07/13 Links Pt1: Trump admin launches campaign to dismantle ICC; Lindsey Graham: A voice of moral clarity falls silent; Trump: ‘We’re going to take out Pickaxe Mountain,’

From Ian:

Twenty-six years after Camp David, Israel needs a new security doctrine

At Camp David, we negotiated with the man who was then regarded as the supposed partner, the only figure who was allegedly willing to sit down and negotiate with Israel (while the rest of the Palestinian leadership rejected the very idea outright). Yet we still reached a dead end. The result of those concessions was not peace, but the outbreak of the Second Intifada, a planned wave of terrorism that claimed the lives of more than one thousand Israelis.

By demonstrating a willingness to make those concessions, we created an extraordinarily dangerous precedent, one in which the international community came to regard Israeli territorial concessions as the natural starting point for every future negotiation.

That precedent must be erased. It must be erased from the pages of our diplomatic and security history, and it must be made clear that those proposals are null and void and cannot serve as the opening position for any future discussion.

The lesson of the Camp David Summit (2000) is even deeper and more relevant today. The summit definitively shattered the assumption that territorial concessions, in and of themselves, would bring reconciliation. It proved that the root of the conflict is not the scope of Israel’s presence in Judea and Samaria, but the very existence of a sovereign Jewish state in the Land of Israel.

Even at the point of Israel’s maximum willingness to compromise, it became clear that a historic compromise was not the objective of the other side.

From this understanding emerges the diplomatic doctrine that Israel must adopt for the decades ahead: lasting arrangements are not achieved through territorial gestures, but are built upon strength, deterrence, and security.

The only practical foundation for any future arrangement will emerge only when a profound change in Palestinian consciousness takes place, one that includes full recognition that Israel is a permanent and indisputable reality, with no intention of withdrawing or relinquishing its right to exist as the nation-state of the Jewish people.

Only when the other side becomes convinced that it cannot defeat Israel or alter reality through terrorism, international pressure, or rejectionism, and that the continued illusion that the Jewish presence in the region is temporary bears no fruit, will the foundation for a stable and realistic arrangement truly be laid.

The key to peace lies not in the breadth of Israeli concessions, but in the strength of Israeli deterrence and the depth of Palestinian recognition of our legitimate existence here.

Turkey, Israel, and the New Ottoman Empire

What Is Behind Erdogan’s Antagonism Toward Israel?
So, why has President Erdogan shifted Turkey away from being a regional partner of Israel to one of its chief antagonists in the Middle East and on the world stage?

There seem to be two leading causes of Erdogan’s anti-Israel posture: His personal animus toward the Jewish people and his regional ambitions.

As an Islamist politician, Erdogan has been influenced by the ideological circle that surrounds him, which is contemptuous of Jews and views the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and establishment of the secular Turkish state as part of a secret Jewish plot.

The existence of Israel as a Jewish state in what is viewed as a traditionally Muslim region only amplifies this dislike and suspicion of Jews.

Aside from Erdogan’s personal ideology, Turkish society has become more open to public expressions of antisemitism in recent years, which has allowed the Turkish strongman to use his public opposition to the Jewish state as a means of garnering more votes among the Turkish public.

Perhaps even more consequential than antisemitism in the worsening of relations between Israel and Turkey are Erdogan’s long-term regional ambitions, which place him in direct confrontation with the Jewish state.

As opposed to other leaders who ruled Turkey before him, Erdogan subscribes to the idea of “neo-Ottomanism,” which aims to position Turkey as a leading force in the Sunni Islamic world.

As the Ottoman Empire controlled much of the Middle East for hundreds of years, Erdogan seeks to return Turkey to this position of power by spreading its influence (and sometimes even its military forces) into neighboring states.

This expansion of Turkey’s role in the Middle East can be seen over the past 10 years, with Turkey sending forces into Iraq to fight ISIS (against the wishes of the Iraqi government), establishing itself militarily in Qatar, extending its influence in the West Bank, Gaza, and Israeli Arab communities, placing a foothold on the Red Sea, and becoming the patron of the new Syrian government since the fall of the Assad regime in 2024.

With the recent diminishment of Iran’s position in the Middle East, Erdogan is even more determined to increase Turkey’s influence in the region and become the new hegemonic power.

So, how do Turkey’s regional ambitions affect its relationship with Israel?

First, Israel’s own security needs can come into direct conflict with Turkey’s desires. This is most clearly seen in Syria, where Israel has established a buffer zone along its border due to its suspicion of the new regime, while Turkey has openly embraced it.

Second, in Erdogan’s view, by becoming increasingly and publicly hostile to the Jewish state, he is leveraging the anti-Israel sentiment of the Arab street to catapult Turkey into being the leading voice of the Muslim world, at the expense of more moderate regimes such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

Thus, it appears likely that as Erdogan’s Turkey becomes a growing force in the Middle East and seeks to dominate the region, it will increasingly become more antagonistic toward Israel.

However, as opposed to this remaining a problem for the Jewish state, Turkey’s regional ambitions will likely become a problem for all Middle Eastern states that do not wish to become subservient to one hegemonic power in the region.

Half Won, Half Lost By Abe Greenwald

Via Commentary Newsletter, sign up here. Trump now seems to understand that the whole negotiation saga was an Iranian ruse. So we’ve gone back in time. The U.S. is once again pounding Iran from the air, and Trump just announced that we’d be reimposing a blockade on Iranian vessels.

But given this administration’s penchant for stopping short of victory, it’s hard to see where this goes, even in the next few days. And why is it that Iran won’t play along with the U.S., abide by the MOU, and collect the billions it has been promised?

The man who’s had the clearest understanding of this war from the start is Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton. While Bolton is a committed Iran hawk, he’s been sounding the alarm about Trump’s lack of strategy since the run-up to the operation. In yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, Bolton argues that the U.S. and Israel have weakened Iran’s government to the point that there is no cohesive Iranian leadership to make a deal. “This disarray explains why some in Iran are again reportedly plotting to murder Mr. Trump,” he writes, “while others are still negotiating with his representatives.”

I’m sure Bolton is correct about the difficulties posed by our semi-victory. But there’s another piece of the puzzle: our semi-failure. American planning blunders have done their part to make a tidy exit impossible. The U.S. was unprepared for and ultimately checked by the Iranian threat on shipping in the Strait of Hormuz. Trump has argued that energy markets will organically overcome this challenge. That could be, but he’s not so confident that he’s ready to leave the strait in the regime’s hands.

So the U.S. has fought itself into a perverse Goldilocks zone where we won just enough and lost just enough to prevent our leaving. The administration has taken a long, winding path merely to reach this point of clarity. I’ll take it, with the hope that the president finally commits to total victory. But I expect that getting from here to there will involve at least as many foolish diversions.

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Ted Cruz is trying to rid the Republican Party of antisemitism

In December 1991, William F. Buckley Jr. devoted nearly 40,000 words of National Review to a single question: was Pat Buchanan an antisemite? Buckley reviewed Buchanan's Gulf War commentary, his "amen corner" description of Congress and Israel, and a set of statements that tracked classic tropes about Jewish influence and dual loyalty. His conclusion: "I find it impossible to defend Pat Buchanan against the charge that what he did and said during the period under examination amounted to anti-Semitism." Buckley did not find that disqualifying: the National Review endorsed Buchanan in the 1992 New Hampshire primary a few weeks after the piece ran. Buckley had ruled the language out of bounds. He had not ruled out the man. Yet his essay reverberated in the conservative movement for years.

