before - there was very little private land altogether in British Mandate Palestine, so the Arabs didn't "own" 93% of the land, but about 17%, the rest being public or other non-privately owned lands. (There were varying classes of lands in between private and public and each side chooses the statistics that help their case, but my numbers are reasonably accurate when talking about private land in the Western sense, not including Arab "musha'a" lands cultivated by Arab villages and also not counting JNF-leased lands cultivated by Jews. And the Jewish percentage would be much higher if there weren't British restrictions on Jews buying land, but that's another topic.)

But let's look at the first half of his statement: the partition plan would have given 55% of the land to only 33% of the population. Sounds unfair, doesn't it? Until you look at the partition map itself:

The vast majority of the land earmarked for the Jewish state was non-arable, Negev desert.

If you exclude non-arable lands from the partition plan, the remainder shows a quite different story than the one given by anti-Zionists. It shows the 33% population of Jews would have received less than 20% of usable land!

This flips the anti-Zionist script on its head - the partition plan was hugely biased towards giving arable land to the Arabs far out of proportion to their population! Under the partition plan the Jewish state would have received ~2,600 km² of non-desert land for its ~600,000 Jews → roughly 230–240 people per km² of usable land, while the Arab state would have received ~11,100 km² of almost entirely non-desert land for its ~725,000 Arabs → roughly 65–70 people per km² of usable land.

In other words, every Jew was allocated about one-quarter to one-third the amount of arable/habitable land that every Arab citizen was allocated.

If you read the UNSCOP report from which the partition plan was hatched, you can see that it supports the "Jews made the desert bloom" idea that is dismissed as a myth. It envisioned hundreds of thousands of Jewish immigrants from Europe and there was no physical space for them, so UNSCOP said that the Jews were more likely to turn the desert into usable land for these immigrants. UNSCOP admitted that that without irrigation and investment, the Negev was "practically rainless and almost without life," but "Jewish agriculturists have given much attention to the problems of irrigation" in drier areas.

So the next time someone tells you the 1947 partition was 'unfair to the Arabs,' remember: the UN offered the Arabs 80%+ of the good land for 67% of the population and the Jews a mostly desert state for 33% of the population - and the Arabs still rejected it and started a war.

The 'unfairness' narrative doesn’t survive contact with an actual map.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

Andrew Pessin has launched the Institute for the Critical Study of Antizionism, and in his introductory manifesto he he quotes Adam Louis-Klein:

“We now need entire teams of researchers — serious, methodical, interdisciplinary — to mine the full archive of genocide studies, settler-colonial theory, Middle Eastern studies, and the whole academic nexus where antizionism has taken root… a vast, largely unexamined body of antizionist hate literature, treated as scholarship but functioning as ideology.”

I am not an academic, but I can certainly critique academics on their own playing field. I've quoted and mocked the most egregious examples of anti-Zionist academic literature a number of times. But what is required here is a more rigorous examination showing that the entire field is rotten at the core.. From what I could tell, anti-Zionist academic literature does not simply contain bias. It behaves like a sealed intellectual ecosystem, with its own canonical texts, circular logic, and selective evidentiary filters. The appearance of scholarly rigor is there - citations, peer review, footnotes - but the underlying method is adversarial rather than truth-seeking. The conclusions are rarely tested; they are assumed.

This is where AI becomes indispensable.

Taylor and Francis hosts hundreds of academic journals. While most papers there are not available in full text, they show their abstracts - and their footnotes. I realized that with a minimal effort I could have AI examine the papers and their references to see if they are following the patterns of normal academic research or if their evidence is all circular and ignoring any counter-examples.

I found that when searching for papers accusing Israel of “settler-colonialism,” “apartheid,” and “genocide,” nearly all of them fail basic academic standards required in the social sciences.

The rot is very deep. Here is what I found in only a half hour of research with Grok:

The Settler-Colonialism Frame: Theory as Template

Searching Taylor & Francis for “settler colonial* + Israel” yields about 110 papers since 2015. In this cluster:

Patrick Wolfe (2006) is cited ~52%
Ilan Pappé (2006) ~48%
Lorenzo Veracini (2010) ~35%
Gershon Shafir (1996) ~28%

These four sources account for roughly 80% of the network’s intellectual gravity. Virtually every subsequent paper refers back to them.

But here is the problem: these works are rarely challenged, only repeated. Assertions like “Zionism is a settler-colonial project by definition.”are taken not as hypotheses to be investigated, but as axioms to be applied.

Primary sources, such as Ottoman-era Jewish land ownership, pre-Mandate Jewish presence, or Mizrahi Jewish indigeneity, almost never receive examination. The fact that Jews have always considered Israel their homeland and have prayed to return for two millennia? Not to be found, because that one fact by itself shows that Jews never considered themselves to be settling someone else's land but returning to their own.

Even within the larger field of settler colonial studies, there are debates on whether Israel fits the definition the way the US or Australia do. Those dissenting opinions not only might but must be mentioned in serious academic papers - yet they are virtually absent in the context of Israel.

The Apartheid Frame: NGOs as Canon

The apartheid literature is even larger, about 230 papers. But here, the intellectual source code changes.

