Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Friday, November 08, 2024

11/08 Links Pt1: Amsterdam shows how bad things are. But this time we have Israel; The Mossad warned of a threat in the Netherlands ahead of the pogrom

From Ian:

Amsterdam ‘Pogrom’: five in hospital, 62 arrested, police say

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated at about 4:30 a.m. local time that he was dispatching two rescue planes to Amsterdam following a “very violent incident against Israeli citizens.”

“The harsh pictures of the assault on our citizens in Amsterdam will not be overlooked,” Netanyahu’s office stated, adding that he “views the horrifying incident with utmost gravity and demands that the Dutch government and security forces take vigorous and swift action against the rioters, and ensure the safety of our citizens.”

Amsterdam police told JNS that “several reports about last night’s events in Amsterdam are circulating on social media.”

“The police have launched a major investigation into multiple violent incidents,” the department told JNS. “So far, it is known that five people have been taken to the hospital and 62 individuals have been arrested.”

“The police are aware of reports regarding a possible hostage situation and missing persons, but currently have no confirmation that this actually took place,” it added. “This aspect is also under investigation.”

The department added that there was to be a noon press conference at Amsterdam City Hall.

The Israeli Foreign Ministry initially said that there has not been contact with three Israelis in Amsterdam. It later said everyone was accounted for.

The Israeli National Security Council stated in Hebrew that Israelis in Amsterdam should remain in their hotel rooms and avoid the street, refrain from wearing visible Jewish or Israeli symbols and notify Dutch police and the Israeli mission about any threat or attack. The council also advised Israelis to return to home, with more planes expected.

Earlier in the day, Maccabi Tel Aviv lost 5-0 to Ajax Amsterdam in a Europa League game. Various reports indicated that Israeli fans were attacked—with some reports of injuries—after leaving the game.

King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands told Israeli President Isaac Herzog that “we failed the Jewish community of the Netherlands during World War II, and last night we failed again,” per an Israeli readout of the call.

Earlier in the day, Dutch Prime Minister Dick Schoof spoke with Herzog and Netanyahu. Schoof wrote that he was “horrified by the antisemitic attacks on Israeli citizens. This is completely unacceptable.”

“The perpetrators will be identified and prosecuted. The situation in Amsterdam is now calm once more,” he wrote.

Amsterdam shows how bad things are. But this time we have Israel

Waking up to the news that Israeli football fans were attacked last night on the streets of Amsterdam I felt sick. Properly, physically sick.

It’s strange, because I’m used to starting my day doom scrolling through Instagram, my feed filled with the latest updates on the plague of antisemitism that’s currently sweeping the globe. But this felt different. And it was.

People are calling it a pogrom. Does that feel extreme? I mean, BH there have been no confirmed deaths yet (although as I write, two Israelis are still unaccounted for). [UPDATE: Everyone has now been accounted for.] There were no rapes. Nothing seems to have been set on fire. I don’t want to give in to the hysteria and add to the distortion of terms such as this, so I’ve looked it up to try and make an informed decision. According to the Holocaust Encyclopaedia: “Pogrom is a Russian word meaning ‘to wreak havoc, to demolish violently’. Historically, the term refers to violent attacks by local non-Jewish populations on Jews in the Russian Empire and in other countries.” I guess I have to agree that, by that definition, it sounds about right. The Board of Deputies concurs. In a statement this morning they said: “Some have likened the situation there to a ‘pogrom’. On the basis of reports we have seen so far, it is hard to disagree.”

The echoes of our past are hard to face – for those of us who know it. Unfortunately, most of the gentile population don’t, so aren’t confronted by the uncanny vision of some of the worst moments of our history repeating in real time. The people and the chants may be different, but the streets and the violence are exactly the same.

One of the elements I’ve found most chilling has been the reports of how the Israeli fans were abandoned by the local authorities. One victim is quoted as saying: “We were all alone. I saw people on the floor, the police didn’t do anything to help us, police cars just drove by and saw it happening and did nothing.” Again, this is disturbingly reminiscent of pogroms’ past. Quoting the definition from the Holocaust Encyclopaedia again, it says: “The perpetrators of pogroms organised locally, sometimes with government and police encouragement.”

Offering an explanation for this, one social media news feed claims that “a large part of the police force in Amsterdam are 2nd-generation migrants from North Africa and the Middle East.” For those who’d like to believe this isn’t the source of the problem (wouldn’t we all), it shared a link to an article in the Jerusalem Post, written just last month, with the headline: Dutch police refuse to guard Jewish sites over 'moral dilemmas,' officers say. The article reports on statements made by Marcel de Weerd and Michel Theeboom, representing the Dutch Jewish Police Network, on anti-Jewish prejudice in the force. “There are colleagues who no longer want to protect Jewish targets or events. They talk about ‘moral dilemmas,’ and I see a tendency emerging to give in to that. That would truly mark the beginning of the end. I’m concerned about that,” Theeboom told Nieuw Israëlisch Weekblad.

The piece goes on: “The officers later spoke with De Telegraaf, where they said that some members of the police expressed they didn’t want to be deployed at the Dutch National Holocaust Museum in Amsterdam and refused food and drinks from the venue.” Once again, it seems to be a case of “same same, but different”. As with the pogroms of the 19th century, in Amsterdam in 2024 the people attacking Jews and the authorities who should be protecting them are cut from the same cloth.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali: The Pogrom in Amsterdam

I well remember when I was reliant on Dutch police protection to ensure that I did not suffer the same fate as my friend Theo van Gogh, who had been stabbed to death by a jihadist in the streets of Amsterdam. One day, one of the agents assigned to my security detail turned out to be of Turkish descent. I became uneasy when he began to criticize me for my work with van Gogh on “Submission,” a film about the treatment of women under Islam. When I expressed my concerns, I was told by his superior officer that it was not up to me who was given the task of protecting me. I was required to learn a new kind of submission—to the dictates of the DEI bureaucracy.

Today, a large part of the police force in Amsterdam is made up of second-generation migrants from North Africa and the Middle East. Since October 7 last year, some officers have already refused to guard Jewish locations such as the Holocaust Museum.

Women and gays in Amsterdam have also felt their world change and shrink. However, it is the Jewish community of Amsterdam who have had to learn to survive in this new environment.

