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! |
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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! |
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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! |
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The Palestinian Authority must undertake reforms and demonstrate transparency and accountability to restore its credibility and the trust of the Palestinian people and international partners, in exchange for being recognized as the sole legitimate governing body of Gaza. This process will include the appointment of a new prime minister and the establishment of a Gaza committee through presidential decree.It also requires that the Israeli government make concessions, on the path to progress towards a two-state solution.The plan includes the deployment of a temporary international mission based on an official request from the Palestinian Authority, whereby the mission will be deployed to replace the Israeli military presence in Gaza, and will supervise the stability of the situation and the enforcement of the law in Gaza.The forces could include personnel from Arab countries, including military contractors, and the Palestinians would not have a direct role in security at first, the UAE document says.The Steering Committee of the Temporary International Mission will consist of the UAE, the United States and other regional countries, and will be tasked with ensuring progress, coordinating international funding, monitoring Palestinian Authority reforms and reconstruction efforts, and security developments.A special committee for Gaza will be formed, consisting of Palestinians, and will be responsible for the daily management of the Strip, the rehabilitation of the economy, social services, and government institutions, and will gradually build the Palestinian Authority's presence in Gaza.The staff and workers will include former government employees of the Palestinian Authority, as well as former government employees who served under Hamas rule, provided they are vetted by the Steering Committee members and Israel.The plan does not seek to conclude a new agreement with Israel, but it will ensure compliance with existing security and economic arrangements (such as the Paris Protocol), and Israeli security concerns will be addressed without the need for renegotiation, the Emirati document states.The document also states that the Palestinian Authority will bear responsibility for the reconstruction of Gaza, with financial support from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and other international donors.Efforts will focus on rebuilding infrastructure, restoring services, and re-establishing Palestinian Authority institutions.It will also aim to complete Palestinian reconciliation, by starting a dialogue between Fatah and Hamas to achieve a consensus that ensures Hamas' acceptance of the committee and the international mission.The document indicates a timetable for initial steps, including issuing a presidential decree to form a new Palestinian Authority government and establishing a Gaza committee.
Everyone has their own reasons for distrusting major media, so Gallup’s latest polling isn’t surprising. The new survey finds trust in media at a low point, tying the nadir it reached in 2016. And although modern media giants recoil at the suggestion that they have only themselves to blame, an honest rendering of history reveals that simple explanation to be the accurate one.The Weaponization of Medical Misinformation and the War in Gaza
Take, for example, an issue with as much resonance today as a century ago: conflict in the Middle East. Reading Yardena Schwartz’s superb, meticulous and hauntingly detailed account of the 1929 Hebron Massacre—Ghosts of a Holy War, which was published earlier this month—I was struck by some of its minor sections on the role of the media then and now. This isn’t the focus of the book, which knowledgeably traces the causes and legacy of the massacre that wiped out a millennia-old Jewish community in its place of birth and set the mold for the next hundred years of Arab-Israeli conflict. But it is a key part of the story.
And it is the part of the story that highlights a test that media companies passed in 1929 but continually fail today. Reversing those failures, as the book shows, is a matter of life and death for Jews around the world.
The Hebron Massacre, which set the stage for everything that followed it, was part of a Palestine-wide campaign of violent riots. The prime mover of these riots was deliberate incitement by Arab leaders, specifically the Al-Aqsa Blood Libel—the lie that Jews were going to seize the mosque compound built by imperial Muslim conquerors atop the site of the ancient Jewish temple as a demonstration of supremacy over the land’s original inhabitants.
Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the first Palestinian Arab nationalist leader (and later well-paid Nazi recruiter and envoy to the Muslim world), was Jerusalem’s grand mufti and had been chipping away at Jewish prayer rights at the Western Wall. Contradicting the city’s own official Islamic guides to the area, Hajj Amin began claiming that the Western Wall was a Muslim site, not a Jewish one. British suppression of Jewish prayer services gave the mufti the opening he needed to widen the propaganda war and mobilize a pogrom. The mostly Arab police force either stood by or joined the slaughter.
The gruesome scenes, as Schwartz notes, would be echoed on Oct. 7, 2023, the next time the Jews in their homeland would be subject to that level of barbarity on such a scale.
The British response to Hebron was to further empower Hajj Amin and the Arabs of the Mandate while arresting Jewish self-defense volunteers and restricting Jewish immigration. Thus rewarded, Hajj Amin’s Palestinian nationalists had established a blueprint they would return to time and again, and the contours of the conflict were set.
In the images from the New York Times story, a bullet appears to rest within the skull and neck of a child. The damage inflicted by any bullet is dependent on the mass and the speed of the bullet. As a rule, the higher the kinetic energy, the higher the wounding capacity and lethality. Any Increase in mass and velocity of the bullet will result in a higher kinetic energy. However, for practical purposes, there is always a limit on how high the mass and the speed can be for any weapon to remain portable.Christine Rosen: Mao-Maoing the News Anchors
The IDF uses the 5.56 x 45 mm NATO cartridge. The bullet fired from this cartridge is very light and designed to inflict damage by fragmentation within the tissue (terminal ballistics). To attain this, this light bullet must strike the target at a very high velocity. The bullet has different variants, each designed to fulfill an intended purpose (antipersonnel, barrier penetration, tracer, etc.).
