Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Sunday, October 06, 2024

10/06 Links: Inside Israel’s penetration of Hezbollah; The choice: civilisation or barbarism; Border Police officer killed, 10 wounded in terror attack

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: The choice: civilisation or barbarism

In other words, there’s simply nothing Israel can do to defend itself adequately that will gain the approval of the so-called civilised world. Simply, the west doesn’t want Israel to win. It wants to leave the Jewish state indefinitely twisting in the murderous wind.

For decades, the west said nothing while Hezbollah assembled its 150,000 rockets pointing at Israel from civilian areas of southern Lebanon, in flagrant disregard of UN resolution 1701.

It said nothing for the past 12 months as Hezbollah bombarded northern Israel with missiles every single day.

It said nothing for more than 20 years while Hamas fired hundreds of rockets from Gaza to kill Israeli civilians, forcing them to all but live in bomb shelters and their children to suffer enduring trauma.

But when Israel finally defends itself, the west suddenly finds its voice and tells it that it mustn’t do so.

Why is this? Several reasons. There’s the way left-wingers and Islamists unite in an attempt to wipe Israel off the map. There’s the endemic Jew-hatred, whose latest mutation is the wish to eradicate the collective Jew in Israel.

There’s the liberal article of faith that all conflicts can be ended through negotiation and compromise, so the notion that sometimes war may be unavoidable to defeat fanatics with non-negotiable agendas is simply never acceptable.

And there’s the destruction of the west’s moral compass under the impact of ideologies aimed at destroying its identity, values and culture.

Now we understand how the Holocaust could have happened. It’s not just that there are people who want to exterminate the Jews. They can only do so with the active connivance or indifference of the rest of the world.

October 7 presented the west with a clear choice: civilisation or barbarism. It has not chosen to defend civilisation. But as the west disintegrates under the weight of moral bankruptcy and collapse of self-belief, iron has entered the Israeli soul.

Israel made a different choice. It said never again would it allow its people to be invaded, slaughtered, raped, beheaded and burned alive. This would be the last war in which it would have to fight for its existence.

The Israelis are deeply traumatised. Their grief and anxiety are off the scale. At the same time, their spirit is unbroken. Yes, many deeply dislike Benjamin Netanyahu and there are large demonstrations aiming to get him out of office. But Israelis are remarkably united in their determination to inflict total defeat upon the enemies who want them gone.

Yet there’s more. The astonishing, heroic commitment of the young conscripts at the front derives from their belief that they aren’t just fighting for their nation and for those who were slaughtered or kidnapped on October 7, but also for all those Jews who came before them and kept the Jewish people alive despite the centuries of such slaughter.

Israel will win this terrible war — whatever the cost — because it knows what it is, loves its Jewish identity and is proud of it. As a result, it is determined to live. The opposite is true of the west that has abandoned it.

Brendan O'Neill: Jewish Lives Matter

This is an extract from Brendan O’Neill’s new book, After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation

The Battle of Cable Street is inconceivable in modern Britain. The ideas, the bravery, the plain decency required for such a street fight with fascism no longer exist. The atomising creed of identitarianism, the relentless rise of privilege policing, the cult of competitive grievance, the wariness of Zionism that so often crosses over into wariness of Jews – all of this has ensured that those 20th-century gatherings across religious lines, colour lines and identity lines to fight for a greater, human cause are unrepeatable in the modern era. These poisonous political strains have made the Battle of Cable Street feel like a distant, almost ancient event. One we can admire but not really imagine. One that the cultural establishment romanticises while being blissfully unaware that were something similar to happen today, they wouldn’t be on the side they think they would be on.

We don’t even need to use our imaginations. Since 7 October we have seen with our own eyes what would happen if there were a sequel to Cable Street. We have seen liberals and leftists march shoulder to shoulder with radical Islamists calling for further pogroms against Jews. We have seen self-styled progressives mingle with Islamists chanting about Muhammad’s violent vengeance against the Jews. We have seen bourgeois radicals chant ‘Zionist scum’ at a man in a kippah. We have seen left commentators make excuses for the bloodiest pogrom against the Jews since the Holocaust. And we have seen them say nothing when a man was given a paltry suspended sentence for threatening Jews with a knife in Golders Green in London. And when three men in the north of England were arrested on suspicion of plotting a gun attack on Jews. And when synagogues were attacked. And when Jewish schoolkids took off their blazers to dodge the attention of racists. And when anti-Semitic hate crimes in London rose by 1,350 per cent.

Is silence still violence, as they told us during the BLM protests of 2020? If so, their ‘violence’ against Jews has been deafening.

The truth is that there have been mini Cable Streets in Britain and elsewhere almost every week since 7 October. Outbreaks of anti-Semitism, the mobbing of ‘Zionist scum’, the chanting for pogroms, the racist harassment of Jews on campus. And the left that loves what happened on Cable Street 88 years ago has either turned a blind eye or taken the side of the persecutors. This is the inhumanity of identity politics. This is where that post-class, hyper- racial, privilege-obsessed ideology of the cultural establishment ends up: with a low-level war on Jews, in broad daylight.

I cycled down Cable Street shortly after Hamas’s pogrom. From virtually every lamppost there fluttered a Palestine flag. It’s a mostly Muslim area now, the Jews having left long ago, so perhaps that is understandable. And yet I couldn’t help but think how sad it is, how tragic even, that on this street where the Jews and their friends held back the tide of British fascism, there now flew the flag of the side that had just carried out a pogrom against the Jews, and not the flag of the side that suffered it.

A fightback is needed against the indifference of our elites to the difficulties facing Jewish people, and against their excuse-making for pogroms, and against their infliction on our societies of a politics of jealousy and division that they falsely call ‘progressive’. And, most importantly, against the people on our streets agitating against ‘Zionists’, which means Jews. If you see them, tell them: You shall not pass.

Phyllis Chesler: Moral Clarity as we approach October 7

We stand with the people of Israel in their existential fight for their national security against the violence of radical Islamism on multiple fronts, domestically, on their borders and across the Middle East region.

The battles Israel faces against Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Iranian regime are just wars against the inhumanity of Islamism, militancy, and antisemitism. The barbaric terror attacks of October 7, 2023, which resulted in the slaughter of over 1,400 Israeli civilians, must never be forgotten. Israel’s efforts to dismantle and destroy Hamas are not just Israel’s fight—they are our fight as well.

We commend Israel’s courage and steadfastness in defending its state against Islamist tyranny, especially in the face of global indifference. The resilience of the Israeli people in standing firm against Hamas, Hezbollah, and jihadists is remarkable. We pray for Israel’s victory against the barrage of missiles from Iran and for an end to the belligerence of Islamist terrorists. Their belief in apocalyptic violence cannot be ignored or minimized.

As a coalition of Muslim and non-Muslim leaders, we stand with Israel’s moral clarity and support the decimation of Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthi rebels, and other Islamist terror surrogates of Iran. This is the most effective strategy for ensuring Israel’s security, as well as the security of the region and the world.

The CLARITy Coalition calls on others to stand with Israel in defense of democratic values and national security. We are a global coalition founded by Muslims, ex-Muslims, academics, scholars, authors, and activists who stand for peace, democracy, liberty, and secular governance and who are deeply concerned by the continuing threat posed to these values by the actions and demands of Islamists in various places around the world.