Yesterday night’s pogrom was thus the opposite of a black swan. Such an event was foreseeable long ago. Twenty years ago, I watched as the Dutch authorities caved in to almost every Islamist demand. Muslim students disrupted or walked out of classes on the history of the Holocaust, so the classes were eliminated from their curriculum. Jews and gays were attacked and beaten in the streets of Amsterdam, so—after a series of platitudes about “unacceptable behavior”—the victims were told not to appear so gay or Jewish in future.

More recently, in one of those ironies that would require an Evelyn Waugh to do full justice, the Anne Frank House, a museum established to commemorate the Holocaust, was made to include Islamophobia as many of the hatreds it is now repurposed to combat.

No doubt Amsterdam today can boast the highest share of minorities employed in government and security agencies. But, as a consequence, those agencies cannot guarantee the safety of Jews.

The globalization of the Intifida is progressing rapidly when, in the year 2024, we are called to witness a pogrom in the city of Baruch Spinoza and Anne Frank.

Lebanon's L'Orient Today lists several Trump advisors who are of Lebanese origin - all of them Christian.

Massad Boulos is the billionaire father-in-law of Trump's daughter Tiffany. he has strong connections to Lebanese Christian leaders. He may replace Amos Hochstein as Trump's envoy to broker an agreement between Israel and Hezbollah. He is already scheduled to travel to Beirut.

Walid Phares was a member of Trump's foreign policy team during the presidential campaign in 2016, but did not work in his previous administration. He has been a terrorism and Middle East expert on Fox News since 2007 and on Newsmax since 2022. This week he highlighted the "strong bond between the United States and Israel."

Tom Barrack is a Lebanese American businessman. He argues that the Gaza war is “largely due to Hamas,” which, rather than “building the Singapore of the Middle East over the past 18 years,” has diverted “funds” to “terrorism and warfare aimed at eliminating Israel and killing Jews.”

Darell Issa was a Republican member of the House of Representatives from 2001 to 2019 and was reelected in 2021. Last July, he urged the U.S. Congress to continue supporting the Lebanese Army, emphasizing that it "remains committed to countering any attempts by outside forces — such as Hezbollah, Palestinians, Syrians or others — to exert control over the country."

They all sound like reasonable people.

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!

Irish textbook on religions says only Judaism supports violence

IMPACT-se recently reviewed textbooks from Ireland for anti-Jewish bias.

It found that in general they were good, but there were some problems.

They noted this table from Inspire - Wisdom of the World. Junior Cycle Religious Education. 7th–9th Class. by Michael Purcell & Ailís Travers, (2020), that compared how the five major religions looked upon peace and war.

While they framed Christianity and Islam as always striving for peace, Judaism is the only one that believes in violence and war for "justice."

For the other religions, war is considered a last resort only under extraordinary conditions; in Judaism it is normalized and Jewish teachings promoting peace are ignored.

In a separate section, the book takes pains to say that jihad means primarily "spiritual struggle" for most Muslims:

Compare to how it is defined in Arabic Wikipedia:

Jihad or Jihad in the way of Allah is an Islamic term that means all actions or words that are done to spread Islam, or to repel an enemy targeting Muslims, or to liberate a Muslim land , or to help a Muslim or Muslims in general....

Jihad has levels, some of which are obligatory for every accountable person, and some of which are a communal obligation ... Jihad against the self and jihad against Satan are obligatory for every accountable person, and jihad against the hypocrites , infidels , and the masters of injustice, innovations, and evils is an individual obligation . Jihad against the infidels by hand may be obligatory for every capable person in certain situations. Ibn al-Qayyim said : “ Jihad has four levels: Jihad against the self, jihad against Satan, jihad against the infidels, and jihad against the hypocrites . ”

The book is whitewashing what jihad means to most Muslims.

There are some other inaccuracies in the book not mentioned by IMPACT-se. It says that Jews perform pilgrimage to "the Wailing Wall" which is not the Jewish name for it; it refers to Jesus as living in "Palestine," it says that Jews only go to synagogue once a week, it describes the Ten Commandments in the Judaism section but uses the Christian system for numbering them. There is very little about how Judaism evolved since 70 CE.

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!

Polls that are commissioned by advocacy groups are always skewed. Sometimes subtly, sometimes grossly, but they can never be trusted without a deep dive into their methodology, the specific questions being asked and the wording of the questions.

I already wrote about how CAIR used an absurdly poor methodology to conclude that more American Muslims would vote for Jill Stein than Kamala Harris, something that exit polls showed was not close to true.

J-Street on Thursday issued results of their comprehensive survey of American Jews on how they voted, and found that Jews preferred Kamala Harris by a 71-26 margin, a 45 point margin. But the Fox News exit polls found a 66-32% split, a 34 point margin.

That's a huge difference. What accounts for it?

It comes down to methodology.

Fox News asked people after they voted, "What is your present religion, if any?" and reported on how many people said their religion was Jewish.

The J-Street survey asked the identical question in their survey of American Jews, yet only 76% of them answered "Jewish." The follow-up question for those who answered negatively: "Even though you do

not consider your religion to be Jewish, do you consider yourself Jewish?" and the answer was 100% "yes."

Fox News asked about religion; J-Street asked about what they call themselves.

A similar thing happened in 2020: J-Street found 77%-21% for Biden; news organization exit polls found 68%-30% among Jews. But their definitions of who is Jewish are vastly different.

Notice that J-Street didn't point out that even according to their own methodology, the gap between Jews voting Democrat and Republican this year narrowed by 11 percentage points.

The 26% of self-described Jews who do not consider their religion to be Judaism is an accurate number, according to Pew. But it shows how polls can be skewed by changing the definition of what a Jew is. And it has a huge impact on the answers to other questions as well.

For example, J-Street asked "Thinking about negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians to resolve their conflict, do you think the U.S. should act as a fair and even-handed broker between Israelis and Palestinians or do you think the U.S. should side with Israel?" They found 51% do not want the US to side with Israel. If you take away the 26% who do not consider their religion to be Jewish, the numbers would flip in the other direction.

Other polls have consistently found that the stronger the Jews identify with Judaism, the stronger they support Israel. Orthodox Jews overwhelmingly showed support for Trump while exit polls show that atheists were strongly pro-Harris.

The atheists are J-Street's target Jewish audience - people who are Jews in name only.

