Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Monday, October 07, 2024

10/07 Links Pt1: After the October 7 pogrom; We expected Hamas to kill Jews. We didn’t expect Americans to celebrate it.

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: After the October 7 pogrom

Writing the Jews out of their own unique suffering like this — and even blaming them for it — is another ancient trope of Jew-hatred. But O’Neill doesn’t stop there. He probes yet more profoundly into the sickness — and discovers a truth that few have identified. This is that antisemitism causes jealousy.

I have myself written about this — that people complain “the Jews have sucked up all the victimhood in the world and left none for anyone else”. Crazy, or what? But as I wrote, faced with the Nazi genocide of the Jews and the complicity or indifference of the west in enabling it to happen, there are people who respond by wanting what, in their warped view, the Jews were given in response — an apparent shield, provided by the charge of antisemitism, against being blamed for anything bad they actually do.

These Jew-haters believe that antisemitism lets the Jews get away with it.

Get away with what, precisely? Well, all the things that antisemites believe about the Jews but aren’t allowed to say and, they believe, are true — for example, that the Jews hurt others in their own interests but hide it behind the charge of antisemitism. The Jew-haters (who purport merely to hate Israel) want that get-out-of-jail-free card for themselves. In other words, as I concluded, rampant Jew-hatred isn’t just an outcome of intersectional victim culture. It squats at its very core.

O’Neill writes:
We are living in an era of Holocaust envy. The ascendancy of the politics of victimhood has nurtured a palpable hostility towards the idea that the Holocaust was uniquely barbarous. In an era in which victimhood confers moral authority, when the way you secure both social sympathy and state resources is by claiming to suffer “structural oppression”, it simply won’t do that the Jews have a singular claim over the gravest instance of victimisation in history. And so their claim on the Holocaust must be questioned, weakened, loosened. What about the other victims of Nazi murder? What about other genocides? Challenging the distinctive nature of the Holocaust, even demoting the Holocaust further down the pecking order of human agony, is the grim inevitable consequence of a cult of competitive grievance in which accruing ever-more tales of pain is the way you move ahead.

There’s much else in O’Neill’s savage analysis of the west’s reaction to the October 7 pogrom — the betrayal of feminism by the refusal to acknowledge the rapes of the female Israeli victims, the cult of “keffiyeh chic” as the ultimate cultural appropriation, and the genocidal streak of the student “snowflakes” who preposterously claim they endure trauma from “micro-aggressions” such as the failure to use their preferred pronouns.

O’Neill views the moral obscenity of the reaction to October 7 as the confluence of Islamist and radical western thought — an alliance between one of the most barbarous and reactionary creeds on the planet with the ideologies of “decolonisation” and critical race theory to seek the destruction of the Jewish state as the forward salient of a war against civilisation and humanity itself.

Brendan O’Neill hasn’t just provided a valuable analysis of the west’s cultural meltdown. He is in himself a health-giving antidote to the poison coursing through the cultural elites of Britain and the west. Bravo.

Seth Mandel: Defining October 7

What was October 7, 2023?

In a sane world, the question would be unnecessary. Unfortunately, we live in a world in which Amnesty International—one of the leading “human rights for everyone but the Jews” organizations around the globe—marked the first anniversary of the Hamas attacks with a video that is perhaps the best single example of why we are in a battle to define the deadliest day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust.

In the video, a woman who’s speaking for a group of marching anti-Israel protesters says: “Don’t let anyone tell you this all started on the seventh of October 2023.”

What is “this”? Believe it or not, she never says. Rather, she launches into a diatribe against Israel’s founding 76 years ago and its continued existence. Later, she says: “And when there is no accountability, there is no reason to change, or to stop. And that’s why, one year on, Israel has escalated its attacks on Lebanon leading to more devastation and death.”

One year on from what, exactly? Where did Lebanon come into the mix? Again, she never says. And on some level, we understand: Her implicit defense of the barbarism of that day is genuinely evil, but as long as she doesn’t say it explicitly she can still look herself in the mirror.