Do I think this blessed, interfaith community constitutes an active Resistance movement capable of bringing Iran down militarily? Obviously not. But they are the bearers of the ideas that will inspire others to try and do so.

Most of all, given the utter, almost surreal viciousness of the pro-Hamas groups who are planning to "flood" American cities, including my own on October 7th--in order to celebrate the barbaric pogrom that took place a year ago in Israel--and in their minds, to continue to instigate terror and foment civil chaos--the Clarity Coalition statement is especially principled and consitutes a brave and necessary next step.

The "civil defense medic" who was a Hezbollah "warrior" - and worked for Hezbollah's "Islamic Health Authority"

On Friday, Israeli jets struck a branch of the Islamic Health Authority in Al Bashoura, Beirut.

A poster of seven "martyrs" was released by the organization.

The person in the upper left is Mehdi Adnan Helbawi, assistant civil defense official and director of operations of the Beirut region for the organization.

Al Akhbar wrote an obituary for him that called him primarily a "warrior," which is not a term one usually uses for medics. It also noted that he was one of the rescuers who retrieved Hassan Nasrallah's body from the bunker underneath an apartment building.

Only Hezbollah members were allowed to approach the area.

There is also a picture going around in anti-Hezbollah Arabic social media of Helbawi standing behind Nasrallah's short-lived successor (red circle.)

Helbawi's father was a prominent fighter against Israel in the 1980s, becoming a "martyr" while trying to torpedo a 1983 agreement between Israel and Lebanon.

What about the Islamic Health Services altogether?

They are entirely a Hezbollah front organization.

Alma Research wrote in 2022:

The Islamic Health Organization has direct and close ties to Hezbollah’s military activity. According to the organization’s website, since its inception, it has been “accompanying Hezbollah combatants’ activities against the Zionist occupation.” The organization routinely assists Hezbollah’s military wing and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards/Quds Force in Lebanon and is part of the human shield tactic. At least 20 of the organization’s operatives are known to have been killed during their service. There is no doubt that the organization’s operatives are currently integrated and will be integrated into any Hezbollah military activity against Israel in the future.

The organization even created a poster showing its close relationship with Hezbollah terrorists.

So while the media is saying that Israel targeted medical facilities, it was targeting Hezbollah members and support staff.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

Lebanon shows us how the world betrayed Gaza by insisting no Palestinians could flee to safety

As of a week ago, an estimated 374,000 people had fled Lebanon to Syria. That doesn't include the thousands that fled by plane over the last few weeks.

It is natural for people to want to flee a war zone. The Lebanese know how thoroughly their country had been hijacked by Hezbollah, how embedded Hezbollah is in many of their neighborhoods, how much Hezbollah has been using them as human shields in its quest to entrench and strengthen itself for the sole purpose of an eventual war to destroy Israel. The UNHCR is doing what it can to help the refugees in Syria.

Yet over the past year the exact same scenario occurred in Gaza. A similar terrorist group had taken over an entire area filled with civilians, hijacked it for the sole purpose of using it as a launching pad to destroy the Jewish state, and cynically used those civilians to be human shields.

Except in Gaza, there was no refugee agency helping those fleeing. Because except for a fortunate few who could pay exorbitant bribes to Egyptian middlemen, Gazans couldn't escape their war zone created by Hamas.

Arab states, instead of welcoming them, insisted that they did not want any Gazans to take refuge there. The world shrugged - they have the right to refuse who enters their borders, right? And besides, this was for the Palestinians' own good, because if they fled, who says they would ever be allowed to return?

No one asked the Palestinians what they wanted to do, and no one gave them a choice. Gazans were desperate to flee, tens of thousands of them turning to social media to raise money to bribe the Egyptians to allow them to enter.

When Egypt built a wall specifically to stop Gazans from having the option of fleeing a war zone, there was not one negative word from Amnesty or Human Rights Watch.

Egypt's refusal to allow Gazans into its country is almost certainly a direct violation of the 1969 Organization of African Unity Refugee Convention which Egypt had signed.

1. Member States of the OAU shall use their best endeavours consistent with their respective legislations to receive refugees and to secure the settlement of those refugees who, for well-founded reasons, are unable or unwilling to return to their country of origin or nationality.
2 . The grant of asylum to refugees is a peaceful and humanitarian act and shall not be regarded as an unfriendly act by any Member State.
3. No person shall be subjected by a Member State to measures such as rejection at the frontier, return or expulsion, which would compel him to return to or remain in a territory where his life, physical integrity or liberty would be threatened for the reasons set out in Article I, paragraphs 1 and 2.

The world community was not only silent, but it tacitly supported Egypt's and Jordan's decision to reject refugees from Gaza even as they have allowed millions to enter from other conflict zones.

Egypt's and Jordan's hypocrisy doesn't end there. Because when they were welcoming refugees from Syria, they did not want Syrian refugees of Palestinian origin - Jordan trned some away and put others in separate camps and Egypt jailed them.

Again, the world was silent.

No one is complaining that the Lebanese can leave Lebanon. No one is insisting that Lebanese must stay and endanger their families for some abstract principle.

That only applies to Palestinians.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

Everyone knows Hamas has been stealing aid to fund its operations. No one - not the NGOs, not the governments, not the Palestinians they ripped off, not the media - seem to care.

The Washington Post discusses how Hamas was able to successfully build itself up as much as it did before October 7 last year.

The article goes into detail about how Hamas built a "war machine" with extensive tunnels and home-grown weapons manufacturing. And it mentions, almost as an aside:

The group relied on outsiders for money and advice. It raised tens of millions of dollars, some of it from Iran, but much of it siphoned from aid money, charitable contributions, tax revenue and — after Oct. 7 — shareholder deposits stolen from Gazan banks.

Later in the article it adds:

Hamas is believed to have socked away hundreds of millions of dollars in cash and cryptocurrencies before Oct. 7, much of it from tax revenue collected from Gazans as well as financial aid given by Qatar — with the tacit approval of Israeli leaders — in recent years to keep the enclave’s economy from collapsing.

Aid money to Gaza comes from sources as diverse as UNRWA, the EU, Save the Children, Islamic Relief, IHH from Turkey, and Oxfam, besides Iran and Qatar. (Hamas also reportedly made hundreds of millions by selling Israeli stocks short before October 7.)

Cash found in Hamas home in Gaza

So where is the outrage from these donors? The article doesn't go into details but it makes it seem like everyone knows that Hamas has always taken part or all of incoming funds meant for aid to build its terror network, its tunnels, its weapons. October 7 was funded to a large extent by these international donors.

Yet we haven't seen any articles demanding answers, or better oversight, or investigations into exactly how Hamas stole these funds from aid agencies, from international donors, and from Gazans themselves.

And if no one is interested in finding out the truth, that means that they really don't mind funding Hamas.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

10/05 Links: Murray: Israel was right to ignore the West; The Year American Jews Woke Up; Wilders: Why Western Patriots Should Support Israel; Al Jazeera: Propaganda or Journalism?

From Ian:

Israel Takes the Gloves Off

October 7 showed why Zionism is necessary. As the attack, the worldwide celebrations, and the ongoing genocidal rallies reveal, hatred of Jews has not abated. The Holocaust shamed most anti-Semites into silence. Hamas's depravities, however, enthuse them.

