Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Wednesday, August 12, 2026

08/12 Links Pt1: Why isn’t Iran attacking Israel?; What Trump's deal changed and why Israel was right to reject it; Isolated Israel? Countries rush to sign trade and security deals

From Ian:

Why isn’t Iran attacking Israel?

Iran’s last weapon
Iran has delivered a sweeping set of demands that the United States must meet before the Strait of Hormuz can be reopened to maritime traffic. The Islamic Republic of Iran has been fighting a war with the Great Satan, America, and the Little Satan, Israel, for 46 years.

Iran’s most powerful strategy has been to use proxies and drones. The proxies are on life support, but not their drones. They are able to keep the Gulf destabilized with these drones and also hit American bases, despite the fact that the US and Israel have neutralized more than 90% of those missiles.

Bombing bridges and power plants is not the answer. It will only hurt the Persian people who are crying out for freedom.

Why isn’t Iran attacking Israel?
To understand what is happening, one must ask a simple question: Why is Iran not attacking Israel?

The answer is that Israel fought one of the first true drone wars involving a great power. But what Israel did that was most effective was target Iranian leadership, such as Razi Mousavi, senior IRGC general and overseer of Syrian-Iran military coordination; Mohammad Reza Zahedi, IRGC Quds Force commander for Lebanon and Syria; Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader; Ali Larijani, secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council; Gholamreza Soleimani, commander of the Basij internal security forces; Alireza Tangsiri, commander of the IRGC Navy; and dozens, if not hundreds, of other Iranian leaders.

Iran is not attacking Israel because Israel targeted the top leadership of Iran, primarily through drone warfare. Cutting off the head of the snake is the key to keeping those snakes from procreating.

Trump has broken Iran’s war machine
What Donald Trump has achieved in the Iran war is astonishing, despite the liberal, godless media attacking him and claiming he has failed. Iran’s nuclear backbone has been broken, and its war machine is in shambles.

The next phase of the war does not have to be a major military operation. Quite the contrary, the US has the largest inventory of advanced drones in the world, but needs to manufacture 10 times that amount.

Iran’s only power left is its drones. They are trying to smuggle more of those fiber-optic drones to Hezbollah through Syria and Iraq and hit US bases in Iran, Kuwait, and Jordan.

Global campaign launched to counter claims of Israeli genocide in Gaza

More than 35 organizations from around the world have joined together in a campaign aiming to debunk “Hamas genocidal propaganda” about the Gaza war.

International Legal Forum CEO Michal Cotler-Wunsh says Hamas’s claim threatens foundational principles of law by hijacking the term genocide to spread what she calls “a modern blood libel,” accusing Israel of committing genocide against the Palestinian people.

Other organizations involved in the “Gaza GenoLIE” campaign include the American-based Anti-Defamation League, the International Legal Forum, Scholars for Peace in the Middle East and the World Columnist Jesse Kline keeps you up to date with what’s happening in Israel and the effects of antisemitism on life here in Canada. Friday mornings.

“The term ‘genocide,’ along with other international legal terms, has been deliberately and systematically hijacked, redefined, inverted, and weaponized to demonize, delegitimize, and apply double standards to ‘the Jew’ among nations,” Cotler-Wunsh said in a statement. “This well-orchestrated campaign to spread a modern blood libel accusing Israel of ‘genocide’ began before any Israeli response to Hamas’ genocidal war crimes and crimes against humanity of October 7.”

The GenoLIE website asserts that the genocide claims began on Oct. 8, 2023, the day after Hamas terrorists invaded southern Israel, killing 1,200 Israelis, most of them civilians. The word genocide was already in wide use, even though Israel’s ground operation did not begin until Oct. 27.

Amnesty International, certain UN bodies and other international groups have found there is evidence Israel committed genocide during the Gaza War. But Israel insists such investigations are fatally biased, and that the nation has done all it can to limit civilian casualties in a war in which the enemy hides behind its civilian population.

Israel acknowledges more than 70,000 people have died in the war. Gaza’s population was about two million prior to the war.

The Gaza GenoLIE website says it is an educational initiative about the “generated and orchestrated genocide lie promoted by anti-Zionists and antisemitic networks in the U.S., Europe and around the world.”

Genocide was defined in the 1948 Genocide Convention, drafted after the Holocaust. Under Article II, genocide refers to certain acts, such as killing, causing serious harm, inflicting destructive conditions of life, committed “with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.”

The GenoLIE campaign argues the most crucial element is the word “intent,” noting that the convention does not merely ask whether people died, or whether they died in large numbers, it asks whether the perpetrator acted with the specific purpose of destroying a protected group because of its membership in that group.

The groups argue that Israel waged war to dismantle Hamas and secure the release of the hostages, and the civilian death toll was a consequence of urban combat against an enemy that “purposely and cynically embed(ed) itself” among its own population.

Third Time Is the Charm? The Mecca Pact and the Sad History of Collective Defense

Seventy-five Years of Collective Defense Announcements
The clearest recent illustration of the gap between announcement and defense lies one country away from Riyadh. Turkey has maintained roughly 3,000 troops in Qatar under a defense partnership that deepened considerably after the 2017 Gulf blockade, a presence Ankara initially characterized as a real fighting force rather than a symbolic gesture. That presence was tested twice within a year, and twice it did nothing. When Iran struck the Al Udeid air base near Doha in June 2025, and again during the war in 2026, the Turkish presence neither deterred the attacks nor prompted a response. When Israel struck Hamas leadership in Doha in September 2025, the Turkish response was a condemnation at the United Nations and attendance at an emergency summit, not a military one.

What is missing from the Turkish presence in Qatar, and from every agreement examined here, is the conversion of solidarity into obligation: a common definition of the aggression that triggers the guarantee, forces assigned to it in advance, an integrated command, agreed rules of engagement, and a settled answer to who decides that the common war has begun. This is the difference between these pacts and the alliance they imitate. NATO functions not because its members pray next to one another but because a common threat and an American hegemon willing to underwrite the guarantee made it worth the surrender of sovereignty that integrated command requires. The Middle East’s treaties reproduce NATO’s language while omitting each of these foundations because their signatories face different adversaries, decline to place their forces under a partner’s command, and have no hegemon prepared to compel or reassure them. A mutual-defense clause is cheap to sign and dear to honor, and one cannot collect its benefits without bearing its costs. The Mecca pact reproduces this arrangement on a larger scale, and with fewer troops actually deployed.

The pattern predates the present crisis by three-quarters of a century. The Treaty of Joint Defense and Economic Cooperation of Arab states in 1950, signed a year after the defeat in Palestine, contained the same clause declaring aggression against one member to be aggression against all, and it established a Joint Defense Council that never functioned as a coordinating body, most conspicuously in the 1967 war, in which the Arab League as such did not intervene at all. The United Arab Command, promised at the first Arab summit in January 1964 and placed under an Egyptian commander, was the only tangible product of that promise. When Israel raided the Jordanian-held West Bank village of as-Samu in November 1966, the command did nothing: its Egyptian core was tied down in the war in Yemen, and the frontline states had refused to allow Egyptian troops onto their soil. There was only one instance in which such a mutual defense treaty was honored, and it led to a disaster when, in May 1967, King Hussein of Jordan placed his army under the Egyptian general Abdul Munim Riad in the days before the war. The sole consequence was that General Riad, acting on false reports of Egyptian victory relayed from Cairo, ordered the Jordanian front into an offensive that cost Jordan East Jerusalem and the West Bank within seventy-two hours. The pattern has persisted in the present decade. Egypt’s proposal for a unified Arab force at Sharm el-Sheikh in 2015, and its NATO-style proposal at Doha in September 2025, never came to fruition.

