Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Monday, March 03, 2025

03/03 Links Pt1: Why International Law Allows Israel to Lay Siege to Gaza; Damning IDF probe: Social media leaks enabled Hamas raid on Nahal Oz; Israel files ICJ complaint regarding hostage held in UNRWA facility

From Ian:

Washington’s U-turn on Ukraine a ‘challenge’ for Israel, experts say

According to Chatham House senior fellow and former Knesset member Ksenia Svetlova, “what happened in the White House with Zelensky shows that the U.S. doesn’t have a constant policy or permanent allies. If there are no permanent allies, if Ukraine is thrown into the trash after all these years … no one is immune.”

According to Svetlova, the fact that the Biden administration froze some weapon shipments to Israel amid domestic political pressure shows that “there are no holy cows, not even Israel.”

“Even in the current term, Trump can change. If there are no constant interests or doctrines, that means anything can change. Israel must be prepared to become like Ukraine,” she said.

Emmanuel Navon, CEO of European pro-Israel organization ELNET and an international relations lecturer at Tel Aviv University, argued that while Trump could theoretically change his mind at any time, Israel is in a different situation because it has strong backing in Trump’s coalition of supporters.

“Ukraine is a place that most Americans don’t really care about, especially not Trump’s constituents,” Navon said. “Israel is important to evangelical voters. Trump cares about his voters and they care about Israel, not Ukraine.”

As for the cease-fire agreement that the Trump administration is trying to negotiate between Russia and Ukraine, Svetlova warned that Trump is “forcing an agreement without a security guarantee [for Ukraine] after three years of a war started by a violent neighbor … No defense will come of that.”

Yet, Svetlova said there is no comparison to the Trump administration’s involvement in Israel-Hamas cease-fire negotiations, where Israel has every advantage over Hamas – with the notable exception of the hostages.

Rather, Svetlova said, Trump’s approach to Ukraine could be a warning sign to Israel that he may push an Iran nuclear deal that is not sufficiently robust.

“It’s a matter of life and death for Israel,” she said. “The Saudis and Emiratis are in the same boat. [The countries] need to seriously discuss a policy not to cross Trump but also not to be a victim of this kind of coercion.”

The fact that Ukraine policy is creating a rift between the U.S. and Europe is also a problem for Israel when it comes to a coordinated response to the Iranian threat. The U.K., Germany and France are the only Western countries with the power to snap back all pre-2015 sanctions on Iran, an ability that expires in October.

Svetlova suggested that Israel plays a mediating role between the U.S. and Europe on Iran, pointing out that “sanctions will be much more effective if there is unity in the Western world on this. Any division is not good for us.”

Navon described European leaders as “completely horrified” at the Trump-Zelensky meeting.

Still, Navon said that there is an opportunity for Israel in the Trump administration’s confrontational attitude towards Europe, citing Vice President J.D. Vance’s speech in Munich last month: “He castigated the Europeans, but said that if you want America to have your back, you have to be more respectful of our common Western values based on Christianity.”

He noted that the European right sees Israel as “one of the pillars of Western civilization” defending those values.

“This is great for Israel because you have quite a few conservative parties in Europe who are open to this message and supportive of Israel,” Navon added. “Israel can use this rift between the U.S. and Europe to its advantage.”

Khaled Abu Toameh: Why Arabs Don't Want To Receive Palestinian Ex-Prisoners

The Jordanians and Lebanese, for their part, have not forgotten how Palestinians sparked civil wars in their countries in the 70s and 80s.

[The Arab countries'] refusal to take in Palestinian prisoners probably arises from the fact that these countries actually do not care about the Palestinians and even consider them an ungrateful people and troublemakers. Many Arabs also seem to have lost faith in the Palestinians' ability to implement reform and end rampant financial and administrative corruption in their governing bodies in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

"The Muslim Brotherhood is a terrorist organization. Help us modern-minded, secular, liberal Muslims marginalize their influence by declaring what they are: a terrorist organization." — Dr. M. Zuhdi Jasser, in testimony before the US House Oversight and Government Reform Subcommittee on National Security, July 11, 2018.

"In point of fact, nothing would be more pro-Muslim than the marginalization of the Muslim Brotherhood and its direct affiliates. Making the Muslim Brotherhood radioactive would allow the light to shine upon the most potent antagonists in Muslim communities: those who reject political Islamist groups and believe in liberty and the separation of mosque and state." — Dr. M. Zuhdi Jasser, in testimony before the US House Oversight and Government Reform Subcommittee on National Security, July 11, 2018.

"Call on American Muslim leaders to take a position on the Muslim Brotherhood and its overarching theo-political ideology. I ask my fellow Muslims: Will they be the side of freedom, liberty, and modernity, or will they be on the side of tyranny of the Muslim Brotherhood, Turkey's AKP, the Iranian Khomeinists, or Pakistan's Jamaat e-Islami?" — Dr. M. Zuhdi Jasser, in testimony before the US House Oversight and Government Reform Subcommittee on National Security, July 11, 2018.

"Develop foreign policy mechanisms to disincentivize Qatari and Turkish Government facilitation of the Brotherhood and ultimately think about suspending Turkey from NATO." — Dr. M. Zuhdi Jasser, in testimony before the US House Oversight and Government Reform Subcommittee on National Security, July 11, 2018.

"And please stop engaging Muslim Brotherhood legacy groups in government, media, and NGOs, and recognize their Islamist terrorist sympathies." — Dr. M. Zuhdi Jasser, in testimony before the US House Oversight and Government Reform Subcommittee on National Security, July 11, 2018.

Such a designation would also make it far more difficult for the countries that support the Muslim Brotherhood, especially Turkey and Qatar, to keep on doing so. The Muslim Brotherhood has already been declared a terrorist organization by the governments of Austria, Russia, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain.

Gaza standoff: Netanyahu and Hamas' high-stakes cease-fire gamble

Over the weekend, Israel and the U.S. announced that they had agreed upon a framework whereby the cease-fire would be extended for 50 days, and in exchange Hamas would release the remaining hostages, both living and dead, in two separate batches. Hamas so far appears to be rejecting the proposal. Ron Ben-Yishai explains the strategic logic at play, and why Gaza’s terrorist rulers may feel themselves under a new kind of pressure:

The main threat is the credible risk of an Israeli military operation to reoccupy Gaza. Five IDF divisions are already positioned around the Strip, ready for rapid deployment. . . . . Second, internal pressure within Gaza is mounting as civilians demand relief. In an effort to intensify this leverage, Israel announced this morning that it was halting humanitarian aid to Gaza so long as Hamas continues to reject the [new cease-fire] plan.

The third and strongest pressure point is U.S. support. President Donald Trump has shown no signs of losing interest in resolving the crisis.

Hamas, for now, is playing tough, banking on the assumption that Israel would avoid resuming large-scale military operations for fear of endangering the hostages. But recent statements from Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Israel Katz suggest that if Hamas refuses the deal, Israel may be willing to take that risk.

