Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Thursday, January 02, 2025

01/02 Links Pt2: How media bias fuels the facade of Palestinian nationhood and ignores accountability; Danny Danon: UN has failed Gaza. It’s time for a new era

From Ian:

How media bias fuels the facade of Palestinian nationhood and ignores accountability

FOR MANY of the world’s leading media outlets, there isn’t even the need for an honest accounting of the war dead. Hamas says 45,000 have been killed – who cares how many are militants or if the numbers are massaged with calculated impunity? Hamas says yet another Israeli attack has killed journalists – never mind if they’re also freelancing as Islamist terrorists.

Meanwhile, despite being the elected leader of a Western democracy, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been branded a genocidaire – unable to enter Poland to honor the 80th anniversary of Auschwitz’s liberation owing to an international arrest warrant by a bogus global court.

And Israeli cultural and civic groups are being banned from global gatherings. Most recently, the delegation to the World Bowls Tour was forbidden from participating in the event in Great Britain next month after an outcry from the pro-Palestinian Action Network, which branded Israel an “apartheid and genocidal state.” (The World Bowls Tour has since reversed its decision.)

And yet much of Hamas’s leadership still travels freely across the Middle East, while pro-Palestinian films continue to be hyped out in Hollywood.

As Hamas refuses to confirm its hostage count, both Israel and the world are forced to negotiate with literal terrorists so that terrorized civilians might go free. Gleeful murderers must be set loose so that Israel may bring their innocent back home.

Nothing is demanded of those murderers to go free, no conditions imposed to ensure they, like Yahya Sinwar, don’t re-offend in an even bloodier and more spectacular fashion. Lots of impunity – little accountability.

For many, a Palestinian state remains the ultimate goal – possibly as a byproduct of Israel’s eventual normalization with Saudi Arabia. Both are still possible.

But even if statehood were achieved, how would Palestinians govern if they never learned the most basic building block of sovereignty – accountability? There can be no sovereignty without accountability to its citizens, neighbors, regional allies, and, ultimately, the global community. Once again, accountability has never been something Palestinians have done particularly well.

As 2025 arrives, both increased military activity in Gaza and yet another potential hostage deal are crowding the headlines. Israel, as always, is being pressured to compromise while the Palestinians continue to play hardball.

This may be business as usual – but it’s a bad business. It’s bad for Israel, which lacks a serious negotiation partner; for the Gaza civilians forced by their craven leadership to jockey for martyrdom; and for the Palestinian nation that so many pretend already exists.

Many hope it never will, but for those who believe that it must, the era of carte blanche diplomacy must end in Gaza, Doha, and Ramallah. And in its place, the gift that no one has dared to demand – the gift of Palestinian accountability.

UNRWA's Refusal to Accept Israeli Sovereignty Will Harm the Palestinians

Israeli authorities found that more than 2,135 UNRWA employees were also terrorists in either Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ). One-fifth of UNRWA school administrators were Hamas terrorists, and 10% of the senior positions (school principals and their deputies, directors, and deputy directors of training centers) were members of Hamas or PIJ.

UNRWA's facilities in Gaza had been turned into terror bases. Hamas had dug extensive tunnels under UNRWA headquarters in Gaza City in which they placed one of their main computer server farms. The electricity for the computers, as well as water, came directly, and in plain sight, from within UNRWA's headquarters.

Having concluded that UNRWA had lost all credibility and morphed into a vassal of the terrorists, Israel's Knesset passed laws on Oct. 28, 2024, to end Israel's June 1967 invitation to UNRWA to operate in Israel, Judea, Samaria, and Gaza. The laws will come into full force on January 30, 2025.

For 76 years, UNRWA has served as the primary vehicle for perpetuating the lie that the "Palestine refugees" will one day demographically and democratically destroy Israel. Under UNRWA, the number of "Palestine refugees" has swelled from 711,000 in 1949 to six million in 2023.

Despite having been given sufficient notice, terror-infested UNRWA is refusing to wrap up its operations and transfer its functions to other actors. It would seem that UNRWA believes it can force itself upon Israel, irrespective of the new legislation.

However, by acting in this manner, UNRWA is doing a disservice to the people to whom it provides services. The international community would be wise to find suitable alternatives.

The Man Who Wasn’t There_ An Account Of A Fake Witness To The Gaza War

The charge by Israel’s enemies that it is committing a genocide against the Palestinians is false, malicious and a complete inversion of the truth. It relies on disinformation and invented legal standards to deny the Jewish state its right to self-defense following Hamas’s genocidal attack on October 7, 2023. Nevertheless, it is being promoted by certain Israelis, whose words are used as an authoritative validation of the bogus claim. One such Israeli– who serves as a hero to those who delight in vilifying Israel– is Lee Mordechai, whose false “genocide” charges against Israel provides fuel for the delegitimization of the Jewish state.

Below is an article by Yigal Carmon — a former Israeli intelligence officer, counterterrorism adviser, and founder of the Middle East Media Research Institute — debunking Mordechai’s sanctimonious accusations.

Introduction
The website “Bearing Witness to the Israel-Gaza War,”1 run by Israeli historian Lee Mordechai,2 claims to be “both a public statement and an archive… [that] aims to make sense of a deeply complex and troubling situation” in Gaza.

Mordechai states that his website/archive “compiles evidence from reliable sources, including humanitarian organizations, investigative reports, and firsthand accounts” of war crimes committed by Israel against the people of Gaza 3 – which, according to Mordechai, meet the definition of “genocide” (in Mordechai’s words, “my definition of genocide”).4

This document will refute several major claims made by Mordechai on his website.

A Note On Mordechai’s Website
Mordechai’s website, Witnessing-the-gaza-war.com, appears to be inaccessible from an Israel-based server. It is unclear why this is so, and whether or not this is deliberate.5 “Witness”

A Misleading Use Of The Term In The Name Of Mordechai’s Website
The first and most basic element to be refuted in Mordechai’s project is his self-definition as “a witness.” Mordechai did not witness any of the alleged war crimes he cites in his report. The name of his website – “bearing witness to the Israel-Gaza war” – is misleading; what Mordechai does on his website is present a collection of information from a wide range of news websites and social media platforms, and reframe it as “evidence.” He has witnessed none of these firsthand.

Harnessing Irrelevant Expertise (History Of The Justinianic Plague) To Claim Authority
Mordechai begins his statement of purpose with the words: “I, Lee Mordechai, an Historian by profession and an Israeli citizen…”6. He harnesses his academic authority as “a historian by profession” to provide pseudo-academic basis to his claims of genocide.