Collective defense agreements in the Middle East have repeatedly functioned as projects of regional order and leadership before they functioned as mechanisms of war. This is why their ceremonial character is substantive rather than incidental. Thus, they repeatedly flounder because collective defense is never merely collective defense. To determine the supreme commander is to determine hierarchy. To place forces permanently in another regional country is to create political leverage inside it. To decide which threat activates the common force is to decide whose definition of regional order prevails. To institutionalize an alliance is therefore to settle, or at least freeze, the struggle for primacy among states that have rarely accepted one another’s primacy.

NATO did not solve this problem through superior committee design. It solved it politically because there was never serious doubt that the United States sat at the apex of the alliance. Western Europeans could integrate because integration did not require Britain, France, West Germany, Italy, and Belgium to settle among themselves which one would dominate the others; an overwhelmingly superior external power already occupied the commanding position, and a massive Soviet adversary supplied a threat sufficiently common to make American hierarchy tolerable.

Assessment
Moreover, the Mecca Joint Defense Agreement is best understood as a message directed at Washington rather than a capability directed at Tehran. Since October 7, Saudi Arabia has worked steadily to advertise its strategic autonomy and its access to alternative partners, first through the bilateral pact with Pakistan, then through the quadrilateral that never materialized, and now through a trilateral agreement staged for maximum visibility. The aim of this sequence has been to raise the cost of American disengagement by demonstrating that the kingdom is prepared to seek elsewhere the guarantees it no longer trusts Washington to provide. The same message is being delivered on other fronts: when the Saudi commentator Ali Shihabi, a reliable barometer of official thinking, warned in the Washington Post that pressing Riyadh too hard on the terms of civil nuclear cooperation could push the Kingdom toward China instead, he was performing the same function as the pacts, reminding Washington that the Kingdom has options and intends to be seen holding them.

For American policymakers, the appropriate response is to read the pact as a piece of diplomatic theater designed to leverage security concessions from Washington. Riyadh’s search for alternatives arises partly from a shortage of defensive capacity and partly from uncertainty about the conditions under which American power will actually be used to defend the Kingdom. Additional air-defense assets can reduce the first problem; only a clearer and more credible understanding of consultation, resupply, and response to proxy attack can address the second. The agreement is, in the end, an argument about American reliability conducted in the language of alliance, and in this region that language has a long history of describing commitments that no one genuinely intends to keep.

When I was a little girl, my father taught me how to kiss the mezuzah. It was a simple thing, but it stuck with me. Maybe it’s the reason that more than anything else, I’m a Jew.

There were other things growing up that helped make me a Jew. Someone always had to hear me say “Shema” before bed. Not the whole prayer. But that one powerful sentence, sung in my childish singsong.

I wanted to write about this. This and other things. But since October 7, I haven’t been able to write. Not like before, when it flowed like a river, from brain to fingers to keyboard.

Now it’s stuck. Maybe something shorted out.

And still, I am trying to find my way back to the keyboard.

So each week I tell myself, “Write something short. Anything. People will understand.”

Instead, I imagine my childhood bedroom, the glossy white paint of its walls and furniture, streaked with the merest tint of pale aqua. My father holding me up to the mezuzah. Teaching me how to kiss it and why.

I only had my father a short time. But I can still hear his voice, its exact cadence and timbre. In thirteen years, he gave me everything I needed.

He made me more than anything else, a Jew.

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)

Israel haters love this week’s Torah portion, Mishpatim. Tzedek tzedek tirdof, usually translated as “Justice, justice you shall pursue,” is the major Biblical quote that every progressive, anti-Israel rabbi knows. It comes from Deuteronomy 16:20, and it is quoted by people who could not tell you what the rest of the verse says, let alone what tzedek itself means.

A little research shows that “tzedek” cannot mean justice in the way that English speakers use the term. Moreover, when they invoke “justice,” they are acting as the judge and jury themselves, which is in no way justice.

The Hebrew word mishpat also means justice or judgment. However, it is not a synonym for tzedek. The proof is in the Torah itself.

Leviticus 19:15 says b’tzedek tishpot amitecha, “judge your fellow with tzedek.” Deuteronomy 1:16 says, u’shfatetem tzedek, “judge with tzedek.” And this week’s verse before the one often quotes, in Deuteronomy 16:18, says v’shaftu et ha’am mishpat tzedek, “they shall judge the people with a mishpat that is tzedek.”

Mishpat is the legal ruling. Tzedek is an adjective describing what kind of legal ruling it should be. Mishpat tzedek does not mean “just justice,” but “correct justice.” Tzedek means “right”. Mishpat tzedek means a ruling that is right, and the phrase only makes sense at all if a ruling can exist that is not right. A judge can follow every procedure, hear every witness, apply the law exactly as written, and still get it wrong. That possibility is built into the vocabulary. (In modern Hebrew, the variant “tzodek” means “correct.”)

The Torah is telling us that legality and rightness are not the same thing, and that having a system is not the same as having the truth. A proper judgment must include intangible factors, such as mercy when appropriate.

The activists who wave “justice justice you shall pursue” at Israel do not distinguish between mishpat and tzedek. They use “justice” the way a toddler uses “mine,” as a word that means whatever gets them what they want. Human rights NGOs and cosplayed trials like “the Russell Tribunal” operate the same way: reach the verdict before admitting any evidence. There is a reason the Amnesty report accusing Israel of genocide was called “the genocide report” internally before it was written. The modern purveyors of 'justice,” like “Students for Justice in Palestine,” have rendered the word meaningless.

One cannot even construct a hypothetical in which these “justice-centered” groups rule in Israel’s favor. No matter how heinous Palestinian crimes are, it is always ultimately Israel who is guilty. A verdict that cannot vary regardless of the facts is neither just nor right. It is a script, and chanting tzedek tzedek tirdof is as mindless as the sham verdicts are. The Torah insists not only on justice but correct, righteous justice. These organizations provide neither.

And then there is the second half of the verse, the part that never makes it onto the progressive rabbis' sermons. Tzedek tzedek tirdof, l’ma’an tichyeh v’yarashta et ha’aretz asher Hashem Elokecha noten lach. “Pursue righteous judgment, so that you may live and inherit the land that the Lord your God is giving you.” In context, this verses are calling for the Children of Israel to create a justice system that not only follows the rules but that applies them correctly, with righteousness. The reward for building a system of mishpat tzedek is the Land of Israel itself. This is one of the most explicitly Zionist verses in the entire Torah, a direct promise linking a functioning, correct justice system to the inheritance of the land.

The idea that the reward for tzedek, tzedek is Jews being able to live in the Promised Land is not very popular among anti-Zionists.

(Paid subscribers to my Substack can see how I relate the verse to my Derechology framework.)