Ted Cruz wants to do something perhaps even more dramatic. Speaking at a March 2026 antisemitism symposium hosted by the Republican Jewish Coalition and National Review, Cruz called for conservatives to purge antisemitic figures from the movement "just as" Buckley did sixty years earlier, then turned to Tucker Carlson: "I believe Tucker Carlson is the single most dangerous demagogue in this country." He has described antisemitism as "the gateway drug to anticapitalism and anti-Americanism," and backs The Front Line, a 501(c)(4) built to make it disqualifying in Republican primaries, mapping races and running messaging campaigns against candidates who traffic in it. 

Buckley published a finding, in his own magazine, that cost him a working relationship with a writer who had called National Review his "spiritual guide." Cruz and The Front Line are trying to go further - to make antisemitism disqualifying for any Republican lawmaker.

Both men treat antisemitism as diagnostic rather than incidental. A movement does not produce Jew-hatred as a random defect. It produces it when something upstream has already gone wrong, and the antisemitism is the symptom that surfaces first because it is the easiest one to spot. Buckley traced Buchanan's rhetoric to a paleoconservative strain trading the movement's postwar commitments, anti-totalitarianism, ordered liberty, alliance with the traditional partners of the West, for an isolationism that found Jews a convenient explanation for America's foreign entanglements. Cruz is diagnosing the same disease in his own generation's terms. He is not primarily worried about the students cheering anti-Israel lines at Turning Point USA events. He is worried about the isolationist "America First" reflex behind the cheering, one that treats Israel, capitalism, and the postwar order as three names for the same betrayal. The antisemitism is the test result. The disease is the abandonment of the commitments that used to define conservatism.

Both men are also paying, or paid, a real cost for saying so in public. Buckley's essay widened a rupture with the paleocon wing that never closed, even after the National Review endorsement tried to paper over it; critics on both sides accused him of either damning an ally or failing to finish the job. Cruz, weighing a 2028 run, is picking a fight with a commentator who reaches a bigger youth audience than he does. At the same March symposium, Republican Jewish Coalition chairman Norm Coleman told the room the party is winning the fight against right-wing antisemitism. Cruz, on the same stage, said flatly that he wasn't sure that was accurate. This is principle over optics and standards over the illusion of unity.

While occasionally the Left makes a show of being strongly against antisemitism, they invariably come up against the anti-Zionists in their camp who hide their antisemitism behind politics, and they are unwilling to take a stand against the "anti-Israel" dog whistles. So Chuck Schumer may have made a speech about antisemitism on the Left in 2023, and Keir Starmer may have purged blatant antisemites from the Labour party, but the source of the rot is still there. Antisemitism on the left travels increasingly under cover of anti-Zionism, and a movement that treats demonization of the Jewish state as presumptively legitimate cannot succeed in drawing a line that doesn't really exist. 

What Buckley and Cruz share is a working premise: when you tolerate the antisemite because he brings votes, ratings, or energy, the toleration licenses everything that follows from it, the isolationism, the conspiracism, the substitution of resentment for argument. Confronting it costs real support and buys nothing in return except the claim that the movement's stated principles are still operative. Buckley made that trade in 1991; Cruz is invoking Buckley's example to justify finishing the job. It is an uphill battle and perhaps a quixotic one. But there may be a way to succeed, and it is not to separate Israel from the antisemitism discussion but to center it. 

That is an essay for another time. 

---

Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon! Reclaiming the Covenant on America's 250th (May 2026) "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

 

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07/12 Links: Lindsey Graham, a stalwart supporter of Israel in the Senate, dies at 71; Sinwar predicted Israel might respond with nuclear strike; The PA's War Against Jewish History

From Ian:

In memo before October 7, Sinwar predicted Israel might respond with nuclear strike

Yahya Sinwar, the late Hamas leader who masterminded the terror group’s October 7, 2023, massacre, assessed ahead of the onslaught that Israel might respond with a nuclear strike on the Gaza Strip, but chose to carry out the invasion anyway, according to a newly revealed document written in the terror chief’s own hand.

The memo, written in August 2022, was obtained by the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center, and excerpts from it were published by Channel 12 on Sunday. A similar document was revealed last fall, though several details were not present in previous reporting.

According to Channel 12, Sinwar laid out specific operational plans, including numbers of fighters to be deployed to particular junctions, envisioning 25 simultaneous breaches of the Israel-Gaza border fence, to take control of 25 different junctions. He envisioned “well-trained squads” carrying out each of these infiltrations, with each squad numbering 100 fighters.

Sinwar also planned for a further 2,210 fighters to attack 221 small communities in the south, and a further 1,600 for eight larger ones. He wrote that 1,200 fighters would be deployed to attack Israeli cities, and 2,000 to attack army bases. The total fighting force he imagined would have numbered some 10,000 terrorists, none of whom would have been privy to the entire scope of the plan.

The figures are significantly higher than the number of Palestinians who actually invaded from Gaza on October 7, which the Israel Defense Forces estimates at around 5,600, of whom about 3,500 were Hamas fighters, along with some 580 fighters from the Palestinian Islamic Jihad group, and about 1,400 other Gazans.

“The goal is to expel the settlers with their vehicles,” the terror chief wrote in the memo, referring to the residents of Israel’s south. He wrote that “priority” should be given to children and women, while ordering that “the men aged 17-50 are to be taken hostage” and that “all phones must be taken, along with any additional documents they are carrying on their person.”

The Channel 12 report emphasized Sinwar’s awareness of the likely costs of the attack, noting that he did not profess certainty that Iran, which backs Hamas, or the Islamic Republic’s other regional proxies such as Hezbollah, would join in the onslaught, as the terror group is widely believed to have hoped they would.

Moreover, the terror chief estimated that Israel would “not hesitate to use all means and weapons at its disposal” in response to the mass murder, adding: “They may even use an atomic bomb, no less.”

“But first, it will be surprised by the attack and enter into chaos,” he wrote, describing the assault as “a campaign of life or death,” and calling for “a popular operation of returning to the villages and recapturing them symbolically.”

WSJ: Aspiring to Regional Domination, Iran Is Ready to Escalate over Hormuz

For the Iranian regime, keeping a chokehold over the Strait of Hormuz has turned out to be more important than the tens of billions of dollars in sanctions relief from the Trump administration. Iranian officials believe the country has finally emerged as a regional hegemon and is seeking to cement its new status by securing permanent arrangements to control the vital waterway - and dominating the Persian Gulf economies along with it.

"This is the only way: recognize the new Iranian order in the Strait of Hormuz," warned Ebrahim Azizi, the head of the Iranian parliament's national security commission. "The Strait of Hormuz will only open with 'Iranian arrangements,' not American threats," added the parliament's speaker and the lead negotiator with the U.S., Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf.

This attitude heralds a rocky future, with continuing uncertainty for global energy markets and a Damoclean Sword of renewed strikes hanging over the Gulf monarchies. "The Islamic Republic will become even more of a gangster regime. Its takeaway from the war is that concessions are won through coercion - by attacking its neighbors, threatening the Strait of Hormuz, and driving up the price of oil," said Karim Sadjadpour, Iran expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

The Iranian regime views the oil-rich Gulf monarchies as belonging to its own natural sphere of influence - a sphere denied to it by America ever since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Tehran's drive to institutionalize Iranian control over the Strait of Hormuz reflects its ambition to establish a new Pax Iranica in the Middle East.

Iran's perception of itself as a new regional hegemon is delusional given how much its military has been degraded, how much its network of proxy forces in the Middle East has been weakened, and how much its economy has been suffocated in recent months, said Salman Al-Ansari, a Saudi geopolitical analyst. "All it has left is bullying, piracy, noise and the ability to act as a spoiler. These are not the qualities of a hegemon, but of a thug."