The muzzle velocity of the 5.56 mm round, when fired from the standard rifles used by the IDF, like the American-made M4 or Israeli-made IWI X95 (Tavor), depending on the barrel length and the variant of bullet, is between 2,900 and 3,100 f/sec. The capability of the bullet to fragment decreases significantly when the bullet speed decreases below 2,500 ft/sec, which is approximately 150 and 200 yards of travel in the air. However, a bullet traveling at that speed is very likely to still pass through an adult human torso and not get lodged within the tissue.
The bullets in the radiograph showed minimal to no deformation and were lodged in the soft tissue. This would suggest they were likely fired from a long distance, possibly at least 500 yards. However, beyond 300 yards, the accuracy of such a light bullet, like the 5.56 mm, is seriously compromised and can be affected even by minimal wind. While it is true that accurate shots with 5.56 x 45 mm bullets are still possible at long distances, this requires a very steady platform and exact calculations of distance to target and wind speed and direction. These conditions are far from those encountered in a war scenario, where rapid target acquisition while avoiding being shot at tends to be the norm.
Although it is technically possible to shoot a small target the size of a child’s head at a distance for the bullet to remain lodged within the soft tissues, to do this consistently, as the authors suggest, is extremely unlikely, if not impossible particularly when considering multiple other variables, like the fact that a child is doubtful to remain stationary, wind conditions in an urban environment, and the expectation of incoming fire.
If one assumes by an extraordinary circumstance that a fired bullet should lodge within the head of a child, it cannot be known with certainty who fired that bullet and why. The IDF uses the standard NATO rifle that shoots a 5.56-round. Hamas favors an AK rifle, but some variants also fire a 5.56 bullet. Also, on occasion, Hamas has been able to obtain NATO-style weapons. So-called celebratory gunfire is the shooting of a bullet directly into the air in celebration. Such practices are known to occur in parts of the Middle East. In the US, celebratory gunfire is generally illegal because it can be associated with severe injuries, including head injuries from falling bullets.
For the healthcare worker in Gaza, politics are prevalent. Israel has just barred six medical NGOs from operating in Gaza. One of these groups, the Palestinian American Medical Association, had members in the New York Times report. No one disputes that children are being injured and killed in Gaza. Still, healthcare workers ceased to be effective advocates for health and safety when they speculated or lied about the nature of injuries they claimed to encounter. Medical accounts of injuries and deaths in an active war zone are critically valuable in making sense of the risks to the civilian population in the battle space. Medical personnel risk acting as purveyors of disinformation when departing from impartial accounting.
One cannot imagine the shooting of innocent children is in the strategic interest of the IDF. Further, the ballistic facts make such targeting impossible. The medical profession must be unbiased. The banning of medical NGOs might be the final straw after a series of pernicious NGO-generated propaganda. In this war, the patients are the losers. The media, with a publish now, retract later approach, has created confusion in the desperate pursuit of a story. Now, more than ever, a calm and impartial appraisal on the part of healthcare and the media is desperately needed. When the war ends, as it indeed will, an accounting of the facts by combatants, including Hamas and its enablers, will seek to identify any crimes committed, and punishment will follow crime accordingly.
The CBS meltdown is notable for a few reasons. First, we learned that CBS News personnel (with the rare exception of legal correspondent Jan Crawford, who defended Dokoupil’s tough questioning) are more conversant in the language of diversity, equity, and inclusion, as well as the popular mental-health tropes of trauma and phobia, than they are in the common standards of professional journalism.
Second, despite some small signs of sanity in recent years, mainstream media clearly have not yet retreated from “peak woke” madness. It was new but unsurprising information that CBS News employs a Race and Culture Unit, distinct from the network’s traditional Standards and Practices division, with a mission as Orwellian as its name. The unit, created in the wake of protests over the killing of George Floyd four years ago, boasts that it has a “four-pronged role at CBS News and stations as a reviewer, an incubator, a producer and a library.”
Its “primary role” is the one it exercised in the Dokoupil–Coates fracas, and that was to “review”—which sounds innocuous but is in fact anything but. The unit functions “in concert with the CBS News Standards and Ethics department to ensure all stories have the proper context, tone and intention.” This includes working “with CBS News network shows, the streaming network and stations by reviewing scripts and screeners as well as providing input in the ideation stage of story ideas.”
The Race and Culture Unit is itself part of a broader “Content for Change” program sponsored by CBS News’s corporate parent, Paramount Global. That program is described as “a global companywide, cross-brand initiative that seeks to use the power of the company’s content creation ecosystem to break down the narratives that enable intolerance, hurtful stereotypes, and systemic racism to exist and grow.”
If the Dokoupil incident is any guide, while CBS News is intent on preventing “systemic racism” from gaining purchase, it has no problem seeing journalistic standards wither. Amid the Dokoupil meltdown, Vice President Kamala Harris sat down for an interview with 60 Minutes. A short social-media clip of the interview featured an answer by Harris to a question about Israel and Gaza. But when the full interview aired, a different answer by Harris was used—prompting questions about whether CBS had edited her remarks to make her response better. According to CBS’s own standards, “Answers to different questions may not be combined to give the impression of one continuous response.”
And yet, that appears to be what CBS has done—and it’s doubtful any of its staffers objected. The once-hallowed network is no longer known for its reporting but for its falsehoods, staff tantrums, selective editing, story suppression, tone-policing, and tape-splicing.