The coopting of Oct. 7 by Hamas’s supporters around the world is why we have to say, and keep saying, what exactly happened that day. It’s what motivates one of the many worthwhile documentaries about Oct. 7, 2023, Pierre Rehov’s Pogrom(s).

Rehov’s documentary is a worthy expression of the horror and the sorrow and the devastation because its premise is also that none of “this” began on Oct. 7, 2023. Hence the title of the film, which not only describes the horrors but attempts to name them.

In the film, Richard Rossin, the former head of Doctors Without Borders, tells the viewer that Oct. 7 was far more than a terror attack. Dalia Ziada, a prominent pro-democracy activist in Egypt during the Arab Spring turmoil, offers: “What happened on October 7 was a genocide attack.”

Perhaps the film’s best attempt to categorize that day comes from Sarah-Masha Fainberg of Tel Aviv University: “Hamas operatives intentionally chose the modus operandi of the pogromists of tsarist Russia and of the Einsatzgruppen during World War II, to reactivate a deep sense of Jewish vulnerability.”

It’s true, Oct. 7 didn’t begin on Oct. 7, 2023. But as Fainberg notes, it also didn’t start in 1948 with Israel’s rebirth. It was the continuation of the long march of the oldest hatred.

In that sense, there is something almost mystical about it. In every generation they rise up to destroy us, and here they are rising up again. Still, Rehov’s film warns against taking that too far and thus removing from the Palestinians their agency. Rehov interviews Yuval Bitton, the former intelligence head of Israel’s prison service and a man who has spent many hours in that capacity with Hamas chief Yahya Sinwar, who masterminded Oct. 7. Bitton was also one of the Israeli doctors who helped save Sinwar’s life while he was in an Israeli prison.

“Whoever defines [Sinwar] as a psychopath gives him a gift,” Bitton says. “That’s basically saying that he didn’t know what he was doing.” But that, Bitton says, is plainly untrue. “Sinwar is not a psychopath. Sinwar knew exactly what he was doing. This is part of their worldview.”

By “this,” Bitton means: The wanton murder, by hand, of 1,200 innocents and the kidnapping of over 200 more men, women, and children. By “this” he means what another captured Hamas operative says when asked what the terror group had planned to do with women captives: “To whore them. To rape them.” By “this” he means the killing spree so savage that emergency responders found teeth and scalps at the kibbutzim that came under attack, kindergartens covered in blood, charred human remains and piles of ashes.

Bari Weiss: A Year of Revelations ‘We expected Hamas to kill Jews. We didn’t expect Americans to celebrate it.’

Someone asked me the other day how I planned to commemorate October 7. I found myself speechless, befuddled by the question.

How do you offer an elegy when the war is not yet over—and 101 hostages, those still alive and the bodies of the murdered, are not yet home? How do you remember a catastrophe when it is still unfolding? How do you mark a past event that feels as though it was a prelude to a much deeper darkness, whose dimensions we are still discovering? How do you look at something with a sense of distance when it has revealed so much, so close to home?

The genocidal war launched by Iran and its proxies a year ago this morning began with rocket fire and a ground invasion by Hamas battalions who carried maps of every kibbutz and village. These maps, made by Palestinians who worked inside Israel, told them where the daycare centers were, where the weapons were stored, which families owned a dog. After several thousand terrorists, targeting civilians, had raped, murdered, and kidnapped, they were followed by waves of ordinary Gazans—to borrow Chris Browning’s phrase—who played their role in a day of slaughter with millennia-old echoes in Jewish history.

Just look at the terror on the face of Shiri Bibas, clinging to her nine-month-old baby Kfir and her four-year-old son Ariel—an image that flashes across my eyes when I put our children to sleep.

I do not mean to say that the more than 1,200 human beings murdered by Hamas terrorists on that day—at a music festival, in their beds, in shelters where they sought safety—are symbols of history or politics. Only that what happened on that day—what Hamas did—was exactly what they had always said they would do in their founding charter, which calls for the genocide of the Jewish people. In stealing the Bibas family, and in butchering and maiming and raping and burning their neighbors, the terror group was doing exactly what it promised.