The top citations are no longer academics but NGOs:

B’Tselem (2021) ~75%
Human Rights Watch (2021) ~68%
Amnesty International (2022) ~62%

These are not academic papers, but advocacy documents. They are not peer-reviewed; they were created with predetermined conclusions and PR strategies behind them.

Yet in academic writing, they are treated as if they were definitive legal assessments. The logic often goes something like, “As established by HRW and B’Tselem, Israel is an apartheid regime.”

But the reports themselves have been directly challenged, in detail, by Eugene Kontorovich, Avi Bell, Gerald Steinberg, CAMERA, and myself. Those critiques exist. They are public and specific.

And yet, in the 230 T&F apartheid papers, they are cited in less than 2% of cases. And when they are cited, it is often dismissively, as “denialist rhetoric,” not as arguments requiring rebuttal.

This is ideological cherry-picking that excludes any contradictory evidence.. It does not reach anything close to accepted academic standards.

The “Genocide” Acceleration

Finally, the most recent wave: the “genocide” framing post-October 7. There have been so far about 150 papers since late 2023 accusing Israel of "genocide," which is astonishing for two years.

And in these, the primary sources are:

Francesca Albanese’s UN Special Rapporteur reports (70%)
ICJ provisional ruling language (65%)
Amnesty’s December 2024 genocide report (already ~55%)

Again, the pattern holds. These sources are treated as if they constitute established legal conclusions rather than political and rhetorical framing.

Arguments rooted in genocide scholarship, like the specific standard of dolus specialis, are barely discussed. The ICJ’s own high evidentiary standards (as applied in Croatia v. Serbia) are almost never mentioned.

There are virtually no counter-interpretations, no accurate readings of the Genocide Convention, no documentation of Israeli efforts to warn civilians, no discussion of Hamas embedding military assets among civilians.

Once again, NGO reports are treated not as evidence but as authority.

In other scholarly fields, like political science, history, and sociology, academic standards require:

representing opposing views fairly
citing dissenting scholarship
acknowledging uncertainties
engaging with primary sources
and above all: practicing falsifiability

What we see instead is the construction of a self-affirming discourse where counter-arguments are not refuted. They are simply not acknowledged.

This produces an illusion of consensus where none exists. It creates the appearance of “settled scholarship” when what actually exists is selective citation and methodological exclusion.

I managed to prove, in less than an hour, what I and probably the members of ICSA have long suspected: that the field of anti-Zionism is not just dismissive but contemptuous of academic standards. It is not a field at all, but an anti-Israel propaganda initiative disguised as scholarship. It does not stand up to the slightest bit of critical scrutiny.

ICSA must adhere to rigorous academic standards to make this case airtight. But I just proved it beyond any reasonable doubt.

Ideas start in journals, get simplified into lectures, then transmitted to student activists, turned into slogans and then accepted as moral certainties which then become dogma, and dogma that cannot be questioned becomes a weapon. Entire university departments are complicit in this truly horrible hijacking of academia. Any honest researcher should be horrified and want to excise this cancer from the social sciences.

Let's hope ICSA will be the spark to burn this entire false field of study down.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

11/29 Links: Israeli president: Move to rename Dublin’s Herzog Park ‘disgraceful’; Tom Stoppard, acclaimed playwright of ‘Rosencrantz and Guildenstern,’ dies at 87

From Ian:

John Podhoretz: Tom Stoppard, 1937-2025

That essay, “On Turning Out to Be Jewish,” was about all Stoppard had to say about his relation to Jewishness and Judaism over the course of the following two decades. But then, according to his official biographer Hermione Lee, he read a novel by a Croatian writer named Dasa Drndic called Trieste. A character in the novel, writes Lee, “lacerates real historical figures whom she describes as ‘bystanders’ or ‘blind observers.’ They include Herbert von Karajan, Madeleine Albright, and Tom Stoppard: people who discover their family history, but turn a blind eye to it. Her ‘blind observers’ are ‘ordinary people’ who “play it safe. They live their lives unimpeded.'”

This hit Stoppard hard. Writes Lee: “He thought: yes, actually, she’s right. He felt that Drndic was justifiably blaming him for excluding from this ‘charmed life’ all those others who had ‘disappeared.’ He took it as an intelligible rebuke. He felt regret and guilt….He went back over his family history, and his Jewishness. It began to seem to him that he had been in denial about his own past. He increasingly felt that he should have been rueing his good fortune in escaping from those events, rather than congratulating himself. As a playwright, he needed to inhabit those lives he never lived, in his imagination. He started to think about a play which would answer the rebuke.”

That play is Leopoldstadt, and in every way, it is a miracle. It is the greatest play of our time, and the greatest play Stoppard ever wrote, and perhaps the greatest literary work written by an octogenarian. It is set not in Czechoslovakia but in an apartment in Vienna we see at four moments in time—1899, 1924, 1938, and 1955. Over the course of the first three scenes we meet 20 members of the extended Marz-Jacobowicz family. In the final scene, only three remain; all the others are dead, either directly or indirectly, due to the Holocaust. One of them is Stoppard’s stand-in, a young British writer who has no memory of his youth in Vienna from which he was removed by his widowed mother’s fiancee until he is reminded of a scar on his hand. He cut it as a little boy and had it stitched up by a now-dead uncle in that very apartment. He dissolves into tears. His cousin, a survivor of the camps, says to him, “You live as if without history, as if you throw no shadow behind you.”