Mordechai’s field of expertise in academia is the Justinianic plague and global pandemics,7 which fall under the research category of Environmental History. Mordechai is not an expert or an academic authority on the topic of genocide. Before publishing this document, Mordechai never dealt with the subject.8 He uses his title of a Late Antiquity historian (AD 541–549) to muster whatever authority and stature he can so as to appear knowledgeable in a field in which he has no expertise whatsoever.

01/02 Links Pt1: From college campuses to Afghanistan, we let Islamic terrorism rise again; The ‘intifada’ comes to New Orleans

From Ian:

Douglas Murray: From college campuses to Afghanistan, we let Islamic terrorism rise again

Let’s all give a big shout-out to the “Globalize the intifada” crowd. You got your way! Congratulations. Hope it feels good.

For years, citizens of Israel have had maniac jihadists driving at them and trying to mow them down on their streets. But this got only cheers from the dolts on US college campuses and New York street protesters.

Then, just before Christmas, Germany again got a taste of this “intifada.” That was when a Saudi immigrant decided to plow a vehicle through a previously happy Christmas market. He killed five people and injured almost 200.

Then, on New Year’s, it was America’s turn again.

This time, the wishes of the students at Columbia and other college campuses arrived on the streets of New Orleans. A man carrying an ISIS flag drove a pickup through New Year’s revelers, killing 14 people and seriously injuring dozens more. The FBI is looking into his network of contacts.

There are several things to say about all this.

The first is that although many people hoped the threat of jihadist violence had diminished, it has not gone away. With jihadist groups running Afghanistan and Syria, among other countries, they are back in control of vast areas, as they were before 9/11.

After the 2001 attacks on this city, America vowed there should be no safe havens for terrorists. That included ungoverned or Islamist-governed spaces abroad where terrorists can be trained and then come to the United States and other Western countries and carry out attacks.

Such spaces were indeed reduced by US and allied forces in the years that followed. But they have come back. Today Afghanistan, Syria and Yemen (to name just three countries) are places where jihadists can train and learn battlefield tactics. Our intelligence agencies and military need to keep a close eye on these places and strike when needed.

The second thing is that it is obvious that a considerable campaign of recruitment inside the United States is still ongoing. The New Orleans terrorist appears to have been radicalized while in the United States. Whether that was online or via a network within the US will soon be learned.

But we should hope that the full force of the law — and law enforcement agencies — comes down on any and all such groupings.

Many in the intelligence community and the police are indeed working hard on such cases. But there is a societal torpor about this work.

If the New Year´s Eve attack had not been jihadist, but had — for instance — been some far-right white supremacist, every corner of our media and politics would be rightly lining up to demand answers. We would be asking who the people were who had put such a person up to such an attack. Who had helped him? Who had encouraged him? Who had said it was all right — in fact good — to do such a thing?

Melanie Phillips: America’s Islamist problem

This political interpretation of Islam is called Islamism. It’s important to acknowledge that many Muslims living in the West are entirely signed up to Western values. However, the aggressive literalist interpretation is dominant among the faithful.

Polling has shown that 52% of British Muslims want to make it illegal to display a picture of Islam’s founder, Mohammed; almost half say Jews have too much power over government policy; and one-third favor implementing Sharia law and declaring Islam as the national religion.

In the United States, a survey by the Heritage Foundation found that 39% of American Muslims believe “Hamas did not commit murder and rape in Israel on Oct. 7” while 43% said: “Israel does not have a right to exist as a Jewish homeland.”

Islamism is spread throughout the world by the Muslim Brotherhood. While this has been banned by several Islamic states, neither London nor Washington has proscribed it.

Western nations also refuse to acknowledge that the Palestinian cause is an Islamist front not just against Israel but also against them. The hostility of the Palestinian Arabs to the existence of a Jewish state has always been at the core a jihadi cause. That’s why the Palestinians persistently make the false and hysterical claim that Israel intends to destroy the Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem.

Hamas and Hezbollah say openly that the war against Israel is part of their war against the west. In New York and elsewhere last month, anti-Israel demonstrators attacked Christmas trees. Hours after the New Orleans atrocity, a mob chanted in Times Square: “There is only one solution—intifada revolution!” “Resistance is glorious, we will be victorious!” and “Gaza, you make us proud.”

Israel and the west are umbilically linked as the targets of Islamic jihadi conquest. Yet for decades, it has been impossible to say any of this without being denounced as “Islamophobic” and singled out for attack.

Islamists have taken full advantage of the West’s refusal to defend an identity it no longer understands while telling itself it’s not worth defending. This myopia has extended across the political spectrum.

During Trump’s first administration, although he banned Muslims from certain countries from entering America, he didn’t recognize the full extent of the threat.

As Sam Westrop pointed out on the Middle East Forum in 2021, his administration handed out more federal money to domestic Islamic organizations than any previous administration, with more than half going to groups with some degree of Islamist influence. “In other words,” he wrote, “under Trump, America has served as a leading state sponsor of nonviolent Islamism.”

Americans have told themselves that the war between Jews and Palestinian Arabs is over the division of the land. They’ve told themselves that ISIS has been defeated, that leaving Afghanistan and Iraq has meant that the United States is no longer a target, and that Iran is a threat solely to Israel. They’ve told themselves that the Islamic world is not their problem.

As New Orleans has so horribly demonstrated, they couldn’t be more wrong.

Brendan O'Neill: The ‘intifada’ comes to New Orleans

The New Orleans massacre follows more than a year of noisy Islamo-apologism in educated circles in the West. Since Hamas’s pogrom of 7 October 2023, sympathy for Islamism has been all the rage among the right-on. ‘Long live the intifada’, they cried. Even ‘Globalise the intifada’. This gushing over ‘intifada’ in the weeks and months following an ‘intifada’ that involved the slaughter of more than a thousand Jews by an army of fanatical Islamists dragged us to ever greater depths of ethical delirium and moral depravity. Some even hailed the Islamist butchery of 7 October as ‘exhilarating’ and ‘energising’. Imagine if someone said that about New Orleans. Imagine if they said they felt elated upon hearing of this barbarous slaying of the young. Perhaps someone will. It is a testament to the slow, deadly corrosion of our civilisational values that it would not be wholly surprising if someone did.