Palm Beach Post opinion editor fired after offensive Gaza cartoon. The coverage is more antisemitic than the cartoon is.

From Stet News of Palm Beach County:

The owners of The Palm Beach Post fired Editorial Page Editor Tony Doris last month after the paper published a syndicated cartoon condemned as antisemitic.

Executives with Gannett, the nation’s largest daily news publisher with more than 200 newspapers and 19 in Florida, fired Doris on Feb. 17. They did not respond to requests for comment.

Doris, 67, had been editorial page editor since April 2021. He said he viewed the cartoon by Jeff Danziger of Counterpoint Media, which ran on Jan. 26, as anti-Israel but not antisemitic.

“They’re conflating criticism of the government of Israel with antisemitism,” Doris told Stet News. “I fully support Israel’s right to exist. … I think you can feel that way and still be open to discussion of the issue of violence that has taken place there. They don’t get to shut down the conversation just because they’re not comfortable with it.”

Doris said he was told he had been fired for violating Gannett guidelines and standards.

In “An Open letter to the Community” published Feb. 9 in The Post, the Jewish Federation of Palm Beach County said the cartoon trivialized “the suffering of Israelis kidnapped and brutally held captive for 16 months” and “even worse, it spread dangerous antisemitic tropes, including the false and inflammatory accusation of bloodlust — a modern-day ‘blood libel’ used for centuries to incite hatred and violence against Jews.”

The full-page ad, co-signed by the federation’s Palm Beach Center to Combat Antisemitism & Hatred, continued: “We cannot stay silent. Hate speech turns into hate crimes. Journalism must inform, not incite. We welcome opportunities to work with media organizations to educate the public on the danger of antisemitism.”

The cartoon is thoroughly disgusting.

It the dead of Gaza as being all civilians, and Israelis as being callous towards the death toll. it implies that caring about the hostages is hypocritical when so many Gazans have been killed because of Hamas' human shields strategy.

As far as I can tell, though, the Jewish community did not demand that anyone be fired. They wrote an open letter, published as an ad, describing how offensive the cartoon is and trying to ensure that something like this doesn't get published again.

It was Gannett's decision to fire Doris. I don't agree with that decision; I prefer to stand on the side of freedom of speech, and the cartoon, as bad as it is, does not cross the line into incitement.

But the story is being framed as the powerful Jews imposing their will on a newspaper. See this New York Times headline:

It could have said that this is a story about freedom of speech or about how skittish institutions are on offending different groups.

There is nothing wrong with the Jewish community complaining, there is nothing wrong with meeting them and understanding how this cartoon was a gross but consistent misstatement of the truth of what happens in Gaza and how it demonizes Jews, albeit indirectly.

But the Jewish community didn't fire him. They didn't, as far as I can see, even ask for him to lose his job. That was purely a Gannett decision.

Instead of writing about how a newspaper may or may not have overstepped, or about how the Gaza war coverage has been filled with bias culminating in this disgusting cartoon, this coverage itself will fuel antisemitism. The impression being given is that those Jews are again censoring any opinions they don't agree with and controlling the media.

The cartoon was awful. Framing this as the Jewish community imposing its will on an editor that didn't deserve to be fired is the real incitement.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

Internal Palestinian troubles are always swept under the rug

The Palestinian Federation of Health Profession Association, the health workers union, has called for a general strike for March 11 and again March 18.

Even after reading the official announcement of the strike, I cannot figure out why. Here's what the message says:

As the strike continues for the twentieth day in the Ministry of Agriculture by your colleagues in the supporting health professions there, and in light of the government’s intransigence and failure to respond to the law and its implementation, and even the tyrants of the Ministry of Agriculture continue to challenge the Palestinian Basic Law and the Palestinian Civil Service Law by refusing to comply with those laws and also violating them in an explicit and blatant manner, then in this case, and out of our national and moral commitment towards the system of laws that govern us and which the government, represented by the Minister of Agriculture, has broken, and to protect the laws of the State of Palestine and our insistence on adhering to them and resorting to them, we announce the following:

1- A comprehensive strike on Tuesday, 3/11/2025, with no presence at workplaces for all supporting medical professions in the Ministry of Health, the Environmental Quality Authority, school health in the Ministry of Education, the Water Authority, the Ministry of Economy and Industry, and the Ministry of Social Development.

2- In the event that the government continues to kick the Palestinian Basic Law and the Civil Service Law, represented by the Minister of Agriculture, there will be a comprehensive strike on Tuesday, 3/18/2025, in all of the aforementioned ministries and bodies, with a central sit-in being held in front of the Council of Ministers in Ramallah. You will be informed later of the gathering places for transportation by buses from all governorates to the sit-in site in Ramallah.

It appears that the strike is in solidarity with a three-week old strike by the workers (or maybe health workers) of the Ministry of Agriculture.

But I cannot find any news stories about that strike, or the reasons for this strike. In all probability it is about wages, but it is not being reported anywhere.

And that is the real story here.

There appears to be an unwritten but ironclad rule within Palestinian media to minimize any reports of internal problems (the exception being between Hamas and Fatah media.) This is almost certainly due to the honor/shame culture - internal disagreements are shameful and therefore must be swept under the rug as much as possible.

The only stories to be emphasized, even in Arabic, are anti-Israel stories. Everything else is a source of embarrassment and must be minimized.

When these stories are barely covered in the Palestinian media, they certainly aren't covered in Western media. Given the huge number of journalists in the region, the only conclusion is that reporters themselves do not want this information to be publicized.

This is all more proof that the world doesn't care about Palestinians. If Israel would shut down all health clinics for a day, we'd see wall-to-wall stories about how sick patients are not being taken care of because of Israeli evil; but when Palestinians themselves close the clinics it does not merit even the smallest mention.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

The lies behind Oscar winner "No Other Land"

Last night, the film "No Other Land" won the Academy Award for Best Documentary.

It is described at the film site "Deadline" as exploring "root causes of enmity as the filmmakers chronicle the Israeli military’s incremental expulsion of the West Bank community of Masafer Yatta — home to 20 ancient Palestinian villages."

That is a myth. There were not 20 ancient Palestinian villages there. All of structures in the area were built since the 1980s, deliberately as a land grab of state lands.

Here is the entire history of the area as described by Wikipedia, today:

In 1881, the British Palestine Exploration Fund (PEF) noted the following places: Shảb el Butm, meaning 'the spur of the terebinth', Tuweil esh Shîh, meaning 'the peak or ridge of Artemisia', Khirbet el Fekhît, meaning 'the ruin of the fissure', and Khirbet Bîr el 'Edd, meaning 'the ruin of the perennial well'. At Khirbet Bîr el 'Edd, PEF noted "traces of ruins, and a cistern", while at Khirbet el Fekhît, they noted "traces of ruins, and a cave."

Here is the PEF map showing the four (not twenty!) places:

The British found no villages, no population, just traces of old ruins.