The richness of the assimilated existences of the Jews of turn-of-the-century Vienna whose Christmas celebration (!) we witness at the play’s beginning is revealed in all its fragility almost immediately; success for the family’s richest member comes in part from his converting to Christianity, but the converted man is soon humiliated for his Jewishness by his wife’s Austrian military-officer lover. The first act features a passionate argument about Zionism and Herzl’s The Jewish State, and the great shadow cast over the rest of the proceedings is if the people in that apartment had heeded Herzl’s call and understood his ideas, they would have moved to Palestine and lived.

Leopoldstadt is a great work of art, and not a tract, but it is the most explicitly Zionist work of art of our time—though the point seems to have sailed over the heads of most of the people who wrote about it in words of extravagant praise. Its celebration and success capped Stoppard’s career not a moment too soon. Because, of course, had he written it three years later and had it been staged in London and New York after October 7th, its Zionism would have been unavoidable to all who saw it, and there would have been protests against it outside the theaters that showed it.

Tom Stoppard chose to stop “living as without history” by writing Leopoldstadt, and in so doing, he brought his career to its apogee with an earnest and passionate piece of work in which he played none of the linguistic games that had made him famous. He wanted to make it known that we must all live with history, with the knowledge of history, with the lessons of history, and not have them erased—either by parents whose journeys were too painful to share with their children and grandchildren or by those who seem determined to forget so that they can commit the same crimes anew, the crimes their grandparents and great-grandparents committed. Tom Stoppard did not live the life of a Jew, but in writing Leopoldstadt, he contributed to the treasure-house of civilization, and for that, he deserves eternal honor. He did good for his people and for the West. May Tom Stoppard’s memory be for a blessing.

Tom Stoppard, acclaimed playwright of ‘Rosencrantz and Guildenstern,’ dies at 87

Stoppard was born Tomas Straussler on July 3, 1937 in what was then Czechoslovakia, the son of Eugen Straussler, a doctor, and Marta (or Martha), née Beckova, who had trained as a nurse.

The Jewish family fled the Nazis and moved to Singapore when he was an infant.

Singapore in turn became unsafe. With his mother and elder brother Peter, he escaped to India. His father stayed behind and died while fleeing after Singapore fell to the Japanese.

In India, Marta Straussler married a British army major, Kenneth Stoppard, and the family moved to England.

Boarding school followed at Pocklington in Yorkshire, northern England, where Tom Stoppard loved cricket more than drama and learned how to be British, which Major Stoppard considered the ultimate nationality.

The adult Stoppard, who rediscovered decades later the Jewish roots that he explored in his final play, would accuse his stepfather of "an innate antisemitism."

He eventually learnt from Czech relatives that all four of his grandparents had been Jewish, and that they had died in Nazi concentration camps.

"I feel incredibly lucky not to have had to survive or die. It's a conspicuous part of what might be termed a charmed life," he wrote in Talk, a US magazine, in 1999, reflecting on returning with his brother to their birthplace Zlin in what is now the Czech Republic.

Scarlett Johansson: I was asked not to make a film about the Holocaust

In Scarlett Johansson’s first film as director, an elderly Jewish woman falsely claims to be a Holocaust survivor after an innocent misunderstanding spins out of control. A month before filming was due to begin, one of Johansson’s financial backers got in touch with a stipulation regarding the script. The gist of it? Love the film, Scarlett, but we’re not so keen on the whole Holocaust thing. Can we have the character lie about something else?

The demand came “after months of preparatory work”, Johansson recalls, despairingly. “I mean, if they’d said ‘I’ll only back this if you shoot in New Jersey,’ or ‘We need to get this done by the spring’, then that would have been one thing. But they were objecting to what the film actually was. It had to be about what happens when someone gets caught in the worst lie imaginable; if not the Holocaust, then what could it be? They offered no alternative. It was just, ‘This is an issue.’”

The Avengers and Marriage Story star stuck to her guns. So the backer pulled out and, with just weeks to go, a significant portion of the $9m (£6.8m) budget disappeared overnight. “We’d been talking about the film for so many months, and then this was the outcome?” she says. “It was really shocking, and I was so disappointed.” Fortunately, an emergency ring-round soon brought Sony Pictures Classics on board as distributors – the studio made up the shortfall, and filming went ahead as planned. tmg.video.placeholder.alt wZ6l2ue--KA

Time was of the essence – not least because Johansson’s leading lady, June Squibb, who had recently celebrated her 94th birthday, was only available for a few weeks. (The redoubtable star of Nebraska and Thelma turned 96 earlier this month.)

Today the two women are sitting side by side in a mirrored salon overlooking the Boulevard de la Croisette in Cannes. Squibb is wearing a colourful silk kimono; Johansson, a white cotton tea dress. Their film, Eleanor the Great, had its world premiere at the town’s festival the previous day, which Johansson attended with her husband, the Saturday Night Live comedian Colin Jost. She and Squibb have just had lunch together, and I’m joining them for coffee and chocolates.

