Wednesday, February 26, 2025
From Ian:
Gil Troy: This Is Our Moment for Fearless Zionism
Gil Troy: This Is Our Moment for Fearless Zionism
Fearless Zionists are not swivel-headed, forever looking over our shoulders, wondering, “What will they say?” We are level-headed, forever looking straight ahead, asking ourselves, “Who are we? What do we need to do? And how do we do it right?” We learn from Americanism, not just Zionism, that liberal-democratic nationalism is a force for good in this world, and that while no nation is perfect, some dictatorial regimes and terrorist organizations are perfectly evil. We are proud, passionate, thoughtful patriots, not afraid of words like “pride,” “love,” “power,” or “anger.” We define true patriots as those who love their country because of its politics always, despite its politics always.Melanie Phillips: Reconciliation — or surrender?
Fearless Zionists understand that war is hell. We know that this war’s moral calculus starts with holding Hamas responsible for everything that has happened since October 7: They started the war, committed despicable crimes, keep holding and abusing hostages, refuse to surrender, and hide behind their own civilians as human shields. We can regret the deaths of Palestinian civilians caught in the crossfire, we try to minimize the death of innocents, but we know the moral onus is on Hamas, not us.
Fearless Zionists aren’t “April 1 Zionists”: supporters of Israel who nevertheless blamed Israel and not the fog of war, along with the instigators of the war Hamas, when seven aid workers were killed mistakenly, tragically – and then started saying “enough, stop fighting,” as the media turned increasingly on Israel. Fearless Zionists don’t call fending off 320 Iranian missiles “taking the win.” They know the difference between defense and offense, between avoiding catastrophe and restoring deterrence. And fearless Zionists have a moral code too, but theirs doesn’t come from anguishing and blaming our soldiers for the holy work of doing the Western world’s dirty work. Our moral code comes from fighting evil, not just condemning it, while understanding how restrained and disciplined and, yes, ethical Israel has been despite facing an enemy that turns mosques into HaMosques, hospitals into Hamaspitals and kindergartens into killergartens.
We reject Jean-Paul Sartre’s formulation, and The New York Times’ assumption: The antisemite doesn’t make the Jew. The anti-Zionists, including that small, loud minority of anti-Zionist Jews, don’t define the Jew. The Jew makes the Jew. I am not a Zionist because of their hatred, but I do occasionally have to shape my Zionist agenda to fight it.
Fearless Zionists learn from our courageous soldiers. We can come from the right and the left, be religious and nonreligious, be pro-Bibi or hate him, pro-Trump or hate him, but we focus on our enemies and fight them with clarity when they come to get us. And we never, ever, stop singing and dancing and continuing our celebration of life.
At Texas Hillel, before starting Friday night services, so many students said how grateful they were for their community, their camaraderie, their people. And one student — soon enlisting as a lone soldier in Israel — declared his gratitude about belong to a people who refuse to be Jews with trembling knees. That’s Fearless Zionism.
And in building our big, broad, blue-and-white tent, we emphasize our foundational consensus, which doesn’t start in hedging or regretting or fixating on those who betray us. Instead, we affirm. We root ourselves in our amazing tradition and our 3,500-year-old story, reach out to our people and likeminded allies worldwide, and find our strength and joy in shouting from the rooftops: “We are Zionists – and will continue to thrive, not just survive.”
At a time when the west is beginning to wake up to the nature and extent of the threat from the Islamic world, Jewish faith leaders in Britain appear to be waving the white flag of surrender.Seth Mandel: The Myth of the ‘War That Created Israel’
Earlier this month, a group of prominent Jewish and Muslim faith leaders — including Britain’s Chief Rabbi — presented to the King the “Muslim-Jewish Reconciliation Accords” which had been created in secret over the course of a year.
Described as a “framework of reconciliation, understanding, and solidarity”, the document calls for “sustained dialogue, mutual understanding and practical collaboration”.
Acknowledging that “tensions in the Middle East often have ripple effects on Muslim-Jewish relations locally,” it says:
These conflicts can lead to mistrust, heightened emotions, and fractures to relationships that we cherish and value so dearly.
Talk about understatement. “Tensions”? “Ripple effects”? “Mistrust”? Do such bland vagaries really convey the impact of the past 16 months of Muslim-led hate-marches against Jews and Israel following the Hamas-led pogrom in Israel on October 7 2023?
While most Muslims pose no threat whatever, and many of the most vicious antisemites and Israel-bashers are white-skinned, Muslims have played a disproportionate part in this anti-Jewish hysteria. The incitement against Israel and the Jews has been orchestrated by both Sunni and Shia Muslim extremists in alliance with the western left. And as opinion polling repeatedly reveals, antisemitism in the Islamic world is far higher than in the general population.
The inter-faith document says that “both communities must strive to offer reassurance, promoting dialogue and reaffirming our shared commitment to peace and mutual understanding”.