For the truth is that something very like the New Orleans massacre happened on 7 October, only on a far larger scale, and back then the activist class celebrated it. The 364 young men and women butchered at the Nova music festival by the invading Islamists from Gaza were every bit as innocent as the slain of Bourbon Street. They were every bit as ‘full of life’. Yet their extermination was downplayed. In some cases it was outright cheered. That Islamist assault was a ‘day of celebration’, some said. ‘Glory to our martyrs’, said student agitators days after those ‘martyrs’ raped and murdered hundreds of revellers who were indistinguishable, in their spirit and their liberty, from the revellers of New Orleans.

The case was made, whether implicitly or explicitly, that the Nova partygoers weren’t all that innocent. They were citizens of a ‘settler-colonial’ regime. They were inhabitants of the ‘Zionist entity’. They had the gall to live free, untroubled lives in a ‘genocidal state’. If it turns out that the butcher of Bourbon Street thought similarly – that no one in America is truly innocent because America commits ‘war crimes’ and sponsors Israel’s ‘genocide’ – what will we say? What can we say? After all, our elites have fully embraced the poisonous ideology of collective guilt and punishment, where if you live in a state that does ‘bad’ things, then you have no right to be surprised if Islamist vengeance comes your way.

No, this is not to say the suspect in the New Year’s Day massacre was directly inspired by the past year’s depraved cries of ‘Bring the intifada home’. The bored rich kids of the West who unforgivably made light of the Islamist slaughter in Israel are not responsible for what that man allegedly did. But we do need to talk about the creepy empathy for the Islamist ideology that has spread like a pox through our institutions. For years, the West failed to take seriously the threat posed by the Islamist menace. Even as hundreds were massacred by Islamists in Britain, France, Germany, Spain and elsewhere, we said ‘Don’t look back in anger’, don’t get too het up, don’t say or do anything that might stir up ‘Islamophobia’. Over the past year, this lethal insouciance in the face of the Islamist derangement morphed into something even worse: active sympathy for Islamism. They call it ‘intifada’ but we all know what they mean: the killing of citizens by Islamist ideologues with a grievance. Like what happened on Bourbon Street.

The attack on New Orleans was an attack on America itself. On its young, its workers, its openness, its freedoms. We should mourn the victims and then confront, head-on, the unsettling rapport with such neo-fascism that has bubbled up in our very own societies in recent years.

Activists Screaming For Someone, Anyone, To Stop Gaza Genocide Also Think Hamas Winning (PreOccupied Territory)

Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.

Check out their Facebook and Substack pages.

London, January 2 - Supporters of the Palestinian cause who take fabricated reports of Israel targeting innocents at face value, resulting in what they claim to be hundreds of thousands of deaths, and who therefore demand that the international community act to aid the helpless Palestinians, simultaneously believe that the Palestinian militant group fighting against Israel kills Israeli soldiers at will and has sent them packing not just from battlefield after battlefield in Gaza, but from Israel itself.

"Stop the Genocide!" and "Victory is imminent from the River to the Sea!" cries emerge concurrently from the same quarters the world over, as activists struggle to decide on which message will resonate with the target audience: Hamas prowess or Palestinian victimhood. They therefore proclaim the slogans of both axioms.

The cognitive dissonance necessary to engage in both rhetorical avenues appears not to trouble those who engage in both lines of argument at the same time, observers say. "Hamas is this powerful military force that can strike the deepest fear in Zionist soldiers," noted journalist Hoyt Petard. "At the same time, every single Gazan is a journalist doctor humanitarian aid worker pregnant child woman. So who's killing all the Zionists?"

"What are the Zionists fleeing from?" wondered Dilly Hussein, a keyboard activist. "We have all these credible reports of Israelis crowding the airports to leave because of October 7 and rocket attacks and the Resistance, but of course there are no acts of violence by Palestinians, who are totally innocent and blameless. Do the glorious rockets exist? Only if you think you're talking to people who can either be intimidated or already want to back a strong horse. Otherwise, the rockets are either a desperate response to oppression which somehow succeed in striking enough terror into Jews to make large number of them level, but not enough terror to get them to stop the genocide."

A puzzled Hussein appeared stunned into silence by a reporter's suggestion that mighty Hamas do something to protect Gazans from the Israeli onslaught, the death toll from which ranges from somewhere around 40,000 - about half of them Hamas or affiliated men, according to IDF sources - to in the hundreds of thousands, as some activists seem to want.

After several moments, Hussein responded. "Since when is it an elected government's responsibility to provide for and protect its people?" he demanded. "What universe do you even live in that that's an expectation?"

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Yes, we know that he praised October 7. Yes, he's compared Israel to Nazis and teaches that comparison to his students. Yes, he espouses the discredited and antisemitic Khazar theory that Jews aren't really Jews.

But that's when Joseph Massad is speaking to a Western audience and he doesn't want to look like a Jew-hater in public. He always skated right up to the line where he could claim that he was only talking about Zionists or something.

But in an interview last March with a Pakistani podcaster, Massad drops any pretense.

He starts off by asserting lots of things that are simply not true, which is a pattern we've seen from him before.

Zionism of course begins perhaps in its earliest manifestations in the Crusades of the 11th century. After all it was the Crusades who began to also refer to Palestine as the holy land and the idea at the time was that uh you know and the major sort of papal announcement of the Crusades, the idea was that Palestine had to be cleansed of um its uh both Muslim and non-Catholic occupiers.

This is not only false but insane. Massad is defining Zionism as "ethnically cleansing Palestine" so therefore the Crusaders, who murdered tens of thousands of Jews, must have been Zionists.

Saying that the Crusaders coined the term "the Holy Land" is also wrong. The Vulgate Book of Wisdom (1st century BCE or CE) explicitly calls the Land of Israel "terra sanctae," the Holy Land. At the time it was not a typically Hebrew phrase which would call it "the Promised Land."

The holiness of the land was never in question for Jews, though - there are many laws from the Torah and elucidated in the Talmud that only apply within the borders of the Promised Land, the reason being precisely because of its sanctity.

Massad is an ignoramus whose view of history is colored exclusively by his hate for Jews.

He goes on:

Remember Judaism had been a missionary religion since its inception and continued to be so through another of the early part of the 11th 12th and 13th centuries and in that sense the idea that European Jews are somehow direct descendants of the ancient Hebrews is of course a bogus claim...

The Talmud quotes a Baraita (2nd-3rd centuries CE) that explicitly says to discourage converts to Judaism. The rabbis are instructed to tell the would-be convert, "What did you see that motivated you to come to convert? Don’t you know that the Jewish people at the present time are anguished, suppressed, despised, and harassed, and hardships are frequently visited upon them? "

Does this sound like missionary religion to you?