For now, the Iranians have limited themselves to largely ineffective attacks on American military facilities in Bahrain, Kuwait and Jordan.

"Fundamentally, the Iranians don't believe that Trump wants to go back to war, so they are going to just push and push. They are really thinking that he is not going to wallop them at all," said Marc Polymeropoulos, a former senior CIA official.

Masih Alinejad: The Iran the Funeral Cameras Don't Show

In the months since supreme leader Ali Khamenei's death, I have received hundreds of messages from friends and contacts inside Iran.

They are messages of disbelief, relief and, when people feel safe enough, joy. But they are still afraid. They are always afraid.

The carefully choreographed seas of mourners at the funeral are an illusion. I know from experience how they are assembled through force.

The total expense of the week-long funeral - including security deployments of roughly 150,000 police, temporary infrastructure, transportation, accommodation for thousands of out-of-town participants, free 24-hour metro and bus services, catering, and a week of public holidays - could approach $800 million.

Why does the system that denounced extravagance pour hundreds of millions into a funeral?

For a supreme leader who was considered a titan of a global movement, the absence of every major world leader is an embarrassment.

This was not mourning. This was a regime staging a display of strength for an audience that is no longer watching.

Many of those attending the funeral genuinely want revenge. During the funeral, crowds of mourners hung an effigy of President Donald Trump. From the funeral stage, regime loyalists repeatedly vowed revenge.

Placards carried by mourners displayed prominent Americans, with red crosshairs or target marks over their foreheads. The captions read, "Sooner or later, your heads will roll."

When the Islamic Republic threatens to kill you, believe them. As a former journalist in Iran, I was forced into exile for criticizing the regime, only for Iranian intelligence operatives to plot my assassination in New York - a plan foiled by the FBI at the last minute.

But before that, the regime threatened me publicly with posters, cartoons, and effigies. For the Islamic Republic, propaganda is the prelude to action.

This is Iran's reality: a population who have learned to perform grief when required, and who express their true feelings only in whispers, anonymously, or not at all.

I have been the keeper of those messages for years. They fill my phone. They fill my social media. They are the Iran the funeral cameras do not show.

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In 1939 a priest described how today's "anti-Zionist" antisemites work

In 1939, Catholic priest Charles Owen Rice told a Pittsburgh audience how antisemites were beating the rap:

"These enemies of the Jew will define anti-Semitism as persecution of the Jew because he is a Jew. They will hold that because, to their anti-Jewish attacks, they affix a rider saying that they exempt good Jews, therefore, they are automatically absolved of anti-Semitism."

When you define antisemitism as "persecution of the Jew because he is a Jew" you are saying that it is only antisemitism when it has no logical excuse. But when Jews are accused of controlling the government, running Wall Street or dominating the media, that is not hatred of Jews as Jews - that could be a valid reason for antisemitism!

Where have we heard the definition of  antisemitism as hating "Jews as Jews" before? Oh yes, just last month. And it was argued by the exact "good Jews" in their roles Rice was referring to.

Australia's Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion invited submissions, and the Australia Palestine Advocacy Network answered with 259 pages built toward a single demand: reject the IHRA definition of antisemitism, because anti-Zionists must not be called antisemitic no matter what they say about the Jewish state. To make that case, APAN enlisted three Jewish anti-Zionist scholars, and all three converged on the same highly restricted definition of antisemitism Charles Owen Rice identified that excludes nearly all antisemites.

Shaul Magid called antisemitism "the unmitigated and unwarranted hatred of, or animus against, the Jew qua Jew." Ilan Pappe called it "hatred of Jews because of who they are." Neve Gordon called it hatred "understood as hatred of Jews per se." All of these are restatements of "antisemitism is persecution of the  Jew because he is a Jew" - in other words, for no valid reason. Apply that definition honestly and even the people accusing Jews of poisoning wells are exonerated, because they didn't hate Jews qua Jews - they only hated the poisoners! A reason is a warrant, and under Magid's, Pappe's, and Gordon's own test, a warrant is an alibi.

The Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism, written specifically to counter the IHRA definition, runs the identical maneuver.  Its core definition turns on hostility to Jews "as Jews," the same restriction Rice's antisemites used and the same one Magid, Pappe, and Gordon rediscovered ninety years later. That framing lets the JDA wave off the ugliest charges against Israel: the genocide accusation, the apartheid libel, and the blood-soaked conspiracy theories about Zionist power, because none of it counts as hatred of the Jew as such. It's hatred of the Jew as an Israeli, an occupier, a colonizer, always with a warrant attached, which by the JDA's own logic means it's never really antisemitism at all.  

JDA does contradict itself by giving examples of hating Jews for various reasons, but their examples are arbitrary: why should saying that Jews secretly spread COVID antisemitic but saying that Jews try to hide their genocide against Palestinians is not?  Adding specific exceptions to "Jews as Jews" does not make the definition much better.  

"Jews as Jews" describes one narrow slice of Jew-hatred, not the whole of it. Rice knew that in 1939, back when the warrants were finance and Bolshevism and a blood libel over Christian children. The same shrinking maneuver keeps resurfacing every time someone needs to excuse a particular hatred while condemning the rest, decade after decade, because it works: define real antisemitism as reasonless, and any hatred with a stated reason, however manufactured, gets to walk out the door labeled something else.

Here's the entire JTA article.

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07/11 Links: Coordinated anti-Israel propaganda campaign blindsided the West after Oct. 7; Trump: 1,000 missiles are locked and loaded and aimed at Iran; One detail changes the whole Ro Khanna story

From Ian:

Coordinated anti-Israel propaganda campaign blindsided the West after Oct. 7, author says

Shortly after the Hamas atrocities of October 7, 2023, Warren Kinsella began noticing what he considered the fingerprints of a professional propaganda campaign.

A Canadian political strategist who has worked for decades in war rooms advising prime ministers and political campaigns in Canada, the United States and Israel, Kinsella makes that case in his new book, “The Hidden Hand: The Information War and the Rise of Antisemitic Propaganda.”

According to Kinsella, Hamas and its networks, along with their Western followers, had thousands of social media accounts primed, protest banners ready, and talking points translated into multiple languages long before the IDF’s response to the carnage had even begun.

Kinsella believes that what may appear to be spontaneous outrage on Western streets and social feeds is, in fact, a coordinated political operation that could only be executed by state actors and professional agitators.

His new book claims Jew-hatred is being mainstreamed by outlaw states and extremist groups who use tools of modern campaigning such as message discipline, cash payouts and logistics training. These actors push slogans like “From the river to the sea” and “Globalize the Intifada” so quickly and uniformly that they cannot be dismissed as organic, Kinsella said.

And, he says, Western democracies have barely begun to respond.

“Almost immediately after October 7, I looked around and quickly formed the opinion that what I was seeing was an organized, professional-style political campaign, pushing out this vile, hateful propaganda against Jews, the Jewish state and Western democracy,” Kinsella, a resident of Prince Edward County, Ontario, told The Times of Israel. “I spoke to other political people I know, and they all had the same reaction.”

In October 2023, “there were thousands of protests around the planet using the same slogans,” said Kinsella, who is also a columnist for the Toronto Sun and founder of the Daisy Consulting Group.

That, to Kinsella, was either “one hell of a coincidence” or evidence of central planning.

Kinsella sees that conclusion as central to the book’s thesis and points to comments by US Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines, who has accused Iran of seeking to fund and encourage anti-Israel protests.

“The bad guys,” he said, “have unlimited resources and armies of propaganda,” with which they have successfully convinced Westerners that Israel is an “apartheid state” and a “white supremacist colonial state bent on destroying a powerless non-white minority.”