11/28 Links Pt2: The Islamists’ Trojan horse; This Cambridge Union debate was a foregone conclusion. But my words needed saying; Sally Rooney is not a victim of censorship

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: The Islamists’ Trojan horse

The Palestinian cause has had an even deeper effect. It has simply corrupted discourse and morality in the West. By adopting Palestinianism as their badge of moral worth, people have signed up to an agenda of lies that they assume is incontrovertible truth.

Convinced that the Palestinians are the wretched of the earth, Western liberals refuse to see that they are actually supporting a genocidal agenda. By internalizing Palestinian Jew-hatred, they now see nothing wrong in themselves spewing out vicious antisemitic tropes.

Demonizing Israel in the name of anti-racism, they have turned morality inside out, reversing victim and aggressor. That’s why, after the terror attacks on Oct. 7, so many of them denied Israeli victimization and instead grotesquely blamed Israel for abuses such as war crimes or genocide, of which Israel was innocent but of which the Palestinians were guilty.

This pathological projection by aggressors of their own evil deeds onto their victims is hardwired into the Palestinian cause and indeed the Islamist world.

The Islamists do this because they believe that Islam is perfection, and everything beyond it is the province of the devil. Islamist aggression against the West is therefore falsely framed as a defense against Western attacks on Islam.

This was why British Muslims in Birmingham justified their exclusion of the Maccabi Tel Aviv away-fans from the club’s match against Aston Villa in October by claiming that the Israeli fans had a record of violence.

They based this on the utterly false assertion that a violent, pre-planned Arab “Jew-hunt” against Maccabi fans at a match in Amsterdam last year, in which the Israelis were chased through the city, beaten and one of them forced into a canal, was in fact a major attack by Israeli “hooligans” against local Muslims.

By allowing the Palestinian cause to subvert their ability to distinguish truth from lies and right from wrong, Western progressives have damaged something rather closer to home than the truth about the Israel-Arab impasse. It meant that they can’t see how their own society is being Islamized.

That’s why the knee-jerk response after any Islamist atrocities in the West is to worry about attacks on Muslims. It’s why in Britain, any criticism of the police delivering “two-tier justice” by treating Muslims less harshly than others, or concern about attempts to Islamize the curriculum of some state-run schools, or speaking about the overwhelmingly Muslim identity of the rape and grooming gangs is all denounced as “Islamophobia” and silenced.

Palestinianism is the Trojan horse for the Islamization of the West.

Mamdani is motivated, above all, by his passion for the Palestinian cause and his hatred of Israel.

It’s clear from his transition team—a nightmarish collection of Israel-haters, nihilists and ultra-leftists—that he intends to drive a wedge down the middle of the Jewish community by using anti-Zionist Jews as human shields to protect him from charges of antisemitism as he pursues his vendetta against Israel.

New York Jews who denounce Israel will receive protection and favors; Jews who are assumed to support Israel will be thrown to the wolves.

And it will all be done in the language of human rights, justice and international law.

UN Solidarity Day ignores Jewish refugees expelled from Arab countries

This isn’t just a perversion of history. It’s perverted, period.

Tomorrow, the United Nations marks “International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People.” The date, November 29, was not chosen by chance. On November 29, 1947, the UN accepted the Partition Plan that would lead to the establishment of the State of Israel. The Arab world rejected the partition and declared war on the nascent Jewish state, hoping to swiftly eradicate it. This is the origin of the “Nakba,” the Palestinian “catastrophe.”

Choosing to commemorate one side of the conflict – the side that launched the war – and on that particular date, is more than cynical. It’s manipulative; a reframing of the narrative. It also deliberately ignores the other half of the story. Hence on November 30, Israel commemorates the expulsion of more than 800,000 Jews from Arab and Muslim lands who came to Israel. These are the Middle East’s most overlooked refugees.

Two years after the Hamas-led invasion and mega-atrocity on October 7, 2023, to mark International Solidarity with the Palestinians, while ignoring what has been inflicted on Israel and the Jewish world, is particularly jarring.

Thanks to the UN granting the Palestinians “perpetual refugee status,” the number of Palestinian refugees has risen in the past 70-plus years from some 750,000 to more than five million. So much for the charges of “genocide” by Israel.

But what happened to the Jews?
The Jews who once lived in the Muslim world have all but disappeared. In places like Algeria and Libya, once the homes of vibrant Jewish communities, not one Jew is left. In Yemen, the Jewish population dropped from more than 55,000 in 1948 to less than a handful today – and that includes poor Levi Salem Musa Marhabi, who has been languishing in a Houthi prison since 2016 for helping to smuggle a Torah scroll out to Israel.

Apart from launching a war on the newborn Jewish state in 1948, the Arab world also took revenge on the Jews living among them with devastating riots and anti-Jewish measures. According to Israeli Foreign Ministry statistics, “[Since 1948]: In the North African region, 259,000 Jews fled from Morocco, 140,000 from Algeria, 100,000 from Tunisia, 75,000 from Egypt, and another 38,000 from Libya. In the Middle East, 135,000 Jews were exiled from Iraq, 55,000 from Yemen, 34,000 from Turkey, 20,000 from Lebanon, and 18,000 from Syria. Iran forced out 25,000 Jews.”