That is not the only problem with the J-Street survey. Like their previous ones, use loaded questions as well to get the responses they want. Any question that begins with "As you may know..." subtly instructs the person being surveyed with information that is highly selective and possibly wrong. Here's one:

When, in the past several years, have there been any negotiations on that level of detail? The last time Israel and Palestinians negotiated even indirectly together for a final peace agreement was over ten years ago, when the Palestinians rejected the US framework for a potential deal. The question does not mention that the negotiations "fell short" because Palestinians rejected even a John Kerry plan that went beyond what Israel offered. Wouldn't that affect the answers?

As always with J-Street, it offers highly selective "facts" to prompt an answer that they want.

Imagine if a question was prefaced this way:

As you may know, for over 80 years Palestinians have rejected every attempt to support a peaceful two state solution between themselves and a Jewish state, no matter what borders and terms were offered. Bill Clinton and John Kerry's plans for peace were rejected. Meanwhile, surveys show that Palestinians consistently and overwhelmingly support terror attacks against Jews in Israel and the Palestinians even even pay the terrorists salaries. Should Israel be pressured to give more concessions to them in order to create a Palestinian state that could very easily turn into an Iranian proxy like Lebanon and Yemen?

This all brings up a much bigger problem - news organizations blindly report polling data, even from the sketchiest sources, as if they are science. The many ways they can be manipulated are not considered. (I found an egregious example, where an anti-Israel organization that innocuously calls itself "Listen to Wisconsin" made it sound like voters in swing states consider support for Gaza to be a huge issue, when in fact their survey only included people who are already strongly anti-Israel.)

Commissioning polls is an easy way to issue press releases and get in a news cycle. Partisan organizations can manipulate even polls done by solid survey organizations by how they word the questions, how they choose the people being polled and even the order of the questions.

The bottom line is, don't trust a news report of a poll by an organization that has reason to manipulate it.

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!

11/07 Links Pt2: BHL on protesters: 'I believe they are fascists'; Irish Parliament Passes Motion Accusing Israel of ‘Genocide’ in Gaza; The Confused Kidnappers of Chaim Weizmann’s Statue

From Ian:

'I believe they are fascists': French intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy on the Canadian anti-Israel protests

An ad for Israel Alone in the trade publication Shelf Awareness was recently pulled, with editors saying that a pro-Israel book would upset their readers. You’ve taken up many controversial causes, you have faced protests, criticisms and in 2008 you were targeted for assassination by Islamist militants. In terms of opprobrium you’ve faced throughout your life, how does it compare to what faces a Western intellectual who unapologetically champions the cause of Israel?

You put it very well. I’ve seen this kind of incident so much in my life that this is not going to intimidate me. When you’ve spent nearly two years in the Ukrainian trenches, when you’ve filmed Bakhmut or Chasiv Yar under bombardment, when you’ve seen comrades fall just a few metres away, do you really think a miserable little guy like this is going to scare me?

The issue, however, lies with American authors. Especially, the younger authors. Because there is nevertheless an extraordinary climate at play here. Here is a country, two countries in fact — Canada and the United States — that were once homelands for persecuted Jews around the world. Here are two countries that were possible refuges for all threatened Jews worldwide. And now, in these countries, it’s the very name of Israel — and, soon, that of the Jews — that is becoming unpronounceable.

A double bind. The First Amendment: Absolute freedom of speech. Antisemitism: one of these so-called “free” expressions has deadly consequences. This is where we are at. This is the situation of Jews in North America. All communities on the continent have the right to protection. All have the right to guard against provocations. Except one — the Jewish minority.

You have long argued that failure to defeat Vladimir Putin in Ukraine would have dire ramifications for the rest of the democratic West. Do you see Israel’s war with Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran and others as similarly being a bulwark between the West and illiberalism?

Of course. It’s the same thing. There would never have been the Gaza War if there hadn’t been the war in Ukraine. What I mean is that Iran would never have taken the initiative to unleash the dogs of Hamas if it hadn’t observed our timid response to Putin unleashing his own dogs on Ukraine.

Similarly, if we abandon Israel, if we allow Hamas or Hezbollah to claim victory, if we give them even an inch of victory and credit, then I predict that the year will not end without China invading Taiwan.

There is an axis of authoritarian powers. These are the five revanchist countries, the “five kings,” which I described in my book The Empire and the Five Kings. They form an unlikely alliance, but an alliance nonetheless. They observe each other. They spy on each other. When one scores a point, the second takes over, and the third rushes in and asserts its imperial ambitions. In this very precise sense, we can say that Israel, like Ukraine, is fighting a battle of civilization. The battle for rights. For democracy. The anti-totalitarian and anti-imperialist battle of our time.

Eugene Kontorovich: Anti-Israel actions taken by the Biden Administration in the Wake of Oct. 7th Massacre

Here is a list, in no order, of some of concrete ways the Biden-Harris Administration has undermined Israel and encouraged the Iranian Axis, even in the months after Oct. 7th - and how the Trump Administration can swiftly rectify it. 1) Making BDS government policy by creating a sanctions program aimed at Jews living in Judea and Samaria.

2) Preventing Gazans from fleeing conflict to increase pressure on Israel: the Biden Administration supported the Hamas/Egypt policy of keeping Gazans trapped in Gaza, the only people in the world not allowed to flee a conflict. Biden treated Egypt's border with Gaza like he should have treated America's with Mexico, and vice versa. Asylum seekers to America in any number, to Egypt in no number. Now Trump can flip the script.

3) Biden's "Four No's": By stressing the Iranian axis can pay no territorial price for its aggression ("no reduction in territory"), Biden gave Hamas and Hezbollah an insurance policy, and set the stage for them to threaten Israel again. Trump can make clear that invading neighboring countries is not guaranteed to be an at least break-even proposition.

4) Cancelling Trump's sanctions on the ICC, and then refusing to support bipartisan legislation holding ICC officials accountable after the sought to indict Israeli officials for defending the country from Hamas. Trump understands the ICC is simply the international version of the lawfare that has been directed at him.

5) Undermining the Pompeo Doctrine, which announced that Jews living in Judea & Samaria is not a war crime. Its schizophrenic to have this legal issue toggle with every administration. Now Congress can enshrine this position into law.

6) Protecting the @UN even as it justified Oct. 7th, and allowed one of its agencies, @UNRWA , to become a Hamas front, and @UNIFIL_ to be a defensive screen for Hezbollah. Trump can again defund UNRWA, but also end its immunity to lawsuits for supporting terror, and cancel UNIFL, saving American taxpayers hundreds of millions.

