Much of the rhetoric against Palestinians being allowed to flee to Egypt is centered around the myth that Palestinians don't want to leave their homeland, and would refuse to cross over the border of "historic Palestine" to live outside it, as that would be tantamount to another "nakba."
But once upon a time, thousands of Palestinians from Gaza were relocated to the same Sinai desert that Egypt wants to ban them from today. Their leaders were silent and the world shrugged.
In the early 1970s, Israel tried to make Gaza into a livable and secure place. One of its major activities was to build, widen and pave roads inside crowded camps. This necessarily demolished housing where these roads were, so Israel built housing projects for Gazans to move to. (Yes, Israel built them houses.)
One of them was in the Sinai, an area Israel conquered during the Six Day War. In the space that used to be a barracks for Canadian peacekeepers in the Sinai, Israel refurbished the building and thousands of Gazans moved into what became known as the "Canada Camp."
While some Arab nations and UNRWA complained about Israel widening the roads and the demolition of buildings to make that work, I don't see any contemporaneous accounts of the moving of these Gazans to the Canada Camp warning about expelling them from "Palestine."
After Israel's Camp David peace treaty giving back the Sinai, Egypt did not want these Palestinians to live in their land. They agreed with Israel on a plan to move them back to Gaza. Egypt was supposed to pay for them to buy land in Gaza to build new houses, but it never ponied up most of the promised money. The residents lived in limbo, without any benefits from Egypt but also no benefits from UNRWA, until the 1990s when Canada itself (and Kuwait) decided to pay for their relocation back to Gaza.
The point is that the Gaza border was not considered sacred to Palestinians when Israel controlled both sides of the border. The borders of "Historic Palestine" were not considered a red line.
And Egypt, then as now, professed its unending support for Palestinians while doing everything it could to get rid of them from its lands.
Coates never explicitly propounds Arafat’s message because he knows that Western scholarship, based on myriad archaeological findings and documentary evidence, buttresses the traditional take that, indeed, the Jews lived in and resided in the Land of Israel\Palestine between say 1200 BC and the 7th century AD. As to the Temple Mount, he fails to mention that archaeologists, Israeli and foreign, have never been allowed to dig beneath the Temple Mount esplanade, where they might find traces of Solomon’s First Temple and certainly would find remnants of the Herodian reconstruction of the Second Temple.
“What I was seeing here seemed about as credible as the history behind those Confederate memorials [in Columbia, South Carolina],” he writes confusingly, conflating ancient Jewish history and the story of the Confederate South.
Coates goes one further in this conflation. Indeed, he exploits his description of his tour of the City of David to vent his anti-Americanism, killing, as it were, two birds with one stone. He tells us of a plaque at the site bearing an American flag and the name of a formed US ambassador to Israel. The plaque reads: “The City of David brings Biblical Jerusalem to life at the very place where the kings and the prophets of the Bible walked. The spiritual bedrock of our values as a nation comes from Jerusalem. It is upon these ideals that the American republic was founded, and the unbreakable bond between the United States and Israel was formed.” And Alon Arad adds his two bits: “When you talk about white supremacy … this is why I think that the Evangelical church and the settlers [in the West Bank] found each other as a perfect match… Their mindset is the same.”
For Coates, “the settlers” are Israel – though most Israelis would dispute this - as the Evangelicals are America – though many, perhaps most, Americans would similarly contest this. It is perhaps worth recalling that the Afro-American campaign to achieve equal rights during the 1960s and 1970s would probably have gotten nowhere had it not been for massive support by northern whites, and some southern whites, including President Lyndon Johnson.
Near the end of the essay on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, Coates unsurprisingly relates the story of Deir Yassin. But he doesn’t play it completely straight. He tells us that the assault on that Palestinian village, just west of West Jerusalem on 9 April 1948, almost midway in the 1948 War, “was led by the Irgun and …. [the] Lehi,” two dissident Jewish groups. The implication of the “led” is, perhaps, that the main Jewish militia, the Haganah, also participated. In fact, the assault was carried out by 130 Irgun (IZL) and Lehi troopers; the Haganah supplied only one or two squads in the middle of the battle, and they played only an insignificant role – they ferried in ammunition and extricated Irgun and Lehi wounded. Secondly, at Deir Yassin there was a battle: Four of the dissident troopers were killed and a dozen or more were wounded. About 100 Arabs died in or just after the battle, most of them civilians; some of these, according to Haganah intelligence reports, were executed. (In his retelling, Coates adds that the Lehi defined the Jews as a “master race” and the Arabs as a “slave race.” I am not familiar with these quotes and they do not express mainstream Lehi ideology. The Lehi, curiously, was composed of right-wing breakaways from the Irgun and left-wing anti-imperialists.
But Coates’s ropes in Deir Yassin for an ulterior purpose. The ruins of Deir Yassin, he points out, are “just a short drive from Yad Vashem [Israel’s memorial to the Holocaust]. The proximity of the two sites staggered me.” Coates’s message is clear: How could the Jews, who suffered six million dead at the hands of the Nazis, massacre Arabs? And he comments: “I knew that some Zionists invoked the Holocaust to justify their repression of the Palestinians” – and “a memorial to genocide was built within walking distance of a massacre that had made that memorial possible.” Implicit here is the absurd equation favored by Arab propagandists: Holocaust=Nakba. But in the Holocaust, the German state, for no reasonable reason, simply murdered six million unarmed Jews; in the second, Israel and the Palestinians fought a war over territory they both claimed and the Israeli militias won and crushed Palestinian society (and, along the way, here and there massacred Arabs as here and there during that war Arabs massacres Jews). The uninformed reader, as most of Coates’s American readers are, will, of course, be seduced into accepting the equation.
But I learned two things from “The Message.” One, surprisingly, was about Theodor Herzl, Zionism’s prophet and, in effect, founder. Coates quotes a long passage (which I had never encountered) in which Herzl bemoaned the “disaster” of Africa, “which remains unresolved to this day, and whose profound tragedy only a Jew can comprehend. This is the African question. Just call to mind all those terrible episodes of the slave trade, of human beings who, merely because they were black, were stolen like cattle, taken prisoner, captured and sold … Once I have witnessed the redemption of the Jews … I wish also to assist in the redemption of the Africans.”