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)

08/11 Links Pt2: On Democracies and Death Cults; What’s the right way to beat the left?; Written Out – The Cultural Erasure of the Jewish People

From Ian:

On Democracies and Death Cults

A terrible mutation afflicts American politics. A pathological hostility toward Israel has become a driver of political identity and debate. The genocide accusation is increasingly treated as settled truth; opposition to Zionism as evidence of virtue; and even Hamas and "armed resistance" can be romanticized or excused. Israel is being cast as such a singular evil that opposing it can seem almost a prerequisite for occupying the moral high ground.

Douglas Murray's recent book, On Democracies and Death Cults, confronts precisely this mutation. He argues that Hamas is a death cult, that Israel is confronting an enemy unlike any conventional military adversary, and that much of the West has become morally incapable of distinguishing between a liberal democracy and an organization that celebrates the murder of civilians.

His central proposition ought to be among the least controversial statements in modern politics: Hamas is evil. The fact that an accomplished writer felt compelled to devote an entire book to persuading educated Western readers of that proposition - and that this is controversial - says volumes about what our society has mutated into.

Hamas's objective is not a negotiated peace or a two-state solution. It has repeatedly opposed such outcomes because it does not seek coexistence with Israel but Israel's destruction. Hamas's own stated aims are impossible to misunderstand.

Murray also describes in excruciatingly graphic detail the evidence he collected of the murders on Oct. 7, in the rural communities invaded by Hamas and at the Nova music festivals - girls shot in the head as they begged for mercy, boys' heads bashed in with hammers, grenades lobbed at people cowering. It is unbearable and leaves no doubt about the evil at work.

Shai Davidai: It’s Time to Stop Playing Defense

Rebutting the “genocide” libel without explaining how Hamas operates from densely populated civilian areas and uses civilian infrastructure for military purposes leaves people without an alternative explanation for the horrifying death and destruction they see in Gaza. Rebutting the “apartheid” libel without explaining how suicide bombings and other terrorist attacks led Israel to construct a security barrier and establish military checkpoints leaves people without an explanation for why those measures exist. Rebutting the “settler colonialism” libel without explaining the Jewish people’s millennia-old connection to the land and the historical circumstances that produced the modern State of Israel leaves people without an explanation for why millions of Jews live there at all. Asking people to abandon an explanation without giving them another through which to make sense of the world risks creating a hole in their story without offering anything with which to fill it.

None of this means lies should be ignored. Some accusations cause immediate harm and must be answered quickly, clearly, and forcefully. Falsehoods can destroy reputations, influence institutions, inspire violence, and become accepted wisdom if no one challenges them. Defense matters. Yet the moment adherents of American Intellectual Antisemitism force us to debate whether their accusation is true, they have already secured an important victory: dictating what everyone else must discuss.

Playing offense means doing something fundamentally different. It means choosing your own questions rather than merely answering theirs. It means deciding which ideas deserve attention, which values should frame the conversation, and which facts people encounter before someone else tells them what those facts mean. It means telling people who the Jewish people are, why we remained connected to our homeland through two thousand years of dispersion, and what happened during centuries in which we lacked the power to protect ourselves. It means explaining why Jewish self-determination emerged, how Israel became the national expression of an ancient people, and why Jewish sovereignty matters in the first place. Instead of spending all our time explaining what Israel is not, we must tell people what it is. We must stop letting our opponents choose the story and start telling the story we actually want people to understand.

On October 7, 2023, Israel’s defensive systems did what they were meant to do: they detected incoming rockets, calculated their trajectories, and destroyed those threatening populated areas before they reached their targets. Over the months that followed, they intercepted thousands more attacks and saved countless lives. Yet no general would confuse successful missile defense with victory.

What is true about the physical war against Hamas is equally true of the ideological war against American Intellectual Antisemitism. If all you ever do is shoot down whatever your opponent fires at you, your opponent still chooses the targets, timing, and tempo of the war. Correct the lies that must be corrected. Defend the truth that must be defended. Shoot down the attacks that cannot be allowed to land. But never confuse successfully intercepting your opponent’s attacks with defeating the ideology launching them.

Defense can keep you alive. Only offense can change the battlefield.

It is time to stop playing defense.

Ruthie Blum: What’s the right way to beat the left?

Combating radicalization, which has creeped into the zeitgeist despite efforts to keep it at bay, is not simply the demand of the day; it’s an existential imperative for liberal Western democracy and civilization. And though the tendency to sound the alarm on individuals running for office is completely understandable, it doesn’t always achieve the desired results. On the contrary.

Greenwald offered a useful reminder of why. “The 2016 presidential election left no doubt about the exact nature of Donald Trump’s flaming outlandishness, and he stunned the world by becoming the GOP nominee and then president,” he wrote. “Starting years before the 2024 election, Democrats made a full-time job of repeating that Trump was a threat to democracy, a sexual predator, a grifter and a convicted felon, and then he was elected president by a greater margin than in 2016.”

The lesson here isn’t that it’s useless to impugn an opponent. It’s that doing so excessively can backfire badly.

Indeed, the irrational, obsessive maligning of Netanyahu by Israeli leftists and their fellow “anybody but Bibi” travelers didn’t succeed at their mission. Instead, they were pummeled at the ballot box in November 2022, ushering in the most right-wing coalition in the country’s history.

The right should take this into account today. It would also do well to consider another problem that Greenwald elucidated: “When a candidate makes his opponent’s unfitness the central message of his campaign, he also makes the race all about his opponent.”

Exactly.

If the right spends the next two and a half months explaining why Eisenkot, Golan and Abbas are the bogeymen, it will be turning them into the protagonists of the election. You don’t have to be an expert in advertising to grasp that this is a way to build, rather than dilute, their brand.

Greenwald’s prescription is worth noting. “Perhaps the best way to go after a radical opponent,” he suggested, “is to get a jump on offering a compelling vision of your own that competes with the dark one he’s peddling.”

That should be the Israeli right’s strategy. Not letting the left off the hook, but preventing it from becoming the centerpiece—and from disguising itself as the center.

08/11 Links Pt1: Want Peace with Israel? Lift the Siege; Benny Morris: A Mid-War Assessment; Mossad ‘toured’ Fordow many times, bombing was ‘fulfillment of all dreams'

From Ian:

Want Peace with Israel? Lift the Siege

One accusation repeated again and again is that Israel is aggressive. But the opposite is true. Israel is denied a peace it has pursued since its establishment in 1948.

The truth is that Israel is surrounded by an explicit desire to erase it, and remaining constantly on guard is what it must do to survive.

On Friday, a defense pact was signed among Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan, champions of Sunni Islam.

It may appear that they want to defend themselves against Shi'ite Iran, but no. Pakistan's defense minister, Khawaja Asif, said: "In the context of Israel, all Muslim countries must unite," describing Israel as "a threat to the entire Muslim world" and calling for a "united military front" against it.

Turkish President Erdogan has made hatred of Israel - and the ambition to take control of Jerusalem - a banner of his politics.

Benny Morris: A Mid-War Assessment

The Islamist war on the Jewish state, which began with the Palestinian Hamas assault from Gaza on Oct. 7, 2023, is still with us, with no end in sight. That assault was followed the next day by rocketing by Lebanese Hizbullah, and the Yemeni Houthi rebels and assorted Islamist militias in Iraq joined in a few weeks later. On April 13-14, 2024, the Islamic Republic of Iran directly attacked Israel with ballistic missiles and suicide drones, initiating a frontal confrontation with the Jewish state.

