Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Wednesday, June 04, 2025

The Jew Who Stays: With or Without the Missiles (Judean Rose)

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

It’s weird that a person can get used to missile sirens, but there it is. So I wrote on Facebook on June 1st, after I emerged from the safe room. Because it did seem odd to me that it no longer sets my heart racing when the sirens go off. I guess a person can get used to anything, which may or may not be a good thing. It is rare for a rocket to fall in our area, but not unheard of. A cavalier attitude and a chip on the shoulder isn’t very effective at keeping missiles away.

Since October 7, missile sirens have become far more frequent. They’re no longer rare, even here in Judea. The missiles are almost always intercepted by the IDF, but that doesn’t mean we’re safe. Shrapnel can do plenty of damage. Especially when we’re not just talking itty bitty pieces of metal, but giant pieces of rocket, as is often the case.

But grappling with the emotions that accompany rocket attacks is complicated. Generally, in our house it goes like this. There’s a siren, and one of us calls out to the others “Siren! Get in the mamad (safe room).”

At least, that's how it used to be. Now it's more like 'Siren' without the exclamation point. We know the drill. We look at our phones to see where the missile is coming from. If it’s from the Houthis in Yemen, there’s more warning. It takes time for those to reach us. Which means there's no need to rush from the bathroom, and there’s time to gather the essentials: food, a drink, a phone. Whatever you want to have with you for the next ten minutes, which is generally how things go.

Of course, the night of the ballistic missile attack from Iran, when over 200 rockets were launched at us, was different. Far scarier than your average rocket attack, if a rocket attack can be said to be average. I was in the kitchen, cooking and listening to something on YouTube, when suddenly a freaky early warning message cut in that had been prearranged to be broadcast to the phones of every Israeli in the country. It sounded really scary. The voice, the sound. I didn’t know what it was—at first, I thought maybe my phone had been hacked.

From the Jerusalem Post, October:

Israel’s Home Front Command deployed its new "Personal Message" missile alert system for the first time under fire Tuesday evening, following an unprecedented missile barrage from Iran. The system, based on Cell Broadcast technology, sends emergency messages directly to mobile phones in targeted areas without requiring users to download an app or register.

Unveiled in August, the system became operational during the massive missile attack from Iran, which saw over 200 missiles launched toward Israel. Tehran issued a stern warning, stating: "If the Zionist regime responds, it will face heavy attacks."

The "Personal Message" system greatly enhances Israel’s emergency readiness by providing precise, real-time alerts. Its independence from cellular networks and GPS means that it can continue to deliver life-saving instructions swiftly during crises, ensuring citizens have the best chance to respond to missile threats effectively.

The alert system uses Cell Broadcast technology, a long-established method that transmits messages via cellular antennas, similar to how FM radio works. This allows for messages to be broadcast to every mobile device in a defined area—whether it’s an entire city or just a specific neighborhood—without the need for individual phone numbers. The alerts are accompanied by a distinct sound to ensure they stand out from regular notifications.

Yup. It definitely was a “distinct sound.” It scared the bejeezus out of me—I genuinely thought we were goners. Then everyone in the house started calling for everyone else to go into the mamad. Missiles from Iran take even longer than those from Yemen, so we sat there for some 40 tense minutes. And, of course, emerged unscathed.

Another “distinct sound” is the siren app my husband installed on his phone. It goes off at about the same time as the real siren but is slightly out of sync, louder, and somehow scarier. I hate it. But he insists it’s helpful—says it’ll get us to the mamad faster.

I was talking about this during a family meal at my daughter’s house—how much I hated that app. My son-in-law leaned in and said, “Because it sounds different, you think it’s a different kind of siren. Something worse.”

He’d nailed it. It reminded me of the Personal Message missile alert system. When you hear that you think, "Something is very, VERY wrong."

Years ago, there was one of those rare occurrences where a missile came our way from Gaza. It hit only a few miles from us, but fell in an open area and no one was hurt. I was home alone, but I knew what to do. I went into the mamad and waited for the danger to pass.

But feelings are complicated. Later that day, I checked my email. At the time I was a moderator for a Jewish genealogy discussion group. The other moderators were not in Israel and they were all chatting away about inconsequential things, nothing really to do with moderation, and I felt myself begin to burn. “Why aren’t they asking about me??” I wondered.