Kinsella’s documentary film “The Campaign” — which complements the book — was first screened in Toronto on March 30. Last month, it was shown in Tel Aviv at Israel’s largest documentary film festival, Docaviv, and at Canada’s Parliament Hill for legislators.

Nova Festival survivors face torrent of abuse

Survivors of the Nova festival massacre on October 7 are facing a torrent of online abuse from bots believed to be manned by Iran.

Thousands of coordinated fake accounts linked to hostile state actors have targeted those who attended the festival, at which 364 people were murdered by Hamas and dozens more injured or taken hostage in 2023.

Social media platforms are failing to remove abusive posts, comments and videos about the survivors, according to a new report monitoring the abuse and shared exclusively with The Telegraph.

The report, set to be published by Fighting Online Anti-Semitism in the coming days, documents a “sustained and multi-layered digital campaign” against survivors of the attack.

The researchers said the “coordinated” campaign was intended to erase, distort and justify the events of Oct 7, not only by challenging the facts of the massacre but also the survivors themselves.

They pointed to social media posts calling for the death of survivors, denying their experiences and labelling them with racist, sexist and other highly offensive slurs.

Conspiracy theories have abounded ever since the massacre, suggesting that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) fired on its own citizens to justify a ground assault on Gaza.

“The phenomenon ranges from complete denial – claiming the attack was a staged event involving ‘crisis actors’ and fake blood – to posts and comments that shift blame onto the IDF,” the report states.

The organisation believes Tehran is behind the campaign of abuse.

Holocaust author said book was ‘canceled’ because he wouldn’t bash Israel, US

A book about the Holocaust was “canceled” after the author said he refused his editor’s insistence that the introduction include criticisms of Israel for committing “war crimes” in Gaza and the Trump-led US for creating “concentration-style prisons” for migrants.

Rafael Medoff, the author of the book “Cartoonists Against the Holocaust,” said he refused to publish what he believed were falsehoods editor Craig Yoe wanted to put in the book contracted to be published by Dark Horse.

Prior to the current controversy, Dark Horse published two of Dr. Medoff’s other books, “Whistleblowers” and “Cartoonists Against Racism” without incident.

It was only after the October 7, 2023, Hamas invasion of Israel that Yoe began demanding that Dr. Medoff denounce Israel as the price to be paid for publishing his new tome “Cartoonists Against the Holocaust,” said Medoff and the Jewish civil rights group StandWithUs.

“The book was canceled. I was canceled,” Medoff, who has written op-eds for The Post, said.

Yoe sent a Sept. 1, 2025 email to Medoff saying he “thought long and hard” about adding a separate “note” in the book to unload on Israel and the US before its planned publication.

Yoe said Trump is “attempting to create concentration camp-style prisons, is sending American residents to gulag type prisons in other countries without constitution guaranteed trials,” Yoe said.

“At the same time,” he added, ” a country populated by an ethnic religious group who were immorally and horrifically tortured and killed in the Holocaust for their ethnicity is led by a prime minister that the world’s top war crimes court has issued warrants for his alleged acts of war crimes and crimes against humanity.”

Medoff sent a detailed response to Yoe objecting to slamming Israel and the US, saying the claims Yoe wanted to print were “factually inaccurate” and would politicize the book.

Head of PEN America, a free expression group, quits because it’s against Israel boycott

Dinaw Mengestu, the head of the free expression group PEN America, resigns after the group said it was against cultural boycotts in an article about anti-Jewish and anti-Israel discrimination.

Mengestu tells The New York Times it is “unethical” for his free speech group to oppose cultural boycotts because it’s discriminatory to the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement.

He accused PEN America of “defending some rights while not defending others.”

PEN America’s Thursday article focused on Israeli and Jewish writers “facing rising isolation and exclusion.”

The article said the group believes boycotts threaten free expression, but recognizes the right to boycott.

PEN America says its mission is to “protect free expression” and the “freedom to write.”

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07/10 Links Pt2: Howard Jacobson: “Had we been living in Berlin, what would we have done?; The trillion-dollar campaign to conquer the West; Andy Burnham’s shameful pandering to anti-Israel bigots

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: The trillion-dollar campaign to conquer the West

More and more information is surfacing to reveal that the Islamic holy war against the West isn’t just being waged on the battleground of the Middle East.

Even more significantly, it’s also being waged through a trillion-dollar influence campaign to colonize and subvert the Western mind, organized by extremists from the Islamic world.

These have tunneled into the West through a vast civic infrastructure whose real purpose and sources of funding have been as well concealed, and in their own way are just as deadly as the subterranean genocide factories in Gaza and Lebanon.

To those with eyes to see, it was obvious from the start that the hate marches springing into existence after Oct. 7, 2023—even while the Hamas-led atrocities were still going on—weren’t spontaneous protests against Israel.

They were instead a globally coordinated campaign to turn gullible Westerners into the unwitting army of Islamic jihad through support for the Palestinian cause.

An important new report by NGO Monitor shows that this post-Oct. 7 protest infrastructure in Britain has used the signature liberal causes of humanitarianism and human rights to launder the Islamic jihad against the West.

The report found that, through a series of concentric circles, just six groups have been involved in more than 80% of the major protests.

In the innermost circle sit the states hostile to the West: Iran, China, Russia and Qatar; terrorist organizations, such as Hamas, Hezbollah and Al-Qaeda; and extremist religious-political movements like the Muslim Brotherhood.

Lapping around them are charities, campaign groups, protest movements and advocacy organizations that provide legitimacy for these hostile forces, amplify their propaganda and transmit extremism to society.

Out of 40 organizations mapped in the report, at least 11 have links to extremist groups or officials who have cooperated with Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Muslim Brotherhood.

New Ted Cruz-aligned organization takes aim at right-wing antisemitism

Allies of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) are launching a new political organization aimed at countering antisemitism within the Republican Party, Jewish Insider has learned, led by Arielle F. Klepach, a former assistant U.S. attorney and senior counsel for the National Jewish Advocacy Center.

The Front Line (TFL) will operate as a 501(c)(4) nonprofit, meaning the group will not have to disclose its donors and can spend unlimited sums toward political activity, provided campaign finance is not its primary purpose and it does not contribute directly to campaigns.

A source familiar with the matter told JI that those behind the organization, which Cruz is not directly involved with, raised several million dollars to fund the operation. Klepach will run the operation as executive director.

In a statement on her hiring, Klepach said she was enthusiastic to join an effort focused on preventing Republicans from mimicking what she described as Democrats’ embrace of anti-Israel sentiment.

“There has been a surge of antisemitism across America, which first engulfed the left and is now threatening the moral integrity and political unity of the conservative movement and the Republican Party,” Klepach said. “I am excited to lead The Front Line’s efforts to defeat right-wing antisemitism before it takes conservatives down the same path of anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and pro-Sharia advocacy that has taken the left.”

TFL’s mission statement describes the group as “an issue advocacy organization aligned with the positions of Ted Cruz dedicated to countering right-wing antisemitism, by making antisemitism disqualifying in the Republican Party and conservative movement, through activities across political, policy, and digital spaces.”

Sanders compares Israel with Sudan and Russia

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who has long accused Israel of “genocide,” compared the Jewish state with Sudan and Russia in a statement on Thursday.

“One might have hoped that, after thousands of years of war, humanity could have come up with a better way to resolve conflicts than killing and mass destruction,” the Jewish senator said. “Unfortunately, that is not the case. There is now more war and bloodshed raging across the world than at almost any point in decades.”

In a statement ostensibly about “civil war and genocide in Sudan,” Sanders noted Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine “without provocation” and what he said is “genocide” in Gaza.