The chief of Paramount Global, Shari Redstone, clearly is not with her own company’s program. She told reporters that Dokoupil “did a great job with that interview” and provided “a role model of what civil discourse is,” adding, “I was very proud of the work that he did.”
She could make changes at CBS News that reflect her views by disbanding the Race and Culture Unit and punishing the chiefs of the division for their surrender to the Maoist DEI regime that was determined to punish Dokoupil…but she just sold the place.
As for Coates, he told a podcast host that he might well have participated in October 7 himself had he been a resident of Gaza. So who’s to say he might not have murdered Jews and raped Jews and kidnapped Jews and burned Jews alive by the thousands?
That would seem to warrant a follow-up question, no?
Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis—the main terrorist organizations at war with Israel—mimic states. They do so even though they govern on behalf of a foreign power: Iran. South Lebanon (many would argue the whole of Lebanon) isn’t a territory dealing with an insurgency; it is Hezbollahland. There is no insurgency. The government has too much control over the population to allow one to develop.Seth Mandel: Hamas Chief’s Death Was Hezbollah’s Nightmare
The Houthis control part of Yemen, including the capital Sanaa, in similar fashion. Before the current war, Hamas was the only game in Gaza. These aren’t resistance groups, they are the groups against whom a citizen would resist.
Terrorists sow terror through violence against innocents. But what if you could inject the same chaos by targeting the terrorists—a legal, ethical, and moral inversion of the evil and criminal methods of the terrorists themselves?
That’s what Israel appears to be doing. Iran has overextended itself, and Hezbollah has gotten too big for its britches. You can’t play at this level, Israel seems to be saying to the terrorist army occupying Lebanon. Hezbollah has made itself vulnerable to the weaknesses it has for so long exploited in others.
Suddenly, the citizenry is suspicious of the totalitarian thugs in charge. Don’t get too close to a Hezbollah soldier, his pager could explode at any moment. Stop believing that you’d starve without Hezbollah; those cash vaults underneath the hospital suggest they’ll starve without you. Remember that “generous” loan that you got from Al-Qard Al-Hassan, the “credit bank?” That place is where Hezbollah can use you to unknowingly wash its money for it—money that, if Hezbollah weren’t here siphoning Lebanese resources, might have been yours to begin with.
Meanwhile, that same suspicion can curtail Hezbollah’s recruitment. A lot of people may be having second thoughts about showing up to the job fair where they hand out the pagers. Or you might wonder: Am I talking to a Hezbollah commander or a Mossad agent dressed up like one for Purim?
Until now, Iran’s terror proxies have had all the advantages of actual nation-states with none of the limitations. They’ve essentially hacked the international system. Gaza’s borders are treated as Hamas’s sovereign territory, yet providing for the people within those borders is somehow Israel’s responsibility. Hezbollah gets a controlling stake in everything Lebanon does, but Israeli counterattacks on Hezbollah bases in Hezbollah territory are “collective punishment.”
Israel seems to have found a way to work within that biased system and use it against Hezbollah and Hamas. Hopefully we’ll see plenty more of this, and not just from Israel. Welcome to the NFL, martyrs.
To many, the fact that Sinwar was the obstacle to a hostage deal was obvious, especially near the end. But it was contested by politicians and the media around the world, including in Israel, vociferously. Either way, we certainly know now: Pursuing Sinwar and the destruction of Hamas was Israel’s best strategy to attain all of its main war goals.West's Political Elites Mourn the Death of a Terrorist Group
That fact may not change much on the ground, but it will alter the perception of the Israeli government and military as aimless or scattershot or making decisions based on electoral politics instead of prosecuting the war in the most effective way possible. That buys Israel some breathing room diplomatically, because, to put a fine point on it, a lot of people were wrong about what Israel was up to and that makes it easier for Israel to go on the offensive diplomatically, not just militarily.
Which means anyone seeking a ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah now must reckon with this clarity. Israel has the upper hand in all ways at the moment, and it will press that advantage. Here’s what that looks like, via Axios:
“One Israeli demand is that the IDF be allowed to engage in ‘active enforcement’ to make sure Hezbollah doesn’t rearm and rebuild its military infrastructure in the areas of southern Lebanon that are close to the border, an Israeli official said.
“The official added that Israel also demands its air force have freedom of operation in Lebanese air space.”
That second one is especially important. But, as Axios notes, both the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon and the Lebanese Armed Forces are likely to object.
Unfortunately for the UN, Israel is in a position to be making demands. Terror groups depend on the ability to regroup and rearm while relying on the international community to hold Israel to notions of sovereignty that the terrorists themselves won’t respect. Which means a ceasefire isn’t really a ceasefire, and it certainly won’t bring peace. If anything, it’ll guarantee more war.
Unless, that is, Israel is given the latitude to do what the UN is mandated to do but refuses: keep Hezbollah from regrowing its limbs between rounds. That would further the cause of peace not just in Israel but in Lebanon as well.
As long as Hamas is operationally headless, Israel can turn more attention to Hezbollah without losing ground in Gaza. Iran’s entire strategy for its proxies is to avoid a fair fight and force Israel to fend off multiple enemies on multiple fronts. A Sinwar-less Gaza, therefore, is Hezbollah’s nightmare. The pressure will be on Iran and its proxies to strike a deal before Israel can deliver a similar knockout punch to Hezbollah. The West should be in no rush to make this any easier for Tehran.
[T]he West's political "elites" condemned Israel for defending itself by targeting Hezbollah's leadership.