I was really angry. I ended up saying something to the lead moderator, and he seemed surprised to hear I was upset. “I figured the rockets don’t get anywhere near you—you’re not close to Gaza.” He wasn’t wrong. They usually don’t get that far. But occasionally, like that day, they do. And the light banter of my colleagues felt deeply unsettling. As if they didn’t care that people—evil people—were targeting Israelis, targeting me, with rockets.

But the truth is, it’s not that they didn’t care. It’s that they were completely unaware. They don’t hear about the attacks. They’re not on their radar—if you’ll pardon the pun—either because the media doesn’t report them, they’re not paying attention, or they assume, like the lead moderator did, that rockets don’t reach my area.

It’s an easy assumption to make—until one actually lands. Then there's the perception that the rockets aren't really dangerous. Israel has become so effective at intercepting missiles that they rarely get through. As a result, some conclude the rockets aren’t really dangerous—that they’re crudely made, cobbled together from junk, and incapable of doing serious harm.

But that would be wrong.

I know because my son’s house in the south took a direct rocket hit on October 7. Luckily, they were not home at the time. Mainly because my son was already doing reserve duty when the war broke out, so my daughter-in-law took the kids to spend the holiday with her parents. Windows were shattered, the safe room was damaged. The solar collector was a total write-off. My daughter-in-law had to rent an apartment in the center of the country and enroll the kids in a local school until their home was repaired and it was safe for them to return.

Once the repairs were finished and they were finally back home, we went for a visit. My son showed us a massive chunk of rocket he’d kept. They were lucky. Their next-door neighbor's house was a complete loss. They aren't coming back. Being that close to Gaza, the attacks and sirens were constant. They’d had enough.

When the sirens started going off more frequently in our area, I figured it was our turn, now. The south had borne the brunt of things for so long. But we weren't “used” to running for our lives while a siren is blaring. That made it a heart-pounding experience each time it happened. We’d race into the room and count the booms. My husband and kids can tell the difference in sound between an interception and a hit, but my ears are still in training. Usually someone curses the senders of those rockets. “Effers. Effing Houthis." Things like that.

It’s hard on my boys—really men now—especially. It’s not a good feeling to have to run for cover. It makes you feel powerless. Cowardly. It makes you angry that you have to hide from danger, rather than meet it.

As I said, we’ve unfortunately adapted to this situation. My heart doesn’t pound the same way anymore. But a couple of months ago, it was different. One night, the siren went off, and my husband said, “Get the boys!” I ran to the back of the house to herd them into the mamad. (Of course, they didn’t need me to do that. They hear the sirens too. But they don’t run. At least part of that is bravado, for sure.)

A few nights later, the siren went off again, and I just about slept through it. Dov called out, “Siren! Go to the mamad.” The mamad is about two feet from our bedroom, but dazed and disoriented, my brain took over and directed me to repeat what I did last time: run to the back of the house and get the boys to the mamad, to safety. To my misfortune, my autopilot is apparently very bad at what it does. I ran smack into my son, who was already on his way toward the mamad. I mean, I really body-slammed him. He yelled, “EEMA! Where are you going??” So I turned myself around and ran into the wall—and the force of it made me fall down the few steps that lead to that part of the house. I was pretty banged up. Still have bruises one month later.

Later, when I reflected on what had happened, I was kind of awestruck. Clearly, I’d been running on instinct—maternal instinct. And I loved that. That even when my brain couldn’t think, my body still understood: protect your offspring. When the sirens go off in the middle of the night, that’s the prime directive.

Not that you really can. Missiles render regular people like me useless. Powerless. I can herd my sons into a (relatively) safe room. But I can’t keep the missiles away from them—or our home.

What I loved even more than the maternal instinct itself was that my son—the one I’d body-slammed—noticed it and said something. “You were completely out of it, and yet you came to protect us. Because you’re our mother.” It pleased me no end that he understood—and let me know it.

After that, the sirens stopped feeling like such a big deal. My heart didn’t race, and I didn’t rush into the safe room.—I walked.

We’re supposed to stay in there for ten minutes, but the boys never last that long. They leave after a few minutes. Then Dov and I look at each other—should we really stay? We’ve already heard the interceptions. The boys are out. We shrug and stay another minute or so, mostly to set a good example for them, even though they’re long gone.