“In October 2023, Hamas attacked Israel, killing 1,200 innocent people and taking 251 hostages,” he said. “In response, Netanyahu and the Israeli military did not simply wage war against Hamas. They waged war against the entire population of Gaza.”

He accused the Jewish state of destroying “virtually the entire physical infrastructure of Gaza.”

Hamas is known to embed deliberately among the civilian population and to use it as human shields.

Five paragraphs into the statement about genocide in Sudan, Sanders finally mentioned Sudan, before pivoting to U.S. President Donald Trump.

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07/10 Links Pt1: US House probe targets New Israel Fund over anti-Netanyahu meddling; Pro-Israel UK MP Ann Widdecombe, murdered; CPJ Staff Packed With Anti-Israel Agitators

From Ian:

Brian Cox: Hamas announced it is stepping down in Gaza. It’s time for Canada to step up

The Board of Peace that is tasked with managing the transition of authority in Gaza welcomed Monday’s announcement that Hamas has dissolved its government, yet the Board nonetheless insisted that its assessment will be “guided by actions, not promises, to meet the critical needs of the people of Gaza.”

If Hamas does not voluntarily disarm and refrain from a governing role in Gaza, these non-negotiable objectives may yet require overwhelming military force to achieve. This means the prospect of intense—even deadly—combat operations remains.

Despite the dangers on the horizon, the potential for this plan to finally achieve durable peace in Palestinian territories is worth the risk.

But doing so will require commitment, resolve, and skilled military capabilities. This is why the Canadian Armed Forces are especially well suited to the task.

One potential roadblock is the current strain in relations between Canada and the United States. Despite current tensions, the government still maintains that “Canada has had no closer friend and ally than the United States” for over 150 years.

And although the peace plan is an American-led initiative for which Trump is appointed chair of the fledgling Board of Peace, the United Nations Security Council has welcomed the board and authorized establishment of an International Stabilization Force (ISF).

This provides international legitimacy to the peace plan, which is a point the government can emphasize to the domestic constituency in light of current diplomatic tensions with America.

Last fall, the Carney government along with Australia, France, and the UK recognized the State of Palestine even though it doesn’t currently qualify for traditional criteria of statehood. Committing robust military capabilities to the ISF in Gaza represents an opportunity to pursue a credible two-state solution.

The Carney government insists that “Canada is a strong supporter of the Middle East Peace Process” and that its approach to the conflict “is guided by its historic and unwavering commitment to a two-state solution, with Israelis and Palestinians living side-by-side in peace and security.”

If Canada is genuinely committed to long-term peace while also supporting “free and fair elections in Palestine in which Hamas must play no role,” political rhetoric, humanitarian aid, and capacity building simply will not be enough.

The consequences of failure are predictable: perpetual conflict, resurgence of Hamas and other Iran-backed regional proxy militias, and eventually a repeat of the October 7 atrocities followed by catastrophic large-scale hostilities.

A coalition of the willing must seize this moment by demonstrating the resolve needed to convert wishes to results.

The time is now for Canada to step up, join in, and take on a decisive role to foster genuine peace in Gaza and beyond.

US House probe targets New Israel Fund over anti-Netanyahu meddling

Two influential US congressional panels have launched a major inquiry into the New Israel Fund (NIF), JNS reported on Friday.

According to the report, the House Judiciary and Ways and Means committees are examining allegations that the American-based leftist organization potentially violated federal tax laws by funneling non-profit capital into partisan political operations aimed at toppling Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

In an official warning obtained by JNS, Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) and Ways and Means Chairman Jason Smith (R-MO) detailed how NIF may have breached its 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status “by providing millions of dollars in funding to groups that engaged in political campaign activities in the 2019 Israeli elections."

US internal revenue laws strictly forbid public charities from intervening in foreign or domestic political races either directly or indirectly.

According to congressional investigators, the NIF covertly backed radical anti-Netanyahu networks.

“NIF provided approximately $356,000 to Zazim, an Israeli organization that ‘operated a transportation system that brought thousands of Bedouin voters’ to the polls that were part of the opposition party to Prime Minister Netanyahu," the lawmakers noted. They also revealed that the organization “also provided approximately $95,000 to Adalah, a group that ‘provided legal representation to the Joint Arab List,’ an alliance of Arab parties that centered their campaign around ousting Prime Minister Netanyahu in favor of his opponent, Benny Gantz."

Further compliance failures were flagged regarding a 2019 court filing indicating that the NIF actively interfered in the sovereign electoral map by securing signatures for a legal petition to block a right-wing legislative candidate. “When the Israeli Supreme Court banned the candidate, ‘NIF called it a victory for democracy,’" the chairmen noted.

The leftist organization has historically presented itself as an entity dedicated to bolstering civil equity, asserting that it has disbursed over $300 million to various left-wing frameworks since 1979. However, the prominent visual on their web portal showcases Arab MK Ayman Odeh, leader of the radical anti-Zionist Hadash-Ta'al faction.

Odeh, despite being an elected member of the Knesset, has made countless anti-Israel statements, including comparisons between Israeli hostages and Hamas terrorists.

Rep. Jim Jordan indicated to JNS that the evidence points to blatant meddling. “The law is the law. You’re not supposed to be using this for electioneering activity," he stressed. “It looks like they were.

Downstream of the Lie By Abe Greenwald

Via Commentary Newsletter, sign up here.
I’m not talking about the dupes who believe anti-Israel propaganda. I mean, rather, those Israel supporters who blame the shift in public opinion on Israel’s failed communications strategy over the past three years.

They act as if anyone else is doing a better job of getting populations to distinguish between lies and truth. Falsehoods and loony theories have come to proliferate everywhere at all times. Look at recent history: Most of the country believed that Donald Trump colluded with Vladimir Putin to win the 2016 election. Most bought into the story that Covid came from a wet market. The 2020 election showed that Americans generally thought Joe Biden was cognitively fit for office. As recently as 2024, Gallup found that a majority of Americans were opposed to banning “gender-affirming” care for minors. And most still think the government is lying to us about aliens.

In such cases of broadly shared misinformation, we tend to blame those peddling the lies, not those who just didn’t scream the truth loud enough. In fact, truthful protestations are repurposed by the liars as further proof of a cover-up.

Look, I don’t really think Israel lost the information war to begin with. As I’ve argued before, the information Israel needed to get across was that it’s not going anywhere and will do whatever is necessary to ensure its survival.

But what’s more important is that the psyop against Israel isn’t ultimately about Israel. It’s a disinformation nuke aimed at the heart of America. Just look at what it’s already done to our social cohesion. Same goes for the Charlie Kirk conspiracy theory, which is itself an anti-Semitic spinoff of the op against Israel. History shows that the promulgation of anti-Semitism can be a death sentence for free societies.

To save our country, I suggest we start looking abroad at who would stand to gain from this kind of crack-up. Never mind the incentive structure of clicks and views. That’s all downstream of the problem’s source. It’s the U.S. that’s losing the information war. And the way to win it is to take the fight straight to our enemies.

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The Abu Safiya Propaganda Campaign - all based on uncorroborated and unlikely descriptions of a man near death

This week produced a textbook coordinated campaign : Amnesty International, CAIR, CodePink, and Physicians for Human Rights Israel all escalated calls for the release of Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, echoed by the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention and carried by the Guardian, the BBC, and NBC News. 

Where did this come from? 

The spark was a single visit. On July 2, Abu Safiya's lawyer, Nasser Odeh, met with him and came away describing a man near death — unable to speak lucidly, beaten by more than five guards with hands, batons, and hammers, nearly losing consciousness several times during the meeting itself, telling Odeh he did not expect to survive.