“Shared commitment”? Really? How many Muslim members of this group publicly denounced Hamas after the October 7 atrocities and said “Not in our name”? How many have publicly rejected the Muslim Brotherhood, the jihadi parent body of Hamas that’s entrenched in Britain’s Muslim community? How many have publicly condemned those members of their community who regularly parade through the streets chanting for intifada, the death of Jews and the destruction of Israel?
The Israeli War of Independence has no other name. This shouldn’t create much of a problem, even for anti-Zionists: they simply oppose the state that won its independence in that war.Seth Mandel: If Hamas Won’t End the War, Israel Will
But lately, the trend of discounting Israel’s existence has picked up steam in the media, which has latched onto the “nakba” narrative. Now, “nakba” is not a replacement for “Israeli War of Independence.” Nakba is a descriptive term coined by Arab intellectuals after the war for the combined Arab armies’ military defeat by Israel. (Later on, it was repurposed to refer to the flight of Arabs during the war.)
The fact that nakba isn’t a substitute for the war’s name poses a problem for the Western press: What does one call the war if one doesn’t want to accurately convey what one is talking about?
It would appear the current answer is: Call it “the war that created Israel.”
Now, it should be noted that this, too, is purely descriptive. So it is possible to use this phrase organically and not necessarily to signal one’s disapproval of the fact of Israel’s existence. But the context in which it is usually used makes clear that, most of the time, it is deployed in bad faith.
Sometimes the bad faith is overt and undisguised.
In the New York Times this week, Fatima AbdulKarim and Erika Solomon published a highly editorialized “report” about Israel’s current operation in and around Jenin, where Iran-backed separatists have dug in and threatened the security of both Israel and the Palestinian Authority.
Israel’s attempt to suppress the terrorist hive required evacuation of certain neighborhoods. (There is a dispute as to whether 14,000 or 40,000 were temporarily displaced, and a few thousand have already returned to their homes.) Although Palestinians were already returning home after three weeks, AbdulKarim and Solomon claim the displacement “evoked painful memories of the Nakba, the Arabic word that has been used to refer to the mass flight and expulsion of Palestinians during the 1948 war that created Israel.”
You can see from the text how awkward it would be to call the war by its name: It would make clear that the nakba has always been about the failure to destroy the Jewish nation.
The clunky phrase “war that created Israel” isn’t new, but it has been cropping up all over print media recently. (It is rarely used even in the written stories of broadcast news agencies like CNN and Fox.) In October, the Financial Times ran an absurd piece making the case for UNRWA—the Hamas-adjacent agency whose employees were involved in the Oct. 7, 2023 slaughter—to win the Nobel Peace Prize. In it, UNRWA is described as having a “mandate to care for Palestinian refugees from the 1948 war that created Israel.” The Financial Times had used that exact same phrasing just months earlier in reporting on UNRWA’s Hamas-connected employees.
This is a good reminder that the deal on the table here has always been on the table. Gaza invaded Israel to spark the war, taking hostages; Israel went into Gaza to get those responsible—i.e., the leadership of Gaza’s governing party and armed forces, Hamas—and to bring back its hostages. That Israel was willing to let Hamas leaders leave the enclave alive was generous. There is no reason that all of the pressure from world leaders (and, ahem, protesting publics) should not have focused on lobbying for this particular outcome from Day One.
Wars are not over when both sides get a few good shots in; that’s a hockey fight. Wars do not end when their fundamental underlying conditions are left intact, even if fighting temporarily ceases; that’s an intermission. It is rather maddening to remember that “give back the hostages you took and leave Gaza” was the offer to Hamas leadership—not every member of Hamas, let alone everyone in Gaza; just the top leaders—and yet the war continues because Hamas and its supporters around the world believe “give back the hostages you took” is incompatible with a freshman decolonization course someone tricked their parents into paying thousands of dollars for.
What if Hamas leaders don’t want to live in a penthouse in Qatar? They can keep releasing hostages under the rubric of phase one.
So that’s two overly generous offers from Israel to Hamas. What’s behind door number three? Ah, that would be the gates of hell: “Hamas can choose the end of the ceasefire, which would mean a return to all-out war.” As one Israeli official told the Times of Israel, “It would be different [than before]. A new defense minister, a new chief of staff, all the weapons we need, and full legitimacy, one hundred percent, from the Trump administration.”
The deadline is March 8. If there are no additional hostage releases by one week from Saturday, the cease-fire ends.
This clarity is, as the official suggests, almost entirely a function of the change of administration in Washington. Donald Trump came into office wanting this war over. Both sides have the means to end this war—Hamas by surrendering and accepting exile for its leaders, Israel by forcing Hamas out of power and its leadership out of Gaza. For the next 11 days we will watch as Hamas mulls over whether it or Israel will end the war.
But one of them will. And after the series of demonic festivals-of-death performed by Hamas each week, and after the revelations of what Palestinians did to those hostages and to the Bibas family, and after it became clear that there was no famine and certainly no genocide and that Hamas had made it all up, Israel may very well have the stomach to end the war if Hamas won’t.
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