The second, and I was previously unfamiliar with Coates’s writings, was his way with words. His homily is emblazoned with catchy phrases. But the end result is a curse. Shakespeare’s Caliban had it right. There, in the “Tempest,” the colonized African tells us he learnt language from his oppressors, the white Anglos, but all that he could do with it was to curse.
Indeed, as the American literary and cultural critic Adam Kirsch points out in his On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice, a book published last August, no small amount of anti-Americanism lies behind the campus’s anti-Zionism: just as American support for Israel feeds anger at America, so anti-American attitudes feed anger at Israel, whose history is perceived to be like that which led to the near extermination of North America’s pre-Columbian peoples. No longer able to fight a real genocide that took place in the past, Israel’s violent critics can feel virtuous by fighting an imaginary one thought to be taking place in the present. “For many academics and activists,” Kirsch writes, “describing Israel as a settler-colonial state was a sufficient justification for the Hamas attack.”
Kirsch’s response to this is to maintain that Zionism was not settler colonialist, and in this he reflects the thinking of most defenders of Israel, who, whatever their criticisms of some of its actions may be, find the extreme charges made against it outrageous. Their arguments are many. The Jews, it is claimed, are as indigenous to Palestine as are its Arabs; Jewish settlers in Palestine never intended to replace its Arab population; every inch of Arab land acquired by them in Zionism’s formative stage, from 1882 to Israel’s establishment in 1948, was legally purchased from its owners; it was the Arabs who sought to eliminate Palestine’s Jews by starting the 1948 war, not the other way around; it is absurd to label as “colonists” the millions of Jews who settled in Israel as refugees from European anti-Semitism, from the Holocaust, from persecution in Arab lands, and from repression in the Soviet Union, etc. How can one compare an Israeli Jew to a French colon, a Boer farmer, or an American frontiersman?
Yet as true as these arguments may be, they miss the mark. It’s not only that they’re not inconsistent with Fayez Sayegh’s description of Zionism. It’s also that, from its inception, Zionism itself thought it was a colonizing movement and spoke of itself in such terms. The first Zionist farming settlements created in the 1880s and 90s called themselves “colonies” (kolonyot or moshavot in Hebrew) and their inhabitants were routinely referred to as “colonists.” When Baron Edmond de Rothschild took most of these settlements under his wing, they became known as moshavot ha-baron, “the baron’s colonies,” and when he eventually ceded control over them, the organization he ceded it to was the Jewish Colonization Association. Herzl, who was critical of Rothschild’s efforts, said of them in an address to the Fifth Zionist Congress in 1901, “Philanthropic colonization is a failure,” and then added, referring to his own plan, “National colonization will succeed.” Two years earlier, in addressing the Third Congress, he had said of the charter for Jewish settlement in Palestine that he hoped to obtain from the Turks: “Only when we shall be in possession of this charter, can we begin practical colonization on a large scale.”
Though Herzl’s plans fell through, Fayez Sayegh was right. Zionism was settler colonialism par excellence. It’s not wrong to think that it was. What is wrong is thinking that the type of colonialism that Sayegh ascribed to Zionism—that which has no “metropolitan home-base” but is “a home-base in its own right”—is automatically reprehensible.
Even more, it is wrong to think that such settler colonialism is a modern phenomenon when, on the contrary, it is one of the oldest in human history. It was such settler colonialism that brought the first homo sapiens out of Africa to Europe, where they gradually replaced the Neanderthals. It was such settler colonialism that led the speakers of proto-Indo-European, from which nearly all the languages of Europe and many of those of West Asia descend, to leave their ancient homeland north of the Black Sea and spread southward, eastward, and westward. It was such settler colonialism when the Aryans invaded India and created a Hindu civilization there; when the ancient Greeks founded their colonies all over the Mediterranean; when the Phoenicians built Carthage and the Arabs brought Islam to the Middle East and North Africa. Such and many similar developments took place over the ages because groups of people set out for new homes, sometimes killing those who lived there, sometime driving them out, sometimes conquering and dominating them, sometimes peacefully mingling with them and assimilating them.
As Wolfe accurately observed, a settler colonialist is not an emigrant. The emigrant leaves home in order to join a society and culture not his own and become part of it. The settler colonialist takes his society and culture with him and implants it in a new environment. Zionism’s message to the Jewish people was, “Let us stop being emigrants to the countries of the world and start being colonists in our own land!” That’s nothing to be ashamed of and we have already lost the intellectual battle when we think that it is. The question is not whether Zionism was settler colonialism; it’s what sort of settler colonialism it was. That’s what needs to be discussed and that’s where we need to take our stand.
After the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961, Hannah Arendt coined the phrase “the banality of evil” to describe how ordinary people can commit evil acts by “just following orders.” Her thesis was that evil can become banal when it’s systematic and unthinking—when ordinary people participate in it without care or choice.
Arendt was admonished for her book, and in my opinion, rightly so. One just has to look at the photos of well-dressed Germans savagely and gleefully beating Jews in the streets or the films shot by British and American soldiers upon liberating the camps to see the superficiality of her theory. The soldiers found corpses with eyes gouged out, bodies split open and remnants of barbaric experimentation. Even more telling, when soldiers took groups of “ordinary” Germans to see the camps for themselves, the expressions on their faces were often not of horror but of complacency.
Germans at the time considered themselves highly educated. But education doesn’t necessarily track with civilized behavior; Marxists also consider themselves highly educated. The fact is, the “good German” is a myth. The only good Germans were the ones who hid Jews and otherwise helped save Jews, not the ones “following orders.”
While this exhibition commemorates the worst genocide in history, it also helps to explain how contemporary “educated” leftists can refuse to understand what the word genocide means, even as they try to repeat it. And in Europe, there’s a good chance that the grandparents of today’s violent rioters were herding humans into gas chambers 80 years ago.