In 1981, then Agriculture Minister Ariel Sharon was alarmed at the spread of illegal Palestinian structures moving towards this area. He proposed to turn the area into a firing zone for IDF training. “I want to tell the representatives of the general staff, we want to offer you additional training areas. Additional training areas must be closed in at the border, [between] the bottom of the Hebron Hills and the Judean Desert. In light of that phenomenon – the spreading of the Arab villagers on the mountainside toward the desert....We have an interest in expanding and enlarging the shooting zones there, in order to keep these areas, which are so vital, in our hands."

There is no doubt that his purpose was political to keep the areas empty in light of Arab expansion towards this desert. There is also no doubt that at the time, there were no permanent structures there yet.

The Regavim NGO describes how these empty areas became today's Masafer Yatta:

The shepherds of Yatta would sleep in caves in nearby grazing areas, rather than trekking back to the village each night. After the IDF closed off the area, the shepherds were permitted to continue grazing their flocks there; the IDF gave them a few days’ warning before live-fire exercises to insure that no one got hurt. The Palestinian Authority seized the opportunity – and began funding construction of permanent structures. Foreign interests jumped right in after them, funding infrastructure projects to support the “indigenous farmers” – laying water and electricity lines that enabled more and more people to set up homesteads on the “free” land.

Aerial images show this to be the case. Here are two such images from 1997 and 2021, showing a village in the area built from scratch.

The Israeli High Court ruled in 2022 that the people claiming they lived on the land for decades had no case - and that even their own evidence contradicted their claims!

For the sake of example, our focus will be on the aerial photographs of "Khirbet al-Fahit" presented by the respondents ("al-Fahit" according to the petitioners). In 1967 and 1981 the area was completely empty of buildings. Some development is evident during the years 1990 and 1991. In 2001 it is evident that a number of buildings were already built in Kharbit, and such were built more and more in 2007, 2009, 2011 and 2012.
An identical picture is revealed from the aerial photographs attached by the petitioners and even more clearly. It can also be seen that in 1972 and 1981 there is no evidence of buildings in the area compared to 2011, when there is a lot of construction on the site.
The same is true with regard to Khirbet Hilweh ("Al Hilweh" according to the petitioners). There is not much room to doubt that in the early years (1967, 1979, 1981 and even 1991) there is no evidence of construction on the site. However in the years 2007, 2009, 2011 and 2012 more and more buildings and houses were built. There is a sharp and noticeable difference between the photos from the early period (in 1972, 1981 and even 1993) and the photo from 2011 in which construction can be clearly identified.

Similarly, the Arabs claimed that the book "Life in the Caves of Mount Hebron" by Yaakov Havakook, published by the Ministry of Defense in 1985, proved that these villages were permanent. The High Court read the book and found that it said the opposite, and moreover, that all the residents of the caves had permanent homes in nearby real villages.

Havakook reiterates that at the time the book was written (1984), it can be seen that every year shepherds from nearby villages used to stay in these ruins and "at the end of winter, the shepherd families return and abandon the caves, which were used during the grazing months, and move to their mother villages or to other, more promising grazing places" (p. 56). Therefore, the reference to Havakook's book does not help the petitioners.

Of the many reviews I've read of "No Other Land," none of them even hint at the facts here. The film is pure propaganda meant to incite people to hate Israel. One review even says the film "will make you want to throw rocks."

That is the entire point.

Propaganda exists not to inform but to manipulate people's emotions. Many reviews mention that the film itself is "resistance," which in Palestinian parlance means both creating propaganda like this and murdering Jews: there is little distinction between the cognitive war and the kinetic war.

Make no mistake: "No Other Land" is part of the cognitive war against the Jewish state.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

Two of the few remaining Jews in Syria describe the antisemitism of the Assad regimes

Turkey's Anadolu Agency interviewed two of the members of Syria's tiny remaining Jewish community.

There are less than 10 Jews in Syria.

One interviewee, Bahour Shemtob, described in chilling detail how bad Syria treated Jews under the Assads.

“In the 1970s, during the rule of Hafez al-Assad, there were severe restrictions on Jews. We were not allowed to travel or own property. At that time, no one was allowed to talk to Jews, and our identity cards had the word ‘Moussawi’ in big red letters.” [It means "of Moses." - EoZ]

According to Shemtob, “During the 1980s, Jews were forbidden from leaving the country, but in the 1990s, the United States reached an agreement with Hafez al-Assad, under which Jews who wanted to leave Syria were allowed to leave.”

“We were like birds trapped in a cage, and as soon as the door was opened, everyone flew away,” he continued. “Many Jews left, leaving their homes and businesses, while others managed to sell their possessions before leaving.”

Shemtob explained that "after the mass exodus 33 years ago, about 30 Jews remained in Syria, but today this number has decreased to only 7, including 3 women."

Regarding the pressures they were subjected to during the Baath regime, he said: “In my youth, if I spoke to a girl, I would be summoned for investigation to the security branch called Palestine.”

“Four years ago, three of my (non-Jewish) friends were arrested for three months, just because they talked to us. Talking to foreigners was forbidden, but now we can talk to whoever we want. During the (Baath) regime, we were under pressure, and that is why our young people left the country,” he added.

Shemtob pointed out that the fall of the Baath regime changed everyone’s lives, including his own, and said: “We now have more freedom. We can speak frankly. There are no longer security barriers in our way, and no one from the intelligence services is monitoring us. In short, I feel that I have become free. Things are better now than they were before.”

Another Syrian Jew, Salim Dabdoub, said his family left in 1992.

“I stayed here to run my business,” said Dabdoub, who was born in Damascus in 1970. “I travel constantly for work, and this also allows me to see my family in the United States. Thank God, things are good for us. There is no discrimination here, everyone loves each other.”

Dabdoub noted that expectations had increased that many Jewish families would visit Syria after the fall of the regime, saying: “Before 1992, there were about 4,000 Jews in Damascus. We had a rabbi, the merchants were here, everyone was here, but everyone emigrated that year.”

He added: "Some of the properties of the Jews who left are still there, but some of them were seized illegally. Some of those involved in the seizure were connected to the regime, as they forged documents to seize the properties."

“In the past, we faced security difficulties. We were under constant surveillance by the security forces, and there was constant fear. Thank God, there is no longer fear today. God willing, the future will be better, and peace will prevail among peoples.”

The headline of the article emphasizes how the remaining Syrian Jews are not Zionist. However, their families definitely were.

In 1992, when Hafez Assad allowed Syrian Jews to leave, he expressly forbade them to go to Israel. Most went to the US - but of those, most soon moved to Israel anyway, as this 1994 article shows.

Notice that the headline writer (for The Age) recognized that of course, the natural home for Jews is Israel.

The article makes it sound like Arab antisemitism is a thing of the past, but it clearly isn't.

When a tiny group of Jews visited Damascus last month, Egyptian magazine Rosa el-Youssef said that this was "a new line in the Greater Israel project: the beginning of Jewish migration to Syria."