But it’s a funny thing. Any noise that sounds anything like a siren makes us stop and strain our ears. Is it a siren? Could it be? It might be background music in a film, or something in someone’s voice from another room—just a pitch or tone that echoes the sound of a missile alert. And our bodies react. There’s a physical jolt, like that maternal instinct I had. Some deeper brain process takes over. I think we’re always listening, even when we don’t realize it. Our brains are listening in spite of us—and they’re ready to tell us to run.

Our street overlooks a highway, and the sound carries in odd ways—making everything seem closer than it really is. Because it’s a long, open stretch with no traffic police in the Gush, local Arabs like to drag race there. They usually do it on Shabbos, when most Jews aren’t driving, so the road’s wide open for them to show off what their cars can do. It’s LOUD. And it’s unsettling. It keeps us awake. It’s not a pleasant sound.

Last night it was not Shabbos, but only Tuesday, but they were out there and even louder than usual and it was freaking me out. I knew exactly what those sounds were, but it just kept sounding to me like sirens. Yet, there lay my husband next to me, in a sound, deep sleep.

One morning not long ago, around 5 a.m., I got up to use the bathroom. A siren went off—and I didn’t hear it. What I did hear was my husband calling the boys, which told me what was happening. He was wondering aloud where I was. Had I run for the boys and slammed into a wall again?
But no—I was just in the bathroom. And as it turns out, it’s soundproof. I never heard the siren at all.

Not long ago, it being a hot day, I trained a fan on my bed and lay down to nap. A siren went off—and nope. I did not hear it. The fan apparently obscures the sound. Should I be afraid to use the fan or go to the bathroom, for fear I won’t hear the siren? I don’t think so. It’s not likely that anything would happen to me even if I don’t hear the siren and don’t go into the safe room.

Then again, on Lag B’Omer, as we were walking to a neighbor’s barbecue, I said to Dov, “Do you know where their mamad is? Is it big enough for everyone?”

I felt compelled to ask, though I didn’t feel especially anxious about it—just a passing thought. Still, we all know the enemy—whether Houthi, Hezbollah, Hamas, or whatever; the list is long—loves to target us during our holidays. I don’t know. I just had a hunch.

We’re always saying things like that, “Be ready. I have a hunch,” and it’s almost always wrong. There’s also the Monday morning quarterbacking thing going on. The siren goes off and someone will say, “I knew it! I knew it was coming.”

But it’s ridiculous, because a part of us is always watchful now, watching and waiting.

A bit later, Dov came to tell me there was a mamad right on the same floor. Our host wasn’t sure everyone would fit, but I was welcome to use it if I wanted. I looked at Dov and said, “He’s not going to use it.” It wasn’t really a question.

Some people just don’t—or won’t—do it. They won’t cower in a shelter. They just won't. And you know what? They aren’t wrong. It’s not bravado, false or otherwise. It’s more like what I always say about terror and things like that: “If it’s got your name on it, there’s not much you can do. And if it ain’t got your number on it, why worry?”

So there we were—sitting around a long table, eating hot dogs, burgers, and wings, having a good ole time—when sure enough, the siren goes off.

Instead of jumping up, I looked around the room to see what people would do. What struck me later, in a strange sort of way, was that the first person to rise from the table was an Israeli woman—the only one in the room with no Anglo background. She stood up, then seemed not to know what to do because others weren’t getting up as quickly as she expected. Still, others did, in fact, get up. A friend asked me, “Why aren’t you getting up?” She couldn’t figure out what I was doing.

But I had seen the lay of the land. Our host wasn’t getting up. Neither was his close friend beside him. I said, “Well, if David’s not going to the mamad, I’m not going to the mamad.”

Dov decided to take my cue and sit there. Something we wouldn’t have done at home. I don’t even now know why I felt we couldn’t go to the mamad because we’d look like wusses. LOL. Like is it really better to be hit by a missile, God forbid, than to look like a wuss??

So there we were, and even our hostess wasn’t wussing out, but calmly refilling trays of food. And then there was a huge WHUMP. The floor moved violently under my feet. We looked at each other. “That was CLOSE.”

Everyone moseyed on back from the safe room to the table. My friend sat across from me and said, “Why didn’t you go? You know, there are kids here.”

Oy. I hadn’t seen them. The fact that grownups sat there during a missile siren was not good at all for them to see. I totally would have gone to the mamad had I known there were kids. They need to see us acting like—um—responsible adults. They need to take these things seriously.

Then my friend showed me her phone. A huge piece of shrapnel had fallen not far from Efrat—quite close, in fact, to homes.