In other words, the Jews have been the victims of ethnic cleansing. And when the Jews disappeared, thousands of years of Jewish heritage, history, and culture were wiped out with them.

Father of Ran Gvili, one of two remaining hostages, to speak at possible final Tel Aviv rally

Itzik Gvili, the father of Master Sgt. Ran Gvili, one of the two remaining slain hostages in Gaza, will speak Saturday night at what may be the final rally in Tel Aviv’s Hostages Square.

Gvili and Thai worker Sudthisak Rinthalak are the two slain captives still held in Gaza, after the body of Kibbutz Be’eri’s Dror Or was released earlier this week.

Gvili was killed battling Hamas terrorists in Kibbutz Alumim on October 7, 2023, and his body was abducted to Gaza. Rinthalak was killed by Hamas terrorists the same day in Kibbutz Be’eri, where he was employed as an agricultural worker.

The other speakers at Saturday night’s Tel Aviv rally are Jon Polin, the father of murdered hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin; Ayelet Goldin, sister of slain soldier Lt. Hadar Goldin; Nira Sharabi, wife of Yossi Sharabi, a hostage slain in Hamas captivity; and Eyal Eshel, father of surveillance soldier Roni Eshel, who was killed on October 7 at the Nahal Oz base.

Alongside the Tel Aviv rally, additional protests will be held at Shaar HaNegev Junction and Carmei Gat, the Kiryat Gat neighborhood home to the evacuated Kibbutz Nir Oz community.

Jerusalem’s Safeguarding Our Shared Home protest group said that it will hold a farewell event on Saturday evening for the Hostages’ Tent at the corner of Aza Road and Balfour, erected since the start of the struggle for the release of the hostages.

A spokesperson for the Hostages Families Forum said Friday that it hasn’t yet been announced whether there will be future rallies.

The forum said earlier this week that Saturday’s rally may be the last as the organization will greatly narrow its activities now that there are only two families left to support.

The Forum recommended stopping the rallies by the end of November, given the cost of around NIS 200,000 ($61,000) each week to erect a stage with video and sound systems, adding that the events don’t serve the current situation of terror groups apparently searching for and locating the remaining bodies in Gaza.

The Gvili family has said it understands the Forum’s decision.

Rinthalak’s family is located in Thailand, and while the Forum is in touch with the Thai Embassy, it has not been involved in rallies. Security forces pay their respects as a convoy carrying the body of a hostage arrives at the Abu Kabir Forensic Institute in Tel Aviv, November 25, 2025. (Avshalom Sassoni/Flash90)

Itzik Gvili said Thursday that he feared his son would never be returned.

“We pray, of course, that he will not be another Ron Arad or [Hadar] Goldin,” Itzik Gvili told Kan news. “That we don’t drag it out for many more years.”

11/28 Links Pt1: Inside the IDF's battle to win world's toughest information war; The PA plan to steal hundreds of millions in foreign aid; Israel's F-35 Combat Secrets That Shocked the Pentagon

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This chart on US antisemitism trends should scare the hell out of you

It is not true that antisemitism is worse now than ever before in America.

In the 1930s and 1940s, antisemitism was mainstream. A survey in 1938, after Kritallnacht, found 53% of Americans blamed European Jews for their Nazi persecution and 60% held negative views about Jews (e.g., "greedy," "pushy," "dishonest").

After Pearl Harbor, Jews were seen as the "greatest threat" to U.S. welfare by 40-50% of Americans - more than any other group including Japanese or Germans!

In the 1940s, even after the Holocaust, 58% of Americans had very negative attitudes towards Jews.

Things slowly became better. In the 1950s, between 30-40% of Americans believed standard antisemitic tropes. That went down to the 22-28% range in the 1960s, and continued to go down steadily until 2019, when it hit an all-time low of 11% of Americans agreeing with several antisemitic stereotypes.

But between 2019 and 2024, we have rocketed back up to 1960s levels.

As a reminder, in the 1960s, Jews were routinely excluded from clubs, from many law firms, and - unofficially - from many suburban housing complexes and resort hotels. Companies also adhered to the Arab boycott which demanded no Jews in top positions of companies they would deal with.

US antisemitism is now back to the levels it was at then.

It gets worse.

In the 1960s, 20% of young people felt that Jews had "too much power." That went down to 10% in 2018.

In 2023 it was at 37%, nearly quadrupling in only five years.

Unlike previous decades, today's youth - as well as college educated students - are more likely to be antisemitic than their parents.

Also, this is the first time since the 1930s that antisemitism was becoming mainstream among both the political Left and the Right.

The time to sound the alarm is now. This is huge change in both amount and direction for antisemitism in America, and there is precious little being done to combat it at a root level.

(1940s and 1950s data from Gallup/Roper polls, since the 1960s from the ADL. The 1980s numbers were copied from the 1970s; they had no survey then.)

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

My last post on Peter Beinart's craven apology to his BDS comrades for speaking at Tel Aviv University was scathing, but it didn't examine his thought process. And a deeper examination reveals something that we all need to learn from.