Some Germans took their own lives so they wouldn’t be forced to perform barbaric acts on innocents. Sadly, that’s one of the few civilized responses to evil. It’s a response we never hear about in the Islamic world. This set of enemies has been taught since birth to hate and kill Jews as they believe it’s religiously sanctioned.
Sophie Scholl, a student leader of the White Rose resistance group during the Holocaust, was also religiously motivated to do everything possible to alert the world to what the Nazis were doing. “Laws change,” she said. “Conscience doesn’t.”
Scholl faced the Nazi guillotine for telling the truth. She was only a few years older than Anne Frank. Anything that excuses barbarism in any of its forms merely mocks the righteousness of those who live their lives doing good deeds and bravely calling out evil. It’s not pleasant to think that gleeful savagery will no doubt return with every generation. But understanding this truth is the only way to move forward.
The Arabs and Democrats are only the most vocal of the many opposed to Trump’s initiative. Left-wing governments from Europe to Australia are lining up to pledge their allegiance to the fantasy of a Palestinian state, in the hopes of propitiating Muslim and Arab constituencies at home—whose understanding of “peace” means eliminating Israel. But even leaving the patent bad faith of those professing “peace” aside, moving Gazans out of Gaza is the only sane option 14 months after they initiated a campaign of rape, murder, and hostage-taking that brought their own house down on their heads.
After all, what’s more fanciful, moving 1.7 million people out of Gaza, a large portion of whom would simply be required to board air-conditioned buses or walk across the nearby Egypt border, or compelling them to live in a giant rubble field booby-trapped by an Iran-backed terrorist group? Estimates vary as to how long it would take to clear Gaza of explosives—half a decade or more? 15 years? 20? Are the Gazans supposed to live quietly in tents for the next decade or two while their homes are rebuilt next door? Where? In “temporary cities” made of Dwell Magazine-like rehabbed shipping containers built by graduates of Birmingham University? In Hamas’ tunnels?
Regardless, should the Palestinians remain in Gaza, they would invariably return to war no matter how much munificence the Gulf Arab states, the European Union, and perhaps even the U.S. might shower on the toxic sand-castle built over the past two decades with billions of Western aid money. Proof the Palestinians can’t and won’t keep the peace is that even after they won a reprieve when Trump’s Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff forced the Biden administration’s ceasefire on Jerusalem, Hamas and its NGO-supported human shields celebrated in the streets as if the Hamas space program had successfully landed Palestinians on Mars. Even as Israel released jailed murderers, the Gazans paraded Israeli hostages through the ruins of Gaza like trophies of war.
The Saudis, Qataris, Emiratis and others who now rend their clothes while lamenting the likely fate of their ant-farm death cult might well have counseled: Quiet brothers, you have been spared. Don’t bring attention to yourselves. For the winds of Gaza shift on a whim and who knows if you are not next to be swept away by fate—or the American President.
Here is the stark reality: Gazans, not just the enlisted members of the Hamas brigades, waged an exterminationist campaign against Israel, and they lost. At virtually any other time in history, save the last 75 years, they would be lucky to lose only territory and not have their legend and language permanently deleted from the book of the living.
Trump’s generous offer to the Gazans therefore signals a return to history, but with a twist. Trump has not only spared them, but vowed to provide them with new lives, better lives, work, new homes, a chance to raise their families in peace, an existence not premised on total and permanent war with a more powerful adversary destined to rout them entirely, and would have already done so if not for the objections of other powerful global players.
Trump, in his innovative mercy, has offered to save the Palestinian people from their own history, and give them a new idea to live by. They should thank their maker for the chance to start anew—and give thanks as well to the American President, who realistically promises them a better future, backed by U.S. global power. Given the repeated failure of the multi-decade-long dream of eliminating and replacing the Jews of Israel, it seems unlikely that the Palestinians will receive a better offer.
Let’s rewind briefly to set the stage. Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, had finally been defeated a dozen years into his second stint as premier, in 2021. Eighteen months later, Bibi found his way back into power, but in order to do so he had to assemble a coalition that was guaranteed to make trouble for him from Day One. His government proposed a radical democratizing of the Israeli judiciary that alienated half the country for a year, and failed anyway.
Then came Oct. 7, 2023, Israel’s 9/11. Netanyahu, who had long (with good reason) branded himself as Mr. Security, had presided over the worst domestic security failure in 50 years. He was made to prosecute the ensuing war effort with Joe Biden tying one hand behind Israel’s back. The International Criminal Court put out a warrant for his arrest.
And then came a series of cinematic operations: the simultaneous detonation of thousands of pagers that Israel had tricked Hezbollah operatives into carrying, the assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in a safe house in Tehran, the elimination of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah deep underground, and the zapping of Iran’s air defenses, among others.
The rollercoaster ride continued: The electoral victory of Donald Trump—no doubt the Israeli government’s preferred candidate—was followed by a painful cease-fire deal that, by all accounts, Netanyahu had been strongarmed into by the new administration while Bibi was still recovering from prostate-removal surgery.
Which brings us to this week. Netanyahu’s stay at the Blair House in Washington, a guest house of sorts for foreign dignitaries, was his 14th—more than anyone else in the history of the house. He is the first foreign leader to meet with Trump since the new president took office.
Earlier on Tuesday, Trump had floated his Gaza-relocation idea, warned the Iranians to watch their step, and pulled U.S. funding from some of the United Nations’ atrocious anti-Israel committees. Trump then led Netanyahu into a packed room for the press briefing. “Congratulations,” the president said to the prime minister. “You bring them out, you really bring them out.”
And suddenly, Netanyahu once again appeared to have made the right bet. His willingness to sign the cease-fire deal and give Trump a big policy win to start his presidency seems to have won him barrels of goodwill. Trump acted as though the four-year Biden presidency was a rude interruption of a U.S.-Israel victory tour:
In his Beyond Good and Evil, Friedrich Nietzsche proposes what he calls a “rule as a riddle.” It goes like this: “If the bond shan’t burst, bite upon it first.” If you can’t fix a problem with conventional means, go unconventional. If something is insoluble, do something radical. It’s the same idea as the Gordian Knot—no one could untie it, so Alexander the Great simply sliced it open. What you don’t get, in the end, is a single piece of rope that remains intact. But the knot no longer exists.