But now, the Jews can fight back. As one father remarked at his son's funeral, without Israel, "the image engraved in our collective memory would have been the photograph of that helpless Jewish boy in the Warsaw Ghetto holding his hands up in the air with Nazi rifles pointed at him." Instead, "the Jewish people are no longer helpless in the face of our enemies." Whoever heard of a pogrom where the dead murderers outnumber the murdered?

Few sights are more inspiring than a free people defending their homeland, and the Israelis are hammering Hamas, Iran, and Iran's other minions who joined the fight. Hamas planned to rule a captive Israel, but instead it skulks beneath the ruins of Gaza. Nearly all of Hezbollah's leaders are dead, and Israeli forces recently entered southern Lebanon to protect northern Israel's besieged communities. For the second time this war, Iran launched hundreds of missiles at Israel to little effect.

There are still 101 hostages in Gaza, 7 Americans among them. Israel recently recovered the bodies of six murdered by Hamas just before they could be freed. One of them, Ori Danino, was only there because he left safety to save lives and was taken. Amazingly, these hostages—emaciated, half-suffocated, kept in a pitch-black tunnel so cramped that they could not stand—fought back when their tormentors became their murderers.

The cost of October 7 has been too high, both for the Israelis and for the innocent Arabs whom Hamas and Iran have cynically and systematically thrown into the line of fire. No one wants to see this suffering—including the Israelis, who routinely expose themselves to danger to warn Gazan and Lebanese civilians. This is the price for years of American appeasement, and the Lebanese are the latest to pay it.

In Shakespeare's Henry V, the king tells his men before a desperate battle, "This story shall the good man teach his son." Like Henry's men, the Israelis are winning a famous victory. But they do not fight for the dubious claims of some king, or even for their own gain. They fight for the right to live in peace. All people of good will should help them.

The lesson of October 7 is that even in the face of enormous cruelty, there are few forces more tenacious than a free people defending the ones they love. And when the battle comes, it is no longer the Jews who should feel afraid.

Douglas Murray: Israel was right to ignore the West

There are sources in the Jewish tradition that warn against exultation at the downfall of one’s enemies. But I am not Jewish, and so I have exulted greatly these past two weeks.

If you follow most of the British media, you may well think that the past year involves the following events: Israel attacked Hamas, Israel invaded Lebanon, Israel bombed Yemen. Oh and someone left a bomb in a room in Tehran that killed the peaceful Palestinian leader Ismail Haniyeh.

Of course all this is an absolute inversion of the truth. Hamas invaded Israel, so Israel attacked Hamas. Hezbollah has spent the past year sending thousands of rockets into Israel, so Israel has responded by destroying Hezbollah. The Houthis in Yemen – now so beloved of demonstrators in the UK – sent missiles and drones hundreds of miles to attack Israel, so Israel bombed the Houthis’ arms stores in Yemen. And Hamas leader Haniyeh, who was born under Egyptian rule and died in Tehran, never brought the Palestinian people anything but misery.

On 7 October last year Israel was surprised by a brigade-sized invasion of terrorists into its territory. These terrorists raped, murdered and burned their way as far inside Israel as they could get. How this intelligence and military failure was possible is something that Israelis still have to work out. But the first answer is because they face a fanatical, ideological opponent which wants to destroy them. Hezbollah joined in the action on 8 October. All these attacks were funded and orchestrated by the Revolutionary Islamic government in Iran, which as I write this is sending hundreds of ballistic missiles at Israel from Iran – strikes that have so far proved a failure.

Hamas still holds a hundred Israelis hostage inside Gaza, but the Israeli government has managed to bring half the hostages home already. For many people in the first days of the war, it seemed impossible that even one hostage would be able to come back to their families alive. So this is no mean feat in itself. Aside from saving the hostages, the other most important thing for Israel has been to strike and destroy the proxy armies of Iran who wish to make the whole of Israel unlivable for Jews.

All this time the governments in Britain and America have given the Israelis advice which mercifully they did not listen to. Earlier this year, Kamala Harris warned that the IDF shouldn’t go into Hamas’s Gaza stronghold in Rafah. As she wisely said: ‘I’ve studied the maps.’ Fortunately the Israelis did not listen to Kamala’s beginners’ guide to Rafah. They went into the Hamas stronghold, continued to search for the hostages, continued to kill Hamas’s leadership and continued to destroy the rocket and other ammunition stores that Hamas has built up for 18 years.

Bret Stephens: The Year American Jews Woke Up

After Oct. 7, it became personal. It was in the neighborhoods in which we lived, the professions and institutions in which we worked, the colleagues we worked alongside, the peers with whom we socialized, the group chats to which we belonged, the causes to which we donated, the high schools and universities our kids attended. The call was coming from inside the house.

It happened in innumerable ways, large and small.

The home of an impeccably progressive Jewish director of a prominent art museum was vandalized with red spray paint and a sign accusing her of being a “white supremacist Zionist.” A storied literary magazine endured mass resignations from its staff members for the sin of publishing the work of a left-wing Israeli. A Jewish journalist scrolled through Instagram and recognized an old friend from Northwestern gleefully tearing down posters of Hamas’s hostages while saying “calba” — dog in Arabic — to the pictures of kidnapped infants and elderly people. A leading progressive congresswoman was asked during a TV interview about Hamas’s rapes of Israeli women and called them an unfortunate fact of war before quickly returning to the subject of Israel’s alleged perfidy. An 89-year-old Holocaust survivor petitioned the Berkeley City Council to pass a Holocaust Remembrance Day proclamation in light of the resurgence of antisemitism and was heckled by demonstrators. An on-campus caricature depicted an affable Jewish law school dean holding a knife and fork drenched in blood. A Columbia University undergraduate posted on Instagram: “Be grateful that I’m not just going out and murdering Zionists.” Tucker Carlson platformed a Hitler apologist. Trump warned Jews that he is prepared to blame them should he lose the election.

All these stories became public, but what could be at least as upsetting were the stories you heard about only over meals with friends and acquaintances. A publishing executive who wanted to promote a novel set during the Holocaust but faced internal resistance from staff members who saw it as “Zionist propaganda.” A college freshman with a Jewish surname being the only person in her dorm to have anti-Israel leaflets pushed under her door. A student who suggested to me, during a give-and-take at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, that Israelis should heed the words of the Book of Matthew and turn the other cheek. It reminded me of Eric Hoffer’s quip that “everyone expects the Jews to be the only real Christians in this world.”

At some point, an awakening of sorts occurred. Perhaps not for every American Jew, but for many. I’ve called them the Oct. 8 Jews — those who woke up a day after our greatest tragedy since the Holocaust to see how little empathy there was for us in many of the spaces and communities and institutions we thought we comfortably inhabited. It was an awakening that often came with a deeper set of realizations.

One realization: American Jews should not expect reciprocity.

Few minorities have been more conspicuously attached to progressive causes than American Jews: Samuel Gompers and labor unionism; Betty Friedan and feminism; Harvey Milk and gay rights; Abraham Joshua Heschel and civil rights; Robert Bernstein and human rights. A proud history, but whatever we poured of ourselves into the pain and struggle of others was not returned in our days of grief. Nor should we expect much understanding: In an era that stresses sensitivity to every microaggression against nearly any minority, macroaggressions against Jews who happen to believe that Israel has a right to exist are not only permitted but demanded.