There was no mention of international law for Hezbollah's unprovoked, year-long attacks: bombardments of missiles and attack drones every day at a country smaller than New Jersey.
EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell lamented Israel's continued successful attempts at destroying one of Iran's proxy armies.
When Israel took out Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, one of the world's most dangerous arch-terrorists, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres could barely hold back his disappointment, counterfactually calling Hezbollah's unprovoked war against Israel and the IDF's response a "cycle of violence."
Only Argentina's President Javier Milei displayed a reaction fitting the removal of a terrorist mass murderer...
Israel, as has been noted, is doing the entire world an enormous service by taking out Hezbollah.
Iran, just since October 2023, through its militias in Syria and Iraq, has launched more than 160 attacks on the US forces in the Middle East.
[W]hen Israel killed Ibrahim Aqil, the mastermind of the 1983 attacks and a member of Hezbollah's Jihad Council, its highest military body, the US could not even bring itself to thank its ally.
The world's political elites apparently cannot forgive Israel for seeking to defend itself, and rid the world of terrorists working to destroy both America and Western civilization. Could these elites, wittingly or not, be working towards the same result?
1729 Psalms, translated into Latin by Dominican friar Santes Pagnino (1470–1536) |
I will lift up mine eyes unto the mountains: From whence shall my help come? My help cometh from the LORD, Who made heaven and earth. ...The LORD shall keep thee from all evil; He shall keep thy soul. . The LORD shall guard thy going out and thy coming in, From this time forth and for ever.O God, if You keep [a record of] iniquities, O Lord, who will stand? ...Israel, hope to the Lord, for kindness is with the Lord and much redemption is with Him. And He will redeem Israel from all their iniquities.
O God, heathens have entered Your domain, defiled Your holy temple, and turned Jerusalem into ruins.They have left Your servants’ corpses as food for the fowl of heaven, and the flesh of Your faithful for the wild beasts....We have become the butt of our neighbors, the scorn and derision of those around us....Pour out Your fury on the nations that do not know You, upon the kingdoms that do not invoke Your name, for they have devoured Jacob and desolated his home....Let the nations not say, “Where is their God?” Before our eyes let it be known among the nationsthat You avenge the spilled blood of Your servants.Let the groans of the prisoners reach You; reprieve those condemned to death, as befits Your great strength.Pay back our neighbors sevenfold for the abuse they have flung at You, O Lord.Then we, Your people, the flock You shepherd, shall glorify You forever; for all time we shall tell Your praises.For Your enemies rage, Your foes assert themselves. They plot craftily against Your people,take counsel against Your treasured ones. They say, “Let us wipe them out as a nation; Israel’s name will be mentioned no more.” Unanimous in their counsel they have made an alliance against You— the clans of Edom and the Ishmaelites, Moab and the Hagrites, Gebal, Ammon, and Amalek, Philistia with the inhabitants of Tyre; Assyria too joins forces with them; they give support to the sons of Lot.Deal with them as You did with Midian, with Sisera, with Jabin, at the brook Kishon— who were destroyed at En-dor, who became dung for the field....As a fire burns a forest, as flames scorch the hills, pursue them with Your tempest, terrify them with Your storm. ...May they be frustrated and terrified, disgraced and doomed forever. May they know that Your name, Yours alone, is the LORD, supreme over all the earth.
Israel is clearly stating the following to the entire world: “I kill whom I wish, I destroy and burn where I wish, I attack whom I wish, I kill all together, but no one should oppose me, everyone should agree to my killing! Because I am the superior race, non-Jews are my slaves and servants. My holy book, the Talmud, gives this authority.”So, the final point of satanic racism is Judaism, which is tied to the Talmud and carries its ideas. This deserves the wrath and curse of Allah.
In the 54th section of the Talmud Baba Bathra; "The property of a non-Jew is like the unowned land under your feet in the desert, whoever takes it first gets it."Again, from the sections Hoshem Hamishpat, Yoreh Deah, Sultan Arah of the Talmud;shedding the blood of non-Jews is offering a sacrifice to Jehovah.All sins committed for the purpose and purpose of Judaism are permissible, provided that they are secret.Only Jews are viewed as human beings. Non-Jews are animals.
A Sydney conference stacked with Hizb ut-Tahrir activists and sheiks who celebrated October 7 has heard that Islam will “dominate … bringing justice to every corner of the world” amid a “civilisational struggle” as its organisers lauded Yahya Sinwar as a slain hero.One speaker, Sheik Ibrahim Dadoun – whose employer the United Muslims of Australia received about $1.65m in government funding in September – said that, despite Sinwar’s recent death, he remained “elated” and that “victory was coming”.The day after Hamas’ October 7 attacks [Dadoun] told a rally that he was “elated … smiling” and that it had been a “day of courage”, although later claimed his words were taken out of context, and earlier this month called Israel a “bastard state”.Billed as the “promised victory” conference, sheik Dadoun reaffirmed his elation, saying: “I will say it again I’m elated, I’m happy … I’ve never seen it, ever in my life, the shift and the tide that has occurred over the last year against the Zionist regime (sic)”.“We are on that path to victory. We are on that path of the civilisational struggle where we’re going to see Islam dominate, where we’re going to see Islam bring justice to every corner in the world (sic).”