So it is with what Donald Trump did at the most dramatic presidential press conference of my adult lifetime by announcing his plan for Gaza. As my sister Ruthie Blum put it on X, “To all those who’ve been screaming for 16 months about the ‘day after’: TAKE THAT!” You want a way forward for the area that has been decimated as a result of the terrorist war launched against an unsuspecting Israel on October 7, 2023—a war Israel neither sought nor planned for nor expected to have to fight? You want to cry bitter tears over the uninhabitability of Gaza as a result of the consquences of the war that is entirely the moral, logistical, and geopolitical responsibility of the terrorist organization Hamas and its sponsor in Iran? Dry your tears, says Donald Trump. Here’s the plan.
Gazans will have to go elsewhere for a while. Gaza will be cleared. It’s a “demolition site.” Unexploded ordinance will have to be dealt with. Many existing structures will have to be torn down. It’s an area the size of Chicago, so it’s quite the job. Following the demo will come the rebuilding. All of this, Trump says, will be paid for by the very wealthy countries in the region, which will also be responsible for housing the displaced Gazans in one, two, four, seven, maybe even twelve comfortable sites. Gaza will be turned into the Riviera of the Middle East. At that point, the people once resident in Gaza can return…if they want to. Otherwise it will become an international city for world people.
Bam! A plan! The bond couldn’t be burst, so Trump bit upon it first. No solution, eh? OK, here’s the solution.
Oh, but President Trump, they won’t pay for it! And they won’t take in the Gazans. Oh, I think they will, Trump says airily.
What’s going on here? Simply the shifting of tectonic plates, not naturally, but through the force of will—the will to power, as Nietzsche might have put it. Yesterday, Trump asserted the will of the United States as the world’s most powerful, richest, most influential, and most dominant nation in saying something must be done about Gaza, here’s what needs to be done, here’s who’s going to pay for it, and here’s who’s going to manage it after. What must be done is it needs to be cleared and rebuilt. Who’s going to pay for it are the fellow Arabs who have been “supporting” the Palestinians in order to keep the Palestinians far away from them. Who’s going to manage it after is the United States, really more as a real-estate management company than a political entity.
Is this all a fantasy? Maybe. But are any of the other ludicrous and cockamamie ideas being floated for the future of the area any less fantastical?
Disclaimer: the views expressed here are solely those of the author, weekly Judean Rose columnist Varda Meyers Epstein.
Could Trump have been misled about Witkoff and his ceasefire
deal? It is certainly not a good look for the president. Trump threatens Hamas,
then caves to its demands and compels Israel to capitulate to Hamas.
We all heard the president threaten Hamas that those
hostages better be released before he takes office. We heard Trump say that all
hell would break loose and that it would frankly
not be good for Hamas.
Does it not seem strange then, that Trump would make Israel pay
Hamas a ransom of 1700 terrorists for 33 hostages? Perhaps the president didn’t
understand the full implications, didn’t realize it would be a capitulation of
both Israel and America to terrorist demands. It would be interesting to know
what conversations are going on behind closed doors. Is Trump really happy with
what was done here by his envoy, Witkoff?
Gatestone Fellow Khaled Abu Toameh hints at a Trump unhappy with the ceasefire deal after
the fact:
Witkoff, who regrettably took a terrible,
ready-to-wear deal from the Biden administration -- a deal ensuring
that Hamas will remain in power in the Gaza Strip -- is proving an unfortunate
embarrassment to Trump.
From the beginning, the deal should have been, as
then-President-elect Trump put it, that all the hostages must be released before
his inauguration or "all hell will break out." Such a warning presupposes
that all the hostages, dead and alive, are placed at the border, on a certain
date at a certain time. No negotiations, no release of hundreds of terrorists,
nothing -- just like the release of American hostages from Iran under President
Ronald Reagan in 1981. It would be interesting to know how Trump's strong,
original vision got so badly derailed.
Does it seem logical that President Trump would force Israel
to capitulate rather than rain down hell on Hamas? Now Biden, sure. Biden set
the scene back in May. In the Biden scenario, Israel always capitulates.
Always. No wonder Biden wants to take credit for Witkoff’s "perfect" deal, as one Fox talk show personality gushed--why do all the Fox people think the ceasefire is so great?
This is not how it should have gone down. We should have got our hostages for free and kept our people safe.
Witkoff’s deal was Biden’s deal of capitulation. What Witkoff did was take
an existing framework, Biden’s framework, and ram it home. Because Donald Trump
wanted it done before he took office. But did Witkoff jump the gun, perhaps
forcing this deal down Israel’s throat without Trump’s full knowledge or understanding?
Is it Donald Trump’s style to put Israel in this position, particularly when
Israel had the upper hand with Hamas.
The kindest way to view this ceasefire deal is to see it as a mistake. Everyone
makes them. Even Trump. That makes the implications no less grave.
Many terrorists were released to Judea and Samaria, where numerous American
Israelis live, including this writer. We are, by large, Trump voters and our communities
have been disproportionately targeted by terror. Countless of our family
members, Americans, have been killed by terrorists that are now in the process
of being released from Israeli prisons into the Arab villages that border our
towns.
We are affected on every level. We thrill to the release of every hostage and drink
in every story of every released captive, and yet, we find the ceasefire deal
absolutely appalling. In fact, none of the people I know are in favor of this
ceasefire deal. We are absolutely sickened that murderers—many with the blood
of local American citizens on their hands—now roam nearby.
Is this a win for America? There was no need for Israel to capitulate, to let murderers go free among the people. The very vast advantage, had been Israel’s. Is a loss for Israel ever a win for America?
It would be nice to think that perhaps in this one area President Trump erred by relying on the wrong person, namely Witkoff. Well, to err is human. Everyone makes mistakes. Even Donald Trump.