Every outlet that ran the story ran Odeh's account, and only Odeh's account. No doctor examined Abu Safiya independently. No photograph or video from the visit exists. The Israel Prison Service denies mistreatment, calling the allegations false. The entire campaign — the Amnesty statement calling the reports "truly horrifying," the UN experts' demand for immediate release, the wire coverage — rests on one lawyer's description of one meeting, a lawyer who has every incentive to shade the truth, and nearly all of it describes Abu Safiya as a civilian pediatrician with no connection to the war beyond treating its casualties.

That framing has a hole in it. A 2016 photograph uncovered by NGO Monitor shows Abu Safiya in military uniform at a Kamal Adwan ceremony alongside senior figures of Hamas's Military Medical Services and National Security Forces, and multiple Arabic-language sources refer to him as a colonel. Abu Safiya's link to Hamas's governing apparatus is a matter of public record, not an Israeli fabrication invented to justify his detention after the fact — a detail the campaign coverage this week omits entirely.

When Israeli forces took Kamal Adwan Hospital that Abu Safiya led on December 27, 2024, they detained more than 240 people they identified as Hamas and Islamic Jihad operatives, including 15 tied to the October 7 attack, and later released interrogation footage of a detainee describing the hospital as a shelter used to stage patrols and move weapons. It strains credulity that the hospital he ran could host so many militants without his knowledge or approval. 

the publicity campaign also ignores the legality of Israel's detention of Abu Safiya. Israel is holding him under the Unlawful Combatants Law, and PHRI and the UN bodies describe that as arbitrary detention requiring either charges or release. But as retired military lawyer Brian Cox has argued, Hamas is not a High Contracting Party to the Geneva Conventions, so its fighters fall outside the POW protections of the Third Convention; the governing provision is Common Article 3, which covers non-international armed conflict and permits holding a detainee for the duration of hostilities without the judicial process that a criminal charge would require. The hostilities have not ended.

We cannot know how accurate Odeh's description of Safiya is. But it echoes testimony that surfaced months earlier from detainees released in February and March, and that testimony was, if anything, more graphic. Those detainees said Abu Safiya could not speak without repeating each word four times, that dogs had been set on him, that his weight had fallen to around forty kilograms. Read together, the two accounts describe a man who has spent the better part of a year under constant torture, beatings, and starvation, sliding steadily toward death.

There is one problem with that picture: the video from June 10.

Abu Safiya appeared before Israel's Supreme Court by video link that day, between the March testimony and Odeh's July account. He was gaunt, but not the emaciated, forty-kilogram figure described months earlier. In the five seconds of footage that circulated, he shows no visible difficulty breathing — sitting still, shackled, unremarkable.

Is it possible that Abu Safiya was near death in March, recovered enough by June to sit calmly through a hearing, and collapsed into near-death again by July? Possible, yes. Likely is a different question, especially once you notice that the lurid details are exactly what got Odeh onto the BBC, that nobody in this chain offers a claim about Abu Safiya's condition that doesn't ultimately trace back to somebody speaking on his behalf, and that the same coverage leaves out a documented military affiliation and a live legal dispute over whether his detention needs a charge at all.

Odeh has every incentive to make his client's case as urgently as he can to whichever outlet will run it, and there is nothing improper in that; it is what advocates do. The failure sits with the news organizations and human rights bodies that took a single uncorroborated account, matched it against no evidence but its own resemblance to an earlier uncorroborated account, and never asked what the one piece of footage actually showed, or what they were leaving out about who Abu Safiya is. A little more skepticism was available to all of them. They chose not to use it.

---

Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon! Reclaiming the Covenant on America's 250th (May 2026) "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

 

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07/09 Links Pt2: Rahm Emanuel and the persistent delusion of failed policies; Jerusalem voted the seventh-best city in the world; Elie Wiesel’s hidden world of letters, loss and friendship

From Ian:

Jonathan Tobin: Rahm Emanuel and the persistent delusion of failed policies

Say this for Rahm Emanuel. He may have about as much chance of being nominated for the presidency in 2028 by the Democratic Party as he does of being elected pope. But he knows how to retain the attention of the national media by manipulating contacts inside the Beltway.

That’s the only way to explain why someone who is not even being included in way-too-early polls about presidential preferences could get the kind of massive coverage he got for a speech given this week in Israel, when those far ahead of him in the contest struggle to be noticed.

On July 7, The Washington Post devoted three full articles to previewing Emanuel’s July 8 talk at Tel Aviv University. The Post, The New York Times, CNN and the rest of the corporate press then followed up with even more coverage of the speech after the fact. Those articles not only depicted it as deeply relevant to the current debate about the U.S.-Israel relationship going on in his party, but also to the reality on the ground in the Middle East.

A rerun of failed ideas
But what made this public relations coup even more remarkable is the fact that the much-ballyhooed address consisted of little more than a recycling of the conventional wisdom of his long-past political heyday. Emanuel’s speech was more or less a rerun of what passed for foreign-policy establishment canon in 1995 and 2015, put forward as a formula for peace in the second quarter of the 21st century.

Once you strip away Emanuel’s attempts to claim both the credibility and credentials to demand that Israelis discard everything their lying eyes and ears have been telling them about their nation’s struggle to survive a multifront war launched by Iran and its terrorist auxiliaries, all you’ve got is what we might term a piece of political nostalgia.

Emanuel calls his big idea the “23-state solution” because it is based on the notion that the Arab and Muslim world can cajole the Palestinian Arabs to make peace. But that’s just window dressing for what is the same two-state solution that his former bosses, Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, foolishly expended so much political capital trying to force into being. Contrary to liberal myth, that formula was thwarted not by Israeli intransigence but by the stubborn refusal of the Palestinians—enabled by much of the Muslim and Arab worlds, in addition to Western leftists—to countenance any future but one in which Israel is erased.

The context here is the fact that the former U.S. ambassador to Japan (2022-2025), mayor of Chicago (2011-2019), White House chief of staff to President Barack Obama (2009-2010), U.S. congressman from Illinois (2003-2009), investment banker (1999-2002) and senior adviser to Clinton (1993-1998) believes that his already impressive résumé ought to be rounded out by a stint as commander-in-chief. The man renowned as a serious policy wonk, albeit one with a predilection for profanity and a notorious temper, may have much to say about a lot of different topics. Yet when it comes to Israel—a subject he claims intimate knowledge of—Rahm is nothing but a blast from the discredited past.

That’s why the truly significant aspect of the speech and the massive coverage it generated isn’t what it says about the 2028 race, efforts to prevent the Democratic Party from becoming the anti-Israel party or even the one that is comfortable with antisemitism. Rather, it points toward the fact that while Israelis have absorbed the lessons of the last 33 years of history, including the Oslo Accords disaster, the Second Intifada, the fruits of the withdrawal from Gaza and the horrors of Oct. 7, 2023, supposedly smart people, including those like Emanuel who know a thing or two about Israel, have learned nothing.

Adam Louis-Klein: Rahm Emanuel’s shocking speech to fracture the bond between Israel and the diaspora

Emanuel does not share a fate with Israelis, and certainly not with the "Zionists" whose forced exodus from social networks, whose professional discrimination in the academy and elsewhere, he frames as a the natural consequence of Israel itself. He speaks from a thousand miles above, insulated from the antizionist abuse that is raging across the West.

His open attribution of collective guilt toward Jews – discriminatory in its very essence – is hardly surprising. It's increasingly treated as the common sense of liberal politics. “Netanyahu is harming Jews” is a common refrain, even though it lacks all logical sense. Netanyahu could be Hitler – as antizionists daily imagine him to be, as they mouth old Soviet slogans – yet targeting ordinary Jews as “genocidal” would still be unacceptable, and blame would lie with those who did so.