Since then, bouts of intensive fighting have been interspersed with ceasefires, with the halts in warfare invariably imposed on Israel by U.S. President Trump and acceded to by the Islamist belligerents happy to enjoy breathers.

The present stalemate leaves Iran controlling passage through the Strait of Hormuz and Iran's proxies - Hamas, Hizbullah, Iraqi militias and the Houthis - recovering and still in the fight. Iran's periodic rocketing and droning of America's regional Sunni allies - Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Jordan - and U.S. military bases in these countries have severely undermined American power and prestige and have underwritten Iran's current hegemony in the Gulf. Trump is palpably reluctant to resume the war with Iran, and the Iranians are exploiting this weakness to the hilt.

As Israelis see it, the war is far from over, and most assume that the Islamists, once ready, will resume their war-making against the Jewish state and a very revenge-minded Iran will press ahead with its nuclear program. Iran's Islamist leaders have consistently declared that their goal is Israel's destruction.

Israeli observers expect Iran to move as quickly as possible to acquire nuclear weapons in the hope that these will shield it from future American and Israeli attack (and provide it with the means to flatten Israel). But while Iranian intentions are crystal clear, its capacity to rapidly progress toward nuclear weaponry is unknown after its major nuclear enrichment facilities were devastated in 2025-26.

Lebanon Lacks the Will and the Power to Confront Hizbullah

There is a contradiction at the heart of Western policy toward Lebanon. The forces in the country that are willing to negotiate with Israel don't have the power to influence those who are at war with it. The Iran-backed forces responsible for the violence openly reject the talks and make clear that they will not consider themselves obligated by any agreements reached. This contradiction shows no signs of being resolved any time soon.

There is little optimism on the Israeli side that the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) performance this time will differ from past experience. Two UN Security Council resolutions, 1559 from 2004 and 1701, which ended the war of 2006, already called for the disarmament of all non-state military groups in Lebanon. Past Lebanese governments accepted these resolutions. Yet Iran's proxy Hizbullah continued to prosecute its long war against Israel from Lebanese soil, without suffering serious hindrance from the forces of the state.

The current government uses sharper tones in its criticisms of Hizbullah. But the Lebanese state lacks both the will and the capacity to force the non-state element to obey. Moreover, the LAF is believed to consist of 50% Shia among its rank and file and 30% in its officer corps.

So the U.S.-brokered Israel-Lebanon diplomatic process rests on a series of fictions. Israel is aware of these fictions and is not in a position to endlessly indulge this illusion, given its responsibility for the residents of Israel's border communities.

The Canadian university survey details how anti-Zionism is destroying academic freedom, today

There is a lot of material in the Canadian Campus Antisemitism and Student Experiences (CASE) survey that was just released, and I don't want to bury any of the important points. I already discussed the appendix pointing out how the students don't even understand that standard antisemitic tropes are bigoted to begin with.

Another very disturbing finding is how the environment on campus is destroying the fundamental right of academic freedom to begin with.

BDS justifies boycotting Israeli academia in the name of academic freedom, and the irony is obvious: they are shutting down access to Israeli research and study, the very opposite of such freedom, by claiming that this is what Israel does. In reality, every example they give is where Israel is responding to specific security needs: checkpoints that slow a professor's commute from Ramallah to Bir Zeit, a university closed after a wave of terror attacks, a permit denied to a visiting lecturer. That is the preferred frame. Israel restricts, the world's students and faculty must speak up.

CASE describes a chilling effect on academic freedom happening right now, on North American campuses, at a scale that dwarfs anything done to Palestinians.. It is the academic freedom of Jewish students, and almost nobody talks about it.

The survey polled roughly 900 Jewish students across Canadian postsecondary institutions. The results are chilling:

71.8% limit what they say in class about being Jewish.
41.3% avoid certain classes or events altogether.
39.8% say antisemitism has hurt their academic performance.
32.5% have considered dropping a course or leaving their program because of it.
25.9% have considered leaving their university entirely.

When you look at classroom-level issues, the problem is worse. 36% encountered course content or discussion they experienced as antisemitic or biased. 34% had a professor bring up Jews, Israel, or Zionism in a class where the subject had nothing to do with any of it. 47% felt pressured to share their opinion of Israel with other students, 36% felt pressured to conform to a professor's views on the subject, and 20% felt pressured to join an anti-Israel protest.

Eighteen percent of the incidents students described named a faculty member as the source of the problem, and another seven percent named a teaching assistant, meaning the people grading these students' work are, by their own account, sometimes the ones doing the intimidating.

This is what an actual academic freedom crisis looks like: a quarter of the affected population weighing whether to abandon their education, and two in five reporting that their grades have already suffered for it.

The usual debate about academic freedom discusses the freedom of the professors to say what they want. Do they have the right to write offensive things on social media? Do they have the right to bring their politics into the lecture hall? Can they move the class itself to a protest encampment?

Nobody asks whether the professor lecturing on "Zionism as a death cult" or assigning a podcast that likens Zionism to Nazism is violating the academic freedom of the Jewish student sitting in the third row, the one who must now calculate whether raising their hand is worth the risk. A university is a place where students are supposed to be free to question a professor's claims, disagree with a reading, or simply stay silent, without paying for it in a grade or in the room's good opinion of them. The CASE report makes this argument explicitly: a professor's freedom to express a strong political view does not cancel a student's freedom to question it, dissent from it, or decline to answer at all. When 71.8% of a population self-censors and 18% name their professors as the source of the antisemitism they've faced, that second freedom is the one actually collapsing.

Not to mention that there is a power asymmetry between the lecturer and the student. For all the talk among progressives about the dangers of power disparities, this one is not considered a problem when the instructor is on the "right side of history." The silenced student has little power to fight back.

Grading a Jewish student down for writing about the sexual violence of October 7, as one CASE respondent describes happening to her, generates no petition and no coverage, because the assumption on campus is that this is simply what a controversial classroom discussion looks like. It is not. It is a professor using the power to grade as a weapon against a viewpoint she does not share, and the CASE data suggest it happens routinely enough that Jewish students have already built their behavior around expecting it. Self-censorship is as debilitating to a campus environment as external censorship is.

Nobody needs to be fired, no protest needs to be banned, no professor needs to lose the freedom to say something odious about Zionism from behind a podium. A written policy protecting student dissent will not by itself produce it, because the student in the third row is weighing the cost of speaking up against the professor's actual conduct, not the student handbook. If a professor is going to declare that Zionism is an evil ideology or that Israel is a "sea of savages and barbarians," as CASE respondents report hearing, that professor has to say just as clearly, and just as often, that disagreement is welcome and will cost nothing in the grade book. The students deserve the same respect the professors demand for themselves. A lecturer who loudly expresses an opinion must be equally loud that others can disagree. When the disagreement descends into sneering dismissal is when academic freedom is shut down.

The side that has the power to give grades and decide on a student's future is in a position of power, and the more strident the opinion, the more important it is to make anyone who disagrees feel comfortable.