The promise of America was to give “bigotry no sanction,” as our first president wrote in 1790 to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, Rhode Island. “May the Children of the Stock of Abraham, who dwell in this land, continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other Inhabitants; while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree, and there shall be none to make him afraid.”

But on October 7, 2023, the enemies of Washington’s vision—of America’s founding impulse—began to reveal themselves.

As news of the scope of the slaughter was still registering, and the tally of hostages still being made—the final count: 240 people from 40 countries carried off like barbaric spoils of war—progressive groups here at home and across the West began to celebrate.

More than 30 student clubs at Harvard put out a letter holding Israel “entirely responsible” for the massacre. Israel. Not Hamas. Israel. This was on October 8, as Hamas terrorists were still roaming Israel’s south, and Hezbollah began its assault on Israel’s north from Lebanon.

Surely it had to be some terrible mistake, a sick prank. But the statement was sincere. And it wasn’t an anomaly.

October 7: A Year of Free Press Stories

A Year Ago Today, Terrorists Stole My Son

There are two videos that capture seconds of the terror my son experienced that day.

In the first one, terrorists are seen outside the shelter, throwing grenades into it one after another, while shouting at someone sitting on the ground outside. Gunshots can be heard in the background. The Hamas men throw grenade after grenade at the young men and women hiding in the shelter, but they are thrown back out—though in the video you cannot see who is deflecting them.

Another horrific video shows Alon being dragged by his hair across the ground outside the shelter by a terrorist in plainclothes. Another, wearing camo fatigues and a green Hamas headband, helps him lift my son into a white Toyota pickup truck. A third terrorist joins in to hit him before two of the terrorists raise their guns and point them at Alon, before the camera pans back toward the shelter. There is blood on him—on his face and on his shirt—but it is hard to make out his face.

For a time, that was all we knew. Later we learned the name of the hero who deflected those grenades. He was Aner Shapiro, and he was 22 years old. He was able to throw seven grenades out of the shelter, but died when the eighth exploded in his hands. He had come to the festival with his dear friend, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, who Hamas murdered after 325 days in captivity.

Was my son Alon kept with Hersh in the tunnels? Is he with Or Levy and Eliya Cohen right now? I have no idea. And I try desperately not to think of his gruesome abduction, or how he has spent the past 365 days.

Instead I try to think about his beautiful blond hair and his green eyes. I think about how funny he is and how much he loves people. I think about how excited he would get about things, and how he would just light up—like with cars, which he’s been obsessed with since he was two years old. Or about cooking and surfing, and of course, music. I think about how I played Beethoven and Mozart for him while he was in my womb.

I think about how, after he finished his army service and saved up some money working at a luxury hotel in the south, he decided to travel to Asia, a common destination for young Israelis. But unlike most of his friends, he did it alone. He told me, “I want to see how I can be with myself, and cope with myself.” He loved it—he did a trek in Nepal and traveled around the south of India and Sri Lanka. He met up with so many people there, new friends and old. He had a big appetite for life, and an ability to find beauty in every experience. It’s hard to find a picture of him where he’s not laughing.

Two months after my son was stolen, a few of his friends arrived at my house to give us a key to their new apartment. That’s where his room is, waiting for him. The last time I saw him, at around eleven o’clock on the night of October 6, Alon played his piano for us a bit before leaving for the festival. He played a cover of Yehudit Ravitz’s “Song Without a Name.” It was beautiful. He left the piano open and it’s been open ever since, waiting.

After a year of the terrible, terrible conditions he has suffered, I don’t know if he will want to continue living as he did before. But if he does, it’s all waiting for him when he comes home.

Three new studies on the huge increase of antisemitism in the US over the past year

On this anniversary of the October 7 pogrom, at least three organizations have released reports about the increase of antisemitism they have seen that accompanied the worst attack on Jews since Auschwitz.

The Foundation to Combat Antisemitism has been polling Americans for the past year and see an unmistakable shift of people from being allies to Jews to being haters. This chart summarizes the shift:

The percentage that hate or lean towards hating Jews has gone up from 15% to 25%; the percentage of those who are allies or leaning allies to Jews went down from 41% to 28%.