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

03/02 Links: Infantilising Palestinians, demonising Israelis; How the UN turned Palestinians into permanent refugees; Israel halts aid to Gaza after Hamas rejects US ceasefire proposal

From Ian:

Infantilising Palestinians, demonising Israelis

Humanity is certainly in short supply in Perfect Victims. In the chapter, ‘Tropes and Drones’, el-Kurd tells us again and again that his problem is not just with Israel, it is also with Jews. ‘The people seeking to expel us from our neighbourhood were Jewish’, he writes, ‘the bureaucrat issuing and revoking our blue ID cards was a Jew’, and ‘as for the soldiers who were frisking us to check those IDs… most of them [were] Jewish’.

El-Kurd fumes against the Palestinian notables who wrote a joint letter taking issue with Palestine Authority president Mahmoud Abbas’s anti-Semitic comments in August 2023 – when he claimed that Hitler ‘fought’ the Jews because they dealt with ‘usury, money and so on’. El-Kurd claims that ‘defending ourselves, often preemptively, against the baseless charge of anti-Semitism’ is a mistake, a tactic that ‘elevates the history of Jewish suffering… above our present-day suffering’.

El-Kurd is convinced that Israel is illegitimate and that Israeli Jews are ‘colonisers’. Quoting Frantz Fanon, he says ‘the work of the colonised is to imagine every possible method for annihilating the colonist’.

But Israelis are not colonisers. They are refugees from persecution in Europe up to 1945, and in the Arab world since 1948. Most were born in Israel. By characterising Jews as the ‘colonisers’, el-Kurd is lending a veneer of legitimacy to his vilification of an entire people.

El-Kurd refuses to be drawn on the future of the Jews because, he says, this can only ever mean the de-railing of the Palestinian cause. He protests that the ‘possibility of a second holocaust is given primacy over a holocaust happening in the present’ – that is, in Gaza.

It is certainly true that Israel has been fighting a deadly war with Hamas since October 2023. But it is not in any sense a ‘holocaust’. The victims of holocausts do not generally have their own armies, nor fire missiles at their persecutors. El-Kurd points to the ‘countless examples of annihilatory rhetoric’ by Israeli officials, but he could just as easily list the genocidal remarks made by Hamas spokesmen, like Osama Hamdan or Ghazi Hamad.

Moreover, Hamas ran riot in southern Israel for just 18 hours on 7 October 2023, and managed to kill 1,200 people, most of them Jews. Its organisational commitment to killing Jews goes back to its founding. After Hamas’s Al-Qassam Brigades attacked Sderot, Be’eri and other towns bordering on Gaza that awful day in 2023, Mohammed el-Kurd was excited. ‘Much of what is happening in occupied Palestine’, he tweeted on 8 October, ‘will be in future history books as an example of revolutionary struggle’. Like so many among the pro-Palestine crowd, el-Kurd has since downplayed the significance of the massacre, complaining that attention is always on 7 October, not on what came before.

El-Kurd claims that Palestinians are denied the ‘common humanity’ applied to others, and are therefore dehumanised. Yet he ignores the clear dehumanisation of Jews that made it possible for Hamas to slaughter families in their homes on 7 October. That is bad enough, but worse is the evasion of responsibility. It is galling to read him protest against ‘the ceaseless infantilisation of the dehumanised subject’, in reference to Palestinians, when he and his fellow anti-Israel campaigners have done the most to infantilise them. For el-Kurd, Hamas should not be held responsible for its actions – any discussion of its atrocities or brutality, he suggests, is a ‘distraction’. What he ignores is that until a leadership emerges that accepts it has a responsibility to make peace, and live alongside its Jewish neighbours, there is no future for Palestine.

El-Kurd concludes his work like a poet, more than an activist, writing ‘the world is changing because it must’. The world is changing, but not in the direction that Mohammed el-Kurd hopes. Hamas has brought disaster upon Gaza. And the prospect of a durable peace between Israelis and Palestinians looks further away than ever.

How the UN turned Palestinians into permanent refugees

To illustrate the absurdity of what has been happening, take the case of Mohamed Anwar Hadid. His father fled Nazareth in 1948 because he ‘did not want the family to live under the Israeli occupation’. He ended up in California where he became a property developer building luxury mansions and hotels in Beverly Hills.

You might not have heard of Hadid. But you are likely to have heard of his daughters, supermodels Gigi and Bella Hadid, both of whom are American-born citizens. Bella, who reputedly earns up to $20million a year, regularly posts anti-Israel sentiments on social media, and has been attending pro-Palestine rallies, chanting ‘From the river to the sea’. Amazingly, the two sisters, their father and other members of the Hadid family are all still registered as Palestinian refugees with UNRWA.

That’s not all. Under the auspices of the UN, people of Palestinian heritage the world over don’t just have a permanent refugee status, they also have a so-called right of return.

Over several decades, the ‘right of return’ has allowed successive Palestinian political leaders to continue a war against Israel by other means – by insisting on their right to return to land ‘occupied’ by Israel. No other group of refugees has been granted a similarly inalienable right of return.

For the Palestine Liberation Organisation, this right was the ‘foremost of Palestinian rights’. Hamas is equally attached to it. In 2018, it organised a massive protest along the border fences with Israel. The objective of this ‘great march of return’ was, according to Hamas’s then leader, Ismail Haniyeh, to ‘break the walls of the blockade, remove the occupation entity and return to all of Palestine’. No wonder novelist Amos Oz, the founder of Israel’s Peace Now movement, has argued that ‘the right of return is a euphemism for the liquidation of Israel’.

The twin issues of refugee status and the right of return have taken on enormous symbolic significance for Palestinians. They have also made, and will continue to make, any peace negotiations between Palestinians and Israelis inordinately difficult.

Now would be a good time to start reassessing Palestinians’ permanent refugee status and the right of return. That way we might finally start taking some of the heat out of this interminable conflict.

Yisrael Medad: Will Palestinians in Gaza get up and go?

Ze’ev Jabotinsky began his 1923 “On the Iron Wall” essay by denying that he is “an enemy of the Arabs, who wants to have them ejected from Palestine, and so forth.”

He insisted that “it is not true.” He did admit that, emotionally, his “attitude to the Arabs is the same as to all other nations: polite indifference.”

A veteran of the campaign for equal rights for Jews in the Russian Empire, including autonomous national rights for all nationalities, he wished to see a parallel reality develop in the Mandate for Palestine. He believed that “there will always be two peoples in Palestine.”

Based on that belief, he added: “I consider it utterly impossible to eject the Arabs from Palestine,” and insisted that he would be prepared to take an oath, binding on future generations, “that we shall never do anything contrary to the principle of equal rights, and that we shall never try to eject anyone.” All that, however, was before the 1929 riots, those of 1936 to 1939, and all the wars since.

He set certain basic principles. There must be peace, and it needs to be obtained by peaceful means. There must be a Jewish majority in the future Jewish state. The Arabs need to agree that the Jews belong to their homeland. Responding to whether all this is possible, he wrote: “The answer to this question does not depend on our attitude to the Arabs, but entirely on the attitude of the Arabs to us and to Zionism.”