Funding to support Australian Palestinian communitiesThe Albanese Government is continuing to focus on social cohesion here in Australia, with funding granted to support young Muslim and Palestinian Australians and their family, friends and community impacted by the conflict and humanitarian crisis in Gaza.The Government will provide new grants totalling $2.4 million to community services that support youth through culturally-informed youth services and pathways to positive community participation. Empowering young Australian Muslims locally is critical to building connections and tackling division, prejudice and hate.The following community based organisations supporting young Muslim Australians are being invited to apply for these grants:Himilo LtdUMA CentreAustralian Multicultural Foundation
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! |
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After several decades of a successful legal career, David Friedman became the U.S. ambassador to Israel in 2017 under then-President Donald Trump and orchestrated major diplomatic advances, including moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, recognizing Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights and helping to broker the 2020 Abraham Accords. In his new book, One Jewish State, Friedman presents ongoing challenges and obstacles, which has already inspired a new party vying for seats in the upcoming World Zionist Congress elections aptly named One Jewish State.How a year of hatred sparked a Jewish renaissance
Friedman challenges “the most widely accepted but fatally flawed concept in Middle Eastern diplomacy: the two-state solution.” Though the two-state appeal from a certain perspective is clear, the case against it, from the pro-Israel perspective, is compelling. The Palestinians just don’t want it. They never have. The Palestinian leadership and most Palestinians do not accept the existence of a Jewish state in any borders. Any state given to them will only advance their agenda of destroying the Jewish state. If that wasn’t clear before the massacre in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, it is indisputably clear now. Israel gifted them Gaza, and Hamas used it to produce mass murder. That is what they did with their proto-“state” and what they say they will do with any future state.
For anyone who supports Israel and the right of Jews to live in this region in safety, a Palestinian state should be a non-starter.
So, what’s left if we jettison the two-state solution? Basically “one state.”
One Palestinian state “from the river to the sea” is obviously off the table for the pro-Israel side. Friedman does not consider a “binational state,” but one can speculate why: That is not a Jewish state, and his starting point is that there must be a Jewish state. That leaves, then, the “one Jewish state.” The basic idea is that Israel must exert its sovereignty over Judea and Samaria. (Gaza is a separate and difficult case, as Friedman acknowledges in a chapter devoted to it, which we shall not treat here.)
In addition to the main negative argument above, there are positive arguments for the idea. These boil down to this: Only under Israeli sovereignty will Palestinians be able to lead full lives of dignity and prosperity, ultimately producing a peaceful outcome for all. Israel is a vibrant democracy “with a track record of respecting the civil, religious and human rights of its minority population, almost all of which is Arab.” Most Arab-Israeli citizens “patriotically support living in their country,” where their standard of living, opportunities and prosperity are orders of magnitude greater than that of their Arab neighbors in surrounding countries, including in the territories administered by Palestinians themselves. The idea is to extend the same situation—i.e., Israeli sovereignty, to the Palestinian Arabs in Judea and Samaria.
With one essential difference. Israeli Arabs are full citizens of Israel with equal rights. Palestinians in Judea and Samaria cannot be. A secure Jewish state cannot swap the security risk posed by Palestinians in Judea and Samaria for the demographic risk of making them full citizens. They may become “residents” of Israel but cannot become full citizens.
Here we reach the point at which critics will explode, “Apartheid!”
Friedman addresses this through a deep dive into the case of Puerto Rico, which he sees as a possible model for the “One Jewish State.” Roughly, Puerto Ricans stand to the United States as Palestinians in Judea and Samaria might stand to Israel. The United States has sovereignty while Puerto Ricans have extensive rights of self-government but not collective national rights to vote in U.S. elections. Why does it work? Because Puerto Ricans live better than they would if they were entirely independent. They derive political, economic and civil benefits, and enjoy all the same basic civil rights as any U.S. citizen but pay less in federal taxes in exchange for not being full citizens. With Israeli sovereignty, Palestinians would have the civil rights guaranteed by Israel’s Basic Law on Human Dignity without the collective right to self-determination; they would pay less Israeli taxes; and they would not vote in national elections.
Friedman also asks which is a better option for Palestinians: Creating a Palestinian state that is likely both to fail by every metric and be overrun by terrorists and thus reproducing Gaza or absorbing those living in Judea and Samaria under Israeli sovereignty and providing them resident status?
When it came to attending the March Against Antisemitism in November, Rollinson was initially “nervous. I had an intrinsic fear that something would happen, but having felt isolated at times, I wanted to be around people who understood. It was an amazing feeling.” Since October 7, she has also started wearing a Star of David around her neck for the first time.Seth Mandel: How Terrorist Cutouts Colonize the Campus
Here, Rollinson is in good company. Actress Felicity Kendall has worn hers every day too. She recently explained that soon after the massacre she was walking through a London park when a Jewish woman approached her and thanked her for wearing a Star of David around her neck. “I was quite taken aback. Would people say anything like that to someone wearing a cross or a turban? It made me think, right, I am wearing this all the time now, and I do,” she said in a July interview. She also attends synagogue weekly. A year on, she tells the Telegraph: “It gives me peace and a routine of meditative thinking.’’
Across the UK, Jews are seeking solace – and not just in their social lives. Anti-Semitism in the workplace has emerged as a new issue over the past year. Dave Rich is head of policy at the Community Security Trust, which protects British Jews from anti-Semitism and related threats. “Lots of workplaces and employment sectors now have new Jewish WhatsApp networks that emerged after October 7. Jewish employees need a space to discuss everything that has been happening,” he says.