A second: “Zionist” has become just another word for Jew. Anti-Zionists deny this strenuously, because a vocal handful of Jews are also anti-Zionist and because outright antisemitism is still unfashionable and because they’d like to believe — or at least tell others — that their objection is to a political ideology rather than to a people or a religion.

But when the wished-for dire consequences of anti-Zionism fall directly on the heads of millions of Jews and when the people the anti-Zionists seek to silence, exclude and shame are almost all Jewish and when the charges they make against Zionists invariably echo the hoariest antisemitic stereotypes — greed, deceit, limitless bloodlust — then the distinctions between anti-Zionist and antisemite blur to the point of invisibility.

And a third: This isn’t going to end anytime soon.

It won’t end because anti-Zionism has a self-righteous fervor that will attract followers and inspire militancy. It won’t end because politics in America are moving toward forms of illiberalism — conspiracy thinking and nativism on the right, a Manichaean view on the left that the world is neatly divided between the oppressors and the oppressed — that are congenial to classic antisemitism. And it won’t end because most Jews will not forsake what it means to be Jewish so that we may be more acceptable to those who despise us.

10/02 Links Pt2: Kassy Akiva: Anti-Semitism Helped Make Me a Jew; The West's True Enemy Is Clear; The New York Times' Hizbullah Terrorist Worship

From Ian:

Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis: What is Zionism?

Sadly, Israel’s history has been plagued by war and violence, as hostile surrounding countries sought to deny Jews the right to live peacefully in their national homeland within a vibrant democracy.

That conflict has frequently been painful, often unbearably so, and the challenge of reconciling the destinies of two peoples in the same land has become ever more intractable with each passing decade. It is important to understand that Zionism is not an obstacle to that reconciliation – indeed, the chance to realise it was offered to both Jewish and Arab inhabitants of the land by the United Nations in 1947. Whereas the Jewish population grasped the opportunity to establish a state with both hands, the Palestinian Arab leadership and neighbouring Arab states firmly rejected it, preferring to wage war. Ever since that time, it has not been Zionism that has created conflict. Israel has endured and thrived despite the repeated attempts and the enduring desire to wipe it off the map.

The fallacy that Zionism and, more specifically, the existence of Israel, is fundamentally incompatible with the well-being of the Palestinian people has become increasingly pervasive over recent years, and its prevalence serves only to harm the cause of peace. We must have no truck with the narrative that Zionism is somehow inherently prejudiced. Zionism advocates self-determination for Jews. It does not agitate against the welfare and well-being of Palestinians. Consequently, I can, at one and the same time hold Zionism at the core of my Jewish identity whilst simultaneously feeling deep pain in seeing the suffering of numerous innocent Palestinians.

Zionism transcends the politics and policies of the day. Israel is a vibrant democracy within which there is healthy and often intense debate. Indeed, the most impassioned critics of any Israeli government are found within Israel itself, but their Zionism remains undimmed. This deep religious, historic, covenantal and emotional bond between the Jewish people and Israel does not mean that every Jewish person plays a role in nor is supportive of every decision taken by any given Israeli government. That is why the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of anti-Semitism correctly identifies “holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the State of Israel” as being manifestly anti-Semitic. This is not the same as acknowledging or celebrating the unarguable collective Jewish relationship with Israel – a case often made by some to suit their flawed narrative that Israel and Judaism are totally separate from one another. Diaspora Jews may be deeply connected to Israel, but they cannot be held responsible for it.

Sadly, there is an increasing tendency to single out Israel, the Jewish state, and by extension, Jewish people, for special treatment in a manner that is inconsistent with how other countries or global conflicts are viewed. In 2023 alone, the UN General Assembly voted to condemn Israel on a total of 14 occasions, while over the same period it condemned countries in the rest of the world put together just seven times . In such forums, the very legitimacy of Israel’s existence is challenged and undermined in a manner not found with respect to any other people or country. A hateful cocktail of singular scrutiny and demonisation is now being routinely used as a tool of delegitimisation. That tool has a name: anti-Zionism.

According to data from the UK’s Community Security Trust, a charity that protects British Jews, the first six months of 2024 saw the highest number of anti-Semitic incidents ever recorded in the UK. Our synagogues and schools have needed to be protected by more guards and higher walls. In May it was reported that police had thwarted a plot to attack a Jewish community in north-west England with automatic weapons. What happens in Israel has a direct impact on the everyday life of Jewish communities around the world. The simplistic thinking that underpins the knee-jerk reaction in holding all Jews to account for everything that takes place in Israel must be refuted at every turn.

It is extremely sad that the existence of a Jewish state in a land within which the Jewish people were indigenous long before the dawn of both Christianity and Islam should be seen as controversial in any way. Zionism, which upholds this right of the Jewish People to a national home in their ancestral homeland, is undoubtedly best served by a peaceful future for both Israelis and Palestinians.

I am a Zionist because I believe that alongside the world’s 157 Christian-majority countries and 49 Muslim-majority countries, there is a vital need for a single Jewish country. I am a Zionist because I am committed to the idea that even in a place where conflict has reigned for centuries, peace is achievable and worth fighting for. I am a Zionist because I have inherited a language, culture and faith from the indigenous people of Judea. I am a Zionist because over thousands of years, my ancestors recommitted daily to holding Israel at the heart of their faith. I am a Zionist because I am a Jew.

Kassy Akiva: Anti-Semitism Helped Make Me a Jew

‘If you finish your conversion to Judaism, are you prepared to deal with anti-Semitism?”

This was the question posed to me by a rabbi during my second meeting with the Rabbinical Court of Massachusetts, which was considering me as a candidate for conversion to Judaism.

The gravity of the question was not lost on me, especially as it came from a man whose early years were spent in a Nazi concentration camp, and who now had the authority to make others—and their descendants—vulnerable to evil by accepting them into the Jewish tribe.

“There is a man sitting in federal prison right now who threatened to kill me because he thought I was Jewish,” I answered. When I was just one year out of college and working as a journalist for the Daily Wire in Los Angeles, I had my first real scare from a truly disturbed person who said he wanted to rape and kill me because he believed I was a Jew. Although he was eventually sent to prison, I learned how dangerous it could be as a semipublic figure with a great love for Judaism—and I wasn’t even a Jew yet.

Since I converted to Judaism in April 2023, the months have been packed with the joy of finally joining the Jewish people and falling in love with my now-husband, contrasted with the tragedy of October 7 and the work I’ve done documenting the massacre sites and anti-Israel protests in its aftermath. Though this is not how I expected my first year as part of Am Yisrael to be, I was oddly well equipped and prepared to encounter the anti-Semitism visible in America’s cities. In fact, anti-Semitism deserves partial credit for leading me to God, His Torah, His land, and His people.

During college, I also encountered hateful trolls who harassed me and questioned whether I was Jewish because of my pointy nose, despite having Irish, English, and French lineage. When I began traveling to Israel on both secular and Christian group trips, I received Jew-hating messages and tweets, complete with images of Hitler and concentration camps. However, things escalated significantly when I started working for Ben Shapiro at the Daily Wire. A well-known white supremacist even labeled me “Ben’s philosemitic flying monkey.”