Seth Mandel: The Confused Kidnappers of Chaim Weizmann’s Statue

Although the story that Weizmann was rewarded for his service with the Balfour Declaration isn’t true—his biographer Jehuda Reinharz is adamant and convincing on this count—the connections Weizmann made and the favor he won in the eyes of the government certainly helped his later Zionist pleas find sympathetic ears. The Balfour Declaration was made on Nov. 2, 1917. The Palestine Action stunt at the University of Manchester was in protest of the 107th anniversary of this momentous document.

The chowderheads who kidnapped the busts of Weizmann and Dixon have thus demonstrated two important characteristics of the Western “pro-Palestine” movement.

The first is that, although much of this activism is taking place at universities, its practitioners are not learning anything about their supposed passion project. Any true champion of Palestine ought to be able to tell Chaim Weizmann from Harold Dixon.

The second is that, on top of their general ignorance is a deep loathing of the West and their fellow humans and the freedom they all enjoy. Weizmann was in that display case because he was a hero to Britain. I suppose I wouldn’t be shocked if the men and women of Palestine Action preferred Germany to have won the war, though their real German idols would only emerge a couple years after Weizmann helped save the world.

Recognition of the Weizmann-Dixon partnership is a tribute not to the state of Israel and the survival of the Jewish people but to the survival of the United Kingdom. This knowledge would not likely change Palestine Action’s actions. But it is a reminder that hatred of the Jews is part and parcel of the hatred of Jewish contributions to civilization, very much including freedom, democracy, scientific advancement, and academic institutions such as those taken for granted by masked poseurs who steal statues.

11/07 Links Pt1: Israel dodges a bullet; UN Must Stop Protecting Israel's Terror Foes in Gaza and Lebanon; Scapegoating Israel, white progressive projection: Torres slams Beinart op-ed

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: Israel dodges a bullet

The Obama and Biden administrations groveled to Iran, negotiated the 2015 nuclear deal that would have legitimized Iranian nuclear weapons after only a few years’ delay and refused to respond with more than a token slap on the wrist to hundreds of Iranian attacks on American assets.

During the Iranian proxy war against Israel following the Oct. 7 pogrom, Washington has put Israel under enormous pressure to surrender, causing the war to be protracted and Israeli troops to be needlessly killed. For Israel, under the Biden administration, America has indeed become “them against us.”

Liberals invert facts like these because they can never allow anything to upset the narrative that defines them in their own eyes as moral and decent—such as that Israel is the rogue actor in the Middle East, or Trump is a fascist—even though the opposite is the case.

Psychologists have a term for this. They call it “projection,” and it is a mental disorder.

Most liberals who told themselves and the world that Harris was on course for an overwhelming victory refuse to acknowledge any reasonable cause for the public to vote for Trump in such huge numbers, such as the cost of living, crime or a collapse of border controls.

This capacity for self-delusion is what characterizes the modern liberal. They will find any number of excuses to justify their own belief system based on a fantasy universe that requires them to lie to themselves to maintain the illusion.

In this presidential election, the American people once again rose up in protest against an entire elite class to reclaim their nation and its culture from those who would destroy it. This was an astonishing, country-wide insurrection against a decadent cultural establishment.

Nevertheless, some 68 million people voted for a candidate who couldn’t string a coherent sentence together—a failing they refused to acknowledge because they were locked into their cartoonish fantasy world in which they painted her opponent as a menace to humanity.

Before Trump had even claimed victory, some of these were threatening to pull the same rolling coup stunt with which they had hounded him in his first term. Would they have as much traction this time? Will Trump be more or less indisciplined and impulsive as president than he was in his first term?

We don’t know. But for the traumatized people of Israel—still under murderous fire from rocket barrages and yet enduring the venomous hostility of much of the so-called civilized world—the election of Donald Trump has punctured their existential loneliness.

Trump is far from perfect. But at this moment, his election feels like deliverance.

John Podhoretz: Let’s Begin Talking About the Jewish Vote

The initial evidence from last night’s election is that there has been a significant shift in the Jewish vote from previous elections, a delta of anywhere from 10 to 40 percent overall. It’s very hard to quantify such things because Jews are few in number, hard to isolate in larger surveys, and hard to pin down. So, for example, one exit poll I saw showed the Jewish vote for Donald Trump in the low 40s; another at 22; another in the 30s. I’m not linking to them because I don’t trust any of them and don’t want to argue with any of them. So I’m instead going to point to certain counties in the United States where Jews reside in slightly or significantly disproportionate numbers. (As the weeks pass and we get accurate final data precinct by precinct in the United States, we can get a clearer picture of the Jewish vote because we’ll be able to key on concentrated areas.)

But look at what my friend Josh Kraushaar, the editor of Jewish Insider, tweeted: “Wow: Trump carried PASSAIC County, New Jersey. Majority/Hispanic electorate and home to a sizable Orthodox Jewish constituency.” Jews make up about 25 percent of the county’s population and it has been a Democratic stronghold forever. Joe Biden took Passaic in 2020 with 57.5 percent to Trump’s 41 percent. Last night, Trump won it with 50 percent to Harris’s 46.5 percent. That’s a 16 point overall swing in Trump’s favor. We don’t yet know how much of that is attributable to the Jewish vote and how much to changes in the Hispanic vote, but Jews surely played a significant role in this change in the county’s political course.

In Palm Beach County, Florida, there are about 175,000 Jews out of a population of 1.5 million, or about 12 percent. Kamala Harris won this county by .74 percent last night. Biden won it by 13 percent in 2020. Trump’s vote climbed nearly 7 percent while Harris dropped 7 points off Biden’s number. Again, we cannot know what the delta was in the Jewish community, but almost exactly the same type of shift happened in Broward County, where Biden got 64 percent in 2020; the vote shifted 14 percent toward Trump this year. Jews make up about 10 percent of the Broward population.

How about Nassau County, NY? Jews make up close to 20 percent of the population. Trump won Nassau by 5 percent. Biden took it by 10 in 2020.

It will take months to get more precise numbers here by going precinct by precinct and even block by block to quantify this change, but this is now something we are able to do if someone is willing to fork over the cash to make a nationwide study of it.

But make no mistake. The steady work is no longer in the waiting. It is in watching the change.

Caroline Glick: The opportunity of Trump’s victory

To contend with the Palestinian threat, Israel needs to extricate itself completely from the strategic deathtrap of the so-called “two-state solution.” David Friedman, Trump’s first-term ambassador to Israel, recently published “One Jewish State.” Friedman’s book sets out the case for Israeli sovereignty in Judea and Samaria. In it, Friedman urges Israel to determine its goal for securing its national rights and security needs in Judea, Samaria and Gaza.