The ADL issued its own statistics for the past twelve months:

There have been more than 10,000 antisemitic incidents in the U.S. in the year since the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attack in Israel, according to ADL (the Anti-Defamation League) preliminary data. This is the highest number of incidents ever recorded in any single year period since ADL started tracking in 1979.

These newly released figures, from Oct. 7, 2023 to Sept. 24, 2024, represent an over 200-percent increase compared to the incidents reported to us during the same period a year before, which saw 3,325 incidents.

At least 1,200 of these antisemitic incidents happened on college campuses. In the same period a year before, ADL recorded about 200 incidents, representing a 500-percent increase.

Of these incidents, over 2,000 occurred at Jewish institutions such as synagogues and Jewish centers. More than half of all incidents at Jewish institutions took the form of bomb threats (only 81 bomb threats against Jewish institutions were recorded in the same period in the prior year.)

ADL’s preliminary data also found that over 3,000 of all incidents took place during anti-Israel rallies, which featured regular explicit expressions of support for terrorist groups including Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), one of the most concerning antisemitic trends ADL captured since Oct. 7, 2023.

Finally, the Online Hate Prevention Institute issued a press release on their latest statistics of online antisemitism. They break it down into specific categories and subcategories. Here is what they found for the time period of February to September 2024:

Incitement to violence was now more linked to ideology than before – both of the Hamas variety and the neo-Nazi variety. This makes radicalisation into violent extremism a greater threat.

74.5% of all the antisemitism gathered included elements of traditional antisemitism. This is the sort of antisemitism that asserts anti-Jewish conspiracy theories, blood libel, deicide, demonisation, dehumanisation, etc.

37.3% of all the antisemitism gathered included elements of Israel related antisemitism. The vast majority of this content applied traditional antisemitism to Israel (think “Israel controls the media / banks / government / world” rather than “Jews control the media / banks / government / world”). The next most common form of this antisemitism was Holocaust inversion, claiming Israeli is the new Nazi state, or Netanyahu is the new Hitler.

Only 8.39% were antisemitic in relation to Israel without also engaging in incitement to violence, Holocaust denial or distortion, or some form of traditional antisemitism.

Only 1.35% was classed as antisemitism because it “denies Israel’s right to exist e.g. by calling it a racist endeavour” without also expressing some other form of antisemitism.

The link between "anti-Zionism" and traditional antisemitism is quite clear online.

Here are the numbers of specific instances they saw on social media during those six months:

The categories are:

Holocaust related content subcategories
1.1 Denying the Holocaust
1.2 Accusing Jews or Israel of exaggerating the Holocaust
1.3 Blaming Jews for the Holocaust
1.4 Distort the facts of the Holocaust
1.5 Glorifying the Holocaust or suggesting it did not go far enough
1.6 Inappropriate comparisons with Nazis
1.7 Holocaust jokes

Incitement to violence subcategories
2.1 Calling for, aiding, or justifying the killing or harming of Jews in the name of a radical ideology or an extremist view of religion.
2.2 Calling for harm to someone because they are Jewish
2.3 Calling for harm to Jewish people in general
2.4 Calling for harm to Jewish property
2.5 Calling for harm to someone believing they are Jewish
2.6 Calling for harm to non-Jews for supporting Jews or opposing antisemitism

Traditional Antisemitism subcategories
3.1 Dehumanising Jews
3.2 Promoting the idea of a world Jewish conspiracy
3.3 Promoting the idea of Jews controlling the media
3.4 Promoting the idea of Jews controlling the economy
3.5 Promoting the idea of Jews controlling government or other societal institutions
3.6 Promoting traditional antisemitism such as blood libel and claims Jews killed Jesus
3.7 Holding Jews collectively responsible acts committed by individuals
3.8 Accusing Jews citizens of being disloyal to their country

Antisemitism related to Israel subcategories
4.1 Accusing Israel inventing or exaggerating the Holocaust
4.2 Denying Jewish people self-determination, e.g., by claiming Israel’s existence is racist
4.3 Requiring a behaviour from Israel not expected of other countries
4.4 Describing Israel or Israelis using antisemitic words or imagery (e.g., claims of Jews killing Jesus or blood libel)
4.5 Comparisons of Israeli policy to Nazism
4.6 Holding Jews collectively responsible for Israel’s actions

Antisemitism is becoming a huge problem. For the two decades I've been studying this, the most reliable indication of what the US will be like in several years is what western Europe is like now.