Ruth* recently set up a group in her company. “Immediately after October 7, I felt really uneasy about going into the office,” she says. “Everybody there knows I’m Jewish and a Zionist, so I felt very self-conscious.” Her colleagues were going on pro-Palestinian marches and although they never said it outright, she felt there was a feeling amongst them that the Hamas attacks were somehow justified, which she found deeply offensive. “My boss was very understanding, but said there wasn’t anything she could do, and that I could work from home when and if I needed to.”
But Ruth didn’t want to shy away. In the end, she and a colleague set up a dedicated Jewish network. “It gives us a feeling of solidarity, despite the pervading unfriendly atmosphere amongst some of my colleagues,” she says.
So affected was former bookshop-owner Joanna De Guia by the relationship with colleagues in her industry, that she changed careers entirely. “I was hurt and angry by the silence of my friends who worked in publishing,” she says. “After October 7, I waited for my “allies” – such as those in the gay community – to jump in and support me. I have hundreds of people in my social circle, but barely 10 contacted me. So I either left my comfortable spaces, or felt pushed out.”
Rewind to September last year and De Guia, a married mother of one, lived a similar way to many Jews in Britain. “I was Left-leaning and barely celebrated the Jewish festivals,” she says. Nor – like many Jews in this country – did de Guia think very much about Israel. “I’d been for a couple of beach holidays in my late teens,” she says. “But I didn’t feel particularly politically aligned with the country.” October 7 changed that.
De Guia eventually sold her business and now works full-time at the London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism, combating anti-Semitism on university campuses. “Our goal is to change the weather in British universities,” she says. Universities in particular have been a difficult arena for young Jews, with pro-Gaza encampments hollering against “genocide”, and demanding their administrations cut ties with Zionists. In the meantime students have found comfort in university Jewish societies. President of the Union of Jewish Students Sami Berkoff explains: “Students have needed somewhere to join with other Jewish students and just be. Jewish students have as much of a right as any other to have the full student experience.”
Rabbi Naftali Schiff, the founder and executive director of Jewish Futures, a family of 10 educational and social organisations dedicated to engaging young Jewish people in a positive way, has also found that engagement has been unprecedented. “Over the past year, we’ve arranged dozens of Friday night meals for students on campuses across the country and events for young professionals,” he says.
“Like many people, I was shocked at the level of vitriolic hate that punctuated some elements of the demonstrations in the streets and on the campuses after October 7,” he says. “Let’s just say it’s been a trip down the memory lane of anti-Semitism. Young Jews have felt targeted, experiencing disconcerting levels of concern, especially on campuses. For the first time in my own life, when waiting at an airport with my beard and a yarmulke [skullcap], I found myself looking over my shoulder with a genuine sense of anxiety.”
However, Rabbi Schiff strongly feels that “the UK is a wonderful place to live as Jews. It’s easy to look at the darkness, however the authorities by and large have been very sympathetic to our concerns and I am confident we shall turn this corner.’’
Since October he has kept two treasured items in his pocket: “A cigarette case, which my grandfather received when demobbed from national service in the First World War, and my father’s dog tags from the Second World War.” Both are symbols of his British pride. Rabbi Schiff adds: “It’s a reminder that we are privileged to live in a liberal democracy and a reminder to be appreciative that in Britain we can live freely as Jewish people, contributing to society as we go. I feel grateful to live in a country like Britain.”
In other words, all the relevant information about Samidoun was known. That’s why, in fact, Columbia suspended four students associated with the “Resistance 101” event on campus and evicted them from university housing facilities. (They had been warned in advance multiple times not to host the event.)
Samidoun, then, is part of a much larger problem. These types of organizations, whether officially designated as terrorist entities or not, have the same aims and the same general practices and certainly the same worldview—and get cash from the same sources and through the same progressive dark-money-donor clearinghouses. Samidoun itself will get taken off the donee list now (one hopes), but it will be replaced by an identical organization. There’s a whack-a-mole element to the pro-Palestinian cutouts in the West, and it enables groups like the PFLP to stay one step ahead of the very governments that have already banned them but can’t seem to stop them from raising money.
For legal purposes, of course, the terrorism designation means everything. But from the standpoint of basic societal decency, the designation changes nothing. The progressive protest movement and America’s elite universities are full of well-funded extremist groups going on recruiting sprees.
In May, the Wall Street Journal reported that the “wave of pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses came on suddenly and shocked people across the nation. But the political tactics underlying some of the demonstrations were the result of months of training, planning and encouragement by longtime activists and left-wing groups.”
Samidoun was but one of those groups—albeit one unconcerned with subtlety. “There is nothing wrong with being a member of Hamas, being a leader of Hamas, being a fighter in Hamas,” Kates said. “These are the people that are on the front lines defending Palestine.” She added that America’s university students and activists must “build an international popular cradle of the resistance.”
Among the other groups helping plan and train the future resistors of America were the national Students for Justice in Palestine, whose individual chapters have been among the most brazenly anti-Semitic and pro-violence participants in the tentifada.
At UCLA’s pro-Hamas encampment, members of Faculty for Justice in Palestine “had organized self-defense teams on the front lines.” One of the affiliated professors compared the current generation of goonish anti-Zionist trainees favorably to his own: “We had a lot of affect and feeling. But there’s a different kind of rigor to these students that is really striking.”