Israel should immediately take Friedman’s advice. Netanyahu, his ministers and advisers must determine a clear strategy for extending Israeli sovereignty to Judea and Samaria and taking permanent military control of Gaza. They must then work with the Trump administration to secure U.S. support for those plans in the framework of a regional peace.

The moral corruption of the U.N. system is nothing new. But since Oct. 7, Israel has recognized that this system, replete with its in-house terror group the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), terror auxiliary force the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) and international courts trying Israel for genocide and treating Israel’s leaders and soldiers as war criminals, is itself a mortal threat to the Jewish state.

Broadly speaking, the U.N. system today is a full-blown alliance of the Marxist, post-national left, China and Islamic terrorist groups. Israel obviously cannot contend with this behemoth on its own. Working with the Trump administration and other nation states that are similarly—if less existentially—harmed by the U.N. system, Israel must spearhead an effort to dismantle, divide and permanently weaken the U.N. system and restore the power of nation states to work separately and in alliance with others to secure international peace and prosperity.

Finally, in light of Israel’s experience with the Biden administration’s exploitation of Israel’s strategic dependence on the United States for munitions as a means to undermine Israel’s war effort, Jerusalem needs to end its client-state relationship with Washington. Israel and the United States must cooperate in transforming the U.S.-Israel bond into a true alliance between a global superpower and a regional power.

Trump’s determination to decrease America’s foreign aid budgets, and his doctrine of supporting allies to enable them to defend themselves as the surest way to decrease America’s need to fight wars, fully aligns his position with Israel’s strategic requirements. Israel should move quickly to forge a new defense relationship with America that would end U.S. military assistance over a 10-year period. During that period, the relationship would shift from supplier-client to a strategic partnership geared toward weapons systems development. To end its vulnerability, Israel should maintain and expand its efforts to rebuild its domestic arms industries with the goal of being fully capable of producing all the munitions it requires to win its wars and preserve post-war peace by the end of Trump’s term. This transformation of U.S.-Israel ties will enable the alliance to survive and thrive over time, to the great benefit of both countries.

In his congratulatory message to Trump on Wednesday morning, Netanyahu wrote, “Your historic return to the White House offers a new beginning for America and a powerful recommitment to the great alliance between Israel and America.”

This is absolutely true. And by firing Gallant, Netanyahu has facilitated the rebuilding of Israel’s alliance with America on firmer footing than ever before. By working together to achieve common goals, Israel and the United States, under Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump, can secure the peace of the Middle East and their nations’ separate and common interests in the international arena, to the benefit of the world as a whole.

Hezbollah Fans Upset At Wrong Side Involving Mosques In Fight (PreOccupied Territory)

Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.

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Beirut, November 7 - Supporters of the Iran-backed Shiite militia exercising political control of Lebanon and forcing the country into armed conflict with Israel railed again today against the Jewish State for deploying munitions in or against Muslim houses of worship, arguing that only one party is permitted to violate the sanctity of such sites for military purposes, while the other, Jewish one must refrain from acting against any military personnel, materiel, or facilities there.

Hezbollah advocates issued further criticism today of IDF operations to destroy structures in southern Lebanon that form part of Hezbollah's military infrastructure. They called the demolitions, which targeted all structures regardless of their pre-conflict use, a violation of the sanctity of the mosques, in which Hezbollah should be permitted to continue locating their positions, tunnel entrances, weapons caches, and other resources.

"The Zionist Entity continues to violate everything sacred by involving mosques in the fighting," declared Mustafa Massiqr of the city's Dahiyeh neighborhood, a Hezbollah stronghold. "Islamic houses of worship are strictly reserved for prayer, study, some community activities, and serving as missile-launching sites or assembly points for our brave fighters."

"The world must condemn the Zionists, but it is only their American backers who make this possible!" charged Massiqr. "This phenomenon, of foreign bankrolling and arming of a malign entity in the region, is illegitimate and must be stopped," added the enthusiastic supporter of Iran bankrolling, arming, and training Hezbollah, Hamas, Ansar Allah, and various Iraqi militias for its own hegemonic ends.

Human rights organizations and international humanitarian organizations echoed Massiqr's position. "Israel has demonstrated again and again its disregard for the hors de combat status of houses of worship," stated former director of Human Rights Watch Ken Roth. "As if the allegation that someone else had made such a facility a military site can justify atrocities. We saw it in Gaza, as well: Israel thinks armed groups supposedly taking up position in a hospital makes that hospital a legitimate military target. As if we apply such provisions to Israel. Everyone knows we don't."

UNIFIL troops similarly noted that Hezbollah's buildup around the UN peacekeeping force's positions deserved no comment or criticism, whereas Israel's attempts to get the UNIFIL troops out of the way in order to target Hezbollah positions was inexcusable. "Outrageous," declared the head of the Irish unit. "Israel can't just do what its enemies do."

That phenomenon parallels the one in which only Israeli retaliatory action attracts characterization as "escalation."

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!

AIPAC tweeted yesterday that 318 of its endorsed candidates won their elections so far, and since then tweeted about four more candidates whose results showed they won, making it 322.

An anti-AIPAC organization shows 327 Congressional candidates endorsed by AIPAC. I cannot find a full list of AIPAC endorsees for Senate; in March I found an article listing about ten. If AIPAC endorsed between 10 and 20 candidates in the 34 Senate races, and add the 322 endorsed for Congress, that would mean that between 93% and 96% of their candidates won.

AIPAC endorses pro-Israel candidates on both the Democratic and Republican sides. Contrary to how the media portrays AIPAC as being against progressive candidates, I count 34 of their candidates self-describing as progressive.

By any measure, AIPAC has done extremely well this year, including in the primaries, with both its Democratic and Republican candidates.

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!

Dayton Beach shop sells all the terrorist headbands and flags you could ever want

Yesterday, people wearing Hamas headbands were protesting in Manhattan.

Where can wannabe terrorist fans of Hamas or other antisemitic groups get their stuff?

From Dayton Beach based 3SJShop! You can find Hamas, Hezbollah, PFLP, Houthi products and many more!

But just because that logo says "Damn the Jews" doesn't mean that the shop promotes terror, they say. They are against terror!