A large chunk of debris from the intercepted Houthi ballistic missile landed in the West Bank settlement of Alon Shvut.

No injuries were caused. pic.twitter.com/621CLfDYlF
— Emanuel (Mannie) Fabian (@manniefabian) May 15, 2025

It’s not that we don’t take these things seriously. But sometimes it’s like, “I’ll be damned if I’ll let those Houthis make me run away and hide.”

It does sometimes make you seethe. Other times you just feel blasé—like, “Whatever.”

So it’s strange. So many tangled, conflicting feelings. And yet, this is our life for now—deciding whether to heed the sirens or simply stay put and carry on with whatever we were doing.

On Shabbos, I don’t use my computer. In fact, I try not to email people or go on social media even after Shabbos ends—especially when it’s still Shabbos in places like America. I don’t want to be the reason someone else ends up using their computer on Shabbos to reply to me.

It’s a gray area in Jewish law, for sure. But for me, it feels right to avoid engaging during that time. Since Shavuot is one day in Israel and two days outside, I stayed off Facebook for a couple of days.

The last status I’d written was, “It’s weird that a person can get used to missile sirens, but there it is.”

After Shavuot ended, I checked my notifications—though I wouldn’t be replying to anyone for another day or so. It was a popular post and drew a lot of responses. My friends here in Israel related. They, too, had noticed the slow process of adaptation and shared their own experiences. (The thing is, we’re so WESTERN here in Israel. It’s surreal for people like us to be under missile fire. We’re practically American, and this just doesn’t happen in New York or California—at least not yet.)

Friends outside of Israel had also left comments—admiring ones, concerned ones. And then, sticking out like a sore thumb, was a comment from a “friend” whose name I didn’t even recognize. I didn’t know we were friends. (I have more “Facebook friends” than actual friends.)

“We left Israel a week ago. There were sirens. Big deal. Not scary at all.”

That comment had me doing a slow burn. I kept going back to it, like a tongue probing a sore tooth. What was it that bothered me so much? It was difficult to explain it, even to myself. Part of it was that it didn’t ring true. You can’t hear a missile siren for the first time and not feel at least a little fear. But maybe she was just an emotionless bot. Or showing off. Or trying to one-up me—because she never had to adapt to sirens. She was going home to America after one or two of them. She had no right to that kind of bravery. Not compared to those of us who live here, under the prolonged, grinding strain of a painful, relentless war.

I decided I didn’t need to analyze it any further. People on social media are just zeroes and ones. And this woman—she was what my mother would’ve called “a pain.” I didn’t need the aggravation, whether it was real, imagined, or self-inflicted. So I was kind to myself. I deleted her comment and unfriended her. It felt good. I just hoped she wouldn’t notice and confront me—I didn’t need that either. I just needed her out of my virtual space. She wasn’t good for me. She can claim to be as tough as, or tougher than, most Israelis. But really, she’s not tough at all. She’s the Jew who left. And I’m the Jew who stays. With or without the missiles.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, issued a condemnation of the attack by a Muslim man on peaceful and elderly demonstrators in Boulder, CO on Sunday:

This attack on the Run for Our Lives march in Boulder was a heinous and unacceptable crime.

If that would have been all they said, it would be an impressive statement. But being CAIR, of course that wasn't the case. They added:

The person who perpetrated this violence in Boulder is a criminal whose unacceptable actions do not, in any way, represent the countless Americans of diverse backgrounds who are peacefully advocating for an end to the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.

Suddenly, the attacker has transformed into a protester of "genocide" whose methods might be wrong but whose heart was in the right place: destroy Israel with lies.

CAIR goes on:

Peaceful protests, political engagement, and civil disobedience are the only ways to change policies in our nation.

As we speak out against this unacceptable crime in Boulder, we also reject the cynical attempts by anti-Palestinian racists and anti-Muslim extremists who seek to use this attack to justify their own bigotry and their war on free speech in America.

Unlike those politicians who have never once condemned any of the shootings, stabbings, car rammings, beatings, and other violence directed at pro-Palestine demonstrators, and who actively support genocidal violence against Palestinians in Gaza, people of conscience condemn all criminal violence against all people, here and abroad.

That’s called moral consistency.

So, we have one full sentence condemning the crime, two half sentences that condemn it while also saying that their political opponents are at least as bad as the terrorist, and two sentences that attack CAIR's critics while pretending to be moral. There is far more text of hurling hate and defending those who share the same politics as the terrorist than of condemning him.