Nonetheless, it is a serious failing. What is the moral justification for letting murderers out of prison into the civilian populace? And what of those terrorists slated to be deported to other countries with whom Israel has fraught relations? Who will keep track of them and their murderous agendas? It is madness to release even one terrorist, let alone 1700 of them into the wild. Is this really what President Trump supports?
In every other way, Trump has been just in regard to Israel and the Jews, and we appreciate that, but putting us in this position of capitulating to Hamas is unconscionable. I, for one, hope that during his meeting with President Trump, Prime Minister Netanyahu will apprise the president of the 82% recidivism rate for terrorists released from Israeli prisons in past exchanges, among their number, Sinwar.
Iran and Hezbollah don't even pretend that Hezbollah is independent.
Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei named Hezbollah leader Naim Qassem as his “representative” in Lebanon, Iranian media reported Wednesday.
The previous "representative" was, by amazing coincidence, the late leader of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah.
The announcement said that Qassam is Iran's representative in "accounting matters, legal aspects, the disbursement of the likes of zakat" as well as promoting Shia Islam among the "deviants" who do not follow their form of Islam.
So, Iran still plans to send lots of money to Hezbollah.
When we say Hezbollah is Iran's proxy, it isn't just an expression. It is a formal relationship.
Which makes Hezbollah's pretense of caring about Lebanon and its people all the more clownish.
Gaza was an "open air prison." But when anyone suggests that Gazans take refuge in other countries, it becomes the cherished homeland of Palestine that they heroically and tenaciously cling to.
What about moving to other parts of British Mandate Palestine (known as "historic Palestine")? The Palestinian Authority rejected anyone moving even temporarily from Gaza to the West Bank. So even moving within "Palestine" is seen as beyond the pale.
Gazans cannot seek respite in Egypt or Jordan. They cannot shelter in the West Bank. They cannot even move within Gaza to avoid death without it being a huge violation of their human rights.
How can we resolve these contradictions and inconsistencies, where Gaza is alternatively a cherished homeland or a hellhole that they cannot escape? Where human rights are chosen and discarded in such an arbitrary way?
By looking at the one place that every "pro-Palestinian" agrees Gazans have the unlimited right to move to, permanently: Israel.
All of the contradictions disappear. The well being of Gazans and human rights and international law are all subservient to the real overarching principle that animates all the decisions by Hamas, by the Palestinian Authority, by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch: Israel must be destroyed as a Jewish state.
Once you understand this prime principle, there are no contradictions. All the other things insisted upon are just used to serve the ultimate aim of destroying Israel.
Everything, and I mean everything, that Palestinian Arab leaders have done since 1948 have been primarily to end the Jewish state. Their own methods differ - the PLO has since 1993 chosen diplomacy as their favored means, Hamas uses terrorism, the PFLP uses the pretense of human rights and international pressure.
Understanding that helps you understand why the PLO rejected a state time and time again, even as they complain about how they are stateless. Because accepting a state with permanent borders means accepting that Israel exists.
This explains why they simultaneously claim that they want a state of their own but also to allow millions of their own people to move not to their own state but to the state they claim abuses Palestinians. The "right of return" is their major long term weapon to destroy Israel.
That explains why Hamas chose to attack Israel when Gaza was in better shape - more imports and exports, more jobs less isolation - than any time since Hamas took over.
All of the things that seemingly make no sense come into focus when you just understand the real aims of the Palestinian leaders and their international supporters.
Find me a single example where the Palestinians did something inconsistent with this prime principle. Find me a case where Mahmoud Abbas acted in opposition to Yasir Arafat's 1974 phased plan to destroy Israel.
You can't. Because Hamas and Fatah (and the UN and the NGO community) and the others all agree with the goal. Everything they say is entirely consistent with this plan.
The contradictions of Gaza is just a microcosm of the inconsistent principles that Palestinians claim to adhere to, because they cannot yet say the real goal out loud.
Yesterday, President Trump signed an executive order to reinstate a "maximum pressure" campaign against Iran.
The preamble is clear and direct.
Since its inception in 1979 as a revolutionary theocracy, the Government of the Islamic Republic of Iran has declared its hostility to the United States and its allies and partners. Iran remains the world’s leading state sponsor of terror and has aided Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, the Taliban, al-Qa’ida, and other terrorist networks. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) is itself a designated Foreign Terrorist Organization.
The Iranian Government, including the IRGC, is using agents and cyber-enabled means to target United States nationals living in the United States and other countries around the world for attacks, including assault, kidnapping, and murder. Iran has also directed its proxy groups, including Hezbollah’s Islamic Jihad Organization, to embed sleeper cells in the Homeland to be activated in support of this terrorist activity.
It is refreshing to see such clarity.
The memorandum defines the US policy towards Iran, and it is aimed at far more than stopping the regime from pursuing a nuclear weapon.
Section 1. Policy. It is the policy of the United States that Iran be denied a nuclear weapon and intercontinental ballistic missiles; that Iran’s network and campaign of regional aggression be neutralized; that the IRGC and its surrogates be disrupted, degraded, or denied access to the resources that sustain their destabilizing activities; and to counter Iran’s aggressive development of missiles and other asymmetric and conventional weapons capabilities.
The language of the policy is almost identical to that of Trump's previous national security presidential memorandum 11 on Iran from 2018.
Here, the administration is making a clear statement of US goals and aims and the orders support those aims.
Interestingly, I cannot find anything indicating that President Biden rescinded NSPM-11, although groups like J-Street urged him to do so. But he obviously ignored it by loosening up the Trump sanctions.
The Biden administration strove for nuance. It tried to send complex messages by wordsmithing every statement. However, Iran and much of the world do not understand nuance in the way it is intended - Iran understood only that the Biden administration had given it a lifeline, and any statements chiding Iran were ignored, since actions speak louder than words.
The Trump administration does not understand nuance either. Meaning, it is speaking in a language that Iran and other players understand quite well.
Donald Trump dropped a bombshell during his press conference with Benjamin Netanyahu:
“The U.S. will take over the Gaza Strip and we will do a job with it too,” he said. “We’ll own it, and be responsible for dismantling all of the dangerous unexploded bombs and other weapons on the site. Level the site and get rid of the destroyed buildings. Level it out create an economic development that will supply unlimited numbers of jobs and housing for the people of the area."