It was as though the anti-Semites had sensed something Jewish about me, but they were confused by my identity—and so was I. The truth is, I was just beginning my journey to understand who I was and my relationship with God. The more anti-Semitic hate mail filled my inbox, the more I became interested in learning about what drove these correspondents to attack Jewish people, and me.

10/02 Links Pt1: Is this the death rattle of Iranian tyranny?; Let Israel Win the War Iran Started; Israel declares Guterres persona non grata

From Ian:

Bredndan O'Neill: Is this the death rattle of Iranian tyranny?

It is such self-satisfied cant. How easy it is for Biden officials who live in leafy DC, and Britain’s liberal scribes who rarely venture from their East London bubbles, to insist that Israel patiently deter Iran rather than clash with it. Missiles paid for by Tehran are not dropping on Shoreditch or Martha’s Vineyard day in, day out. Militants backed by Iran did not recently swarm London or New York City to rape, kidnap and kill civilians. There aren’t Iran stooges mere miles from our towns threatening to excise our ‘cancerous’ presence from our own lands.

7 October changed the game. It made it clear that Iran’s proxies are not just a threat to be carefully monitored but a fascistic menace capable of killing thousands of Jews. Not just something to be deterred but something to be destroyed. I’m going to go out on a limb and say protecting Jewish life is more important than propping up Washington’s clapped-out Middle East policy. What is really ‘troublesome’ is not Israel’s just reaction to Hamas’s mass murder of its citizens, and to Hezbollah’s ceaseless firing of missiles since 7 October, one of which butchered 12 children, but the haughty indignation of pampered Westerners who are lucky enough never to have experienced the existential threat of a pincer movement of racist armies. They should spend more time counting their blessings and less begrudging Israel’s right to defend itself.

The soft sympathy for Iran that we’ve seen on social media these past 24 hours, and even in corners of the mainstream media, is bizarre. Iran is the imperial player in this tale. For all its self-regarding bluster about Hezbollah and Hamas being part of an ‘Axis of Resistance’ – bluster that some Western leftists shamefully embrace – in truth these movements are tools of Iranian expansionism. Iran has bent the entirety of Lebanon to its jealous regional ambitions, by continually boosting Hezbollah there. It has hijacked Palestinian politics and Palestinian life in its deranged crusade to land blows on Israel via its stooges in Hamas. It has cursed Yemen with years of war with its arming and goading of the Houthis against both Saudi Arabia and Israel.

To Iran, these are not free nations, but lowly outposts for its own political ambitions and religious ideology. Israel, in countering Iran’s pitiless exploitation of various states to prop up its fundamentalist worldview, is behaving far more like a ‘resistance’. It is resisting Iran’s proxy war on the Jewish nation and its bending of vast swathes of the Middle East to its theocratic will. That many Western leftists sympathise more with the religious hysterics who use and abuse less powerful states than they do with the democratic state of Israel tells us all we need to know about their moral disarray and their drift from reason. They masquerade as anti-imperialist while openly empathising with Iran’s imperious creep through supposedly sovereign lands.

Few things in politics are simple. One should always tease out the complexities, embrace the nuance. But to my mind, what is happening right now is pretty straightforward. You are either on the side of a barbarous theocratic regime that oppresses and murders women, workers and minorities and whose allies recently carried out the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust, or you are on the side of Israel. It’s time to choose.

Eli Lake: Let Israel Win the War Iran Started

The last time Iran launched a barrage of missiles and slow-moving drones at Israel, in April, Israel and her regional allies also defeated the attack. But Israel limited its retaliation to a radar system near Iran’s nuclear sites, after Biden publicly urged America’s ally to “take the win.” As Iran’s escalation Tuesday showed, April’s “win” was more of an invitation.

After much hemming and hawing over Rafah, Israel proved Harris wrong. In May it helped evacuate nearly 1 million people from the small city and began to deal the final blow to Hamas as a military organization. Last month, Israel’s defense minister announced that Hamas no longer existed as a military force. So much for that talking point.

The Rafah incursion marks Netanyahu’s defiance of his ally’s restraints. Israel has had a new approach to its war for survival ever since. Last month, it launched a series of operations that eliminated the entire senior leadership of Hezbollah—the Iran-sponsored terror army that was pointing more than 100,000 missiles at Israel. This series of strikes and attacks has already destroyed half of Hezbollah’s missile stockpiles, according to Israeli officials.

And yet, despite the success of Israel’s military operations against Hezbollah, President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris still warned against further escalation of a war that has been regional since Iran’s proxies started it on October 7 and 8.

And this brings things back to the American policy of restraining Israel. One can never get into the minds of the madmen who run Iran, but it’s quite possible the mullahs believed that America would continue to restrain Israel to deescalate the regional conflict that Iran—through its proxies—initiated nearly a year ago.

But what does it tell us about what comes next? Thus far, the Biden administration is playing its cards close to the vest. Speaking to reporters on Tuesday, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said that he and the president were consulting with Israel on how to respond to the Iranian attack. He gave no specifics, but said one of the factors would be to “promote stability to the maximum extent possible as we go forward.”

If Sullivan means that the U.S. will continue its policy of hoping to deter Iran by restraining Israel, then he is inviting further Iranian escalation. With two of Iran’s proxies—Hamas and Hezbollah—reeling, now is not the time to return the Middle East to an inherently unstable status quo. Real stability demands the ending of Iran’s nuclear blackmail of the region.

In other words, if Sullivan and Biden are serious, now would be the time to take off the handcuffs. Israel has vast capabilities—as it has shown in Lebanon, Gaza, Syria, and Iran over the last year. But it’s even more capable when its chief ally supports its mission.

So why not give Israel the green light and help it defang the chief cause of regional instability, the Iranian regime? Through pluck, daring, and ingenuity, Israel changed the dynamics of the war last month. Iran is wobbling. The win is there if the president takes it.

Bonnie Glick: Time to Cut the Cord in Lebanon

Don’t pop the champagne corks yet. While there is certainly reason to cheer for the termination of the bloody terrorist leadership of Hezbollah in Lebanon, Israel’s military strikes in and around Beirut only addressed part of the problem. Israel’s approach, using airstrikes, beeper strikes, and walkie-talkie strikes, is nothing short of miraculous. But the disease that spreads from Lebanon is not solely driven by Hezbollah and its paymasters in Tehran.

Certainly Iran’s most recent launch of hundreds of missiles at Israel “in retaliation” for the successful hit on Hassan Nasrallah in his Beirut bunker is an important and highly escalatory move by Iran, but it also is not the whole picture in Lebanon.

Lebanon is driven by corruption that runs throughout the entirety of its elite government structures, military and civilian. For decades, government officials, skilled in the French art of the bon mot, have snookered America. Hezbollah is always the problem, far be it for the downtrodden Lebanese to address the cancer in their midst head on.

Now is the perfect moment to reevaluate US assistance to Lebanon, starting with military aid. The Biden-Harris administration’s move in 2021 to more than double American contributions to the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) to $236 million. In 2023, the Biden-Harris administration contributed additionally over $70 million to pay the salaries of members of the LAF in the form of direct cash transfers. If Americans knew that their hard-earned tax dollars were going to pay the salaries of a foreign army that is formally still at war with Israel, a treaty ally, they might have some concerns. With good reason.