A century later, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, speaking at the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations in mid-February, said: “Why not give Gazans a choice? … Over the last couple of years … 150,000 Gazans left. … If people want to leave, if they want to emigrate, it’s their choice. And I think President [Donald] Trump’s plan is right on the dot.”

In other words, they should have freedom of movement and the right to emigrate.

Netanyahu could have added that some 70% of Palestinians in Gaza consider themselves “refugees.” As such, they are planning to move away from Gaza in any case. Of course, their desired destination is Israel—with the aim of eradicating the Jewish state, a purpose they adopted as a life’s mission since 1947 when they rejected that year’s U.N. Partition Plan in a not very peaceful manner.

Many of them continued to pursue their aim during the 1950s in the ranks of the fedayeen when they engaged in cross-border raids of theft, destruction and murder. A new phase of their “armed struggle” resumed after the Sinai Campaign with the founding of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) in 1964. In 1987, Hamas was established, designated a foreign terrorist organization by the United States and other countries.

I saw this comment in Substack from Binyamin Zev Wolf:

I am a Palestinian refugee.

UNRWA defines a Palestine refugee as someone "whose normal place of residence was Palestine during the period 1 June 1946 to 15 May 1948, and who lost both home and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 conflict." Moreover, descendants of Palestine refugee males, including legally adopted children, are also eligible for registration.

In 1948, my family was living in the old city of Jerusalem and were ethnically cleansed from their home by the Jordanians. My great great grandfather was a big rabbi and lost all his writings and his position as rabbi in the old city. I should be getting money from UNWRA.

To become a registered Palestine refugee according to UNRWA eligibility criteria, it is not enough to be descended (through the paternal line) from someone who fits the criteria, but one must also register at an UNRWA office in person.

Israel just shut down the UNRWA offices in Jerusalem, but there are still plenty in the West Bank. And lots of people who are descended from Jewish refugees in 1948 now live across the Green line in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria.

There may also be Arab Israeli citizens who fit the criteria. Many live across the Green Line, mostly in Jerusalem but also in "settlements."

It would be a great idea for a an Israeli Jew and and Israeli Arab who live across the Green line to both go to an UNRWA office and attempt to register as refugees, with appropriate documentation as described in UNRWA's Consolidated Eligibility and Registration Instructions.

If UNRWA says they cannot register because they are citizens of a country, then ask why Palestinian citizens in Jordan (and some in Lebanon) are considered refugees.

If UNRWA says that they cannot register because they live in Israel, ask them if that means that they consider Judea and Samaria to be part of Israel.

If UNRWA says the Arab is eligible and the Jew is not, ask why they discriminate against Jews.

With the Sheikh Jarrah office closed, unfortunately the applicants might need a military escort to make these applications safely. The stunt would be worth it to expose UNRWA's hypocrisy.

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How to explain the events of this weekend? Israel is taking a negotiating lesson from Trump.

Israel today decided to cut off all humanitarian aid to Gaza. This occurred on the heels of Israel saying it was willing to extend the ceasefire for six weeks.

What's going on?

Israel is playing hardball, taking a page from Donald Trump's book of how to negotiate.

Over the weekend, Israel offered to extend the ceasefire with Gaza according to parameters crafted by Donald Trump's negotiator, Steve Witkoff, which would have Hamas immediately release half the hostages and the bodies in exchange for a continued halt to fighting during Ramadan and Passover, about six weeks.

At the end of the period, if a permanent ceasefire is agreed upon, Hamas would release the remaining hostages.

Hamas rejected the terms, insisting that Phase 2 be implemented immediately and unconditionally.

Hamas' official position is that Phase 2 is mandated by the ceasefire agreement after Phase 1 completed. But it wasn't. Phase 2 was always contingent on both parties agreeing to its specific terms during Phase 1, which did not happen. Without that agreement, Phase 2 cannot start. Witkoff's plan is to extend Phase 1 and keep the ceasefire going.

But without an agreement, as of midnight Saturday night, the ceasefire is over.

Hamas is gambling, thinking that there is too much world pressure for Israel to continue not resuming the war and as well as to allow 600 trucks a day into Gaza as Phase 1 mandated. From Hamas' perspective, they have nothing to lose by insisting that Phase 2 begin and more Israeli concessions - mostly withdrawals that would ensure Hamas can fill the vacuum left by the IDF.

Israel, perhaps in coordination with the US, is saying that Hamas has a great deal to lose. If the ceasefire is over then Israel can decide to stop the aid and resume fighting.

Under the rules of war as stated in the Fourth Geneva Convention, siege warfare is legal. It needs to allow critical humanitarian aid with the explicit exception of when the aid would be diverted by, or improve the military efforts and economic posture of, the enemy - which is exactly how Hamas has used it for the past 16 months.

Since October 2023, after only ten days of war, Israel has been forced by the US to allow in humanitarian aid even though Hamas benefitted from it. As I noted in January 2024, that decision more than any other is what kept Hamas fighting and kept the war going. It could have ended within a couple of months without that pressure from the Biden administration.

Now Israel has support from a US that is willing to let it win.

This is the manifestation of Trump's message to Hamas two weeks ago that if they don't release all the hostages, all hell will break out.

Israel also extended and increased the IDF's option to call up reserves, from 320,000 to 400,000, at the same time. In addition, the US expedited the transfer of billions of dollars of weapons to Israel, a move that was not unnoticed by Hamas.

The message from Israel is clear: It is no longer hostages for prisoners and hostages for Israeli withdrawal - it is hostages if Hamas wants to avoid war and to continue to get aid. Hamas has a great deal to lose by not releasing more hostages.

As far as world pressure on Israel is concerned, the answer is simple: if the world cares so much about aid into Gaza, then pressure Hamas to release more hostages to get that aid. Israel played by the rules that it must provide aid and all it accomplished was extending a devastating war by over a year.

By changing the calculus of aid, Israel is also showing how hypocritical the international community is. They insist that Israel provide unconditional aid. Israel's response, now backed by the US, is that it would be happy to provide aid, but no longer unconditionally. The legal siege can be lifted in exchange for hostages.

Israel is now saying that it is Hamas' decision to keep human beings as hostages, therefore it is Hamas' decision to stop the aid. This puts the international community in a position of saying that they support Hamas keeping hostages more than they support Gazans receiving humanitarian aid.

This has been their position from the start. Israel is now making it explicit.

Without the Biden administration pressuring Israel, the war would have been over a long time ago.

Trump is allowing Israel to change the rules to what they should have been in October 2023.

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

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There really is no difference between the neo-Nazi and Arab attitudes towards Jews

From the Egyptian news site Dostor:

Journalist Adel Hamouda confirmed that the Jewish lobby in the United States plays an important role in influencing American politics, as it has a great ability to control a number of members of the US Congress and funds a large portion of the budgets of political parties.

He added, during today's episode of the "Face the Truth" program broadcast on Cairo News Channel , that Israel has received $300 billion in American aid until 2023, making it the largest recipient of American aid.