Sometimes it is hard to parse out what Trump means. he started off saying that there will be other countries that would invest in rebuilding Gaza. But did he really mean the US would "own" it?
During the Q&A, he made clear that is exactly what he meant.
"As far as Gaza is concerned, we'll do what is necessary...We're going to take over that piece we're going to develop it, create thousands and thousands of jobs and it'll be something that the entire Middle East can be very proud of."
And he seemed to contradict himself by saying that Palestinians would live in this new Gaza, but also "the world people" will live there: "I envision a world people living there, the world's people. I think you'll make that into an international unbelievable place. I think.... world representatives from all over the world will be there. Palestinians also, Palestinians will live there, many people will live there."
Normally, a plan like this would be researched, planned, refined, given to the players for opinions and agreed upon before being publicized.
This is not how Trump works. He does not know details nor does he care. He works in broad brush strokes. This plan sounds like it was hatched that afternoon. Yet he has a very good instinct for cutting through the bull and trying to solve the root of the problem, rather than get stuck on the minutia that the experts love to argue about.
So what is Trump's vision, really?
It sounds like he wants Gazans to leave to other Arab countries, but not necessarily permanently unless they want to. He wants it to become an American territory or protectorate, perhaps similar to the US Virgin Islands. He wants to look at Gaza as an investment opportunity, not a money sink, and he wants the US to profit from it. A Mediterranean paradise where tourists can visit, where Western capitalists and oil sheikhs can rub shoulders and make deals.
The Palestinian Authority is utterly absent from this vision. So is Palestinian rule.
Would this be legal? Almost no one would say so, but creative legal minds could find a way. Gaza was never a part of any nation that has a current legal claim on it. A (strained) case could be made that Gaza - especially postwar Gaza - is terra nullius, and therefore the US can occupy it legally. In the end, international law is what the major powers want it to be and they find justifications afterwards. Israel's critics have been doing this for decades. This is no more creative than saying that Gaza between 2007-2023 was occupied by Israel, or the "apartheid" and "genocide" slurs.
Why shouldn't the US slant its own vision of international law in the other direction for once? To Trump, legality isn't an absolute - it is a political tool that is used subjectively, therefore the US can do the same thing.
An occupation would require troops. Trump has been reluctant to involve the US in foreign adventures; I do not know what he has in mind for the army. But this seems to be consistent with his desire to "clean out" Gaza - which means to only allow back in the Gazans who are not likely terrorists.
One thing is for sure: Israel and America haters will despise this plan, and claim that it violates human rights and international law. And this plan, if done properly, would save more lives than anything the "human rights" posers could possibly imagine as being "justice." Which is what makes this so compelling: if you care about the value of human life, you can have the fake "justice" of a Gaza terror state or you can have peace, but you cannot have both. Trump's plan is more pro-peace than all the "ceasefire" protestors ever could be.
Nderitu’s first statement on “the situation in the Middle East,” issued on October 15, called for the return of the Israeli hostages as well as a ceasefire. “And then I spoke about Hamas,” she said, “what they did. I described it. . . . And of course, the key thing that made me the enemy was saying that the attacks happened on Israeli territory, which they did.” (Hamas does not recognize Israel, founded in 1948 and admitted to the UN in 1949.)
That night, a UN Office of Human Rights civil servant sent Nderitu an email, cc’d to several top UN officials, including the United Nations high commissioner for human rights and undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs. (In February of 2023, that undersecretary-general would create a stir by saying, in an interview with Sky News, “Hamas is not a terrorist group for us. As you know, it is a political movement.”)
The UN civil servant described Nderitu’s statement as “one-sided,” suggesting that it “might cause reputational risk on the image of the United Nations as an independent neutral impartial body.” For an institution as hierarchical as the UN, this kind of direct written critique of an undersecretary-general by a junior staffer was highly unusual, as was his request that Nderitu review her “statement with the aim to ensure greater balance and harmonize it with similar UN leaders’ statements.”
Little more than a week later, Nderitu received a two-page letter signed by an unnamed group of “concerned UN staff including Palestinians.” While they joined her “in condemning the intentional attacks and abduction of Israeli civilians by Hamas,” they wrote, “we expected that your statement regarding Israel’s attacks on and collective punishment of Palestinian civilians would have been equally clear and unequivocal.”
That December 9, Nderitu hosted a commemoration of the 75th anniversary of the Genocide Convention, an event that she had been planning for a year. Speakers included judges and prosecutors who had served on the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, and also Karim Khan, the chief prosecutor for the International Criminal Court. (In November 2024, the ICC issued arrest warrants for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and defense minister Yoav Gallant; neither has been arrested.)
On the same day as the commemoration of the Genocide Convention, another anonymous group, this one calling itself Concerned Citizens of the International Community, posted a petition calling for Nderitu’s resignation on Change.org. It garnered more than 22,000 signatures. “The gravity of her failures demands immediate action,” it stated. “We hereby demand an immediate and transparent review and investigation of the special adviser on the prevention of genocide on her failure to fulfill her mandate and to widely publish the outcome of this investigation.” (No such investigation occurred.)
Just two days later, on December 11, 2023, a second petition on Change.org, this one in support of Nderitu, was posted by an anonymous group called Humans for Human Rights. It received more than 7,000 signatures.
“They were lighting fires under me from every angle,” Nderitu said. While she continued releasing statements on the war in Gaza, including one in February 2024 in which she warned that “the risk of commission of atrocity crimes should a full [Israeli] military incursion into Rafah take place is serious, real, and high,” they were of no avail when it came to her critics. “It’s not about what I said,” Nderitu recalls. “The key thing is that I never called this genocide.”
Almost immediately, a UN civil servant wrote an email complaining about Nderitu to several top officials, warning that her condemnation of Hamas “might cause reputational risk on the image of the United Nations as an independent neutral impartial body.” He suggested Nderitu rewrite her statement to copy the usual anti-Israel belligerence from UN activists.