Again, in his zeal to demonize Jews, Massad makes up history.

What is special here about Zionism is not only the invention of Ancient Israel and the invention of Jews as descendants of the Ancient Hebrews – it is almost like a Hitlerian project to speak of Jews genetically in this fashion. It only becomes fashionable, of course, in the 19th century, with the rise of racial science and the biological sciences.

So tracing your origins is now "Hitlerian?"

How about the Muslims who use the title "Sayyed" to indicate that they are direct descendants of Mohammed - are they Hitlerian too? Or the many Palestinians who proudly trace their origins to the Arabian Peninsula, preferably Mecca and Medina, but many from Yemen, and who keep track of all their families and tribes - are they "Hitlerian"?

Or is that term only to be used for the people who were the victims of Hitler, not the people who want to continue Hitler's goal of exterminating the Jews?

Massad is no scholar. He is a professor who uses the trappings of scholarship to promote antisemitic propaganda.

(h/t MEMRI)

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Hezbollah used to publicly announce and celebrate all of its "martyrs." As of September 23, it said that it had lost 513 members, and as of that point the vast majority of deaths in Lebanon had been terrorist group members.

Since then, when Israel escalated its air and then limited ground campaign against Hezbollah, the group stopped admitting any deaths besides prominent leaders. Instead, it adopted the Hamas model of pushing a narrative of Israel killing nobody but civilians.

Lebanon has announced 3,402 deaths between September 15 and the ceasefire on November 27. How many of those were terrorists?

L'Orient le Jour attempted to find out.

A Syrian researcher with the nom de plume of Qalaat al-Mudiq has been scouring Facebook to count the number of funerals held in southern Lebanon for Hezbollah fighters. So far, they count 1,742 Hezbollah members killed in that timeframe plus 80 members of other militant groups. However, they note that this is a conservative estimate:

"Fighters whose affiliation with Hezbollah was unclear were excluded, making this a conservative estimate,” they explained.

They added, “The analysis indicates that Hezbollah has lost an average of nearly 20 fighters per day since Sept. 23, particularly Syrian war veterans and young reservists. The actual number is likely higher, exceeding 30 per day based on our monitoring, but we lacked the resources to verify all cases.”

If the number is 31 per day for those 65 days, then at least 2,015 terrorists were killed - about a 1.4 to 1 ratio of terrorists to civilians.

Lebanon says that 1,040 women and children were killed in that time period.

One other detail to note from the article is how many foreign forces allied to Hezbollah have been killed:

Although not exhaustive, L’Orient-Le Jour identified several dozen foreign combatants likely killed in Lebanon, despite Hezbollah's denial of deploying external forces.

Among them are five Yemeni fighters affiliated with Ansar Allah, the official name of the Houthi rebels, six Syrians associated with Hezbollah in Syria and Islamic jihad. Additionally, two Iraqis from Kata'ib Hezbollah, one Iranian from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and one Saudi member of the Saudi branch of Hezbollah have been documented. Various Palestinian factions present in Lebanon have also suffered losses.

At the moment, it appears that the ratio of militants to civilians killed exceeds 1.4 to 1; if you include all deaths since October 7 in Lebanon the ratio is closer to 1.9 to 1.

These numbers aren't perfect. A few dozen have been killed since the ceasefire, the total militant count includes about 40 Hezbollah members killed in Syria, and bodies are still being found in the rubble. But it seems pretty clear that this is an exceptional result for urban warfare and that Israel's warnings to civilians to leave areas saved thousands of lives that could have been lost if any other army was fighting under similar circumstances.

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The spokesman for Islamic Jihad's Al Quds Brigades attacked the families of hostages today by claiming, that one hostage who would have been released in the first round of a deal attempted suicide.

The statement said " the medical team succeeded in saving the prisoner's life after he attempted suicide due to his psychological state that deteriorated as a result of the Netanyahu government's decision, which set new conditions that led to the failure and delay of negotiations for his release."

The transparent lie is meant to cause pain to the suffering families of hostages and to use them to protest against the Israeli government, ultimately to allow a deal that will keep the terrorists in charge of Gaza.

The lie becomes obvious when we look at previous claims by Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

In a strikingly similar announcement in May, Hamas said “We rescued, a few days ago, in the final moments, one of the enemy's prisoners after he attempted suicide in his place of captivity. We hold the enemy and (Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin) Netanyahu personally responsible for the deteriorating physical and mental health of some of the enemy's prisoners.”

In July, Islamic Jihad said, "Some enemy prisoners have attempted suicide as a result of the extreme frustration they are feeling due to their government's neglect of their cause." They also claimed that they started treating the prisoners the same as Israel treats their prisoners, resulting in the suicide attempts.

In all the cases the reasons given for the supposed suicide attempts happens to align with the political goals of the terror groups. Of course, they show no evidence that any of it is true.

Besides their cruelty, this is the definition of terrorism - they intend to terrorize the Israeli civilian population, desperate for any crumb of news about the hostages, for political ends.

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"Jewish Voice for Peace" absurdly claims celebrating the military victory of the Hasmoneans is a Zionist invention

One would think that the Jewish Voice for Peace Rabbinical Council would know at least a little bit about Judaism. Unfortunately, they are nearly as ignorant as the JVP members who celebrate Havdalah while the sun is out and say kaddish for dead terrorists.

For the last day of Chanukah, JVP's rabbis engage in a little revisionism of two millennia of rabbinic writings.

Mai Hanukkah – “What is Hanukkah?” asked the rabbis of the Talmud. In answer to their own rhetorical question, they chose not to tell the story of the Maccabean victory over the Seleucid empire in 160 BCE. Rather, they offered the famous story of the rededication of the Temple and the miracle of the oil that burned for eight days. For the rabbis, the oil of the menorah symbolized hope and faith in the face of overwhelming odds, not the spoils of war.

The phrase "Mai Chanukah" in the Talmud (Shabbat 21b) comes after a discussion of the mitzvah of lighting the menorah - including the famous argument between Beit Hillel and Beit Shammai on the number of candles to be lit each night. It is not the introduction to the topic. Which means that the phrase "Mai Chanukah" is asking what is the reason for the lighting of the candles, not what Chanukah is about.

The answer mentioning the cruse of oil also notes the military victory: "When the Hasmonean monarchy overcame them and emerged victorious over them, they searched and found only one cruse of oil..."

But JVP then says that celebrating the military victory is a Zionist invention that Jews didn't consider before the 19th century.