He explained that Jewish influence in the United States is not limited to politics, but extends to all aspects of American life, stressing that 50% of the top 200 American intellectuals and 20% of professors at major universities are Jews, and 40% of partners in major law firms in New York and Washington are Jews.

Sounds just like the Goyim Defense League:

But the Goyim Defense League spreads its hate by placing flyers in plastic bags and leaving them outside homes. Jordanians and Egyptians do it openly in their TV talk shows.

Which again brings up the question: if the progressive Left hates the Right so much, why don't they ever call out when Arabs act exactly like the far-Right?

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

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03/01 Links: Why Zionism Is Not Colonialism; Hamas stalls Gaza ceasefire talks, betting Israel won't resume fighting; The BBC is too toxic to even recognise its own disgrace

From Ian:

Begin’s unpublished writings to be released on 33rd anniversary of his death

A collection of previously unseen documents, letters and articles written by former Prime Minister Menachem Begin will be made public next week, coinciding with the 33rd anniversary of his death.

Among the handwritten papers is a document outlining Begin’s views on human rights, the need for a constitution and the tension between the judiciary and the legislature.

In 1952, Begin wrote a 65-page paper titled A Personal View, A National View and Basic Principles. Due to austerity measures in the young state of Israel, he drafted it on discarded rolls of paper from a printing press.

“There is no justice without courts,” Begin wrote. “Justices are but flesh and blood and may make mistakes, be bribed or afraid, but the determinative role of the court in our society is not the human weaknesses of any particular judge but the ‘psychological position’ given to that institution and those who sit in judgment.” He argued that both the judiciary and authorities must uphold the courts’ complete independence.

Herzl Makov, CEO of the Menachem Begin Heritage Center, described the documents as a reflection of Begin’s political philosophy and humility. “It is a sharp political analysis that distills Begin’s liberal-national worldview,” he said.

In the writings, Begin also addressed Israel’s territorial aspirations and the necessity of national might. He warned that Israel’s security depended on its power. “Anyone with eyes in his head knows that when we are strong, we will not be attacked by the Arabs, even without signed agreements. And if we are weak, our Arab enemies will rise to destroy us, even if such agreements are forged in diplomacy.”

Begin criticized Israel’s early leaders for conceding historical lands, lamenting that they agreed to establish the state without key biblical sites within its borders. “National leaders were found willing to sign, in the name of the people of Israel, that Jerusalem, Hebron, Bethlehem, Jericho, Nablus and all the good land east of the Jordan would not be ours. Is there a national-historic crime equal to this?”

Growing threat of US isolationism is a danger to the US-Israel alliance

Throughout history, political movements, even those not initially antisemitic, have often seen their most radical factions steer them toward antisemitism.

In recent years, segments of the American left have embraced militant Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives, Critical Race Theory (CRT), Marxist ideologies, and policies that exacerbate societal divisions.

This shift has, at times, fostered antisemitic sentiments as observed in rhetoric from certain college campuses, organizations, such as the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), Jewish Voice for Peace, national unions, civil rights groups, and members of the “Squad.”

For instance, a recent report from StopAntisemitism revealed that 72% of Jewish college students in the United States feel unwelcome, with over half having faced antisemitism.

The Republican Party has successfully positioned itself against many of these divisive issues, recognizing their danger to the American way of life and the direct opposition to liberal US values. The new administration has already made strides in addressing these social challenges and affirmed itself as a strong ally of the Jewish people and the State of Israel.

However, the GOP has a blind spot for a Trojan horse gaining momentum within its ranks: a faction of “America First” isolationists who promote policies that, if unchecked, could threaten both America’s global standing and its allies, particularly Israel.

Defining themselves sometimes as “restrainers,” these figures advocate a philosophy of strengthening domestic affairs by rallying against most types of foreign aid and limiting military engagement abroad. While a measure of restraint in foreign policy is healthy, taken to an extreme, it risks weakening America’s global leadership and its commitment to strategic allies. The Jewish community must recognize this emerging threat and its potential to undermine the US-Israel alliance.

The United States cannot afford to completely retreat from the world stage without severe consequences for its own and global security.

History has shown that when America stands back, adversaries quickly fill the vacuum – whether in the Middle East, Europe, Asia, or Latin America. A disengaged America emboldens hostile regimes, undermines global stability, and endangers our interests and allies.

Turning away from Israel, as advocated by the America First isolationists, would send a dangerous message to other US allies: America is no longer a reliable partner.

The isolationist sentiment echoes past missteps, such as the US’s reluctance to confront the growing threats of Nazi Germany in the 1930s. If the US pulls back now, nations that rely on American support may be forced to seek alliances elsewhere, including with adversaries like China, Russia, and Iran.

John Aziz: Why Zionism Is Not Colonialism

The claim that Zionism is a form of colonialism is at the heart of a lot of anti-Zionist narratives. The story goes that white, Western Jews decided to colonise Palestine, and displace the native Palestinian Arab population.

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One piece of historical evidence that often gets thrown around in these conversations and seems to have gone mega viral a few times recently is this headline from the New York Times, proclaiming that Zionists intended to colonise Palestine:

The implications of this accusation of colonisation is that colonisation is a horrible thing that must end as the arc of history bends further and further towards justice, to paraphrase Martin Luther King, Jr. In other words, the colonisers must give the land back to the previous owners, and return from whence they came.

But ownership of land, especially in a national sense, is a complex and fraught topic. Yes, it’s true that Palestinian Arabs were living in the land as a majority during the British Mandate between 1917-1947, and the Ottoman Empire during 1517-1917. But there were multiple earlier Jewish polities in the Holy Land across history, with the most recent independent Jewish entity ending with the defeat of the Bar Kokhba revolt in 136 AD, after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 AD following the first Jewish-Roman war.

The result of the Roman colonisation of the land was the enslavement and expulsion of many of the pre-existing indigenous Jewish population, who became scattered across the former Roman empire in Europe and the middle east. Similarly, the ancestors of the Palestinians are not only from later Arab conquerors, and the Romans and Byzantines themselves, but they are also descended in large part from parts of the Jewish population that stayed on the land in spite of Roman rule, and later converted to Christianity or Islam.

This is why Jewish and Palestinian populations are genetically quite closely linked:

The reality of Zionism is that it was the descendants of Jewish people who had previously been displaced from Palestine (or the Land of Israel, or whatever you want to call it) trying to return to the home land of their ancestors.

This is why unlike with classical colonialism, for example the French colonisation of Algeria—which is often cited as an inspiration by Palestinian anti-Zionists—there is no mother country or colonial metropole in the case of Zionism. Colonialism is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as the act of one country acquiring control over another country, occupying it with settlers, and exploiting it economically.

Now some may contest this definition. But by that definition, the New York Times description of Zionism as an act of colonisation was simply not accurate.

The question to ask anyone who claims Zionism is colonialism is what is the mother country?

Reform rabbi: ‘Hamas is the Palestinians,’ two-state solution a delusion

The murder of Shiri Bibas and her two children at the hands of Palestinian terrorists has ended the possibility of a two-state solution, a prominent Reform rabbi declared on Friday.

Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch, senior rabbi at New York City’s Stephen Wise Free Synagogue, told congregants in an explosive Shabbat sermon that he had “snapped” over the killings.

“This was the week that finally ended the hope–at least in my lifetime–for a Palestinian state and a Jewish state existing side-by-side,” Hirsch said. “The Palestinians themselves strangled this fragile hope in its crib.”

“Until such time as the Palestinians themselves say they want peaceful coexistence–two states living side-by-side–we must cease deluding ourselves that a two-state solution is available now,” he added.

Gazan terrorists abducted Shiri Bibas, 32, and her two sons Ariel, 4, and Kfir, 9-months-old, from Kibbutz Nir Oz in the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Based on forensic evidence, their captors murdered the two children “with their bare hands” within weeks of the attacks, according to the Israel Defense Forces.

The funeral for the three victims was held on Wednesday after their bodies were returned to Israel as part of Phase 1 of the ceasefire-for-hostages deal between Hamas and Israel.

According to Hirsch, the murders and Hamas’s staging of parade-like ceremonies to crowds of cheering Gazans during the release of emaciated Israeli hostages is an indictment of Palestinian society, which suffers from a “moral miasma and social collapse” and whose national movement fuels “an endless cycle of violent depravity.”

02/28 Links Pt2: The West is colonizing the Palestinian cause; Dara Horn returns to history — and literature — after Oct. 7; BBC is in crisis and only systemic change can fix it

From Ian:

The West is colonizing the Palestinian cause

This term “Palestine” was first introduced by the Romans. Expelling the Jews from their land, they renamed Judea as Palestine. Over the centuries, this term was accepted by Jews themselves. The Land of Israel and Palestine became synonymous.

But in the 1920s, the West migrated the term. Arabs in Palestine at the time expressed their collective sentiment through the nascent Hashemite Arab Kingdom of Syria. They identified as Syrians. When France took over Syria and ended the Arab Kingdom, Western colonialist offices imposed a new identity on Arabs in Palestine: “Palestinians.” British diplomat Mark Sykes (of the Sykes-Pictot agreement) even came up with a flag.

While this colonialist identity-engineering exercise was initially rejected by Arabs living in Palestine, European powers cultivated the notion of Palestinian nationalism in order to promote their own Western interests: The British as counterforce to the Jews, Germans as counterforce to the British, and since the 1993 Oslo Accords, the EU and European governments as a counterforce to the State of Israel and by extension to America.

This worked and, by the turn of the 21st century, it was clear that the term Palestine, as well as the Sykes flag represented the national movement of Palestinian Arabs.

But in recent years, and especially since October 7, the term has been migrating, yet again, from describing a group of individuals in the Middle East, toward describing an abstract concept in the West.

This, for example, was reflected in the September 2023 University of Pennsylvania Palestine Writes festival. American students were not expected to write of the longing for a land they never been to – nor knew much of – but about such concepts as: occupation, suppression, injustice. Similarly, President Donald Trump referring to Senator Chuck Schumer as a “Palestinian” is not a reference to his ethnic background, but to his ideology.

Some can argue, cynically, that the re-appropriation of the term is legitimate. After all, it was Europe who “owns the copyright” on the term Palestine: The Romans created it, and the British, French, and Germans promoted it.

But what about the human rights of Palestinians themselves?

Voluntary de-Palestinization
Repeatedly, Palestinians are denied their basic rights to personal self-determination by their European oppressors. When Palestinians chose to be employed and mentored by Jewish-owned businesses, European governments launched aggressive campaigns to have those businesses shut down, such as SodaStream. Similarly, when Palestinians in Gaza chose to flee a war zone, the West failed to provide escape routes, and now that President Trump has introduced such a plan, Westerns are opposing it, effectively denying Palestinians the basic human right to leave.

There is an inevitable clash: Europe and Europhilic circles in the United States care exclusively about Palestinian national rights, even at the price of Palestinian human rights. This, while Palestinians naturally care about their personal safety, prosperity, and indeed rights as human beings.

To put it bluntly, Europeans and Western pro-Palestinians dehumanize Palestinians.

We are in an era of seismic changes. The Middle East of September 2023 is not coming back, and therefore, Western foreign offices and seasoned peacemakers should get rid of legacy frameworks and assumptions that, perhaps, were relevant back then, but are only standing in the way of peace today.

In this realm, there is a golden opportunity to shift away from frameworks based on a zero-sum game, such as “land for peace” and the two-state solution, toward frameworks that are based on a win-win, such as the Abraham Accords and President Trump’s Gaza relocation plan.

Dara Horn returns to history — and literature — after Oct. 7

The last few years have been strange ones for writer Dara Horn. Used to creating imaginative Jewish worlds as a fiction writer, she published her first nonfiction book in 2021, expecting it to be a “detour.” Instead, the publication of People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present, about the very real and often very depressing world that Jews inhabit, changed the course of her career.

“I became this receptacle for all of these horror stories from Jewish readers,” Horn said. “I was immersed in this dumpster fire that now all of us are living in.”

The book was a series of essays examining the ways in which different societies engage with Jewish history and culture — usually, she found, by venerating Jewish suffering in traumatic historical events such as the Holocaust or the Spanish Inquisition, without teaching people to reckon with Jews as they currently are. The argument was explosive even before the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attacks. Since then, the book’s title has become a ghoulishly ironic tagline for many Jews.

“The premise of the book is really that Jews are only acceptable in a non-Jewish society when they have no power, whether that means politically impotent or dead,” Horn told Jewish Insider in an interview this week. “That is just roaring back at us now. That is the only way that it’s acceptable to be Jewish, if you have no agency.”

Now, Horn has published her first new book in more than three years, a departure from both the award-winning literary fiction she is known for and the nonfiction essays about antisemitism she has written for major publications including The Atlantic and The New York Times since Oct. 7.

One Little Goat: A Passover Catastrophe is a graphic novel, geared toward middle school readers, about a family that gets stuck at their Seder for six months because their house is so messy that the children are unable to find the afikomen. In order to retrieve it, the protagonist must go on a time-travel journey through thousands of years of Jewish history, visiting Seders throughout time — guided by a talking goat from the song “Chad Gadya” — until he retrieves the afikomen, finally saving his family from the longest Seder ever.

“If you’ve ever been to a Passover Seder, you know that they feel like they last forever,” the book begins. In the pane below, the text reads: “It’s a holiday celebrating freedom, but you are stuck at that table for a very long time.” Horn read this passage with a laugh, and a word of praise for the illustration skills of her collaborator Theo Ellsworth, a cartoonist in Montana who she cold-emailed after she found her kids reading one of his books.

“The way he illustrated this is he has this kid sitting in the chair in the top frame, and then the bottom frame is a bearded skeleton covered in cobwebs, seated in the same chair, which is how I feel like a lot of kids feel, and even some adults,” Horn said.

BBC is in crisis and only systemic change can fix it

In a quite remarkable first, after 16 months of anti-Israel bias and gaslighting of the Jewish community, the BBC has admitted fault in relation to its documentary, Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone.