Then, of course, came the open letter from “concerned UN staff” pressuring Nderitu to treat Hamas as Israel’s moral equal. On Dec. 9, she was greeted with a Change.org petition that gave the game away: “With the official in charge of genocide prevention taking no action despite public pressure, statements by UN Special Rapporteurs, and thousands of civilians killed, including UN staff and their families, we demand Nderitu’s immediate resignation and for her to be held accountable for her failure to act in response to mass atrocities in Gaza.”
Nderitu, they said, had failed “to fulfill her mandate”—which was, of course, to lend her credibility to the anti-Semitic mob’s blood libels. She’d open her UN email address to find messages like “Filthy zionist rat, you will burn in hell forever for supporting the rape and torture and murder of little kids by your bestial masters.”
The next venue for the harassment campaign against Nderitu was the UN’s press briefing room, where representatives from Saudi and Qatari state outlets trashed Nderitu by name. Yet here again, the phrasing of those posing as journalists is instructive. One question from the Dec. 14, 2023, briefing was this gem:
“Ms. Nderitu has always been very vocal and very active in calling out every little sign she sees around the world that there is genocide may be happening. She spoke out for Darfur recently, even Nagorno-Karabakh — against the hateful rhetoric coming out of that, Nagorno-Karabakh. Why has she been silent on Gaza?”
It’s at this point that one is tempted to feel encouraged by the reporter, who is so close to getting it! He is, in fact, arguably answering his own question. If the genocide specialist is outspoken on some conflicts but not others, what might we learn from this? The obvious answer is: The genocide specialist talks about genocides and does not talk about cases that clearly don’t amount to genocide. That’s why you have an expert on genocide in that position.
The UN ecosystem completely flips out when an official isn’t corrupt. And these open letters and protests, barely six weeks into Israel’s counter-incursion into Gaza, also serve to remind us how badly anti-Israel activists telegraphed their pitches. “Genocide” was the talking point with which they began the war.
Nderitu didn’t understand that she wasn’t being hired to do her job. She was being hired to read a predeveloped script. It’s just that she was too honorable to degrade her life and work for the sole purpose of spreading lies about the Jewish state. So they’ll have to find someone else.
The strength of the five women who returned, Daniella Gilboa, Liri Albag, Naama Levy, Agam Berger, and Karina Ariev has resonated across Israel. Hamas knew how important the young women were.
Hamas now faces a different challenge: As it releases more hostages, it can’t hold parades every week because many people will tire of these images. When the terror organization first conducted its handover, many tuned in to watch. Hamas used this as a spectacle.
Hamas's dilemma
But, after this happens three or five times, there might be less of a turnout – because what begins with interest, tends to fade. Hamas can declare “victory” every week, but people may stop listening, especially when they are bitter over the state of their daily lives, and have more pressing needs to tend to.
Hamas can only squeeze this hostage deal so much. At some point, it will want the deal to move forward, but will also receive less and less credit for what it gets from it. Hamas took so many hostages on October 7 – 251, along with four men whom it has held hostage since 2014 – that its ability to exploit this situation is diminishing.
Meaning, that the tables may turn a bit, where Hamas will want the deal to continue and ask its close mediator Qatar to do whatever is possible to keep things going. In turn, they will give Trump an opening to continue to showcase his ability to get deals done and declare victories.
Hamas knows that among the hostages it continues to hold, almost are all men, and that some are deceased, with the overall number of each remaining unclear.
It understands its dilemma: Handing over bodies is not the picture of victory that it wants – it can’t parade bodies on stage and give them a certificate the way it did with the observers. Hamas already has overplayed its hand in this respect, trying to showcase how holding young women and elderly men for 15 months is victorious.
Many see the images of the strong young women returning to Israel, the strength of the elderly men such as Gadi Mozes, and the five Thai foreign workers who were released – Thaenna Pongsak, Sathian Suwannakham, Sriaoun Watchara, Seathao Bannawat, and Lumnao Surasak – and empathize with them.
In that sense, Hamas is losing the battle for its image in the arena of public relations and is facing diminishing returns in Gaza. For a year, it used the hostages and produced videos of them, but now it really does need the deal to advance.
This is clearly an opening for Trump and those who support the deal to continue the ceasefire, but also to apply more pressure on Hamas.
Hamas has been using hostage release operations to rebuild its forces and map territory within Gaza, Israeli sources say.
The terror group is deploying more soldiers at each successive handover and conducting reconnaissance with drones that film the ceremonies.
"Each time they're changing the location of the handover, so they're mapping Gaza, Rafah, Khan Yunis, Gaza Port, so they're building the intelligence," said Ronen Solomon, an Israeli intelligence analyst.
The Israeli sources claimed that Hamas recruitment efforts had not been as successful as estimated by the U.S. State Department. Israel estimates that only a few hundred new, young and inexperienced recruits have been taken on.
The quantity of equipment still held by Hamas is also coming to light, with each round of hostage releases showing more arms, including machine guns, anti-tank missiles and drones.
Hamas still has 20,000 fighters and dozens of miles of tunnels in Gaza. It is already working to rebuild its capabilities and train a new generation of terrorists. Rebuilding Gaza means rebuilding Hamas. Therefore, any reconstruction of Gaza under Hamas rule must be limited to the bare minimum.
Every mechanism established to monitor materials entering Gaza has failed in the past and will fail again in preventing Hamas from using them to restore its military capabilities. Israel and the U.S. must send a clear message to the Arab world: As long as Hamas controls Gaza, another war is only a matter of time and any investment in reconstruction will be wasted.
We must also be wary of the illusion of a "technocratic government" in Gaza. As long as Hamas remains the dominant armed force, it will ultimately control any civilian authority established in Gaza.
The Palestinian Authority (PA) cannot be the solution either. Not only does the PA continue to pay salaries to terrorists and fail to prevent attacks from its territory, it is also clear that just as Hamas expelled the PA from Gaza in 2007, the same would happen again if the PA were entrusted with security responsibilities there.