This inspiring sacred message of Hanukkah lasted centuries, until it was subverted and overturned by political Zionism.

Tragically, the Zionist movement chose to put its faith in human power and national territorial sovereignty, seeking to create a “Third Jewish Commonwealth” in historic Palestine. In so doing, it forged a wholly new Jewish identity: an internalization and inversion of European antisemitic themes of Jewish feebleness. This ideal prioritized physical strength and militarism, and was often exemplified by the revival of the Maccabees as Jewish heroes, forsaking the miracle of the oil for a focus on violent militarism.

Al Hanissim in 1642 siddur

Wow. The authors of the Al Hanissim prayer (found in prayerbooks from the 9th century) who spelled out the miracles of Chanukah didn't know that. The prayer thanks God for the military victory - and doesn't mention the miracle of the oil at all!

Zionists!

Similarly, Maimonides (Rambam) in his Mishneh Torah (12th century) discusses the military victory before the miracle of the oil. (The 17th century Pri Chadash explains that, according to the Rambam, the first day of the celebration was instituted in appreciation of the military victories, and the remaining days to commemorate the miracle of the oil. This is one of hundreds of answers to the age-old question of why Chanukah is eight days long, not seven.)

"HaNeirot Halalu" from a
1684 prayerbook

The song sung during the lighting of the candles, HaNeitor Halalu, which is centuries old, also calls out the military victory.

It is true that early Zionists emphasized the military victory and downplayed the miracle of the oil. That was a fairly temporary phenomenon. But the JVP "rabbis" are truly the modern Hellenists, doing everything they can to replace Jewish concepts like celebrating God's help in a military victory of the "few against the many" with their own false gods of anti-Zionism and the pretense of caring about human rights.

And to justify their Jewishly indefensible position, they have no problem twisting and rewriting 2,000 years of Jewish history.

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01/01 Links Pt2: Melanie Phillips: The truth of the Palestinian cause; The Cautionary Tale of Jimmy Carter; Ireland’s Top Catholic Cleric Attacks Israel for Gaza War in New Year’s Message

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: The truth of the Palestinian cause

The only proper response is to call out these Palestinian lies. But instead of regarding them as a collective psychopathology, politicians and media stoke the flames of Jew-hatred by themselves parroting the propaganda about Israel behaving unconscionably.

Left-wing governments that ideologically support the Palestinian cause and also kowtow to Muslim constituencies in which Jew-hatred is rife, shockingly recycle the lies about Israel. The worst offenders have been the governments in Britain, Australia and Canada. No surprise, therefore, that Jew-hatred in those countries is now so brazen, pervasive and extreme.

Alas, too many Jews are also part of this madness. They support the Palestinian Arab cause out of a misplaced sense of fairness, a craving for fashionable approval or extreme ignorance about Jewish and Middle East history. So instead of calling out genocidal acts and fabricated claims of Palestinian Arabs, these co-called “moderate” Jews redouble support for a “two-state solution” as a response to exterminatory aggression.

Jew-hatred has not only been normalised. It’s been rebranded as social justice because support for Palestinianism, which seeks to write the Jews out of their country, their history, and the world, is what now passes for a moral sense among swathes of the public, the entire intelligentsia and even — heaven help us — many Jews.

Let’s not hear any protests that you were once a member of Habonim or have a holiday home in Herzliya or have had to unfriend former chums on Facebook because they’ve callously ignored the Israeli hostages. If you support the Palestinian Arab cause today, you are facilitating deranged and murderous Jew-hatred. Own it.

What Does “Globalize the Intifada” Mean and How Can it Lead to Targeting Jews with Violence?

Since Hamas’ massacres against Israelis on October 7 and Israel’s following attempts to free hostages and eliminate the threat posed by Hamas, Jewish individuals, synagogues, and cultural institutions have been the target of violence in the name of protests against Israel. These are in addition to anti-Israel protesters targeting corporations that do business with Israel.

A social media post from the anti-Israel group Within Our Lifetime, a self-described Palestinian-led community organization, was headlined with the phrase “Globalize the Intifada” and had examples of Israeli and U.S. companies and transit hubs, the locations included The New York Times, Penn Station, Grand Central Station, the BlackRock investment firm, and the Israeli tech company Check Point.

“Each of the locations on this map reflects the location of an office of an enemy of both the Palestinian people and colonized people all over the world. Today and beyond, these locations will be sites for popular mobilization in defense of our people,” the group wrote.

“May this map serve as a call for every struggle to act in their own interest,” the group said in its call to action. “As we do so, we uplift one another’s struggles and free Palestine from the river to the sea.”

Everything you need to know about this antisemitic term.

AJC CEO Ted Deutch said: “This is not promoting peace. This is an incitement to violence against Jews and it must be taken seriously.”

That map was one of several posted by the group, which has supported the October 7 Hamas massacre as “whatever means necessary it takes” to achieve Palestinian liberation and has held numerous street protests denouncing Israel.

Other posts displayed additional maps with pins showing the locations of several Jewish and Jewish-led organizations.

If the New York mapping strategy feels familiar, it should.

In June 2022, an anti-Israel campaign dubbed the “Boston Mapping Project.” claiming to show the ties between various Massachusetts institutions and “support for the colonization of Palestine,” raised alarms over its dangerous targeting of the Jewish community. The map put a target on the backs of Jews who were already feeling highly concerned about their safety.

The Massachusetts map, published by anonymous supporters of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, was promoted by anti-Israel groups such as Boston BDS and Massachusetts Peace Action

Jesus was Palestinian? That really would be a miracle

Grylls subsequently removed the reference to Mary being Palestinian and clarified his position, saying she was “clearly Jewish”. So why call her Palestinian in the first place?

After more than a year of pro-Palestinians telling Jews that their historical and biblical links to Israel were irrelevant (in an attempt to delegitimise the Jewish state) it turns out that historical and biblical links really are important, so long as they don’t involve Jews. Now Jesus is Palestinian, the theory goes, it’s completely fine to argue that “some” of those who inhabited the region 2,000 years ago do have a claim on the land after all. Placards at marches read “Jesus is Palestinian” or “Jesus, the most famous Palestinian”.

There is, of course, a deeper precedent for this, in that Jesus’ Jewishness has been played down since the third century, when Christianity proliferated into Roman society. Then, even more so when his death became an excuse for anti-Semitism in the Middle Ages. In that sense, this attempt to politicise him is nothing new. There was also a certain German group you may have heard of from the 1930s and 40s who were very keen to eliminate any link between Jesus and his Jewish identity. It’s in this long, troubled context that we should see the potential harm this idea possesses.