Yes, they passed the buck and failed to take any immediate action, but after the Asserson Report, the 100-plus corrections in “misreporting” they’ve been forced to make, the appalling anti-Israel social media posts senior BBC journalists have indulged in and of course BBC Arabic continuing to employ staff who openly celebrated the Oct 7th massacre, any admittance of guilt feels significant.

Perhaps worst of all was the acknowledgement by the BBC that money was in fact sent to the wife of a senior member of Hamas. This is now a question for the authorities and certainly for Dame Dinenage Commons select committee to investigate.

The complete and utter failure of journalistic standards, lack of due diligence and breakdown in trust between the public and our national broadcaster with regards to this documentary, is the culmination of the arrogance of BBC leadership since the Hamas massacre.

This depth of failure does not happen in a vacuum though. It happens because the BBC’s values & code of conduct, it’s very mission to tell the truth, be impartial and transparent have been eroded over time.

The license fee payer’s money in this country should not be going to terrorists, the content coming out of our national broadcaster should not be terrorist propaganda and BBC talent and staff shouldn’t be signing politically motivated statements, which place their own twisted world views above the importance of their employer’s impartiality.

The BBC is in crisis and when one faces a systemic problem, the only solution is systemic change. For anyone who cares about the integrity and indeed the future of our national broadcaster, let’s hope that Samir Shah and the board have the courage to do just that.

02/28 Links Pt1: Israel Takes a Hard Look at Its Prewar Assumptions; Why a Palestinian state is a security risk Israel cannot afford; ABC leave out ‘Allahu Akbar’ chants from school protest

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: Israel Takes a Hard Look at Its Prewar Assumptions

Israel did not believe that Hamas wanted, or was capable of carrying out, a full-fledged total war. But it did, and it planned for it, and here we are.

“Israel believed that leveraging improved civil conditions in Gaza would make Hamas less likely to launch a war,” Fabian writes. “Israel worked to have defenses ready for rounds of conflicts lasting several days and the possibility of it deteriorating into a war, during which the IDF could attack and degrade Hamas’s force build-up. At the same time, Israel worked to reach some level of agreements with Hamas to improve the civil conditions in the Strip. In hindsight, Hamas’s efforts to reach understandings with Israel were part of a deception campaign to trick Israel into thinking it was uninterested in war.”

Any and every drop of legitimacy Israel gave Hamas in the name of improving Palestinians’ lives was paid back in Israeli blood. The result of Israel thinking it could coexist with Hamas was devastation for everybody. Hamas’s ultimate defeat is imperative for Israelis and Palestinians alike; neither can afford to leave Hamas intact. And that is an important lesson for the self-proclaimed pro-Palestinian advocates of the world as well.

As for the second major takeaway: The border fence separating Israel from Gaza was intended to represent merely a part of a larger security network that was mostly out of sight. But the reliance on detection technology, which Hamas was able to disarm, meant that there really only was a fence separating the two. Good fences make good neighbors; Israel did not have either.

But the principle goes for the IDF as well: The Israeli establishment misjudged the extent of Hamas’s tunnel construction underneath Gaza. They, too, couldn’t see the entire playing field because part of it was underground, but they were pretty sure they would know if the reality was significantly different from their expectations. It was, and they didn’t know.

The report has important implications for Lebanon, too. Israel expected Hezbollah to represent the greatest threat on its border. But Hamas’s increased threat didn’t make Hezbollah any less of a threat than it already was, regardless of which one posed the more immediate danger to Israeli civilians. Simply put, Hezbollah (and forces similar) cannot be allowed to put Israel in that situation ever again. If you’re wondering why Israel is taking such a serious approach to any perceived threats materializing in the chaos of Syria’s transition, this should answer that question as well.

Israel—and the region more generally—paid dearly for the belief that as long as these terror groups kept their boots off Israeli soil they were a manageable threat basically at all times. The prevention of another devastating regional war depends on Israel not repeating that mistake, no matter how much the rest of the world wants it to.

Seth Mandel: Israel’s Strategic Goals in Lebanon and the New Syria

This should be obvious: Why would Israel allow a second South Lebanon? The goal is to ensure that when the dust settles on this regional post-Oct. 7 war, the new status quo looks very different from the previous one: No Hezbollahland, no Hamastan. It’s why the IDF is taking a proactive approach toward the Iranian-backed terrorist hive in Jenin in the West Bank. And for that very same reason, Israel is watching the new Syria very closely.

Some of Israel’s Syria policy is designed to help the Syrian Druze feel more secure. If that can be done successfully, a pro-Western corridor running from Kurdish territory through Druze areas to Israel’s border could emerge. This would help the new Syrian government too, since it could settle the nerves of areas that might otherwise consider breaking away from Damascus’s control. Ensuring the safety of ethnic and religious minorities in Syria would also help Damascus convince the West to give it a chance.

There is another problem: Turkey. As I wrote in December, the fall of the House of Assad created the biggest Mideast power vacuum since the fall of the Soviet Union. And Turkey, the pro-Hamas power next door, is primed to fill it.

After all, the Kurds are only on alert because Turkey put them there: Ankara periodically sends its armed forces across the border to harass and weaken America’s Kurdish allies in the fight against ISIS. The new Syrian government owes its existence in part to Turkish backing. The intent is clearly for an array of anti-Israel (and anti-U.S.) forces to use Syria much as Iran used Lebanon: as a place to cultivate and command terrorist proxies against the West.

The idea that Israel is just randomly striking Syrian territory to flex its muscles is absurd. As is the idea, increasingly voiced in some quarters, that Israel wants to sabotage Syrian state stability—as if what Israel longs for is more instability in the region.

Israel doesn’t want a power vacuum south of Damascus and it doesn’t want Syria to become a Turkish puppet regime. So it is taking steps to secure its interests, as any responsible state would, by shoring up its allies and its defenses. The fact that this is controversial while the post-Oct. 7 war is extant is childish and, frankly, hypocritical: One does not hear much caterwauling about Turkey securing its interests in Syria.

Israelis would love it if none of this were necessary. Until that happens, Israel is navigating the world as it is.

Trump's Home Run: Neutralize Hamas, Qatar, Houthis, Iran

"[Iran's] Operation True Promise 3 will be carried out at the right time, with precision, and in a scale sufficient to destroy Israel and raze Tel Aviv and Haifa to the ground." — Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Major General Ebrahim Jabbari, February 2025.

A Trump decision to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a Foreign Terrorist Organization would go a long way toward making it difficult for its many offshoots to continue supporting it.

Even more urgent is for the Trump administration to neutralize Hamas, Qatar, Iran, Hezbollah and the Houthis -- to limit their ability to keep on destabilizing the entire region, as well as to curtail the Houthis' stranglehold on global shipping. The policy is certainly congruent with the long-held American principle of maintaining the international freedom of navigation.

The move would also send a warning to China not to continue its aggressive effort to gain control of the world's critical sea lines near Taiwan, Australia, the Philippines and Japan.