A Jewish student who has watched classmates get frozen out for saying something politically incorrect about Israel or the Palestinians will read an unqualified political declaration as exactly what it is: a rule as to what is acceptable and unacceptable to say in the classroom.

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)

08/10 Links Pt2: Foreign money is flooding US politics — but AIPAC’s is American; Ireland’s fog of prejudice; Selective Outrage: The WSJ Distorts the Reality of Christians in Israel

From Ian:

Bethany Mandel: Foreign money is flooding US politics — but AIPAC’s is American

If Americans are actually concerned about foreign money influencing American politics and policy, there is plenty to investigate. And unlike AIPAC, much of it is actually foreign.

Americans for Public Trust has just launched a new database, FollowForeignMoney.org, attempting to track the enormous sums flowing from foreign sources into American nonprofit groups and advocacy organizations. At launch, APT says it has identified more than $5 billion in spending across more than 500 groups, documented in more than 12,000 records.

The scale is remarkable, but so is the loophole that makes much of it possible. Federal law prohibits foreign entities from contributing to candidates, political committees, and super PACs, or participating in a campaign’s decision-making process. But elections are hardly the only way to influence American politics, and there are far fewer restrictions on foreign money once it moves outside the narrow confines of electoral activity.

Foreign dollars can finance nonpartisan get-out-the-vote campaigns, voter registration, issue advertising, and various policy and lobbying efforts, all of which can help shape the political environment in which Americans eventually cast their ballots. As APT explains, the line between regulated electoral activity, where foreign money is prohibited, and unregulated issue activity, where it is typically permitted, is “nearly indistinguishable to the average American.”

For some perspective, AIPAC, which again is funded by American donors, spent $29 million in 2022, $46 million in 2024, and $67 million in 2026, much of it in Democratic primaries. Those are substantial sums, and Americans are perfectly entitled to debate whether they like AIPAC’s political priorities, its tactics, or the candidates it supports.

But there is something deeply unserious about treating money donated by Americans to an American organization advocating an issue they care about as a sinister form of foreign influence, while billions of dollars originating overseas can flow into American organizations seeking to shape our laws, institutions, and political culture with comparatively little scrutiny.

In a conversation with the Washington Examiner, Caitlin Sutherland, executive director of Americans for Public Trust, explained what her organization found when it began following the money.

“Foreign money is flowing through the nonprofit sector to implement an extremist climate agenda and bankroll radical left-wing causes and policies,” Sutherland said, including organizations supporting political causes such as radical ballot measures. “And it’s all propped up by foreign money.”

The database allows users to trace that money through the complicated network of foundations, nonprofit groups, and advocacy organizations through which it often travels. An organization spending millions of dollars trying to change public opinion, influence legislation, register voters, or pass a ballot measure is participating in American political life, whether its name ever appears on a candidate’s campaign-finance report.

Congress was beginning to take notice of the problem even before APT released its database. At a hearing this year, House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jason Smith (R-MO) focused on how nonprofit organizations can exploit gaps in American law to bring foreign money into domestic political and policy fights.

Smith later put the problem plainly: “Tax-exempt status … exists to support legitimate charitable and educational work that strengthens our communities, not to serve as cover for foreign propaganda, election interference, or activities that undermine our national interest.”

There is a legitimate debate to be had about how far Congress should go in restricting foreign donations to American nonprofits, particularly because any new law would have to avoid inadvertently ensnaring legitimate charitable, educational, or religious organizations that receive support from abroad. But it is difficult to have that debate honestly when our political and media class applies the label “foreign influence” so selectively.

AIPAC’s donors are Americans exercising the same right every other American has to pool their money around an issue they consider important and support or oppose candidates accordingly. The fact that the issue is Israel does not transform those Americans into agents of Israel any more than Cuban Americans advocating policy toward Cuba or Ukrainian Americans lobbying for aid to Ukraine become agents of foreign governments.

That is what made Axelrod’s calculation so revealing. He was not simply complaining about the amount AIPAC spent, or making the familiar argument that there is too much money sloshing around American politics. He described an organization funded by Americans as “essentially an agent” of a foreign government because those Americans are politically engaged on behalf of the Jewish state.

My husband, Seth Mandel, identified the more disturbing implication in Commentary after watching the exchange. “Why would Axelrod, who has worked so hard to position himself as a moderate in temperament and a card-carrying member of the mainstream, go on CNN and slap American Jews across the face?” he asked.

“And that’s when I realized it. Axelrod is positioning himself in the party’s mainstream. Accusing AIPAC of being a foreign agent isn’t relegated to the fever swamps anymore. And Axelrod, a very smart observer of Democratic Party politics, saw El-Sayed’s victory over Stevens as confirmation that this is what the party is now. And that might be the most dispiriting part of it all.”

That observation makes the timing of APT’s database particularly useful because it offers a remarkably simple test of what this debate is actually about. If Axelrod and others are genuinely alarmed by foreign money influencing American politics, they have just been handed a database documenting more than $5 billion of it, spread across thousands of records and hundreds of organizations. There is enough there to keep journalists, lawmakers, and cable-news panels occupied for quite some time examining whether American law adequately protects our political system from money originating overseas.

Yet that wasn’t the money Axelrod was talking about on CNN. The $30 million that concerned him was raised and spent by Americans, and calling it foreign required treating the political interests of those Americans as somehow foreign themselves.

AIPAC’s supporters are not just Jews; they include evangelical Christians and millions of other Americans who believe, for religious, moral, or strategic reasons, that the United States should maintain a strong relationship with Israel. Americans organize politically around all sorts of foreign-policy questions, and we generally understand that doing so is an expression of their American political rights rather than evidence that they are acting on behalf of another government.

Something peculiar happens, however, when the country in question is Israel and a substantial number of the Americans doing the organizing are Jews.

Ireland’s fog of prejudice

It is striking that at a time when the Torah just commanded us to learn how to see, we are also confronted with examples of what happens when prejudice prevents people from seeing clearly.

Ireland has a long and painful history of living under British rule. The memory of oppression, struggle for national self-determination and resistance to a powerful empire is deeply embedded in the Irish consciousness.

Logically, that history should create a natural sympathy for the Jewish people and for Israel.

The Jewish people, too, have experienced centuries of foreign domination, persecution and exile. Israel has emerged from a history in which Jews were repeatedly denied security, sovereignty and the ability to determine their own destiny. Israel itself was also governed under the British Mandate before its independence in 1948.

One might therefore expect Ireland, of all countries, to understand the complexity of a people seeking security and self-determination after generations of suffering. Yet sometimes, history teaches the opposite lesson. People can remember their own oppression while becoming blind or indifferent to the experiences of others.

Last week exposed a particularly striking example in the debate over Israeli technology in Ireland.

Elbit Systems, an Israeli defense company, has developed a sophisticated aviation navigation technology that helps aircraft operate and land safely in difficult weather conditions, including conditions of poor visibility. This navigation system has become a near standard on military and state jets in countries across the world.

Ireland, a country famously familiar with fog, should be especially capable of appreciating the value of technology that helps pilots navigate safely when they cannot rely on their eyes alone.

And yet, headlines were made last week when it was reported that the Irish government refused to install this advanced landing system in official state aircraft—the Irish “Air Force One”—due to its Israeli origin. The twisted irony is so difficult to miss. A nation accustomed to physical fog is allowing the ideological fog that clouds its moral vision to imperil the safety of its leaders.