There have been nativity scenes with the baby Jesus wrapped in a Palestinian keffiyeh across UK and US towns recently, following the “Nativity in the rubble” concept that began in Bethlehem, along with assertions that he was born in “occupied Palestine”. This concept hit the jackpot when it appeared in the Vatican in a scene blessed by Pope Francis himself (although it was later removed following criticism that it portrayed Palestinians uniquely as the victims).

If you leave aside the theological and historical absurdity – equating a Jewish man from 2000 years ago with a political identity that didn’t exist – this is the nub of the problem. It promotes the idea that Jews are systematic baby killers. This is the sort of thing that is screamed at elderly people on the streets of London, Glasgow and Brighton. That’s not something Jesus would have approved of. He was Jewish, after all.

Disclaimer: the views expressed here are solely those of the author, weekly Judean Rose columnist Varda Meyers Epstein.

Jimmy Carter died, but few Jews mourn him. Carter’s animus toward the Jewish people is by now, legendary. Elder of Ziyon offered an overview Carter’s overt Jew-hatred in Jimmy Carter, antisemite. Saving the worst for last, Elder detailed Jimmy Carter’s plea for leniency for Martin Bartesch, a former SS guard at the Mauthausen work camp during WWII:

The single most damning example of Carter's antisemitism comes from an incident in 1987.

Neal Sher was the head of the Office of Special Investigations, the Justice Department’s Nazi prosecution unit. They had iron-clad evidence that a Chicago resident, Martin Bartesch, a member of the SS Death’s Head Division at the Mauthausen concentration camp, was a war criminal and a murderer.

Bartesch's family started a huge campaign against the OSI, writing letters to members of Congress and other prominent people asking for help. Most politicians contacted the OSI to find out the details, OSI provided them with evidence of his guilt, and they would drop the matter.

But, Sher says, not Jimmy Carter.

During a 2007 Israel National Radio interview, Neal Sher went into some detail about a letter he received from Carter (emphasis added):

“In 1987, Carter had been out of office for seven years or so,” Sher recalled. “It was a very active period for my office. We had just barred Kurt Waldheim – he was then president of Austria and former head of the United Nations – from entering the U.S. because of his Nazi past and his involvement in the persecution of civilians during the war. We had just deported an Estonian Nazi Commandant back to the Soviet Union after a bruising battle after which we were attacked by Reagan White House Communications Director Patrick Buchanan.

“Also around that time, in the spring of 1987, we deported a series of SS guards from concentration camps, whose names nobody would know. One such character we sent back to Austria was a man named Martin Bartesch.

“We had an extraordinary piece of evidence against him – a book that was kept by the SS and captured by the American armed forces when they liberated Mauthausen,” Sher said. “We called it the death book. It was a roster that the Germans required them to keep that identified SS guards as they extended weapons to murder the inmates and prisoners.

“We kicked him out and he went back to Austria. In the meantime, his family – he had adult kids – went on a campaign, also supported by his church, to try to get special treatment. In so doing they attacked the activities of our office and me personally. They claimed we used phony evidence from the Soviet Union – which was nonsense. They claimed he was a young man of only 17 or 18 when he joined the Nazi forces, asking for some sympathetic treatment and defense from our office, which they claimed was just after vengeance.”

The family approached several members of Congress. “The congressmen would, very understandably, forward their claims over to our office and when they learned the facts they would invariably drop the case,” Sher recalled.

“One day, in the fall of ’87, my secretary walks in and gives me a letter with a Georgia return address reading ‘Jimmy Carter.’ I assumed it was a prank from some old college buddies, but it wasn’t. It was the original copy of the letter Bartesch’s daughter sent to Carter, after Bartesch had already been deported.

“In the letter, she claimed we were un-American, only after vengeance, and persecuting a man for what he did when he was only 17 and 18 years old.

“I couldn’t help thinking of my own father who returned home with shrapnel wounds after he joined the U.S. Army as a teenager to fight the Nazis and hit the beaches at Normandy at that same age on D-day.

“On the upper corner of the letter was a note signed by Jimmy Carter saying that in cases such as this, he wanted ‘special consideration for the family for humanitarian reasons.’

“I didn’t respond to the letter – the case was already over and he was out of the country – but it always stuck in my craw. A former president who didn’t do what I would expect him to do - with a full staff at his disposal – to find out the facts before he took up the side of this person. But I wasn’t going to pick a fight with a former president. We had enough on our plate.”

“It always bothered me, but I didn’t go public with it until recently, when he wrote this book [Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid V.E.] and let it spill out where his sentiments really lie,” Sher said. “Here was Jimmy Carter jumping in on behalf of someone who did not deserve in any way, shape or form special consideration. And the things he has now said about the Jewish lobby really exposes where his heart really lies.”

As Sher states, the family of Martin Bartesch, launched a letter-writing campaign on his behalf. At that time, in 1987, the Washington Post saw fit to print Heinz Bartesch’s defense of his Nazi father:

'FALSE ALLEGATIONS' ABOUT MARTIN BARTESCH

Over the past several weeks The Post has carried the story of the Office of Special Investigations' prosecution of my father, Martin Bartesch. The misquotes and false allegations have been so great that what most Americans now know is a gross distortion of the truth and equals the disinformation campaigns of the KGB. Some of the falsehoods that have appeared in print:

It is alleged that Martin Bartesch lied on his immigration form. He didn't lie -- his immigration form clearly states his service in the S.S. in 1943-45. He did serve in the Prinz Eugene division. His only oversight was to not list his duty as guard at Mauthausen for three weeks. A questionable oversight, not a lie.

It is alleged that my father fled the country to avoid prosecution. He didn't flee but left as a free man with a valid U.S. passport, with full knowledge and consent from the government. He left willfully to avoid financial ruin from a trial which, under the Holtzman Amendment, would have been grossly unfair and therefore impossible to win.

It is alleged that he is accused of murder. As a guard, his duty was to shoot at escaping prisoners. He shot an escaping convicted felon. The Wehrmacht penal code clearly stated that failure to perform duties would result in execution. This is exactly the command that the American GIs had who did shoot and did kill escaping Japanese from our internment camps.

It is alleged that my father assisted in the persecution of the Jews. His only guard duties before fighting on the Russian front were at labor camps that contained prisoners of war, resistance fighters and convicted felons. It is a known fact that the subcamps where my father was stationed had very few Jews and no women and children. Most of the deaths at Mauthausen occurred at the end of the war, long after my father left in October 1943.