The triumph of terrorist front groups in recruiting and training and fund-raising is a success story to some and a cautionary tale to others. American institutions are increasingly treating it as the former.
After months of watching Israel struggle to gain the upper hand, supporters of the Jewish state became euphoric, heartened by Israel’s stunning achievements. But this is not a time to celebrate. Wars are not linear. Isolated victories in battle do not lead inexorably to winning in a wider war.Col. Kemp: Harris doesn’t know how to defeat Hamas. Israel should press the advantage
Israel remains small and vulnerable to attack. The Iranian regime still arms and directs proxies across the Middle East. Its “ring of fire” still surrounds Israel and continues to darken its skies with drones, missiles, and rockets.
Israeli ground forces are now fighting another tactical battle, this time in Lebanon, against a Hezbollah terrorist army that is better trained and equipped than perhaps any other foe they have encountered since the founding of the state. Terror attacks launched against Israel inside its borders and on the West Bank continue to be carried out by Iran’s Palestinian proxies. These battles will claim lives, erode morale, and sap the country’s resources. In other words, a brutal war continues.
Then again, Iran’s proxies are weakening. The soldiers of the IDF understand the stakes, and they are fighting accordingly. The Islamic Republic, meanwhile, lacks a competent air force, and it has not seen a war on its on soil since the Iran-Iraq War, which was fought from 1980 to 1988 and concluded only when that Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini chose to “drink from the poison chalice” and end a war he knew he could not win.
The Israelis, through capabilities and innovations developed with painstaking patience and mastery over decades in anticipation of this moment, now aim to neutralize the Iranian regime’s long war launched on October 7. Some in Israel merely seek to get Supreme Leader Ali Khameini to drink from Khomeini’s chalice. Others seek nothing less than the downfall of the Islamic Republic. Whatever surprises the Israelis have in store to achieve that ambitious end are unknowable to us. But one thing we do know: Israel has gotten its mojo back.
With Hamas’s hard-line leader out of the picture, is it now time for Israel to sue for peace? Both Joe Biden and Kamala Harris think so and have together fired the starting gun for what will no doubt be another round of intensive pressure on Israel to end the war.Brendan O'Neill: The tragedy of Palestine
In both cases their judgement so far in this war has not been unimpeachable. For example, Biden and Harris demanded that the IDF should not enter Rafah earlier this year and threatened “consequences” if it did. Prime Minister Netanyahu was having none of that and, in the face of domestic political and military opposition as well, ordered an offensive against Hamas inside Rafah. With minimal civilian casualties, that move destroyed the rump Hamas military formations in the city and severed the terrorist lifeline beneath the Egyptian border.
It also led directly to the death of Sinwar. Immediately after that both Biden and Harris tried to claim some of the credit for the terrorist leader’s elimination but the reality is that if they’d had their way Sinwar would still be alive today.
The priority for President and Vice President, though, is not victory for Israel in an existential war, but victory for Harris at the polls, which they calculate a supposed peace deal would help secure.
But now is certainly not the time for Israel to give even lip-service to the exhortations of the miscalculating Biden and Harris. As in the past their demands that Israel stop fighting rather than calling for Hamas’s surrender give hope and strength to the terrorists, and to their Iranian masters, and help prolong the bloodshed. Instead, with Hamas reeling, now is the time to intensify the fight and drive home the advantage.
Netanyahu’s policy of attrition against the terror armies while eliminating their leadership, whether in Gaza, Lebanon or Iran, is certainly working. What would not work in any of these places is the Western obsession with ceasefires, peace deals and de-escalation. Against jihadist enemies, all such appeasement of those dedicated to your annihilation can at best only store up the same threat for another day, or an even greater one. We only have to look at the nightmare of Afghanistan, now a haven for global terrorist gangs after Biden catastrophically ceded the country to the Taliban.
In any case, Hamas doesn’t seem to want to play ball with the Biden-Harris desire for a peace deal. In the wake of Sinwar’s death, senior terrorist Khalil al Hayya made clear that Hamas will not free the hostages until the IDF has completely withdrawn from Gaza and released Palestinian terrorists from custody. That was of course Sinwar’s position and it’s not clear why Biden and Harris should think whoever takes over from him will be any less hard-line. Optimism is not a strategy.
The category error of these garment-renders is to view Hamas as a ‘national liberation movement’. In truth, Hamas aspires not to ‘free Palestine’ but to subjugate it to the unforgiving dominion of Islamist diktat. Hamas’s aim is not the creation of a democratic, independent Palestine but the ruthless subsumption of all Palestinian territory – and Israel, of course – into the ideology of the Caliphate. By its own confession, Hamas longs to enforce not the rule of the Palestinian people but the rule of God. Until the ‘sovereignty of Islam’ is imposed ‘in this region’, it decrees, there will be ‘nothing but carnage, displacement and terror’. So it’s Islamism or death, bowing down to Allah or butchery – does that sound like liberation to you?
As I argue in my book, After the Pogrom, Hamas is ‘as far from an anti-colonial movement as it is possible to get’. Where past national liberation movements aspired, at least, to represent ‘the people’, Hamas conceives of itself as a narrow instrument of God. Where those old movements dreamed of creating a nation, Hamas dreams of subjecting a nation to God’s will – we will ‘raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine’, it promises (my italics). It wants to impose on Palestine the ‘sovereignty of Islam’ – the sovereignty of the edicts of Sharia with their blind intolerance of manmade law, women’s rights and democracy itself.