This isn't moral consistency. It is using an attack on Jews as an opportunity to further attack Jews.

There is one other word that shows that CAIR is a disgusting organization. In the introduction to the statement, it says by way of background:

On Sunday afternoon, a man used what authorities describe as a “makeshift flamethrower” to attack a group of marchers selectively calling for the release of captives held in Gaza.

What does CAIR mean by using the term "selectively"? The only explanation I can think of is that CAIR is criticizing the protesters for not also calling for the release of Hamas terrorists in Israeli prisons.

It extols "peaceful protests" when done by people who hate Israel, but when it is done by Zionist Jews, CAIR implies, they are self-serving hypocrites for not also calling Israel to release more terrorists.

CAIR is beneath contempt. Its "condemnation" is nothing of the sort - just an excuse to publish more and more hate, which turns into incitement that leads to attacks like this one.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

Over Shavuot, I have been reading The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Ethics and Morality, an overview of the field. Since I have been coming to this project of universalizing Jewish ethics from outside the system, I wanted to know if there was anything I was missing that needs to be addressed in what appears already to be a very strong conceptual framework.

The book traces the history of Jewish ethics, from the Biblical and Talmudic eras through the brilliant medieval philosophers and into the twentieth century. But as I read, one thing kept bothering me: the most prominent names in Jewish philosophy, from Maimonides to Joseph Soloveitchik, keep trying to answer how Jewish ethics fits within the dominant secular philosophies of their eras - Aristotle, Kant, and beyond. These thinkers were undoubtedly brilliant and advanced Jewish ethics immeasurably, but their arguments are, at root, apologetic: an attempt to show that Jewish ethics can hold its own in the language of secular philosophy.

Yet my project has been systematically showing the gaps in secular models of ethics. The Jewish system, I argue, is a superset of the secular ethical systems: it doesn’t merely adopt values, duties, or virtues, but integrates all of these within a much more comprehensive framework rooted, above all, in the concept of covenant. The Jewish model is not a loose collection of values: it is an entire ecosystem, designed to grapple with complexity and real-world dilemmas, to prioritize between conflicting goods, and to treat compromise not as a failure but as a strength. It works at the personal, communal, national, and international levels, without losing coherence.

Trying to fit Jewish ethics into the much narrower frame of existing secular models is, in my view, a category error. If anything, secular ethics should be looking to Jewish ethics for solutions to its persistent shortcomings - shortcomings that philosophers themselves have been identifying and debating for centuries.

I shudder at the thought that I am doing something beyond the giants. Yet it appears I do have one giant on my side, though mentioned only peripherally in the Oxford Handbook: Judah Halevi, the brilliant author of the Kuzari. Halevi was anti-Aristotelian; he argued that Greek ethics, while clever and full of useful tools, were far too limited to serve as a model for Jewish ethics, which is rooted in revelation and lived communal experience. He criticized Greek ethics for focusing on individual perfection and neglecting communal responsibility, a theme that resonates with my own critique. (Notably, he also distinguished between universal rational morality and revelatory law, another similarity with my approach.)

If I am right, then Jewish philosophy took a fateful turn with Maimonides, one that positioned secular ethics as the standard Jewish thought must live up to. This was understandable: Jewish philosophers living in exile often felt compelled to justify Judaism to the dominant cultures around them. But today, with a restored Jewish state and a changing world, perhaps it is time to recognize the genius of Jewish ethics—not as a supplement to Western philosophy, but as a comprehensive, practical, and universal model in its own right that can stand up to, and surpass, the best secular ethical philosophies.

In my next post about this topic I hope to show how the Jewish ethical system brilliantly and seamlessly covers individual, communal, national- and international-level ethics in a single conceptual idea - and how that can be universalized for the entire world.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

From Sultan Ibrahim Al-Khalaf, a columnist at Al Rai Media, which runs the most popular newspaper in Kuwait along with a major TV station:

Western media has been able to distort the image of Nazi Germany after its defeat in World War II, imprinting it in people's minds as an evil specter, an enemy of humanity, whenever the Nazis are mentioned.

Zionist Jews played a major role in defaming the Nazis in order to take revenge for the oppression they suffered at their hands. They imposed on the world the story of the "Holocaust," which represents that oppression. This story is full of exaggerations, far from the truth, and mostly a figment of the imagination, such as the extermination of 6 million Jews in Europe. They then imposed a law that punishes anyone who doubts or denies the "Holocaust," and another that punishes anyone who attacks Jews, on the charge of "anti-Semitism."