Martin Bartesch committed no war crimes -- the OSI knows this. The complaint against him never even mentioned any war crimes. Again, his only "crime" was a questionable immigration infraction.

These are not all, but certainly the biggest of the falsehoods presented in my father's case. What the OSI did to my father was unfair, cruel, immoral and very un-American. It is appalling that the media acted as a free public relations vehicle for the OSI to spread its lies. HEINZ H. BARTESCH Corte Madera, Calif.

Was Heinz Bartesch being honest when he claimed that Martin Bartesch didn’t lie on his immigration form—that he simply forgot to write that he was a guard at Mauthausen? Put simply: no. When Bartesch was deposed in 1986, he refused to answer questions about what he did during the war pleading the Fifth on the grounds that he feared foreign prosecution. This suggests that Bartesch intentionally omitted the same key information on his immigration form.

Bartesch wasn’t talking then. He sure wasn’t going to talk in 1986, when the US government—with darned good reason—was after him.

At that point, the US government took Bartesch to court, asking that he be compelled to provide answers to their questions. The court did so, noting that the deposition and Bartesch’s responses would be sealed to protect him from prosecution outside of the US.

From United States v. Bartesch (1986) (emphasis added):

*428 I. FACTS

The government filed this denaturalization action against the defendant Martin Bartesch on April 7, 1986. The government alleges that the defendant misrepresented his activities during World War II when he applied for and obtained immigration to, and citizenship in, the United States. As an alternative ground for denaturalization, the government alleges that the defendant acquiesced and personally assisted in persecution and conduct contrary to civilization and human decency on behalf of Nazi Germany during wartime. The wartime activities occurred during defendant's service as a concentration camp guard in the Totenkopf-Sturmbann (Death's Head Battalion) at the Mauthausen concentration camp system in Austria.

During his deposition conducted on June 2 and 3, 1986, defendant, on advice of counsel, asserted a Fifth Amendment privilege and refused to answer questions concerning his whereabouts and activities between July 1, 1943 and August 25, 1945. In addition, he refused to answer questions regarding his efforts to immigrate and obtain United States citizenship. Defense counsel stated that the invocation of the Fifth Amendment was not based on the possibility of prosecution in the United States, but rather on the possibility of prosecution in West Germany, Austria, or Romania.

Relying on his Fifth Amendment privilege, defendant refused to answer questions such as: (1) whether (during the period between July 1, 1943 and August 25, 1945) he had ever been at Mauthausen or any concentration camp; (2) whether he belonged to a Totenkopf-Sturmbann; or (3) whether he performed military service. With respect to his immigration and naturalization, defendant refused to answer whether he intentionally had provided false information to United States officials and whether sworn immigration documents placing him in the SS combat division "Prinz Eugen" were correct. These questions are some examples of the questions which defendant refused to answer in his deposition.

Defendant did answer "no" to the following questions: (1) whether he had ever mistreated, shot, or killed a prisoner; (2) fired a weapon; (3) touched a prisoner; and (4) was ever present at a hanging. Defendant's answer to the complaint, filed on June 13, 1986, took a similar approach. In all, defendant invoked the Fifth Amendment in response to 21 paragraphs of the complaint (paragraphs 7, 9-11, 14-15, 18, 22, 36, 42, 48, 53, 55-58, 65, 70, 75-76, 79).

Also among the falsehoods in the letter the Washington Post saw fit to print, Heinz Bartesch claimed that his father had nothing to do with the “persecution of the Jews.” Furthermore, wrote Heinz, there were “very few Jews” at places like Mauthausen. This too, is a lie.

From Yad Vashem (emphases added):

In May 1944, Mauthausen admitted large transports of Jews from Auschwitz. The number of Jews who died in Mauthausen that year topped 3,000. Many groups of Poles also arrived in Mauthausen in 1944, after the Warsaw Polish Uprising was suppressed, in October 1944. Many Polish students and underground members were killed soon after they arrived.

Almost 25,000 new prisoners came to Mauthausen in 1945, including a stream of Jewish prisoners from Hungary who had been previously interned in camps along the Austrian-Hungarian border, and forced to build a line of fortifications. As the battlefront drew closer, their camps were emptied out and the prisoners were marched on foot to Mauthausen. Many died en route.

The Jews interned in Mauthausen were treated much worse than the other prisoners. They were forced to dig tunnels at the sub-camps for underground ammunition factories and were expected to do so at an unbearably fast pace. After a month or so, the Jewish workers were so physically broken and exhausted they could hardly move.

On May 3, 1945, a police unit from Vienna took over the camp's security. The next day, all work stopped at the camp and the SS officers left. On May 5, American troops arrived and liberated the camp. Altogether, 199,404 prisoners passed through Mauthausen. Approximately 119,000 of them, including 38,120 Jews, were killed or died from the harsh conditions, exhaustion, malnourishment and overwork. Furthermore, the sick, weak and "undesirable" prisoners were taken to the nearby Hartheim Castle to be exterminated in the gas chamber during the periods of August 1941 to October 1942 and April to December 1944.

A US soldier looks at the Mauthausen crematorium during the liberation of the camp. Austria, May 1945.

A US soldier with liberated prisoners of the Mauthausen concentration camp. Austria, May 1945.

A pile of corpses at the Russian Camp (Hospital Camp) section of the Mauthausen concentration camp after liberation. Mauthausen, Austria, May 5-15, 1945.

A view of the quarry at the Mauthausen concentration camp, where prisoners were subjected to forced labor. Austria, 1938-1945.

So many lies from Heinz. Heinz wrote that “Martin Bartesch committed no war crimes -- the OSI knows this. The complaint against him never even mentioned any war crimes. Again, his only "crime" was a questionable immigration infraction.”

Again, false. As Neal Sher told Israel National Radio, the OSI had the murder book, the “roster that the Germans required them to keep that identified SS guards as they extended weapons to murder the inmates and prisoners.” That murder book identified Martin Bartesch as having shot and killed a French Jew.

From the NY Times (emphasis added):

One piece of evidence gathered against Mr. Bartesch by the Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations was the Mauthausen ''Unnatural Death Book,'' a log kept from October 1942 to April 1945 of prisoner deaths.

Entry No. 300 shows that on Oct. 20, 1943, a French Jew named Max Ochshorn was shot to death at the main camp of Mauthausen by Pvt. Martin Bartesch of the SS, who was then 17.