Beinart is very smart. He knew about the BDSers' anger at his talk beforehand, and he went ahead and gave it anyway. So why would he defend his decision before the talk and then, afterwards, apologize for it? The BDSers who aren't accepting his apology have a point - if he really cares about their feelings, as his apology stated, then he was as aware of their objections before the talk as he was afterwards.

Something must have happened at the talk that prompted him to reverse his opinion on the propriety of his speech.

Unfortunately, there is no video of the speech or the Q&A. But there is one detailed article about it as a blog at Times of Israel, by Alec Mauer.

Mauer says that Beinart was one of his childhood heroes. He shares Beinart's ideas of 15 years ago about the two state solution, of being against BDS. He is disappointed that Beinart's position today makes no sense to living, breathing Israelis - including the liberal ones who attend TAU or who make films. Beinart repeated BDS claims that they are not boycotting individuals but only institutions, and being at one such institution, he understands that this is a nonsensical distinction.

Based on his report, it appears that many of the students who attended were like him - people who are liberal, who want Palestinians to have a state and equal rights, but who actually live there.

In other words, Beinart 2025 met Beinart 2010 - and couldn't win an argument with himself. He was confronted with people who share his stated goals but actually think about them realistically. And he failed to move them.

In the past 15 years, while Beinart moved more and more to the anti-Israel Left, he came up with reasons that sounded reasonable to his new audience - but that made increasingly little sense to those on the Israeli Left who would be affected by his desired policies. He spoke to echo chambers of progressives in America who look at the world through the simplistic oppressor vs. oppressed lens and the feedback in that echo chamber prompted him to keep moving that way.

One crucial point that is not often mentioned in these contexts: his livelihood became more and more dependent on his political positions. It is incredibly difficult to think independently when your income depends on thinking only one way. As progressive Americans moved more towards blatant antisemitism, Beinart had to work not to alienate them.

His talk at TAU showed him that his progression from liberal Zionist to anti-Israel activist, which he pretends was a natural evolution, did not impress those who are exactly like he used to be. They knew his arguments and they wanted to hear him answer their questions about them. He couldn't do it.

Before the talk, he believed the praise heaped on him by his followers, that his arguments are airtight, that he can convince any sincere liberal Zionist of the righteousness of his new positions by quoting Amnesty and B'Tselem. When he realized that he was not nearly as consistent or smart as he thought he was, he decided that going to TAU was a mistake. But he cannot admit he couldn't win the arguments.

Beinart didn't go to Israel for dialogue. He went to admonish the students. He went not as an intellectual but as a prophet. And the students would have none of that.

A truly humble person would have listened to the students and admitted that he doesn't have the answers. A conceited person blames those who refuted him as being part of the evil enemy.

Beinart's apology was not an act of contrition. It was an act of conceit to avoid admitting his hypocrisy. Usually apologies are signs of humility, but in this case, Beinart's apology was an act of self preservation. And the BDSers understand that.

Humility is a necessary component of growth. Beinart's arrogance shows what happens when one believes that they are infallible - their own ethics go out the window to keep from admitting they are wrong.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

It was inevitable, but @PeterBeinart has now outsourced his brain to BDS

Peter Beinart spoke at Tel Aviv University this week. Both Israel haters and Zionists criticized him for this, and he apologized to only one side.

But one aspect of his craven apology appears to be Beinart's first direct support for BDS against all Israeli institutions, not just "settlements" or "aspects of BDS" as he had argued before.

By speaking earlier this week at Tel Aviv University, I made a serious mistake.

In the past, when formulating my views about Israel-Palestine, I’ve sought out Palestinian friends and interlocutors and listened carefully to their views. In this case, I did not.

I really wanted to speak to Israelis. In the US, I’ve cultivated conversations with Jews with whom I strongly disagree, both to listen and in hopes of changing their minds. Over the horrifying last two years, I’ve hoped for more conversations with Israelis, to explain why I believe Israel has committed genocide in Gaza and why I believe Jewish supremacy is fundamentally wrong. My motivation for giving the talk wasn’t financial; I didn’t receive an honorarium. I wanted to say certain things to an Israeli audience. Speaking at Tel Aviv University seemed to offer that chance.

I let my desire for that conversation override my solidarity with Palestinians, who in the face of ethnic cleansing, apartheid and genocide have asked the world boycott Israeli institutions that are complicit in their oppression. As Noura Erakat and others have pointed out, there are ways for me to talk to Israelis without violating BDS guidelines and undermining a collective effort against oppression. I could have had the exchange I desired while respecting a non-violent movement based on human rights and international law. Had I listened more to Palestinians, I would have realized that earlier.

It’s embarrassing to admit such a serious mistake. I dearly wish I had not made this one, which has caused particular harm because international pressure is crucial to ensuring Palestinian freedom. This was a failure of judgment. I am sorry.

He sounds like an abused wife apologizing to her husband after being beaten.

And so the transformation from "Zionist critic of Israel" to "non-Zionist critic of Israel" to "BDS supporter" is complete. From now on, Beinart now takes all of his instructions on how to act, what to write, what to do, what to say and what to think from the BDS movement.

He has finally outsourced his brain to terrorist lovers like Noura Erekat, who must approve everything he does in the future.