May this be a year of happiness, security, and peace.

I will not be blogging until at least Saturday night.

K'tiva v'chatima tovah!

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Every year, the St. Petersburg Jewish community holds a Holocaust memorial on the first Sunday of October. It commemorates the 800 Jews of Pushkin who were murdered by the Nazis in 1941.

But not this year.

The deputy head of the St. Petersburg district administration, Vladimir Lvov, banned the annual event, using the excuse of coronavirus restrictions.

However, the ceremony was held in 2022 and 2023.

One news site notes that St. Petersburg authorities routinely use Covid-19 as an excuse to ban political expression that they oppose.

So it sure appears that they are now sanctioning antisemitism.

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Iran is mourning the death of Brigadier General Abbas Nilforoushan, the Deputy Commander of Operations for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

He was really evil. And not only about Israel.

Two years ago, Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish Iranian woman, was arrested by the Iranian moral police because of an "improper hijab" and was killed by the police.

Large protests erupted, and the Iranian security forces responded with lethal force, killing over 550 protesters, including 68 children and 49 women,

Abbas Nilforoushan was one of the key figures in the crackdown on freedoms.

As a result, Nilforoushan was sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department. After he justified the deaths by saying “for subversion, one must pass through a sea of blood,” he and 17 others were added to the European Union’s sanctions list.

Anyone who cares about women's rights should cheer his death.

Nilforoushan said that "America's retreat from Afghanistan was a major victory for the region's nations." He also showed sympathy for the Taliban, saying, “I believe the Taliban have now understood that Afghanistan is made up of various ethnic groups and sects, and together, they form Afghanistan. I think the Taliban have reached a proper understanding of this and can no longer ignore the role of ethnic groups or women in Afghanistan.”

This is besides his hateful rhetoric about Israel and the West.

During a ceremony mourning Qassem Soleimani, he said, “Soleimani’s followers will soon bring the Zionist criminals out of their hiding places in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv and avenge the blood of the Palestinians.”

In 2023, he said, "We warn the West not to repeat past mistakes. Don’t make us put our boots from the 1980s back on, or you’ll find yourselves begging again. We settle accounts with our enemies, and we don’t leave debts unpaid; you can ask the Zionist regime about that."

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This video of some of the missiles shot from Iran towards Israel was reportedly taken from a British Airways flight to Dubai.

At 0:26, you see a large flash. Which looks a lot like one of the ballistic missiles exploded soon after launch.

Iran is proud of its domestic arms industry. But this looks more like a ballistic version of Hamas' home manufactured rockets - of which some 10% tend to fail - than the type of weapon you can export.

The video shows another shocking piece of unprofessionalism from Iran: it didn't warn airlines not to fly in the area (a NOTAM, Notice to Airmen.) According to the tweet with this video, the airline immediately turned around after seeing these missiles, but they are obviously a hazard to any airplane in the vicinity.

News reports show that there was infighting between Iran's IRGC and its president about whether to strike Israel. The IRGC does not report to Iran's army - meaning there are two, independent armies. The IRGC is a designated terror group. These missiles belonged to the IRGC, which characterized the strike not as deterrence or defensive but as "revenge."

This is not how a professional army acts, or how a professional army speaks.

Being unprofessional does not mean Iran isn't dangerous. It is a nuclear threshold state with an advanced military. This makes its unprofessionalism even more frightening: if ballistic missiles could explode prematurely, maybe a nuclear bomb could as well.

Regime change would make he world - and Iran itself - a much safer place.

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During last night's vice presidential debate, the first question was asked by CBS' Margaret Brennan:

Earlier today, Iran launched its largest attack yet on Israel. But that attack failed thanks to joint U.S. and Israeli defensive action. President Biden has deployed more than 40,000 U.S. military personnel and assets to that region over the past year to try to prevent a regional war. Iran is weakened, but the U.S. still considers it the largest state sponsor of terrorism in the world, and it has drastically reduced the time it would take to develop a nuclear weapon. It is down now to one or two weeks time. Governor Walz, if you are the final voice in the situation room, would you support or oppose a preemptive strike by Israel on Iran?

Walz' answer was very telling, in more ways than one:

Well, thank you. And thank you for those joining at home tonight. Let's keep in mind where this started. October 7th, Hamas terrorists massacred over 1400 Israelis and took prisoners. Iran, or, Israel's ability to be able to defend itself is absolutely fundamental, getting its hostages back, fundamental, and ending the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. But the expansion of Israel and its proxies is an absolute, fundamental necessity for the United States to have the steady leadership there. You saw it experienced today, where, along with our Israeli partners and our coalition, able to stop the incoming attack.

Walz' response is a mess. Walz twice mixed up Iran and Israel. Imagine the headlines today if Trump or Vance did that. And even if he had accurately said Iran in the second highlighted sentence, his answer sounds just as muddled and nonsensical as the worst of Joe Biden's performances.

Once you decode what he is saying, though, the answer is even worse - and it reflects current mainstream Democratic policies. Israel can defend itself and the US will help, but Israel cannot go after its enemies. It must remain in defensive mode and do nothing to actively deter those who are sworn to destroy it.

Which means, under the Harris/Walz administration, Israel's enemies can keep attacking with impunity with no fear that the war might end up on their territory.

This has been the mantra from Democratic administrations since Obama - "Israel has the right to defend itself" does not mean Israel has the right to deter attacks. On the contrary, nearly everything Israel does when it goes on the offensive is criticized, either publicly or behind closed doors.

Vance's answer, once he got past his personal history and his claim that Trump brought peace through strength, was straightforward and refreshing:

Now, you asked about a preemptive strike, Margaret, and I want to answer the question. Look, it is up to Israel what they think they need to do to keep their country safe. And we should support our allies wherever they are when they're fighting the bad guys. I think that's the right approach to take with the Israel question.

The contrast is clear. Vance said his administration would support whatever Israel decides is in its best interests. Walz emphatically did not say anything close to that.

On the contrary, in the Harris/Walz administration, as with the Obama administration and to a large extent with Biden, they would tell Israel what is best for Israel.

Both of them claim to be "pro-Israel." But only one side treats Israel as a partner, while the other treats her like an unruly child who must be taught the proper way to act.

One side treats Israel with respect and the other with condescension. In no way can he latter be considered "pro-Israel."

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10/01 Links Pt1: A Headless Superpower In a Time of War; Iranians Kill One Palestinian in Missile Assault on Israel; Six killed in Jaffa terror shooting

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: A Headless Superpower In a Time of War

The only time we see Harris acknowledge her current status as the incumbent is when her debilitating fear of social interaction kicks in. This week she had to make a choice: preside over a photo-op FEMA meeting about the devastation Hurricane Helene is visiting upon the American Southeast, or actually visit North Carolina or Georgia. She chose the bloodless and rather weird FEMA option, which didn’t involve possibly unscripted interactions with the public.

The combination of Harris’s social anxiety and her self-seriousness has made her distant when she is reading from a teleprompter and unintelligible when she isn’t, so she relies on preloaded canned lines. The result is that the rest of the world is moving too fast for her to be anything but a spectator.