At 3SJShop.com, we adamantly reject and denounce terrorism, Nazism, Fascism, and any other dictatorial or destructive ideologies. Our commitment to these principles is reflected in the meticulous craftsmanship of our products. Every patch, piece of militaria, and item of regalia is proudly handmade in the USA using 100% American materials.

These items cater to a diverse audience including historians, collectors, educators, archivists, and re-enactors, serving as invaluable tools for historical exploration and understanding.

Our mission is to provide high-quality replicas that serve as historical artifacts and pieces of art, reflecting our dedication to craftsmanship and authenticity....Our items are designed for collectors, reenactors, and those with a historical interest, not for promoting or supporting any specific ideology.

See? They don't intend to promote terrorism - their stickers and patches, are meant for historians who love to collect reproductions made in Florida!

Of course, when their products are used for promoting terrorism, 3SJShop is quite proud:

And even though they really, really care about historical research, they don't have any Nazi products which would fit under the same category.

I don't think that they are doing anything illegal, but they clearly support terror and attract terrorist supporters are their major customer base.

With all the anti-Israel protests over the past year, it looks like business is booming.

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 Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) issued a final pre-election poll on November 1 showing a slight lead for Green Party candidate Jill Stein over Kamala Harris among registers American Muslim voters.

This virtual tie between Harris and Stein was seen in their earlier polls as well.

This story was published in numerous media outlets.

So how did Muslims end up voting? It wasn't anything close to the poll.

According to the Fox News exit polls, among Muslims, Harris got 63% compared to Trump's 32%, with all others at 4%.

According to AP's exit polls, 61% of Muslims voted for Harris and 30% for Trump. Stein could not have gotten more than 9%.

Why did CAIR get it so completely wrong?

CAIR described their polling methodology in their August survey:

Who is Molitical Consulting? CAIR says that its president is Mohammed (Mo) Maraqa.

The LLC has no Internet presence. It has not done any surveys besides for CAIR that I can find.

Jihad Watch looked at Mo Maraqa in September and found that he was the head of three other shady companies, all of which have no Internet presence. One is "American Third Pillar Charities, " another is "Jasmine LLC." The third is called, no kidding, "ISIS Research Group."

The address for all of them is an apartment house in Washington DC.

Maraqa was a panelist at Arabcon in Dearborn in September at an Election Strategy Session - along with Linda Sarsour. He also led a session called "Empowering American Voters to Advocate for Palestinian Human Rights."

Maraqa is also involved with the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, and Molitico jointly created an initiative called "Arab.Vote" with the ADC and CAIR.

From everything we can see, Molitico is a one person operation whose polling techniques are provably unreliable, yet its only member is prominent in the Arab community. Maraqa's creation of multiple organizations, and his claims of being involved with several more, indicate that he is a scammer.

But are CAIR and the ADC in on the scams? Is it possible that CAIR hired a polling firm without any track record whose address is an residential apartment? Or did they choose a company of someone they knew and not care at all about accuracy?

Even if we assume that the poll itself is what Molitico says it is, it is inherently a bad poll. Molitico says the survey was done via SMS messages to tens of thousands of Muslim voters. It only received 1,500 responses. Which means that the poll is worthless - only people who want to respond are counted, and people who respond to SMS polls do not represent the electorate at all. It is a self-selecting sample, and any pollster worth their salt would never create such a poorly designed poll.

But a poll like that could be done by a single person, as opposed to legitimate polls that require teams of people.

Today, at 10 AM, CAIR will announce their own exit poll and analysis. Almost certainly, Mo Maraqa is the one behind the exit polls. It will be interesting to see what happens.

UPDATE: The live video of the exit poll analysis seems to have been scrapped. As of 10:15, it cannot be found on the Facebook site they pointed to.

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!

Jewish Socialists really don't have a clue

In Jacobin, there is a review of a book called "The Radical Jewish Tradition: Revolutionaries, Resistance Fighters and Firebrands," by Janey Stone and Donny Gluckstein.

The point of the reviewer is that Zionism was a "fringe movement" in Europe before World War II and Jewish socialists had completely different ideas on how to fight antisemitism:

Turn of the century Russia also faced a series of increasingly severe political crises as the ossified Romanov monarchy struggled to keep pace with a modernizing economy, a militant labor movement, and emerging national liberation movements. These tensions made Russia a tinderbox for antisemitism as Tsars Alexander III and Nicholas II attempted to displace popular frustration onto Jews. Tsarist propaganda drew on Christian anti-Jewish prejudice to portray Jews as either wealthy capitalists responsible for the world’s economic misery or, alternately, as socialists who threatened to tear apart civilization itself.

Combined with poverty and legal discrimination, the experience of often brutal day-to-day antisemitism pushed Russia’s Jewish population toward three broad alternatives. A minority founded organizations promising a better life in an exclusively Jewish homeland. Far more, however, emigrated to developed capitalist countries.

And to those who rejected the first two answers, the Bund offered a radical leftist political project that sought to end antisemitism by transforming society entirely.

Zionists claimed that antisemitism would never be defeated, and argued that to live freely and in safety, Jews needed an exclusive homeland. Bundists rejected this as pessimistic and separatist and argued that it was necessary to fight racism and capitalism at the same time, by uniting working-class and oppressed peoples across national, religious, and ethnic lines. Contrary to Zionists, Bundists understood that the fate of Jewish people in Russia and Poland was bound up with that of the entire regional working class and all the ethnic minorities therein.

And the point of the article is:

[As] the number of Jewish people opposed to Zionism grows, it’s crucial that the Left revisits histories like those presented by Stone and Gluckstein in The Radical Jewish Tradition, both to undermine the Zionist conflation between Israel and Jews, and to outline a Leftist Jewish tradition.

I would argue that their statistics on the number of Zionists in eastern Europe is undercounted, sine they are comparing members of Zionist organizations with members of the Bund, and most Jews sympathetic to Zionism would not have necessarily joined organizations. My quick research found that perhaps 20% of Jews were Zionist in the 1920s compared to perhaps 15% who were Bundists.

But the bizarre part is how little self-awareness there is in this article.

The Bundists fought antisemitism by building solidarity with their fellow Russians, Poles and other workers.

How did that work out for them?

Did it protect them during the Holocaust? Did the socialist Poles come out in force to block Nazi deportations of Jews - or did they enthusiastically participate? How did the Jews fare in the Soviet Union under Stalin?

Now, if Zionism had successfully created an independent Jewish state by 1938, how many millions of lives could have been saved?