This is a role that Beinart now enthusiastically supports. He just wants to be loved by terrorists. (His magazine, Jewish Currents, refuses to condemn Hamas for October 7.)

But that isn't enough! Even after his groveling apology, the haters weren't mollified. TOI writes:

His apology, however, drew more backlash from leading anti-Israel activists. Nerdeen Kiswani, a leading anti-Zionist organizer in New York City, posted on X, “Peter consistently disrespects communities he claims to support, particularly Palestinians, and then apologizes for it.”

Ali Abunimah, founder of the Electronic Intifada website, wrote, “It’s hard not to see this as anything other than an exercise in damage control, to restore his marketability following the overwhelming backlash to his informed, conscious, willful decision to violate a clear picket line.”

This is the BDS playbook. As soon as you give them an inch, they berate you even more to browbeat you into total submission.

To the BDS crowd, Beinart isn't an articulate supporter of the Palestinian cause who should be applauded for telling Zionists they are wrong. He is just a Jew, and Jews are useless unless they act like dhimmis, begging for acceptance and protection from their Palestinian overlords and agreeing that Jews who think for themselves are just closet Zionists.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

You Can Have My Gun When You Pry It Out Of My Child’s Cold, Dead Hands by Sakmi Deek, Hamas fighter (PreOccupied Territory)

Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.

Check out their Facebook and Substack pages.

Khan Yunis, November 27 - Hearing plenty of gab lately, about so-called "international bodies" agreeing to a plan to disarm our organization. Makes me laugh. No one's going to disarm us. You can have my weapons when you pry them out of the hands of my ten-year-old son.

You think some "multinational force" will take away our guns? No, you are all cowards who shrink from confronting our fierce warriors who will defy you, and you will do nothing, as usual, leaving it once again to the Israelis to do your work for you. Then, when they try, we will put the weapons in our children's hands and send them out to face the soldiers, who will defend themselves by shooting at our children, and we will cry that Israel is killing our children, and you will get angry again at Israel for killing children, and you will stop calling for our disarmament.

We have vast resources to prevent any such disarmament. Not only do I have a ten-year-old son from whom you must confiscate weapons, I have an eight-year-old daughter, a twelve-year-old daughter, and another son, fifteen - each of whom, and most likely all of whom, will carry those weapons. You will have to pry the guns from their cold, dead hands.

Oh, not just guns. Explosives, rocket-propelled grenades, knives, improvised mines, and even a crossbow or two, if I can remember where I put those. Rocks big enough to cause serious injury or death. Incendiary devices. Want them? Come get them. Make sure to shoot the children wielding them, or you're dead, too. Then we get to parade the images of dead children all over standard and social media, and ride the wave of outrage to further cement our hold on the Gaza Strip.

Did I mention clubs and pipes? We generally use those not against the Zionists, but against people in Gaza who refuse to pay us for food, shelter, medicine, and "protection," or who speak out against our way of doing things. But if you think you can replace our rule in Gaza, you'll have to pry those out of our children's cold, dead hands, as well. We start training them young - not just the well-documented classroom and kids'-TV indoctrination, but hands-on experience enforcing our authority in the territory.

Good luck with that, though, because, like the Israelis we killed on and after October 7, expect those kids to be booby-trapped.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

11/27 Links Pt2: The Founding Fathers and the Promised Land; Arnold Roth: Why is US justice for its victims of terror still thwarted?

From Ian:

Katie Pavlich: The Founding Fathers and the Promised Land

In the aftermath of World War II, the United States has supported the modern establishment of Israel as a democratic alliance and, more recently, as an economic partner. National security, intelligence sharing, technology development, scientific research, combating global Islamic terrorism and much more are also ongoing and shared interests.

The history of America and Israel didn’t start in 1948. It goes back to 1776, when American rebels looked to the Promised Land, its foundational story, and were inspired to reject the British Empire in pursuit of their own nation.

“We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved,” states the Declaration of Independence, signed by 56 men.

“And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.”

The Founding Fathers were men of God and believers in the Bible. This is evident in their speeches, writings, proposals and public prayers. Faith was their guiding force, principle and tool to win the American Revolution — against all odds.

“In 1776, a month after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams met to discuss the design of the Great Seal of the United States. Benjamin Franklin’s idea for the Great Seal wasn’t an eagle or the stars and stripes. We wanted the Seal to depict Moses leading the Children of Israel through the Red Sea, out of slavery and into freedom,” author and filmmaker David Kiern writes. “Jefferson countered, proposing imagery of the Hebrews in the desert, led by a pillar of fire, marching toward the Promised Land.”

After the Americans won their freedom, the credit for Israel’s divine inspiration continued.

“May the same wonder-working Deity, who long since delivered the Hebrews from their Egyptian oppressors, planted them in a promised land, whose providential agency has lately been conspicuous in establishing these United States as an independent nation, still continue to water them with the dews of heaven and make the inhabitants of every denomination participate in the temporal and spiritual blessings of that people whose God is Jehovah,” President Washington wrote to the Hebrew Congregation of Savannah in 1790.