This is not just a hypothetical risk. In 2011, an airplane attempting to land in Cork, Ireland, crashed in dense fog after three failed attempts to land, killing a relative of the Irish president and five other people.

When a technology that can improve aviation is judged not according to what it does, but according to the nationality of the people who developed it, something has gone seriously wrong.

Made in India: Inside the India-Israel weapons alliance Amnesty wants dismantled

AMNESTY IS asking New Delhi to go considerably further than imposing additional checks on exports.

It called for an immediate halt to arms transfers to Israel and a comprehensive embargo covering weapons, components, technologies, technical assistance and training. It also recommended that Indian companies terminate business relationships, including joint research and development, with Elbit Systems, Rafael and Israel Aerospace Industries.

“Israeli systems currently form the technological backbone of India’s security architecture along its sensitive borders with China and Pakistan,” Birvadker told the Post, on what possible consequences implementation would have for India’s own military.

“Companies like Elbit, Rafael, and IAI are not standard import suppliers,” she said. “They are India’s premier partners in building a domestic defense industry.”

Birvadker went further, arguing that severing the relationship could set back India’s objective of technological self-reliance “by decades.”

“India would once again find itself dependent on other global powers, a resurgence of defense colonialism,” Bivadker stated. “Who benefits from such an outcome?” The legal argument: The controversy lies in what is not publicly visible

Amnesty’s challenge is also directed at India’s export-control system itself.

India is not a party to the Arms Trade Treaty, although it is a party to the Geneva Conventions and Genocide Convention. Amnesty argues that those existing obligations are sufficient to require India to halt transfers where there is a clear risk that weapons could contribute to serious violations.

Indian arms exports are not unregulated. Military and dual-use goods are controlled through the SCOMET system and require authorization from the Directorate General of Foreign Trade. Applications are reviewed through an inter-ministerial process involving the foreign, defense, and home ministries, and official guidelines require consideration of the end user, declared end use, chain of transmission, and whether an export could conflict with Indian national security or foreign policy.

The controversy, according to Amnesty, lies in what is not publicly visible.

The inter-ministerial deliberations are confidential, leaving no public record showing whether international humanitarian law or India’s treaty obligations were specifically assessed when licenses for exports to Israel were approved.

Amnesty filed a Right to Information request seeking details of specific export licenses and any human rights assessments undertaken by the government, but said it had received no reply before publication.

Birvadker’s position is that New Delhi should resist external pressure rather than allow NGOs to determine its strategic relationships.

“New Delhi must categorically reject the pressure to suspend defense exports, fiercely guarding its principle of strategic autonomy and its sovereign right to conduct relations in alignment with its national interests,” she said.

“Yielding to Amnesty’s demands would severely undermine India’s credibility as a reliable defense partner on the global stage,” she told the Post.

India’s concept of strategic autonomy predates the Israel controversy. It was visible, for example, when New Delhi resisted Western pressure over Russian oil purchases following the invasion of Ukraine, prioritizing energy security and its freedom to maintain relationships across competing geopolitical blocs.

The relationship with Israel increasingly fits into that same model. India remains a major purchaser of Israeli technology while becoming a supplier in its own right. Israeli companies gain an enormous manufacturing base and access to Indian industry; India acquires technology, domestic production and exposure to global defense markets. The greater the integration, the harder it becomes to describe the partnership simply as one country selling weapons to another.

That is another revealing aspect of Amnesty’s report. Its authors see the hundreds of thousands of Indian-made components flowing to Israeli companies as evidence that the relationship should be curtailed. Birvadker cites the same supply chains as evidence that the relationship has become strategically indispensable.

The argument over Gaza will remain bitter and unresolved, particularly when the charge of genocide is treated as settled despite the substantial legal arguments against it. The industrial shift beneath that debate, however, is already taking shape.

India is no longer merely buying Israeli weapons. Increasingly, some of Israel’s weapons begin their journey in India.

08/10 Links Pt1: The Arab-Islamic Formula for 'Peace': Ignore Hamas, Blame Israel; Bondi Royal Commission blasted over snubbing Josh Frydenberg; UN data counts Palestinian terror as ‘settler violence’

From Ian:

Jonathan Conricus: Disarm, verify, withdraw. The only path forward for Gaza

Nikolai Mladenov’s newly announced Gaza agreement offers a rare glimmer of hope amid years of bloodshed and despair. At its core is a straightforward proposition: the phased disarmament of Hamas and other Palestinian terror organizations in exchange for the eventual withdrawal of Israeli forces from the Strip. Israelis and Gazans alike desperately want Hamas’s weapons taken away, Gaza demilitarized, and a new form of leadership to take root—one rooted in respectful coexistence rather than endless jihad.

The desire for this outcome runs deep. Many Israelis, stil reeling from the horrors of October 7, when Hamas invaders massacred civilians in border communities, see demilitarization as the only reliable way to restore security to the kibbutzim and towns that face Gaza. They have no appetite for indefinite military operations. Popular rhetoric aside, neither the Israeli public nor the military wants to remain in Gaza indefinitely. What they want is simple: the absence of a genocidal terror organization on the other side of the fence, armed with rockets, tunnels, and an ideology of annihilation.

Gazans, too, have every reason to support this. Years of rule by a mafia that prioritizes tunnels and rockets over schools, hospitals, and prosperity have exacted a terrible tol. A Gaza free of Hamas’s military apparatus could finally begin to rebuild and choose life over perpetual conflict.

Yet history teaches caution. Hamas has a well-documented record of tactical pauses. The Islamic concept of ‘Hudna’—a temporary cessation of hostilities—has been invoked when jihadi forces find themselves at a disadvantage, only to be broken once strength is regained. If the current peace deal amounts to nothing more than another Hudna, it wil fail.

What is required instead is genuine, complete disarmament: every long-range rocket, every AK-47, maps of the entire tunnel network, and the locations of weapons manufacturing sites, all handed over under independent international verification. Only then does the plan become something more than a ruse. Only then does it become a foundation for lasting change.

Israel’s actions wil hinge entirely on whether that verification occurs. The absence of an immediate official Israeli endorsement is understandable in the current political climate. With elections approaching, any government is wary of appearing to accept international dictates that place civilians at risk. No responsible leadership wil sign onto an arrangement that leaves the core threat intact. But once Hamas’s arsenal is demonstrably gone and the Strip is verifiably demilitarized, Israel has every incentive to withdraw. There is no strategic or public desire to remain. The moment the threat disappears, the justification for military action disappears with it.

Before October 7, Israel was not conducting operations inside Gaza. The pattern of cause and effect is clear: rockets, tunnels, and invasions produce defensive responses. Remove the cause, and the response ends.

Keep the gas on the counterterrorism pedal

In Gaza and Lebanon, Israel is compelled to play the diplomatic game being led by Washington in order to continue enjoying its support and avoid being portrayed as the recalcitrant party. But Israel must not allow that game to constrain its freedom of action to destroy terrorist infrastructure and eliminate terrorists wherever they may be.

Over the weekend, Israel rejected current plans to disarm Hamas. Its reasons were clear: Despite the efforts of the United States, the terrorist organization has no intent to do so.