This is scary as hell.

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!

Previously, I noted a research article by the Alma Research thinktank. It referenced another article, written in 2020, about how Iran uses its Red Crescent medical services to advance Iran's military goals.

The ‘modus operandi’ of the [Iranian Red Crescent] already used in service of the Quds Forces has been revealed in several strategic junctions. In an interview with the Iranian media in April 2019, a former IRGC senior commander official, Saeed Qassemi, revealed that in the framework of Iran’s assistance to Bosnian Muslims, the IRGC troops present in Bosnia used the Iranian Red Crescent in order to provide military training to Jihad Sunni militants in Bosnia during the Bosnian war (1992-1995).

Alongside this, WikiLeaks documents revealed that the Iranian Red Crescent serves as a cover for Quds Forces and the Iranian Intelligence Office (MOIS), making extensive use to advance Iranian subversion in various countries including Lebanon, Bahrain, Yemen and Iraq. As revealed, all the teams that the Iranian Red Crescent dispatched to Lebanon during the Second Lebanon War, allegedly to assist the civilian population, were in fact Quds Forces who arrived in Lebanon to assist Hezbollah. The crews brought military equipment and weapon supplies masked as shipments of medical equipment.

Others have noted the cozy relationship between the Iranian Red Crescent and the Revolutionary Guards.

Here's what that Wikileaks memo says about how Iran used the Iranian Red Crescent (IRC) as a cover for military in Lebanon:

The IRC again facilitated the entry of Qods force officers to Lebanon during the Israel-Hezbollah war in summer 2006. Although Dr. Towfighi did not travel to Lebanon during the conflict, he reiterated that the only true IRC officers dispatched to Lebanon were the doctors and drivers; all others were IRGC and MOIS officials. Dr. Towfighi further said that the IRC shipments of medical supplies served also to facilitate weapons shipments. He said that IRC drivers had seen missiles in the planes destined for Lebanon when delivering medical supplies to the plane. The plane was allegedly "half full" prior to the arrival of any medical supplies.

Dr. Khatami also allowed the transfer of an IRC hospital in southern Lebanon to Hezbollah. Dr. Towfighi said that Hassan Nasrallah had asked Supreme Leader Khamenei to allow Hezbollah to run the hospital during Dr. Noorbala's tenure as IRC president. Although Khamenei acquiesced, Dr. Noorbala prevented the transfer until his own departure. The hospital still has an IRGC officer - a Dr. Adib - as its chief, but is under Hezbollah control. Dr. Adib is allegedly close to Nasrallah and is also trying to create a network of medical clinics in Lebanon.

Now look at some recent headlines.

The Tehran Times reported Sunday that the Iranian Red Crescent Society set up a field hospital on the Lebanon-Syria border - a very convenient way to smuggle arms to Lebanon. Imagine the outcry if Israel would bomb that field hospital - yet it would be completely justified if it has intelligence that it is being used to smuggle weapons to Hezbollah.

Over the weekend, the IRCS said it had sent or was about to send 60 tons of supplies to Lebanon.

Given its history, Iran is not sending over supplies because it loves Lebanon or even its Shiite population. Israel has been doing everything it can to stop Iran from smuggling weapons to Hezbollah, and it sure seems likely that some of these tons of medical supplies are anything but medical.

(h/t Irene)

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!

This video of an explosion in the southern suburbs of Beirut was shown live on Lebanon's Al Jadeed TV.

The secondary explosions are clear indications that this was a weapons depot in the middle of a residential neighborhood.

At 0:14, you can see one of the missiles from the target shoot out several hundred feet over the buildings of the area, then make a U-turn and target the area of the explosion. It may have been a heat-seeking surface to air missile meant to shoot down aircraft.

As far as I can tell, Lebanese media are publishing photos from the explosion without mentioning the obvious, that their neighborhoods are filled with Hezbollah rockets.

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!