Even before Israel was created, and through the time of the British White Paper, some 400,000 Jews immigrated from Europe to Israel between 1900-1940, the heyday of the Bund. Meaning, Zionism saved 400,000 Jews from death.

How many did socialism save?

The article is positioned to say that socialism is a better alternative than Zionism in fighting antisemitism. By the most important metric - which one saved more lives - Zionism did far, far better than socialism did, although some socialist groups did speak out against Nazi antisemitism.

It is not a winning argument to say that there were hundreds of thousands of socialist Jews in Eastern Europe during the 1930s, when most of them were killed and their fellow socialists they thought they were in solidarity with didn't so a whole hell of a lot. (To be sure, some of the righteous Gentiles were socialists, like Irena Sendler, but I am not aware of any worker's party that make saving Jews a priority.)

The crazy part is that the Jewish socialists today still make the same argument that worker solidarity is the key to fight antisemitism. Yet are these people doing anything to fight antisemitism today? They only talk about far-Right antisemitism, but they condone - or embrace - the antisemitism of the Muslim world, Black antisemitism, and progressive antisemitism.

And if they argue that Israel is causing antisemitism, that is because of the socialists themselves, who are in the forefront of making antisemitism-as-anti-Zionism acceptable in Leftist circles.

The cluelessness is remarkable.

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!

11/06 Links Pt2: The Unapologetic Bernie Marcus; Macron’s error: The UN did not create Israel; The Disgusting Lies of Haaretz; Is Brandeis University being ‘Palestinized?’

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: The Unapologetic Bernie Marcus

Bernie Marcus, the billionaire Home Depot founder and philanthropist who died yesterday at age 95, was in the process of giving away the majority of his fortune. But there’s a good lesson in one of his more-recent causes. In 2020, Marcus gave $20 million to launch RootOne, a program to send Jewish teenagers to Israel. He later put another $60 million into it.

The point of the program, according to Marcus: “We want young people stepping onto their college campuses with deep connections to Israel and strong Jewish identities.”

Marcus saw what Jewish students were up against and wanted them to feel a sense of pride and comfort with their Jewish faith before they entered the whirlwind of brainless anti-Zionist hostility on campus. Marcus had also given to organizations like Hillel International. The craziness of the past year has only reinforced the urgency of supporting Jews on campus.

His unapologetic Zionism was matched by his unapologetic advocacy of economic liberty and the free market. In 2019, he and grocery-chain billionaire John Catsimatidis cowrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal that began, provocatively: “The two of us are quite rich. We have earned more money than we could have imagined and more than we can spend on ourselves, our children and grandchildren. These days getting rich off a profitable business is regarded as almost sinister. But we have nothing to apologize for, and we don’t think the government should have more of our profits.”

To be clear, he wrote, “We believe in a well-funded government, and we understand it is our duty to pay our fair share of taxes. And we do.”

Marcus’s parents were Russian Jewish immigrants and his dreams of becoming a doctor were dashed when was accepted to Harvard Medical School but couldn’t afford it. So he found other dreams—one of which was the concept that would become Home Depot. In 1978, he and business partner Arthur Blank teamed up with financier Ken Langone to make it a reality.

Marcus’s life story is an uncommon one, but it does carry a universal lesson: We could do with less apologizing for success—and no apologizing for Zionism.

The US must reject the Palestinian claim of a ‘right of return’

American foreign policy can be quite resistant to change. When it comes to the Arab-Israeli conflict, that inertia includes a perennial refusal to take a decisive position on the so-called Palestinian right of return. The result has been decades of failed peace negotiations. With renewed talk of a two-state solution, it’s important to revisit this issue as a new approach is in order.

During the 1948 Israeli War of Independence, approximately 700,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled from what is now the State of Israel. Those refugees were housed in Judea and Samaria, the Gaza Strip and various refugee camps in neighboring Arab countries. Except for Jordan, those countries did not offer them citizenship.

Shortly after the war, the United Nations formed the U.N. Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) to manage the welfare of the refugees. UNRWA’s original mandate was to resettle the refugees in their host countries. However, in the face of Palestinian opposition, UNRWA abandoned that goal and instead began to advocate for the return of the refugees to their former homes. To complicate matters, it has taken the position that the original 1948 refugees and all of their descendants are entitled to refugee status. Today, that amounts to approximately five million people who, UNRWA maintains, have a “right of return” to what is now the State of Israel. The Palestinian leadership agrees, arguing that this supposed right is non-negotiable.

But there is no such right as Adi Schwartz and Einat Wilf have shown in their book, The War of Return. One study after another confirms this. Perhaps the best example is an exhaustive analysis by professor Andrew Kent, as cited by Schwartz and Wilf, in which he concludes that it is “clear that the claimed Palestinian ‘right of return’ for refugees from the 1947–49 conflict has no substantial legal basis.” Most legal scholars without a political agenda who have addressed the issue agree that 5 million Palestinian refugees are not entitled to take up residence in the State of Israel.

Nevertheless, American peace negotiators have failed to take a firm position on this crucial issue. And so, Palestinian officials have been free to claim that the conflict cannot be settled without recognition of a full right of return.

Perhaps because this issue is so contentious, the parties have largely avoided it over the history of peace negotiations. Under the Oslo Accords, questions regarding refugees were designated as a “final status” issue to be addressed at the end of peace negotiations. That set a pattern that continues to this day.

American foreign policy views the right of return as a bargaining chip in peace negotiations. For example, negotiators have suggested a symbolic right of return limited to only a few thousand refugees. However, U.S. policy has been ambiguous and noncommittal if such a right exists.

Macron’s error: The UN did not create Israel

French Prime Minister Emmanuel Macron told his cabinet last month that Israel was created by a decision of the United Nations and that the Jewish state should not “disregard the decisions of the U.N.”

However, the United Nations did not create Israel. Point of fact: U.N. General Assembly Resolution 181, generally known as the Partition Plan, was never implemented. By its express terms, it was merely a recommendation. While it requested that the U.N. Security Council take measures to implement it, this never occurred.

The Partition Plan was unequivocally rejected by the Arab world, which sought, by force, to eliminate any possibility of a Jewish state in any part of Israel (then referred to as the British Mandate of Palestine). There was no real appetite by the permanent members of the Security Council to intervene militarily to effectuate the recommended Partition Plan in the face of Arab militant intransigence or to prevent the existing Arab nations from invading and overrunning the country. The Jews in Israel were left on their own to deal with the onslaught and invasion.