While the CEO of the Board of Peace, Nikolay Mladenov, has maneuvered between the intricacies of the “20-point plan” and the “15-point framework” to reassure Israel, Hamas has made its intentions regarding the commitments contained in these agreements perfectly clear.

“We do not intend to hand over the weapons to Israel,” says senior Hamas official Ghazi Hamad. “No disarmament process will take place before Israel completes its withdrawal from the Strip.”

For those who may have difficulty remembering, this is the same Ghazi Hamad who, just days after the massacre of 1,200 people in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, explained in media interviews that Israel is “a state that we want to bring down” and promised that the “‘Al-Aqsa Flood’ is only the first time. There will be a second, third and fourth time. We have the resilience and the ability to fight and pay the price.”

This is also the same Ghazi Hamad who, in an interview last week with English broadcaster Piers Morgan, insisted that Hamas had never intended to kill civilians on Oct. 7, attempting to blur—and even deny—the seminal event that ignited the ensuing war.

The long arm of Israel’s security services has not yet reached him, but the score will yet be settled.

Either way, if anyone had any doubts, Hamad’s words make clear that Hamas views the diplomatic talks merely as leverage to drive the Israel Defense Forces out of Gaza, without relinquishing either its military power or its ruling infrastructure.

Meanwhile, with the assistance of the Board of Peace, Gaza terrorists have received, free of charge, a 14-day respite from the blitz of Israeli targeted counterterrorism strikes that had been hitting them until a week ago.

Khaled Abu Toameh: The Arab-Islamic Formula for 'Peace': Ignore Hamas, Blame Israel

The foreign ministers of Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, Indonesia, Pakistan, Turkey, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt accused Israel of "violating" international law and undermining efforts to implement the Board of Peace's recently published "Roadmap for Completing the Implementation of President Trump's Comprehensive Peace Plan in Gaza." They also called for those responsible for "grave violations" to be held accountable.

The ministers forgot to mention that Hamas, by refusing to disarm and continuing to hold on to power in the Gaza Strip, is the party committing "grave violations."

If accountability is important, why does it apply only to Israel?

Where is the demand that Hamas be held accountable for bringing death and destruction upon the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip by launching its invasion of Israel?

Why not issue a clear demand that Hamas surrender all its weapons? The omission is especially disturbing because three of the countries represented in the statement – Turkey, Qatar and Pakistan – are members of Trump's Board of Peace and are supposedly helping to bring security and stability to the Gaza Strip.

Do the Arabs and Muslims — or the Europeans — really believe that creating a Palestinian state would automatically produce peace? Who would prevent Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad from taking over such a state? Who would confiscate their weapons? Who would prevent Iran or Turkey from supplying Palestinian proxies with weapons, money and training? Who would guarantee that a future Palestinian state would not be used to launch more October 7-style attacks against Israel?

Israel withdrew every soldier and expelled every Jewish resident from the Gaza Strip in 2005. Palestinians subsequently had an opportunity to demonstrate what self-rule could look like. Hamas won the 2006 Palestinian Authority parliamentary election and seized full control of the Gaza Strip the following year.

Instead of turning the Gaza Strip into a model of prosperity and coexistence, Hamas transformed it into a base for terrorism against Israel. Why should Israel be expected to repeat this "experiment" on a much larger and more dangerous scale — either in Gaza or in the West Bank, overlooking major Israeli population centers?

Peace will not come from ignoring Hamas, demonizing Israel and Jews, or repeating slogans about a "two-state solution" as though October 7 had never happened. It will come only when the international community — including Arab and Islamic countries — makes it clear that armed jihadist organizations cannot be allowed to control Palestinian territory, possess private armies, or determine the future of Israelis and Palestinians through terrorism. That would be a far more useful message for Arab and Islamic governments to deliver than yet another communique condemning Israel.

Canadian students don't think protesting synagogues, boycotting Jewish businesses or saying Jews are too economically powerful is antisemitic

A national report on antisemitism at Canadian universities has a lot of very concerning findings. For now, let's look at Appendix D.

That describes an upcoming report that concentrates on surveying all Canadian students, not just Jewish students. And it mentions three findings:

[M]ajorities did not consider several forms of anti-Jewish targeting antisemitic, including boycotting Jewish-owned businesses because of their perceived Israel tie (54%) and protesting outside Jewish houses of worship (54%). More than half (55%) did not identify the statement that Jews have too much influence on the economy as antisemitic.

This means that Canadian students don't even know blatant antisemitism when they see it.

This is a result of constant anti-Israel messaging combined with the false assertion that anti-Zionism has nothing to do with antisemitism. When you combine those two as facts, then every antisemitic act can be coded to be anti-Zionist.

For example, for the synagogue question, I'm sure that the answer given would be that they considered synagogues to be Zionist institutions and therefore open to protest. The wording of the first question, "boycotting Jewish-owned businesses because of their perceived Israel tie ," shows that perceptions of being pro-Israel is enough to justify targeting Jewish businesses.

And the last question, which is one of the most classic antisemitic tropes, isn't even recognized as antisemitic? Keep in mind that Jews are only 1% of the Canadian population, and most Canadians don't think that saying Jews have too much influence on the economy is anti-Jewish???

The survey is not only finding increased antisemitism. It is documenting the mainlining of antisemitism as if it is normal thinking. And that may be even worse.

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)

Haaretz recently wrote about Haredi protests outside a Jerusalem coffee shop open on Shabbat, and about the secular Jews who are supporting it, framing it as yet another example of ultra-Orthodox Jews trying to impose their will on the seculars.

But what they didn't say is that the coffee shop is owned by Jews for Jesus and is meant to convert Jews to Christianity. And its secular supporters don't realize this either.

"I came from Tel Aviv. The secular embrace here makes me feel amazing," said one of them, Anat, as she waited in line. "There's a sense of awakening, and a feeling that we won't quietly surrender to the ultra-Orthodox and religious takeover."

"It starts with the prohibiting you from buying coffee on Shabbat and will continue with sleeves that are meant to hide exposed shoulders. I'm raising three daughters here, and I worry about their individual freedom 20 years from now," she said.

To be sure, the Jews for Jesus connection does not seem to be the main issue that is animating the haredim. There are other coffee shops open on Shabbat in Jerusalem that do not get protests. The problem is that the coffee shop opened very close to an Orthodox neighborhood, as Jewlicious explains.

The alleyway where Café Basimta is located abuts the largely religious Nachlaot neighborhood, and is just two blocks away from where an Orthodox neighborhood lies. The Haredim acquiesce to the non-kosher businesses in the downtown area that are open on Shabbat, as well as those on a side street on the other side of Nachlaot. But they feel that this new café is just a little too close for comfort and, in their minds, it violates an unwritten agreement on the secular/religious status quo in the city.

The owner of the coffee shop, Yoel Ben David, was born to a Scottish Christian father and a Moroccan Jewish mother. He was raised in the Caribbean, England, and Paris. He and his wife seem to have dabbled with Breslov Hasidism for a time; he claims that he grew peyot and wore tzitzit before magically reading Isaiah 53 and finding Jesus. He has an MA in Jewish Ministry and Leadership. He has been the head of Jerusalem's branch of Jews for Jesus and he trains the other missionaries there on how to reach Israeli Jews.