Which means national-security imperatives are being handled by Cabinet secretaries who will soon be out of a job, like Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. The latter, you might remember, disappeared without explanation for a couple weeks at the beginning of the year to get treatment at Walter Reed without telling the president. The Pentagon appeared to be running on autopilot and yet Biden didn’t fire Austin, making them both look absurd.

Here’s what’s happening in the Middle East today: Iran fired 180 ballistic missiles at Israel while the IDF sent ground troops into South Lebanon to dismantle the terror infrastructure Hezbollah built to launch an attack similar to the one launched by Hamas on Oct. 7. Israel is being attacked by Iran or its proxies now from five separate countries.

Today alone, just before that missile barrage, a shooter killed six Israelis in Jaffa and injured about ten others. A couple rounds of rockets were fired from Lebanon at Israeli population centers. Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen attacked two ships in the Red Sea, one with missiles and the other with drone boats.

It has been quite the afternoon in the Middle East so far. Yet it wasn’t unusual. Every day seems to bring this amount of news from the conflict in one form or another. And that’s without zooming out to the ongoing land war in Europe thanks to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, or China’s militaristic stunts in which Beijing’s coast guard ships have been swarming and ramming Philippine boats and most recently a Vietnamese fishing craft.

It’s not a good time for the American superpower to be rudderless, but here we undeniably are. Let’s hope the damage can at least be contained until we have a president.

Caroline Glick: Israel, ignoring Biden’s gripes, does the job the UN won’t: Beat back Hezbollah

For 10 months, Hezbollah launched up to 20 projectiles at Israel every day. They killed scores of Israelis, including 10 children killed by a missile while playing soccer on a Saturday afternoon.

Hezbollah’s missiles destroyed hundreds of homes, devastating farms and livestock. They have torched forests and nature preserves, causing environmental devastation. And they targeted and hit sensitive military installations along the border.

Over the summer, Hezbollah escalated its assaults. The number of projectiles increased, reaching 50 to 120 per day. The range expanded to the lower Galilee and the Gulf of Haifa.

Clearly, Iran had decided to transform Lebanon into the new center of gravity in its multifront war against Israel after Israel successfully decimated most of Hamas’ military power and seized control over the international border between Gaza and Egypt, preventing Hamas from rebuilding its forces.

Instead of waiting to be invaded again, Israel chose to win the war.

And for the past two weeks, it has been doing just that.

Instead of discussing another cease-fire that will leave Hezbollah intact on the border and in control of Lebanon, Israel has begun to destroy the most powerful terror army in the world — an army controlled by Iran with tentacles that extend throughout Europe, North America, South America and Asia.

If Israel wins, not only will it secure its own borders and citizenry, it will secure the stability of the region and protect the entire world from the scourge of Iranian-backed Islamic terrorism.

If Israel falters, if it wobbles under US pressure and accepts a premature cease-fire, it will remain in mortal danger.

The region will be destabilized and the infrastructure of American power in the Middle East will crumble as every Arab state rushes to make deals with Iran — and with its allies, China and Russia.

It’s obvious why Israel needs to win. Its survival and the lives of its 10 million citizens are on the line.

What is hard to understand is why the Biden administration refuses to back that existential victory.

Seth Frantzman: Israel and its Western allies should now strike back against Iran

Iran must be deterred from more attacks. It is time for Israel and Israel’s partners and allies to strike back. The strikes on Iran should not just be a quiet operation because a quiet small precision strike will leave Iran feeling it has still won because it can pretend the incident didn’t happen. What this means is that a “cyberattack” or some kind of small explosion somewhere, is not enough. Iran needs to feel a setback to its ballistic missile program or to its energy facilities or some other kind of strategic infrastructure.

The Iranian people, most of whom oppose the regime, should see the response. This will threaten the regime more than any attack on a regime S-300 battery or on some regime bunker in a mountain somewhere. When Iranians see that their regime is a paper tiger they will be emboldened. This means a response to the attack should involve something that doesn’t harm Iranian civilians but which civilians can see. Israel retaliated against Houthi missile attacks by striking a port in Yemen. Israel has retaliated against Hezbollah by eliminating Hezbollah commanders in Beirut. Israel was also blamed for exploding pagers that harmed thousands of Hezbollah activists. This is how Lebanon sees that Hezbollah is a menace and also a weak organization that cannot protect its own.

The Iranian regime is a menace to the region. Its use of long range missiles has threatened the Gulf and many western allies. Iran even got China to broker reconciliation with Saudi Arabia over the last two years. Iran is on the march in the region with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps precisely because most countries are afraid of Iran and don’t think the west or others will protect them. For instance, anyone sitting in a Gulf country today can see videos of the ballistic missile attack on Israel and imagine such an attack on the gleaming towers of the Gulf. They know Iran can lay waste peaceful cities. They also see that Iran is conducting a joint military drill with Oman, according to a report at Iranian state media on October 1. They know that Iran’s president is flying to Qatar. They see how Iran is on the march. For this reason the region needs to see a response to the Iranian attack on Israel. They need to see that Iran can no longer get away with attacks on every country in the Middle East.

Iran’s ballistic missile program is now a major threat to the region and the world. Iran is working with Russia to export military technology and drones to Moscow. Iran is threatening the Gulf and the US. Iran’s missiles could one day carry nuclear weapons. Iran has shown its strength and likely hides more surprises in its missile facilities at home. It is time for Iran to receive a response.

10/01 Links Pt2: BHL: Israel Acts Alone; The choice was between civilisation or barbarism; UN has betrayed its founding principles; The racist protocols of Ta-Nehisi Coates

From Ian:

Bernard-Henri Lévy: Israel Acts Alone

In short, the free world, the real one, the one that stretches from New York, Paris, and Rome to the crowds that, from Tehran to Ankara and from Moscow to Beijing and Kabul, do not resign themselves to living under imbecilic and bloody dictatorships, can breathe a little easier and see the signs of possible change.

Of course, nothing is yet decided.

Hezbollah still has tens of thousands of missiles pointed at Israel.

And history having, as Marx said, to remain in the same metaphorical register, more imagination than man, the “five kings” that are Iran, Russia, the Islamist International, Turkey, and China are not without recourse, far from it.

But the Israelis have delivered a lesson in determination and courage.

They did the opposite to what the European and American Munich Agreement cheerleaders were repeating like broken records: “De-escalate! De-escalate!” After all, according to the theories of just war, and after that, according to Clausewitz, there are situations in the world where, alas, escalation is necessary and the only option.

And the Israelis reminded the world that there are moments in history, when your (Israel’s) survival is at stake, when entire peoples (Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Iraqi and Syrian Kurds) are taken hostage and threatened, when the strategy of compromise is taken by the enemy (formerly Nazi Germany, today the Islamic Republic of Iran) as an invitation to hit even harder—moments, then, where one of those strong acts that the cowards call “escalation” can turn the tide, redraw the power map, and save lives.

The IDF acts alone because that is, today, its situation.

But it acts—contrary to what armchair strategists castigating an “Israel now out of control” repeat everywhere—with measure and without hubris.

It breaks the operational capabilities of a state within a state that terrorized the world. And it does this, as always, while trying to do everything it could to spare innocent civilians.