Western media is horrified at Holocaust denial - except when it is done by Arabs.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

06/03 Links: ‘Free Palestine’ Terrorism; Why Humanitarian Organizations hate the GHF; BBC have become the gold standard for fake news in support of Hamas.

From Ian:

John Spencer and Arsen Ostrovsky: The US-Israel Gaza aid plan is working — which is why Hamas is spreading lies about it

The GHF threatens to dismantle that system by delivering directly to civilians, bypassing the terror group that has used starvation as a strategy.

So Hamas has turned to a two-pronged response.

First, disruption on the ground: sending armed operatives to provoke chaos at aid sites, firing on civilians attempting to access food and deliberately manufacturing volatility.

Second, disinformation: flooding social media and compliant news outlets with false casualty counts, doctored images and fabricated narratives — all to paint Israel as the aggressor and itself as the victim.

This isn’t theory.

It’s strategy.

It’s textbook Hamas.

And more than 600 days into a war they began, too much of the world’s media still parrots its talking points without question.

That’s not journalism — it’s complicity.

Yes, the suffering in Gaza is real.

But its cause is not Israel’s military operations or efforts to rescue the hostages Hamas still holds; it’s Hamas’ own strategy of exploitation and terror.

Meantime, the international community, led by UNRWA, had been the primary source of humanitarian assistance in Gaza and for years willfully turned a blind eye to Hamas’ exploitation of aid — failing to enforce meaningful oversight, even employing Hamas members (many who took part in the Oct. 7 attacks) as local staff and using its facilities to hoard aid for terror operations.

Now, UNRWA would seemingly rather see the GHF fail, and the people of Gaza actually starve, so it can continue using the Jewish state as its forever-scapegoat.

Israel has taken unprecedented steps to minimize civilian harm, facing an enemy that embeds in civilian areas, hoards humanitarian aid and sacrifices its own people to gain global sympathy.

Humanitarian aid must never be a bargaining chip for terrorists.

But by insisting on a system that leaves aid in Hamas’ hands, much of the international community has allowed exactly that.

Hamas would rather starve its own people than lose control over them.

Those who truly care about the welfare of Palestinian civilians must support a system that bypasses Hamas altogether.

That system is the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.

The GHF is delivering what countless international actors have failed to provide: direct, accountable, large-scale humanitarian assistance that does not empower a terrorist group.

It breaks Hamas’ monopoly over aid and strips it of one of its most dangerous tools — using food as a means of control.

That’s why Hamas is trying to sabotage this initiative.

Supporting the GHF means more than feeding the hungry.

It means breaking Hamas’ grip on Gaza’s civilians.

It means dismantling the group’s strategy of domination through deprivation.

And it means backing a bold US-Israeli initiative that delivers not only food — but hope.

Why Humanitarian Organizations hate the GHF

Neutrality
Critics assert that Israel’s military oversight of GHF distribution centers, including securing perimeters for U.S. contractors, violates neutrality (aid must not align with a belligerent) and independence (aid must be free from military control). This criticism is baseless. No modern war has been fought without Western armies being responsible for humanitarian supplies.

For example:
In Iraq (2003–2011), the U.S. established Civil-Military Operations Centers (CMOCs) to coordinate aid with NGOs, directly delivering supplies in secure areas to prevent insurgent theft (U.S. Department of Defense, 2004). USAID funded independent groups like Mercy Corps, but U.S. military involvement was significant.

In Afghanistan (2001–2021), the U.S. conducted airdrops of 2.4 million humanitarian rations and escorted UN convoys, ensuring civilian access while securing routes (WFP, 2002).

These actions, far more intrusive than Israel’s role in the GHF, faced no comparable IHL objections. Israel’s measures—screening aid and securing distribution—are permitted under Article 23(c) of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which allows controls to prevent aid from benefiting the enemy. GHF is not operated by Israel but by private contractors with the IDF only guarding the perimeter.

Impartiality
Critics claim that directing aid to southern Gaza while restricting northern deliveries violates impartiality, as aid must be distributed based on need without discrimination (Article 70, Additional Protocol I). However, Hamas is the one controlling aid now, diverting supplies to its fighters and selling them for profit. Israel’s restrictions aim to prevent this, as allowed under Article 23(c), which permits measures to ensure aid reaches civilians, not combatants.