Indeed, the cafe was always meant for converting Jews. In his request for prayers, Yoel asks for "J4J Jerusalem Coffee Shop permits/approvals and evangelism effort." Jews for Jesus itself refers to Basimta as "our beautiful new coffee shop in Jerusalem!"

Jews for Jesus owns other cafes throughout Israel for the same purpose. Interestingly, their Tel Aviv cafe is closed on Shabbat.

It is entirely possible that the Jerusalem Shabbat hours was meant to get the cafe in the newspapers and use that to spread the Gospel. "Jews for Jesus CEO Aaron Abramson knew the decision to open a coffee shop in Jerusalem with Saturday business hours would cause a stir among the city’s ultra-Orthodox," Christianity Today reported. That is not respect - that is planning.

A hint that the Shabbat controversy was the intention all along comes from a 2008 article Ben David co-wrote:

Occurrences of persecution and hostility to the Christian mission in Israel actually broadcast and magnify the Gospel. For example, as a result of hostilities to the Jews for Jesus evangelistic campaigns in the greater Tel-Aviv region in May 2008, we were able to preach the Gospel on national television.

There is no such thing as bad publicity, and opening a cafe next to a Jewish neighborhood in Jerusalem on Shabbat is a surefire way to get the Haredim upset - and to get the secular Jews to feel sympathetic to the cafe. The same article makes clear that secular Israelis are the target; people who do not know enough about Judaism to argue. So Ben David tells interviewers that he is supporting the freedom of secular Jews in Israel when in fact he is trying to convert them.

Some Israeli supporters of the cafe change their tune when they learn the truth. JTA reports that Hapoel Jerusalem soccer team planned to give Basimta free advertising on their uniforms to support their freedom to open on Shabbat, but changed their minds when they found out the cafe was a front for Jews for Jesus.

“Our original intention was simply to support a small business that was being denied its freedom of operation, and we still believe in that principle,” club spokesperson Matan Avrina told JTA. “However, we also realized that this specific story is more complex than we initially knew.”

(h/t Avi)

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)

08/09 Links: Has "Never Again" Blinded Us?; The Ethical Case for Finishing the War Against Iran; 25 years ago, the Sbarro bombing opened a wound in Israel that still hasn’t healed

From Ian:

Has "Never Again" Blinded Us?

I am a grandchild of Holocaust survivors - barely survivors - who stepped out of the camps into a world emptied of everyone they had ever loved. In the last three years, atrocities beyond imagination have been inflicted on us. Again and again we have watched parents bury their children. They tried to erase our entire nation. They tried to kill our faith and everything we bring to the world. And yet we rose again. We flourished, and we carried our dead forward by naming our sons and daughters after them and by making the world a better place.

"Never Again" rests on a hope. We believed the world would learn, that no one could confront the piles of shoes, the children's faces, the naked corpses, and remain unchanged. But only those who already felt some bond to Jews were capable of caring. Millions did not. Billions did not. The world walked through our museums and remained largely unmoved, or moved only briefly, never long enough to restrain antisemitism.

We wanted to believe morality could be taught. But not for the Jewish question. Pain does not create affinity; affinity must already exist for empathy to take root. And without that affinity, without some prior sense of connection to Jews as a living people, whatever response we think we see is not empathy, it is a grimace.

We spent decades in the belief that if we exposed everything, if we spared nothing, truth itself would end antisemitism. It would compel compassion. It never did. Antisemitism was not waiting for enlightenment. It was waiting for permission. For years now, the world has behaved as if there were a statute of limitations on the moral freeze that followed the Holocaust, as if the restraint purchased by our six million dead had quietly expired. After the Oct. 7 pogrom, there was no pause in Jew-hatred, not even for one day.

Antisemitism does not respond to evidence. It does not submit to reason. Hitler did not murder Jews because of what they believed, how they lived, or what they owned. He murdered the poor and the rich, the pious and the secular, the assimilated and the insular, the newborn and the elderly. There was no argument that could have saved them. There never is.

The rubicon of antisemitism crossed in the West - Israel will face new dangers, too

The current wave of antisemitism will – and already is – fundamentally altering Jewish life in the countries with the largest communities outside of Israel: the United States, France, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and Germany.

Almost three years since October 7, and the wave of antisemitism is not receding; it is becoming more pervasive and more commonplace. In the US, for example, one in three individuals said they were targets of antisemitism, and over half of Jews have changed their behavior out of fear of antisemitism, according to a recent survey.

The antisemitism genie will not go back into the bottle on its own. Political and social polarization, the convergence of left-wing and right-wing hatred, hostility toward Jews in academia, greater proclivity towards antisemitism among younger adults, well-funded Israel-defamation campaigns by state actors, and growing immigration from Arab countries with high rates of religious extremism – all signal that we have likely crossed a point of no return.

This doesn’t bode ill only for Jews in the West; there are major repercussions for Israel as well. Foremost, its strategic alliance with the United States is in jeopardy, as public sentiment turns increasingly anti-Israel and somewhat anti-Jewish. Israel will need to reassess its strategic situation and act.

First, Israel must continue to pursue military self-sufficiency. It must have the capacity to fight an extended war without dependency on the US (or any other country) for arms, munitions, and spare parts. After all, a future American president may simply refuse to provide them.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu compared Israel’s new situation to the ancient isolationist Greek city-state of Sparta, which successfully fought its wars alone. The analogy was useful but flawed: in a global world, Israel should not aspire to Spartan isolation.

Rather, Israel should redouble efforts to build robust alliances with non-Western countries that don’t fall along the trend-lines of rising antisemitism – including India, former Soviet Republics, countries in South America, the Far East, and Africa, including moderate Muslim nations.

Among Western allies, Israel should foster mechanisms of co-dependence, so that there will be a real cost for such countries should they choose to abandon their partnerships with Israel.

Israel Is Making Plans for a Post-America Middle East

Israeli Consul General in New York Ofir Akunis says what worries him most is not the bouts of conflict in the Middle East. It's a drift in American politics that could one day spell the end of the historic U.S.-Israel alliance. Citing recent electoral victories by candidates espousing criticism of Israel, Akunis argued that "the reality is that some people here, for sure, prefer the ayatollahs rather than the American administration....To prefer your enemies rather than your political opponents, this is something new."

While it was his "hope that the United States of America will always be with us, we will need to prepare ourselves to be more independent than we used to be," given the trends he was witnessing.

It's not just Iran and its predominantly Shiite Muslim Axis of Resistance that Israel sees on its threat radar. An emerging "quartet" comprising the leading Sunni Muslim powers of Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt and Pakistan is also viewed with deep suspicion. "The ayatollahs are still in Iran. So, we need to solve this problem, and then we'll talk about the next challenge," Akunis said.

It's those in the West who direct their outrage not toward Iran but Israel that he blames most. "Those people do not say even one word about the ayatollahs, not even one word about their slogan 'Death to America,' and not even one word about the Iran massacre [of civilians]. What is it? Gaza, Gaza, Gaza."

"I can give you an answer about Gaza. Gaza can be like the Emirates, or Bahrain, or Singapore of the Middle East. No Hamas? Gaza can be prosperous. By the way, like in Lebanon. No Hizbullah? Lebanon can be prosperous."