The casual rhetoric of blame reflect a deeper problem: the systematic concealment of antizionism, of Israel-hate, as something that could actually be the structural cause not only for changes in Israel's “reputation,” and not only for the violence against diaspora Jews, but for the crises in the Middle East themselves. Why, exactly, is Israel in a permanent state of war, which includes occupation and ongoing reciprocal violence? Why, exactly, does the question of whether the United States should be entangled in these wars come up in the first place? Violence against Israelis here is taken as natural and given.

While Emanuel claims to want Arab states to recognise Israel's right to exist, to integrate Israel into the region, he seems uninterested in the moral stakes of anyone seeking to annihilate a state in the first place. He seems oblivious to the social media accounts with millions of followers screaming with joy at the sight of Iranian missiles falling on Israeli civilians. Somehow none of that causes any moral outrage, since he has saved it all up for “Netanyahu” – the villain of his decadent fantasies.

The absence of any actual engagement with global antizionism is not merely a lacuna in the discourse: it is one that serves to reproduce that violence itself. By refusing to name the cause, and refusing to hold its principal actors accountable, ongoing wars are continually given justification, while blame is displaced onto Israel. This ongoing habit of evasion and non-accountability around antizionism – including refusing to say its name – causes harm to Israelis, Jews, and Palestinians alike.

Emanuel's politics does not seek peace; it seeks moral legitimacy and it exploits Israel as a tool to achieve it. His tone of superiority is not incidental. Like the old German Jews who looked down upon the traditional Eastern “Ostjuden” with contempt in the early 20th century, the liberal American Jew, insulated from antizionist abuse on the ground, now proclaims their civilisational superiority to the primitive Israeli.

I doubt that such a relationship is meant to lead to a memorandum of understanding.

Chief Rabbi urges Church of England to reject ‘genocide’ report ahead of Synod vote

The Chief Rabbi has urged the Church of England’s governing body to reject a controversial report accusing Israel of genocide, warning it threatens decades of Jewish-Christian relationship-building.

Sir Ephraim Mirvis spoke out before next week’s General Synod debate on whether the Church should formally engage with A Moment of Truth: Faith in a Time of Genocide, also known as Kairos II, as part of its efforts to better understand the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The report, produced by Palestinian Christian organisation Kairos Palestine, describes Israel’s military campaign in Gaza as a “genocidal war” and claims the Jewish state is a “colonial enterprise built on racism”. It also accuses Israel of apartheid and settler colonialism.

In a statement published on X following reporting by The Times, the Chief Rabbi said: “The content of Kairos II is deeply concerning, and I would hope the Synod will see it for what it is. While it is important to recognise the suffering of Palestinian Christians, this document does so in a way which can only harm the cause of peace.”

He added: “It presents a one-sided account of a complex conflict, downplays the historical experiences and legitimate concerns of Jewish people, and offers little more than political activism dressed up as theology.”

Mirvis continued: “It is truly shocking that a document which purports to speak in the name of truth contains so much falsehood – using extreme rhetoric to challenge the very concept of a Jewish state, and to oppose existing peace agreements in the region.”

He warned that “at a time when Christian-Jewish relations require nuance, trust and a willingness to engage with complexity, Kairos II risks undermining decades of careful relationship-building.”

The Chief Rabbi concluded: “Meaningful progress begins when the dignity, aspirations and suffering of all peoples are acknowledged. Kairos II takes us further away from that goal, not closer to it.”

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07/09 Links Pt1: BHL: Post-Oct. 7 isolation of Israel a ‘historic moral failure’; Israel’s ‘medical malpractice’; Australia’s Treatment of Jews Is a Warning to the World

From Ian:

Bernard-Henri Lévy calls post-Oct. 7 isolation of Israel a ‘historic moral failure’

The diplomatic isolation of Israel during the war in Gaza following the Oct. 7 Hamas massacre will go down in history as a moral failure and a defeat of humanity, French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy said on Thursday.

“The absence of support for Israel will be considered by future historians as a moment of huge disgrace for the West,” Lévy told JNS in an interview in Tel Aviv. “It is a defeat of humanity and a moral defeat. It is the loss of any moral compass.”

Lévy, who lives in Paris, rushed to Israel the day after the Oct. 7 attacks and the following year penned Israel Alone, a book about the lack of diplomatic support for the Jewish state in the West.

“I was beyond shocked,” he said.

He was back in Israel on Thursday to deliver the keynote address at the annual conference on contemporary antisemitism hosted by the Comper Center for the Study of Antisemitism and Racism at the University of Haifa. The gathering is the largest annual academic conference on modern-day antisemitism, drawing an estimated 550 participants, including 250 in-person presenters, with others joining virtually from abroad.

The 77-year-old French intellectual, commonly known as BHL, decried the surge in antisemitism, which he called “unprecedented in my lifetime,” noting that he rarely gives lectures in France for security reasons and that the only safe place for him to speak in the United Kingdom is a synagogue.

“Even if I come to speak about philosophy or non-Jewish issues, the only safe place for me in the U.K. is a synagogue,” he said.

Lévy noted that he has lived under police protection in Paris for more than two decades, since the publication of his book about the 2002 murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in Pakistan.

Mindful of the growing exodus of Jews from Western European cities, Lévy said he is determined to fight back.

“Europe would have no future if Jews stepped back,” he said, blaming a toxic mix of “stupid, illiterate, and barbaric anti-Semites” and a French leadership whose stance on Israel often adds fuel to the fire.

“The situation gives me the will to resist, to fight, and to win,” he said.

Amb. Michael Oren: Israel Is Not Isolated, Not Bloodthirsty

I was asked if Vice President JD Vance was right in saying that, apart from the U.S., Israel has no friends in the world. I answered "no," and listed the many friends Israel has in South America, Africa, the Arab Gulf, and India, a country with a population four times that of the U.S.

If I was asked "is JD Vance right when he said that Israel 'can't just kill (its) way out of solving every single national security problem that [it has]?'" - the answer is even more adamantly: "No!"

The charge that Israel uses brute force to resolve all its security problems is firstly and historically false. This is the country which, in 1949, signed armistice agreements with four Arab countries that only a year before had tried to destroy us. In 1967, that same country offered to return almost all of the sizable territories we captured in the Six-Day War in return for peace with the Arab leaders who once again sought to annihilate it.

This is the country, Israel, which returned the Sinai peninsula, an area more than three times its size, in return for peace with Egypt. We are the nation that signed a peace agreement with the arch terrorist Arafat who for decades specialized in murdering Israelis. He soon went back to murdering Israelis and still we sought peace with him.

Israel is the country which, arguably more than any other in the world, has done more to avoid having to kill our way out of our security problems. Still, there are some problems that Israel has no choice but to address with force. As Vice President Vance knows full well, there is no diplomatic solution for Israel's problems with Hamas, Hizbullah, and Iran - enemies sworn to wipe us off the map.

Though we must never cease striving to preserve our crucial alliance with the U.S., we must respectfully but forcefully correct American leaders when they spread falsehoods about Israel, defame our national character, and distort our history. Israel defends itself when it must but makes peace whenever it can.

Ruthie Blum: Israel’s ‘medical malpractice’

Israel ought to have its head examined. Its bleeding heart could use a check-up, too. Because something is clearly wrong with a country that repeatedly deploys its extraordinary medical expertise to preserve the lives of people who later dedicate themselves to harming it.

The latest diagnosis comes courtesy of an astonishing revelation this week by Avi Shushan, former spokesman for Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center-Ichilov Hospital, on the Channel 14 program “Sheva” with co-hosts Yehuda Schlesinger and Yaakov Bardugo.