The shofar that we heard on Rosh Hashana is meant to wake us up from our slumber, to look anew at how we have been thinking and acting, to shake us out of our complacency, to come up with ways to improve ourselves for the future. When listened to the right way, one should be a different person after hearing the shofar than we were beforehand.

The Simchat Torah pogrom was the most horrific event targeting Jews since the Holocaust. We cannot bring the 1,200 precious lives back but we can damn well learn lessons from the klaxon of that day and make sure that never again really means never again.

We need to understand the lessons of October 7.

Hamas and its allies really are today's Nazis.

The only thing stopping today's Jew-haters from murdering 7 million Jews in Israel is is the Israel Defense Forces. The genocidal desire of Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and Iranian leaders to murder or expel all the Jews in the Middle East is indistinguishable from that of the Nazis. The antisemitic incitement in Palestinian, Jordanian, Egyptian, Yemeni and Turkish media is no different than that in Der Stürmer in the 1930s and 1940s. And the justifications for rape, murder and burning Jews alive is just as ludicrous today as it was for the Nazis.

In the 1930s, the Nazi single-minded hate of Jews was not taken seriously, either. It was downplayed, pooh-poohed, assumed to be just rhetoric to attract followers, and the Jews who were screaming about the threat were dismissed as being hysterical and biased.

Just as it was then, only the Jews and a very few others were right to sound the alarm. Many more lives would have been saved if the world understood the danger earlier.

In a time when Iran is practically a nuclear weapons power. With Iran having the the ability to create another Holocaust at the push of a button, the time to stop them is now, not in five or ten years.

Most people refuse to accept, or choose to downplay, the threat from Islamist terrorists and Iran.

The West has forgotten the distinction between real peace and a temporary lull. Israel made the same mistake, hoping against history that deterrence can bring semi-permanent calm and security. A certain amount of violence and terror was considered "acceptable." Meanwhile, the enemies of Israel and the West never hid their ambitions - they say them every day in their own media, in mosques, from their own parliaments.

And their ambitions are not limited to the Middle East. Over the year, they have become much more public in their threats to the West - even from preachers whose freedom of speech is protected by the West.

Antisemitism is back.

Antisemitism never left, of course, but the latent antisemitism that never disappeared has become more public and more accepted.

We have seen, in real time, how Holocaust denial is possible. Because we have seen October 7 denial from every possible, contradictory angle - claims that no civilians were killed, or that Israel killed all the civilians, that there were no rapes and Israel was the only party raping. Hamas is both a freedom-fighting party of resistance and the ultimate innocent victim of Jewish evil. Palestinians have the right to murder Jews and Jews do not have the right to defend themselves.

The first anti-Israel rallies started immediately after the pogrom, and the insistence that posters of the hostages be ripped down entrenched the fact that to many people, the very idea that Jews should be objects of sympathy is deemed utterly unacceptable. Jews are monsters, and any other narrative must be shouted down.

None of this would occur for any other country, even if accused of the exact same things, even if proven over and over again to have done far worse. . October 7 gave the modern antisemites not just a reason but an imperative to double down on their lies.

And, just as with Nazi Germany, too many people believe them.

The mainstream media and NGOs are irredeemably antisemitic.

I don't say this lightly. And certainly the media and human rights organizations don't think of themselves that way.

But there is one irrefutable fact about the coverage by the media of this war: Hamas statements are treated with more respect than Israeli statements. This is even though Hamas statements are written anonymously and spoken by a man with a mask. While no one can point to a single official IDF statement that was found to be a lie, and numerous Hamas statements (including those from the Gaza health ministry) have been shown to be literally impossible, the media still treats Hamas statements with respect and doesn't trust the Israeli statements, adding caveats like "CNN was not able to independently verify the IDF's statement" - which they do not say about Hamas or Hezbollah claims.

Treating Jews as untrustworthy is an old antisemitic trope, and it is one that we see every day.