It is important to note that there is no reference in Resolution 181 to the so-called Palestinian people. The label was invented more than a decade and a half later. There was also no reference to a so-called West Bank. This was an artificial construct by Jordan, which illegally annexed the land to distinguish it from Jordan proper, located on the eastern side of the Jordan River.

Resolution 181 referred to the area as the hill country of Samaria and Judea. The name given to the proposed partitioned area intended to house Arab residents of Israel was the “Arab state,” not the “Palestinian state.”

At the time and historically, Arab residents in Israel were viewed—and, indeed, viewed themselves—as a part of the Arab people. As Anwar Nusseibeh, a Jordanian minister in the 1950s, explained, Arabs who resided in the areas assigned to the re-established Jewish State of Israel saw themselves as a part of the Arab nation, generally and specifically as a part of Syria. There was no concept of a separate so-called Palestinian people, nor was there any distinct identity beyond being a part of pan-Arabism.

It is critical to appreciate that the U.N. Charter explicitly provides, in Article 80, that “ … nothing in this chapter shall be construed in or of itself to alter in any manner the rights whatsoever of any states or any peoples or the terms of existing international instruments to which members of the United Nations may respectively be parties.”

11/06 Links Pt1: Trump will not restrain Israel: the clock is now ticking for Iran and its proxies; Shapiro: Turning point of election was when Trump visited Rebbe's grave

From Ian:

John Podhoretz: Trump the ‘colossus’ is the comeback king of American politics

We are in the midst of the greatest political comeback in American history — which follows, by eight years, the greatest political stunt in American history.

That stunt was Donald Trump’s first win, in 2016. The comeback is his extraordinary performance over the past four years following his defeat in 2020.

I am not here going to adjudicate Trump’s sins or errors, though I am so mindful of them that I did not vote for him and wrote in someone else.

No, I am here to represent hundreds of millions of slack-jawed people around the world, gaping in wonderment at the fact that Trump got to this place on Election Night 2024.

Think of it. This is a man who was impeached (for a second time) two weeks before leaving office in 2021. In the years that followed that second impeachment, he was pursued by a state attorney general, two local prosecutors and a federal special prosecutor.

He was indicted 91 times in three different criminal courts and found liable in two civil courts. He has been convicted (ludicrously, in my view) of 34 (ludicrous, again) felonies.

He has had his home raided by federal agents. He has seen his eponymous business effectively shut down by a Manhattan judge.

He has been the subject of relentless and limitless hostile press coverage that dwarfs any negative characterizations of any other human being of our time.

And yet here he is, on the cusp of becoming president of the United States for a second go-round.

His utter refusal to be bent or broken by his enemies and his critics and his determination to redeem himself by recapturing the office he lost has no parallel that I can think of — not in American history, anyway.

Seth Frantzman: Trump will not restrain Israel: the clock is now ticking for Iran and its proxies

These groups have believed over the last several years that they could keep pushing the envelope in the region. They felt there was a wind at their back as the world shifted from a US-led world order to one that is multi-polar and increasingly challenged by Russia and China. Hezbollah, for instance, threatened Israel into a maritime deal in 2022 that Israel was falsely told would bring stability and security. The Houthis assumed they could attack ships and block a major maritime route after the October 7 attacks because they believed the US and its allies in the region would appease them. The Houthis have been largely correct in this analysis. They have been appeased, suffering only minor pushback. The Biden administration talked tough but it wasn’t willing to go far enough to keep maritime trade corridors open. This was a major change from more than a century of US foreign policy that has focused on freedom of navigation, a key policy of US President Woodrow Wilson.

Iran still feels empowered. It has threatened more direct attacks on Israel. The sense in Iran and among Iranian proxies, friends and allies that time is on their side came amidst major shifts globally. Iran looked at the US withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 and the displacement of Armenians from Nagorna-Karabakh in 2023 and assumed it could do as it pleased.

Hamas, hosted by Doha, believed that the time was ripe in 2023 for its genocidal attack on October 7. It calculated that it could massacre 1,000 people and take 250 hostage, including numerous Americans and other foreign citizens, and face zero consequences. Hamas believed it could get away with October 7 and get Doha, a key US ally, and Iran to leverage that into a deal that would leave it in power in Gaza and bring it to power in the West Bank. Hezbollah believed it could rain down rockets on Israel. Iran felt it could launch hundreds of missiles at Israel.

Donald Trump’s victory may change this sense of impunity. It could set in motion several processes in the region. First, it could accelerate plans by Iran and its proxies to continue the war and chaos they unleashed on October 7. They may think they have another two months to increase attacks before their window of opportunity closes. However, they know they are being watched in Washington by the incoming US administration. They also know that Israel will not be restrained by the US. Iran and other anti-western countries and proxies have believed over the last decade that time is on their side. Do they think that the US election has changed the clock? This is the big question they will face in the next two months.

Seth Mandel: The Birth of ‘the Jewish Vote’?

Similarly, elections in the modern era have been keeping track of the “Jewish votes.” But there was no evidence for the existence of “the Jewish vote.”

This year, that has changed. I have heard more than one person say something to effect of: “I wasn’t shocked by Oct. 7 in Israel but Oct. 8 in America.” Meaning that the horrific massacres carried out by Hamas were perfectly in character for a terrorist group that exists solely to carry out the mass murder of Jews. But many Jews here and around the world did not expect to see the streets and public squares of major American cities fill to the brim with people celebrating those atrocities. They did not expect to see U.S. campuses become, overnight, outposts of explicit Hamas and Hezbollah superfans. They were surprised that members of the U.S. Congress would make pilgrimage to the tentifadas calling for genocide against the Jews, and that a Democratic congresswoman would headline a China-backed conference whose organizers were affiliated with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a designated terrorist organization. They were unnerved by the successful campaign to prevent a Jewish governor from becoming Harris’s running mate.

Jewish Democrats did not, by and large, stop being Democrats. But they did stop being invisible—at least in Michigan and Pennsylvania. What this means for the concept of the “Jewish vote” going forward will not be apparent for some time, because it’s never clear whether one election constitutes an outlier or the beginning of a trend. Additionally, there are not many Jewish voters, at least compared to other politically prominent ethnic and racial groups, no matter how you count them—and so there will be even fewer Jewish voters who start to consistently vote on Jewish issues.

Jews don’t need to be “emancipated” from the Democratic Party—or any party. But they do need to be emancipated from their invisibility to the major parties. If that is changing, it is a change for the better.