Alan Baker: The 50th anniversary of the infamous UN ‘Zionism is Racism’ resolution

As stated by the then-U.S. ambassador to the U.N., Daniel Moynihan, “The United Nations is about to make antisemitism international law. The U.S. does not acknowledge, it will not abide by, it will never acquiesce in this infamous act. … A great evil has been loosed upon the world.”

The offensive determination equating Zionism with racism was subsequently formally revoked by General Assembly Resolution 46/86, adopted on Dec. 16, 1991, and supported by a majority of 111 states, with 25 Arab League, Muslim and African states opposing.

In introducing the revocation motion during his address to the 45th session of the United Nations General Assembly on Oct. 1, 1990, then-U.S. President George H.W. Bush stated, “NGA Resolution 3379, the so-called ‘Zionism is racism’ resolution, mocks this pledge and the principles upon which the United Nations was founded. And I call now for its repeal. Zionism is not a policy; it is the idea that led to the creation of a home for the Jewish people, to the State of Israel. And to equate Zionism with the intolerable sin of racism is to twist history and forget the terrible plight of Jews in World War II and, indeed, throughout history. To equate Zionism with racism is to reject Israel itself, a member of good standing of the United Nations. This body cannot claim to seek peace and at the same time challenge Israel’s right to exist. By repealing this resolution unconditionally, the United Nations will enhance its credibility and serve the cause of peace.”

On June 21, 2004, at a U.N. Conference on Antisemitism, then-Secretary-General of the United Nations Kofi Annan stated, “The actions of the United Nations on the issue of antisemitism have not always been worthy of its ideals. It is deplorable that the General Assembly adopted in 1975 a resolution which assimilated Zionism with racism and I welcome that it later came back on its position.”

But despite its revocation in 1991 and the 2004 condemnation by Annan, the Zionism-racism equation has remained engraved in the annals of the U.N. as an integral component of its operating mode. The damage had been done. The equation enabled the creation and continued permanent financing of an extensive bureaucratic apparatus within the U.N. system of bodies, committees, international organs and specialized agencies designed to amplify and encourage an ongoing Muslim, Arab and Palestinian campaign aimed at undermining Israel as a sovereign state member of the international community.

The resolution paved the way for the formalization of an artificially devised “status,” uniquely tailored for the Palestinian observer representation in the U.N., denominated as a “non-member-observer-state status.”

This anomaly has regrettably become a permanent fixture in the realities of the organization as well as in the present-day realities of the Middle East.

Under the false guise of “statehood,” this anomalous “status” granted to the Palestinians has subsequently been used as a pretext for manipulating a willing U.N. Secretariat and various U.N. bodies, including the International Court of Justice, individual states, and international and intergovernmental bodies, including the International Criminal Court, into acknowledging, recognizing and accepting into their membership a nonexistent Palestinian state. This, despite the nonexistence of any sovereign Palestinian entity and despite the fact that no binding or authoritative international instrument has ever acknowledged the existence of any sovereign Palestinian territory.

Such recognition clearly undermines, runs counter to and prejudges the intended outcome of the negotiations agreed to in the internationally recognized and internationally witnessed Oslo Accords, an integral component of the Middle East peace process, in which the Palestinian leadership committed to negotiating with Israel the issue of the permanent status of the territories.

Conclusion
The effects of the1975 Zionism-Racism resolution remain an indelible component of the realities in today’s Middle East. The subsequent apparent revocation of the offensive determination in that resolution did not diminish the long-term damage that it caused.

This damage still plagues the international community and, more significantly, the Jewish people and the State of Israel.

The genie cannot be returned to its bottle.

Gil Troy: Thanks to Zionism, We Won - and Will Continue Winning, while Teaching the West about Self-Defense, Self-Reliance, and Self-Respect

Americans are traditionally focused on their lives and, at best, domestic politics. That's why it's stunning to see how much coverage, fury, and focus there has been for two years on Israel in Gaza. Manipulative, well-funded networks have cultivated this Israel-obsession and Palestinian-romanticization. It is magnified mindlessly online.

America seems filled with laptop warriors who never fired a gun and cannot tell friend from foe, arrogantly making long-distance military calls about IDF strategy. Meanwhile, armchair moralists throw lightning bolts of condemnation at Israel, having ignored their own country's behavior in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Never forget: Hamas's Iranian-funded Oct. 7 massacre imposed this existential war for survival on Israel. Oct. 7 marks the latest, bloodiest, chapter in Palestinian exterminationists' decades-long war against Zionism. Read their charters, speeches, and sermons. They've framed their "struggle" as an all-or-nothing fight to eliminate the "Zionist entity." They're the ones who repeatedly rejected compromise since the 1940s, and keep improvising various ways to kill Jews.

Zionism resets the conversation that puts Israel's supporters in a defensive crouch. It transcends the defensiveness, refuting the accusations in deeds not words, with joy not anguish, victories not defeatism. It accentuates the eternals: identity, history, community, continuity, survival. Zionism takes Israel off probation, celebrating Jews' historic commitment to one another, our people, state and land - our intertwined fate.

Identity Zionism roots Jews in a centrifugal reality spinning around our tradition, our land, our people, our state. That superpower resists modern Western culture's forces, spinning toward fragmented affinities, and thereby undermining loyalties to others, to the collective.