And, as we all now know since the fall of the great empires and, more recently, of the USSR, dictators fear, not just failure, but the external humiliation that leaves them naked before their internal opposition—such that Israel may well be in the process of fulfilling in Iran itself the great dream of Western republics, moderate Arab countries, and, again, heroines of democracy who have courageously paraded for two years now in Tehran to the shouts of “Woman, Life, Freedom.”

For these reasons, Israel’s allies must urgently regroup to support it, not just in defense, but for victory.

Melanie Phillips: The choice was between civilisation or barbarism

For decades, the West said nothing while Hezbollah assembled its 150,000 rockets pointing at Israel from civilian areas of southern Lebanon in flagrant disregard of UN resolution 1701. It said nothing for the past 12 months as Hezbollah bombarded northern Israel with missiles every single day. It said nothing for more than 20 years while Hamas fired hundreds of rockets from Gaza to kill Israeli civilians, forcing them to all but live in bomb shelters and their children to suffer enduring trauma.

But when Israel finally defends itself, the West suddenly finds its voice and tells it that it mustn’t do so.

Why is this? Several reasons. There’s the way left-wingers and Islamists unite in an attempt to wipe Israel off the map. There’s the endemic Jew-hatred, whose latest mutation is the wish to eradicate the collective Jew in Israel. There’s the liberal article of faith that all conflicts can be ended through negotiation and compromise, so the notion that sometimes war may be unavoidable to defeat fanatics with non-negotiable agendas is simply never acceptable. And there’s the destruction of the West’s moral compass under the impact of ideologies aimed at destroying its identity, values and culture.

Now we understand how the Holocaust could have happened. It’s not just that there are people who want to exterminate Jews. They can only do so with the active connivance or indifference of the rest of the world.

October 7 presented the West with a clear choice: civilisation or barbarism. It has not chosen to defend civilisation. But as the West disintegrates under the weight of moral bankruptcy and collapse of self-belief, iron has entered the Israeli soul. Israel made a different choice. It said never again would it allow its people to be invaded, slaughtered, raped, beheaded and burned alive. This would be the last war in which it would have to fight for its existence.

The Israelis are deeply traumatised. Their grief and anxiety are off the scale. At the same time, their spirit is unbroken. Yes, many deeply dislike Benjamin Netanyahu and there are large demonstrations aiming to get him out of office. But Israelis are remarkably united in their determination to inflict total defeat upon the enemies who want them gone.

Yet there’s more. The astonishing, heroic commitment of the young conscripts at the front derives from their belief that they aren’t just fighting for their nation and for those who were slaughtered or kidnapped on October 7, but also for all those Jews who came before them and kept the Jewish people alive despite the centuries of such slaughter.

Israel will win this terrible war – whatever the cost – because it knows what it is, loves its Jewish identity and is proud of it. As a result, it is determined to live. The opposite is true of the West that has abandoned it.

Melanie Phillips: The Hamas Broadcasting Corporation

This is not just a question of the BBC failing to discharge its charter obligation to be fair and balanced, serious as that dereliction of journalistic duty is in itself. The vicious media coverage in the west, produced by Hamas and its fellow travellers in the Palestinian cause and consisting of serial falsehoods, malicious distortions and blood libels designed to demonise, delegitimise and destroy Israel, is an absolutely essential weapon in the Hamas armoury.

Through the totally false narrative of Israeli interlopers in “Palestine” who first drove out the “indigenous Palestinians” and are now illegally and oppressively occupying their land — every part of which is untrue — the western public was softened up during many decades for the big lie that’s been pumped out for the past year that the IDF has been wantonly killing and starving civilians in Gaza.

That is the very opposite of the truth. This lie has helped incite hysteria and violent hatred against both Israel and diaspora Jews, and ramped up pressure on western governments to dump on Israel while giving Hamas an easy ride. And while much of the media has been complicit in this — Sky News has been particularly disgusting — the most influential and powerful media outlet that has led the pack in this incitement has been the BBC. whose coverage of this terrible war has been, in general, utterly monstrous.

As Cohen and Deech write:
Military analysts and experts across the world will tell you that Hamas cannot win the war it started with Israel by force of arms alone. Anti-Israel propaganda isn’t merely a tactic for Hamas; it is integral to its war effort. Indeed, it is a war aim in and of itself. Hamas must convince the world, through media outlets like the BBC, that Israel is brutal, indiscriminate, and unjust; that the deaths of innocent Palestinian civilians are something that Israel wantonly pursues, rather than a tragic consequence of Hamas turning the Palestinian people into human shields.

Hamas has embedded its terrorist infrastructure amongst civilians, including in former school buildings (often mistakenly described as working schools in news reports), hospitals and mosques. With an iniquitous disregard for the truth, Hamas even lays the false charge of ‘genocide’ against Israel in responding to the attack on 7 October - the worst antisemitic atrocity since the Holocaust and an indisputably genocidal act.

Through these tactics, they seek to claim that Israel is actually fighting a war of aggression, rather than taking necessary defensive action in an existential fight against Iran and its proxies.

As this report comprehensively demonstrates, the BBC all too often accepts Hamas’s distortions as fair framing or fact. Worse than that, it then sells them on to a credulous world as news burnished by the BBC’s authority and reputation.

Among the examples the report lists:
On the day of the October 7 pogrom itself, while the rest of Britain’s media were detailing the brutality of Hamas’s attack on Israel and before Israel went to war in Gaza, the BBC led its coverage with a headline about “Israeli revenge attacks”.
In the immediate aftermath of the October 7 pogrom, it broadcast interviews with Hamas apologists who used this platform to make comments which the BBC was forced to admit were “offensive”.
It reported that an “Israeli strike” killed “hundreds” at the Al Ahli hospital: thereby repeating, legitimising and reinforcing entirely false claims that directly caused unrest in some European and Middle Eastern countries, including serious arson attacks upon synagogues in Germany and Tunisia.
It failed to remove articles suggesting the same hospital blast may have been caused by the Israeli military, even after the BBC admitted it got its reporting wrong.
It reported that Israeli soldiers had been “targeting” medical teams and Arab speakers as they hunted Hamas terrorists in a hospital, when instead they actually had brought medical teams and Arab speakers with them to help the patients during the military operation.
It published an article that wrongly claimed a UN report had warned “half of Gaza’s population is starving” and peddled a false Hamas propaganda line that Gaza had become a “polio epidemic zone”.
At the height of the conflict, BBC Arabic was forced to correct articles on average every 48 hours, including copy that referred to Hamas as the “resistance”.
BBC Arabic platformed one guest who had previously referred to the October 7 massacre as a “heroic military miracle” and another who described Hamas atrocities against innocent Israelis as “necessary”.
It failed to remove graphs from its website that purported to show that 70 per cent of Gazan fatalities were women and children – after those figures were shown to be inaccurate.
It routinely quoted figures produced by the Hamas Health Ministry without highlighting it as a terrorist-run organisation, and routinely failed to stress in reporting that Hamas fatality figures are unverifiable and include thousands of Hamas terrorists.
It repeatedly reported Israeli strikes on Hamas command centres based inside school buildings as “strikes on schools” and repeatedly failed to explain the terror group’s use of innocent Palestinians as human shields.
It used freelance journalists and eyewitness reports without due diligence on their social media accounts which would have revealed clear anti-Israel bias.
A senior BBC executive admitted inaccuracies had “real world consequences” for British Jews but were inevitable because of the “fog of war”.