The current war is a direct consequence of the Islamist delusions of the hysterics of Hamas. In their eyes, Gaza is not a terrestrial plane that ought to enjoy self-governance – it’s another front in the cosmic showdown between the ‘sovereignty of Islam’ and the ‘Jews’ usurpation of Palestine’. And the people of Gaza are not individuals deserving of life and respect – they’re mere martyrs-in-the-making, fleshy fodder for Hamas’s fanatical war on the Jews. In the words of Article 8 of the Hamas Covenant, ‘death for the sake of Allah is the loftiest of [our] wishes’. Sinwar himself updated this deathly creed following the outbreak of war between Hamas and Israel when he said dead Gazans are ‘necessary sacrifices’ to get ‘the Israelis right where we want them’.
Hamas is not a liberation movement – it’s a death cult. This is the central difference between the old armies of national liberation and Hamas’s army of God: where the former believed their people had a right to live freely, the latter thinks their people should embrace death happily. Statehood is no longer the ‘loftiest’ of goals – death is. Gazans are promised not democracy, but martyrdom; not independence, but oblivion. In declaring a religious war on Israel, in slaughtering 1,200 Jews on 7 October, Hamas brought war to Gaza and reduced an aspiring nation to a theatre of holy warfare, and its people to bit-part players in the Hamas psychosis, underlings of fundamentalism, whose highest duty is to die.
Hamas is not alone in subjugating Palestine to its own lethal narcissism. Its Islamist hijacking of the Palestine issue is more than matched by the woke hijacking of it by the lost elites of the West. They, too, bend Palestine to their vain agendas. Palestine has become the omnicause of our cultural establishments. It’s the issue through which they express their self-absorbed angst with the West itself, with modernity, with this thing we call ‘civilisation’. On our campuses, in our streets, in the media world and art world, ‘Palestine’ has become a vessel for the fashionable anxieties of the privileged. Like Hamas, these ostentatious pitiers of the Palestinians turn Palestine from a real place with real people into an abstract moral landscape in which what really matters is my hang-ups, not their aspirations.
This is the fate of the Palestinians, then: physical fodder for the holy warmongering of Hamas and moral fodder for the virtue-signalling of the West’s elites. Playthings of both the Islamist theocracy and the cultural aristocracy. And thus do those who claim to be on the side of Palestinians dehumanise them far more than Israel does, turning them into a stage army for fundamentalism, whether of the Islamist variety or the woke variety. It is hard to see where the Palestinians go from here. The dream of a Palestinian state – or even a two-state solution – has been broken on the wheel of nihilism.
Palestinian Fatalities in Gaza 41,615Palestinians Missing/Estimated Dead Under the Rubble 10,000Estimated Deaths from Starvation: 62,413Estimated Deaths from Lack of Access to Care for Chronic Diseases: 5,000Estimated Deaths from Infectious Diseases, Maternal/Neonatal Deaths, and Others: ?
The fact that Palestinians in Gaza are so hungry that many have died, or that this is theresult of deliberate Israeli policy, is not in dispute. However, the scale of this starvation isnot widely appreciated.The IPC released reports on Gaza in January, March, and July 2024. Death from starvation of course takes time, and it is not clear how many people in Gaza have died from starvation and its complications or how many will die in the future. Still, according to the IPC technical manual: in the catastrophe phase of food insecurity the crude death rate rises to at least 2 deaths per 10,000 people per day, and in the emergency phase the crude death rate rises to 1-2 deaths per 10,000 people per day. The IPC data is summarized in the table below:
In total it is likely that 62,413 people have died of starvation and its compilations in Gaza from October 7, 2023 to September 30, 2024. Most of these will have been young children.
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We have every reason to oppose the ongoing Israeli offensive and even more to the prospect of a possible occupation of our territory by a foreign force. Israel is bombing Lebanon, erasing entire villages, and invading its lands, and this cannot in any case — regardless of what one thinks of Hezbollah — be tolerated, let alone approved.
However, for decades, we have tolerated and even ended up normalizing a totally absurd situation that grants a foreign country the right to decide on war or peace on our territory. Admittedly, we did not have the means to escape an Iranian grip imposed by force, but nothing obligated us to offer it institutional and popular cover. To say that the issue of Hezbollah could not be resolved at the Lebanese level is one thing; to accept this ‘fait accompli’ while waiting for the regional situation to evolve is another. The attacks, coups, and threats of civil war have contributed to making the unacceptable acceptable.But the fault does not lie only with Iran and Hezbollah, who at least deserve credit for having had a clear project and for having done everything to implement it. It falls on us, the Lebanese people, across all backgrounds, for having succumbed to fear, relativism and especially opportunism. This war may be that ‘of others,’ but we are indeed the primary responsible parties!The immediate priority is to silence the weapons. We have no leverage over Israel or the United States, and therefore our only chance to achieve this as Lebanese is to convince Hezbollah to accept its defeat. The likelihood that this will work is infinitesimal, but we at least have a duty to try.Only in a second phase, once a cease-fire is established, will we need to engage in a great dialogue to rethink the Lebanese formula with the aim of laying the foundations for a viable state. A state that protects and unites all communities and that can present itself as a credible alternative to the militia party. Because one of the outcomes of this national dialogue, if it ever takes place, must be the disarmament of Hezbollah and Lebanon's departure from the Iranian sphere of influence.
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