There is much more to say about Martin Bartesch, for instance that he continued to collect social security after he was stripped of his citizenship and deported for a further two years until he died. (I hope it was painful.) Bartesch did evil and lied about it to get off scot-free. His family was complicit in covering up his crimes against humanity, because yes. Jews are human.

Martin Bartesch after the war

Which leads us back to Jimmeh and his little note in the upper corner of a letter from SS-Sturmmann Martin Bartesch’s daughter, asking for clemency for her father. The letter, similar to that of her brother Heinz, was one filled with lies. As Neal Sher related, without any fact-finding process whatsoever, the dead president decided to let the Nazi (unknown to Carter, already deported) off the hook. Why?

Because of “cases like this.” (emphasis added):

To director O.S.I.

I hope that in cases like this that special consideration can be given to affected families for humanitarian reasons.
Jimmy Carter

Now what are we to think when the “case like this” is, in fact, one in which someone killed a Jew (and probably more) and covered it up? In light of the now-dead president’s long history of, for example, cozying up to Jew-hating terrorists like Haniyeh and preaching against Jews in church, there can be only one conclusion.

A bad bad man and there’s no reason to sugarcoat it. pic.twitter.com/XpAyIMgntB
— Hillel Fuld (@HilzFuld) December 30, 2024

From the perspective of Jimmy Carter the antisemite, in the case where the murder victim is Jewish, the perpetrator (and his family!) deserve special consideration for “humanitarian reasons.”

That sure sounds a lot like “Final Solution.” Which makes sense: in the antisemitic world of Jimmy Carter—or rather the one he just left—liquidating the Jews is something people do for “humanitarian reasons,” i.e.; to benefit humanity. Which is why many of us Jews are not sorry Jimmeh has, in the inimitable words of Monty Python, joined the bleedin' choir invisible.

I don’t wonder what awaits—I hope he loves a good fire.

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"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

01/01 Links Pt1: Happy New Year; The new scramble for the Middle East; 10 Killed, Two Israelis wounded in ISIS-affiliated terror attack in New Orleans

From Ian:

Seth Frantzman: 2025 could see a wave of optimism spread across the Middle East

Last year began in the Middle East under the dark clouds of the Hamas massacre that had occurred in October 2023, and the resulting war in Gaza. New Year’s Day 2024 started with a large barrage of Hamas rockets being fired just after midnight – timed to try to show Israel that it could not win the war.

Hamas is still trying to fire rockets into Israel, a year on. On December 28 it fired two long-range rockets from northern Gaza, setting off alarms across communities between Jerusalem and Gaza.

These few rockets were likely from a stock of that have been sitting around since October 2023, buried and ready to be fired. Hamas has had a hard time rebuilding its rocket arsenal since. However, the terrorist group continues to hold 100 hostages.

The continuing war in Gaza is, of course, not the only thing taking place in the Middle East. The Iranian-backed Houthis in Yemen continue to attack both Israel and shipping in the Red Sea. Hezbollah is still making trouble in Lebanon.

But there are bright spots. The Assad regime in Syria was overthrown on December 8. It melted away and seemed to fall apart within a few days, almost as if it had never existed.

This was a strange way for the regime to collapse and is a reminder that authoritarian structures rot from the inside and can appear stronger than they really are. The Assad regime survived with backing from Russia and Iran. It was propped up with the help of Iranian-backed militias in Iraq. However, it was a rotting door and all that had to be done to destroy it was to kick it in.

The fall of the Assad regime could bring some hope to the region. Perhaps things can change. Perhaps Hamas might collapse as well, with the right sort of decisive action. Iran is weakened by the decline of Assad and other problems it faces economically.

The new scramble for the Middle East

In the summer of 2023, Syria and the wider Middle East seemed more stable than at any point in recent memory. It was telling that, in May of that year, the Arab League, a regional organisation of Arab states, welcomed Bashar al-Assad’s war-torn Syria back into the fold after over a decade of isolation. Four months later, US national security adviser Jake Sullivan memorably declared that the Middle East ‘is quieter today than it has been in two decades’.

Fast forward to the end of this year, and Sullivan’s judgement looks more than a little hasty. The long-standing shadow war between Israel and Iran has since erupted into open conflict, with Israel carrying out high-profile assassinations in Damascus, Tehran and Beirut, and Iran launching massive missile and drone barrages at Israel on at least two occasions. And right at the end of this year, Assad’s brutal, yet seemingly stable, Syrian regime fell to a militia headed up by an ex-member of al-Qaeda. As we head into 2025, the Middle East has rarely sounded quite as noisy as it does right now.

The conflict between Israel and Iran and the fall of Assad are directly related. On the eve of Hamas’s barbaric attack on Israel on 7 October 2023, Iran was in a position of relative strength. Through political alliances and a network of militias known as the ‘axis of resistance’ (including Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen and assorted Shia groups in Iraq) it exerted considerable power throughout the region. And nowhere more so than in Syria, where Iranian proxies, with help from Russia, were effectively propping up Assad’s dictatorship.

Hamas’s attack on Israel changed everything. It ignited a conflict that has ultimately destroyed the balance of power in the region. Over the past 15 months, Israel has decimated Iran’s militias. It has crushed Hamas in Gaza, crippled Hezbollah in Lebanon and carried out air strikes and assassinations in Iraq and even Iran itself. The Israeli pounding of Iran’s proxy forces has not only impacted Tehran – it has also undermined those dependent on Iranian support for their very survival, such as Assad’s Syrian regime.

Hezbollah and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, aided and abetted by the Russian military, had shored up Assad’s government from the 2011 popular uprisings onwards. It’s now clear that without the military force of his backers, Assad’s authority rested on very little. Russia’s decision to move some of its forces from Syria to the frontlines of the war in Ukraine undermined Assad and increased his reliance on Iran. So when Hezbollah was forced to redeploy its Syrian forces to Lebanon in October this year, it effectively gave Assad’s opponents in the north-west province of Idlib the green light to launch an offensive. Which, after a two-month delay, they finally did on 26 November.

It took this several-thousand-strong militia, headed up by Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), just two weeks to take Damascus and topple Assad. In that time, these militants barely encountered any resistance from Assad’s regime as they drove their motorbikes and pick-up trucks through Syria. It’s now clear why. Without Iranian support, Assad had very little resistance to offer. HTS knew this, hence its decision to mount the insurgency after the withdrawal of Hezbollah. Israel’s pummelling of Iranian forces, proxy or otherwise, had unwittingly paved the way for an Islamist takeover of what is left of the Syrian state.