The secondary effects of this are huge. Because Israel is not believed when it says it was targeting Hamas or Hezbollah terrorists hiding among civilians who are killed, and terror groups routinely deny what we have seen lots of videos proving, then the media treating Israeli spokespeople as liars opens up the door to bogus charges of "genocide." Genocide requires intent, and there is absolutely zero evidence that Israel intends to destroy all the Palestinians in Gaza - but because the media doesn't trust Jews, it doesn't fact-check the lies of the antisemites. Because deep down they agree that the Jews must be up to something, and the Palestinian "people of color" must be assumed to be innocent.

Israel cannot outsource its security.

Israel cannot rely on anyone else for security.

UNIFIL proved once again to be an utterly useless group that had one job - keeping the peace in Lebanon- and it failed. The UN itself remained a cesspool of antisemitic hate.

The UK turned from somewhat of an ally to an enemy in one day. France just proved it is as interested in surrendering to Islamist terrorists as they ever were.

The US claims to be Israel's friend but it kept hamstringing Israel, and its humanitarian pier was merely a transparent attempt to stop Israel from doing what needs to be done in Gaza. Its support for Israel comes with a catch and its aid to Israel is often in the form of handcuffs.

Israel must make its own decisions about its own security. Every part of its military, from mortar rounds to bunker buster bombs to advanced aircraft, must be produced domestically or else it is at the mercy of those who might not agree with Israel's decisions. It finally started moving in that direction, but it will take many years.

And it also needs a lot of help from Heaven.

Iran is pulling the strings.

It may be possible that Sinwar chose to attack without coordinating with Iran and Hezbollah. From what we have learned, October 7 could have been much worse had Hezbollah decided to join in with similar attacks it had planned for the north of Israel.

In the end, though, Iran is the party that provides money, weapons, guidance, advice, training and strategy. Israel is not at war with Saudi Arabia or Jordan or Egypt - it is only fighting forces that are allied with Iran. Iran must be the target of not just a symbolic strike but a knockout blow, military and economic, because without Iran, the other attackers would run out of resources within months.

Iran has been terrorizing the entire Middle East for decades. It has relied on its proxy strategy to avoid risk to itself. It is way past time to call its bluff and turn the tide of its heretofore inexorable increase in strength across the region. The West needs to wake up and choose the side that is trying to save the world singlehandedly.

Israel has been waging a brilliant, moral and just war, and it needs to do much more.

While the antisemites claim Israel is deliberately attacking civilians and ignorant people of the world assume Israel is at the very least uncaring towards the people on the other side, military experts are astonished at how Israel has raised the bar to avoid civilian harm while not compromising on its military goals. Its tactics against a foe entrenched in hundreds of miles of tunnels underneath civilian structures, and who choose to do military actions from within the people it pretends to care about, will be studied for years.

Israel had to make up these tactics on the fly. One of the most impressive parts about it was how quickly the IDF learns lessons and incorporates them into their war plans within days or hours. While other militaries still have separation between their air forces, navy, ground troops, artillery, spycraft and intelligence, Israel has integrated them in ways unheard of by even the most professional Western armies.

The most difficult part has been the hostages. Israel must rescue those they can, but the only deals that are acceptable to release them are those that will still allow Israel to crush Hamas. Allowing Hamas to re-group and to control Gaza again is simply not acceptable, and the world must learn that it will never happen.

The intelligence piece is most impressive. The IDF captures enemies and within a very short period of time the intelligence they provide helps the IDF choose the next targets and the next intelligence trove. The percentage of civilians killed was pretty low even in the first months of the war compared to militants but it has steadily gone down over time.

International law does not require one to allow the enemy to win because they have created a strategy of human shields. Israel has every legal right to try to win even when thousands of innocents are killed - and the party responsible for that is the one that chose to hide behind the civilians to begin with.

The war is not just kinetic. It is cognitive. Israel maybe doing poorly in getting its points across to the Western world, but the Arab world sees what it is doing and they support Israel against Muslim Brotherhood offshoots and Iran.

Israel has made some mistakes, both before and since October 7, 2023. It is fighting a war the likes of which has never been seen before. But in the past month it has re-taken the initiative and the momentum from the terrorists. There is a long road ahead, but this is an existential fight.

It is a fight Israel didn't want but once it started, it is a war that Israel cannot afford to lose - or to delay.

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!

10/06 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.