According to Shushan, about seven years ago, when Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was gravely ill, the Mossad requested that an Ichilov specialist be dispatched to Ankara to treat him. The physician, Shushan said, did not travel as a private citizen offering personal assistance. He went, rather, “on behalf of the State of Israel.”

If true, the story is remarkable enough on its own. Israel, a country Erdoğan has repeatedly vilified, extended a helping hand when he needed one.

The gratitude wasn’t exactly forthcoming.

Turkey and Israel aren’t officially enemy states. They maintain diplomatic ties, even if relations have deteriorated dramatically. But Erdoğan’s words and deeds have long placed the neo-Ottoman-emperor wannabe firmly in the camp of Israel’s adversaries.

He has transformed Turkey into a political home for Hamas leaders. He has hosted members of the terrorist organization’s senior ranks and defended them as “freedom fighters.” He has backed flotillas aimed at breaching Israel’s blockade of Gaza. He has accused the Jewish state of crimes against humanity while embracing some of the most vicious antisemitic rhetoric in the international arena.

After the Oct. 7 massacre, when Hamas terrorists murdered, raped, burned and kidnapped innocent men, women and children, Erdoğan did not condemn the perpetrators. Instead, he portrayed Hamas as a legitimate resistance movement and attacked Israel for defending itself.

The man who, according to Shushan, was kept alive by an Israeli doctor, repaid Israel with hostility.

But Erdoğan isn’t an anomaly; he’s merely the latest patient in a long-running Israeli medical drama: a country that keeps curing those infected with a lethal hatred of the Jewish state.

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Amnesty Israel's rebuttal to the "genocide" slander

When Amnesty issued its "genocide report," Amnesty Israel published a rebuttal. It was hardly a pro-IDF analysis, but it showed how the "genocide" charge was without legal basis.

Amnesty never responded. Instead, it dismantled the Israel branch of Amnesty. 

As a result, the amnesty.org.il domain is gone and so is Amnesty Israel's rebuttal.

While I disagree with much of its analysis, the refutation of Amnesty's genocide charge is as good as any you are likely to see.  And since it is no longer available via search engines, I'm publishing the entire report here.

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Anti-Zionists think American military leaders are stupid

Section 224 of the FY2027 National Defense Authorization Act, since renumbered 219 in the House, creates a "United States-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative." It directs the Secretary of Defense to appoint an executive agent to synchronize joint work on missile defense, counter-drone systems, AI, autonomous platforms, and cybersecurity, and to move that work faster from research into production. Its text derives from the stalled U.S.-Israel FUTURES Act, folded into a must-pass bill.

Anti-Zionists are livid.

It is true that no other country has quite this arrangement with the U.S. military. The provision shifts a deepening relationship out of the annual appropriations process, where each year's aid faces a vote and conditions, and into Pentagon procurement channels that are harder to see and harder to unwind. That's a real risk that needs to be weighed against the benefits.

But critics are  going past the logical objections into antisemitic conspiracy theories. 

Khanna posted, "We cannot integrate our military with Israel's and lose our sovereignty." How does that work?

The United States runs AUKUS with Australia and the United Kingdom, a submarine and advanced-technology pact deeper than anything Section 224 contemplates. It shares co-development across NATO. Foreign components run throughout the F-35 supply chain by design. None of that is said to cost America its sovereignty, because they plainly do not. No amount of technical cooperation changes who sits in the Pentagon and decides how to defend the country; command, acquisition authority, and classification rules stay in American hands, as they do with every ally. For "lose our sovereignty" to mean anything, you need an unstated premise: that partnering with this particular party can somehow override the judgment of American leaders and bend their decisions against American interests. That the mere presence of Israelis in the process corrupts the process. That premise is not an argument. It is a spell.

Khanna is only the beginning. Joe Kent, former director of the National Counterterrorism Center, warned that opening sensitive technology to Israel means "back doors and spyware can be installed that will most certainly be used by the Israelis to influence U.S. policy." Not "might be" but "most certainly," a categorical prophecy that Israeli technology inside American systems will function as a hypnotic device operating on American policy itself. This is the sovereignty spell restated in software: contact with Israeli code does not add a supplier to be vetted, it plants a mechanism that overrides American will.

The other headline objection is quite different from Kent's. Josh Paul of the Arab Center presses it hardest: Israel will use its access to steal American technology, pursuing espionage against the systems it now touches. 

Paul adds another fantasy: "Israel will be able to threaten to withhold, or actually withhold, subcomponents or software updates that might be key to the operability of future US weapons systems, essentially holding US military capabilities hostage."  

Then there are the simultaneous social media accounts popping up with the single word: "merger." They are claiming that this bill would merge the US and Israeli militaries into a single force. This has become a major theme in recent days, from CAIR to BDS to lots of social media "news" sites. This is too stupid for words. 

Another objection from Eli Clifton and Ian Lustick in The Guardian spins an amazing conspiracy theory that has to be read to be believed. Describing the people behind the FUTURES Act, they say:

Their vision is of “New Jerusalem” (the US) wedded to “Old Jerusalem” (Israel) on the basis of both having been divinely chosen for the mission of saving civilization from the “red-green” (Marxist-Muslim) alliance.

For Israel, this means not just ruling all the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, but dominating the Middle East, launching wars of “prevention” against all potential adversaries (including Turkey, Iran and even Egypt) and, with Britain and France succumbing to the influence of foreign immigrants and the disease of “European secularism”, serving as the US’s most important ally in its global struggle to preserve “civilization” – labeled either “Jewish-Christian” or “western”.

The extravagance of such ideas clearly marks the origins of the project, exposing the influence of well-funded dark-money groups and thinktanks exerting their influence on behalf of Israel’s government.

Not coincidentally, Clufton and Lustick are releasing a book in August titled "Israel’s Lobby: America in the Grip of a Foreign Power."

The assumption behind each objection is that Israel is inherently an evil power hellbent on world domination leveraging America as its unwitting slave. 

In the end all of these criticisms are not just assuming Israeli brilliance and duplicity, but also American naivete and stupidity. 

In reality, US military and political leaders don't enter agreements that are bad for America. They have every ability to rebuff Israel and that all-powerful "Zionist Lobby" when they feel that their interests diverge. And they have, repeatedly.

In the real world, nations extensively test weapons systems and software before adopting them. In the real world, the harm from being discovered to install spyware far outweighs any benefits. In the real world, nations sign agreements for each shared technology to impose real penalties for anyone who breaks the agreement.  In the real world, any implementation of technology would include controls to ensure that the risks of depending on a single component are mitigated (i.e., with source code included with the software.) These are all risks that armies (and even regular corporations) know how to handle. 

And notice what none of them address: the benefits to the US of such an agreement. Why would it even be entertained if the US didn't see a real advantage of adopting Israeli technologies and share information that might give them new ways to attack known problems? 

When you refuse to even acknowledge the benefits along with the risks, then it is not a serious analysis. It is the retroactive justification for the pre-designed anti-Israel opinion. Which explains why so many different critics come up with so many different yet equally bizarre objections - because the point isn't a coherent argument, but the appearance of one.  Something for other anti-Zionists to grab onto and think, look, this "expert" says what I want to believe.. 

As I said, there are reasonable arguments against the act. Ro Khanna even says some of them separately. But when the rhetoric reaches into conspiracy theory and the assumption of American incompetence to hold onto its own sovereignty, we are no longer dealing with responsible argument.

We are looking at age-old antisemitism swapping the Elders of Zion with "Zionists."

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Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon! Reclaiming the Covenant on America's 250th (May 2026) "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

 

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