Since no other entity aside from Israel will be willing to fight Hamas over the long term, only a temporary Israeli military-civil administration in Gaza can dismantle Hamas's armed control and lay the groundwork for a local civilian alternative that could gain strength in the future.
Preventing reconstruction will also send a clear message to Gaza's population that as long as Hamas remains in power and committed to terrorism, there is no future for the territory. Additionally, it will signal to Islamist terrorist supporters, who were emboldened by Hamas's recent hostage deal, that there is a heavy price to be paid for launching murderous attacks against Israel.
It started going viral today; as of this writing it has been viewed over 210,000 times with hundreds more every minute.
As with many truth bombs, it is driving the antisemites crazy. Their responses are quite illuminating.
Many are saying that DNA proves that Jews aren't really Jews and Palestinians are the only indigenous people of the region (and some say that most Palestinians are descended from Jews.)
Of course, reputable DNA studies consistently prove that Jews are descended from the region. As far as Palestinians go, I have not looked closely at the studies that say they descended from the Levant to see how they chose their samples, but a significant number of Palestinians proudly trace their origins to elsewhere, especially the Arabian peninsula. In fact, a Palestinian project "Howiyya" ("Identity") that started in 2010 has been trying to identify the origins of Palestinian families and readily admits the claims that many Palestinian clans came from elsewhere is true:
According to Yasser Qaddoura, the project director, preserving Palestinian family trees is part of an identity battle aimed at refuting the Zionist narrative that Palestine was a “land without a people.”
Qaddoura explains that the occupation has always tried to cast doubt on the Palestinians’ affiliation by claiming that their family names (such as Al-Masry, Al-Baghdadi, Al-Beiruti, etc.) indicate their origins in neighboring countries.
The occupation forgets that these migrations were natural throughout history, and that the Palestinian people, like the rest of the world’s peoples, are made up of individuals who moved due to economic, political, or social circumstances.
The only group of Palestinian families I've seen that consistently traced themselves back to the region are Christians. Who converted from - well, you know.
Speaking of DNA, a surprising number of people claimed that Israel bans DNA testing because Zionists are afraid that they will find out they were really Khazars or otherwise not original Jews.
This is another lie that is based on a grain of truth. Israel does regulate DNA testing for privacy purposes but any Israeli who wants can easily buy a DNA test online.
A number of Muslims are saying that Moses and Abraham were Muslim, insisting I study history. Their "history book" is, of course, the Quran.
Another antisemitic response shared by many is people pointing out that the coin isn't round, and they are amused that Jews are guilty of "clipping" or shaving the sides of coins to steal gold and silver.
Coin clipping is real. Associating it specifically with Jews is an antisemitic trope.
The English accused Jews of the practice in the 13th century, sentencing 300 Jews to death and seizing their assets.
I had no idea that this libel was still around. Amazing what you can learn by posting something that upsets antisemites. Not quite as amazing is how these people who claim to care about human rights are so quick to spread a libel that was used to justify the murder of many Jews.
Then there are the people who tacitly admit that Jews really are indigenous but move the goalposts by saying variants of "So does this give you the right to (murder, rape, bomb) children?"
If you want to talk about Israel's war practices and why they are moral, I have plenty of articles about that. But the truth is obviously not what these people are interested in.
This is an excerpt from "Moon Of Israel," a 1924 Austrian film that depicted a love story between a Jewish slave and an Egyptian prince. It is perhaps best known for its depiction of the splitting of the sea, which was considered by critics at the time to be technically superior to that of Cecil B. DeMille in his 1923 silent version of The Ten Commandments. Unfortunately, the film quality of Moon of Israel is not close to restored versions of the original Ten Commandments. (You can see that version here, start around 30:00.)
USAID was ostensibly funding humanitarian and democracy-building programs for Palestinians in the territories. It took pains to ensure that any infrastructure projects it built in the territories were only for Arabs, not Jews. (In at least one case, a road that they built for Palestinians ended up also benefitting Jews, much to the consternation of Haaretz.)
There have been many bumps along the way. For example, the head of a Palestinian "refugee" agency that USAID funded was a raging antisemite. But in general, USAID would attempt to ensure that the funding they gave did not go to terrorists, at least not directly.
In more recent years, however, USAID (like the EU) has been actively trying to give Area C land, under Israeli control, to Palestinians. The Biden administration supported USAID building an entire Palestinian university as well as other Palestinian projects on Area C lands.
There is another angle to this which is rarely reported. When USAID attaches strings to its programs to minimize the chances that they will be used for terror, Palestinian leaders fume.
As early as 2011, Palestinians warned about the evils of USAID requiring recipients to sign statements that they oppose terrorism. In 2012, Palestinian universities were urged not to accept USAID money because they would investigate whether professors were terrorists.
In 2019. the PA itself told USAID to stop all activities out of fear of terror-related lawsuits. The Anti-Terrorism Clarification Act (ATCA), passed by Congress and signed into law by then-President Trump allows Americans to sue those receiving foreign aid from their country in US courts over complicity in "acts of war" and the PA did not want any money under those circumstances.
The major reason given for US foreign aid is to be "soft power" to promote pro-American and pro-democracy thinking among the people. However, Palestinians - and Arabs altogether - never got that memo.
Millions of dollars were given in private, without publishing the recipients and with no transparency, apparently because of fear that there would be backlash from Palestinians for accepting money from the US.
What kind of "soft power" is it when the US cannot even make the names of the recipients public because they hate the US so much?
USAID has clearly not come close to achieving its stated goals in the Palestinian territories. It has not advanced democracy, it has not dissuaded terrorism, it has not improved Palestinian governance or reduced corruption. The Palestinians want all of the funding but none of the responsibility.
An Egyptian cleric once said that he considered all US funding of Egypt to be a form of jizya tax - something the dhimmis owe their Muslim masters. This is exactly how the Palestinians have treated US funding from USAID - it is something they feel they are owed.
As with UNRWA, over the years USAID itself has internalized that thinking and throwing money away on Palestinians without expecting anything in return became the entrenched mentality of the agency.
That is all the evidence you need that hundreds of millions of dollars have been wasted over the years.
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