The fact that one of the warring parties, Hamas, had been effectively controlling the aid did not seem to bother the same “humanitarian” organization that alleges that the IDF’s involvement in securing the distribution centers is a violation of the impartiality principle.

Moreover, IHL permits effective sieges to isolate combatants, provided civilian harm is proportionate (Article 54, Additional Protocol I). Allegations of Weaponization

Humanitarian organizations allege that Israel uses the GHF to pressure Hamas or manipulate civilian movements, violating Article 49 (forcible transfer). These claims are exaggerated and echo Hamas’s propaganda. Hamas actively sabotages GHF centers, spreading misinformation to deter civilians. The GHF’s targeted delivery is a practical response to Hamas’s diversion, not a violation of IHL. Hamas had been the one using the control of the aid as a weapon of war by using the Gazans as pawns in its media war against Israel.

Weaponizing IHL
The humanitarian community’s criticisms reflect a double standard in interpreting IHL that prevents Israel from dismantling Hamas’s last lever of power—control over aid. The double standard that is applied to Israel comes directly from the symbiotic relationship that UN organization in Gaza gave established with Hamas.

These organizations use IHL and the language of human rights to parrot Hamas propaganda by creating a standard of IHL that is impossible to follow. The goal post keeps on changing in such a way that would prevent Israel from effectively achieving a victory over Hamas, the ruling government of Gaza.

Hamas is on the brink of collapse, with Gazans storming its warehouses and defying its. The GHF is the final step to break this control, and this is why it is the final nail in Hamas’s coffin. Precisely, for these, the “humanitarian” organization has thrown everything but the kitchen sink at the GHF to prevent the final collapse of the Hamas government.

True concern for Gaza’s humanitarian situation requires allowing Israel to finish the war against Hamas. Defeating Hamas will end its tyranny and the immense suffering Hamas has inflicted on its own population.

Eli Lake: Who Profits From Gaza’s Desperation?

In other words, Hamas wants to sabotage Israel’s plans to cut out the terrorist group from one of its remaining sources of control and leverage in Gaza: distribution of food and aid. That is an important piece of context missing from nearly all of the first-day stories on the alleged massacres. It also may explain why on Tuesday morning, the world awoke to more reports of Palestinians being shot as they awaited food deliveries. At a bare minimum it’s reasonable to conclude that Hamas is instigating confrontations with the IDF in order to provoke the shootings of hungry aid recipients.

This, however, does not eliminate the possibility that Israeli soldiers have in some cases fired in the direction of Palestinians awaiting aid. Israel is attempting to deliver food in the middle of a war zone. Even the most professional armies make mistakes. If the accounts of these shootings are accurate, then the Israelis have fired warning shots as crowds approached a site before the aid distribution was ready. That’s a tragedy, but not a massacre.

“I believe Hamas has every interest in sabotaging the aid mechanism because they cannot control it or loot it to finance their existence,” Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, the director of Realign For Palestine and a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, told The Free Press. “What little evidence I have been able to see thus far suggests [the recent reports of shootings] may have been an excessive case of crowd control by the Israeli military gone wrong.”

Alkhatib has taken the responsible approach. There is still scant evidence of what actually happened on Sunday at Rafah. A video shared by an Al Jazeera journalist, for example, showed footage of an aid distribution point in Khan Younis, not in Rafah where the alleged massacre took place. When the BBC checked its facts, it issued a clarification pointing to these discrepancies.

“The circumstances of this strike are unclear,” the BBC said. Well, that’s an understatement.

Even if Israel is to blame for the alleged shootings in Rafah, it would be a triumph for Hamas if these reported incidents scuttled the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation’s work. If Israel and its allies—more than a year and a half into the war—have found a way to sever aid distribution from Hamas’s grip, there is a real chance that finally these fanatics will be driven from power by the very people they have misruled for nearly two decades. That is how to end the war.

Alkhatib agrees. He recommended the new aid approach be expanded so that Palestinians can receive aid without walking miles and being forced to wait for hours on end in the unforgiving sun and heat.

Nonetheless, he said, “It has shown an immense potential for many who are desperate to access food without having to pay massively inflated prices for aid that is supposed to be free in the first place.” Alkhatib added that the exorbitant prices Gazans must pay for food that is supposed to be free of charge is a scandal. “That’s not on Israel,” he said. “That is on Hamas, the international NGO community, and the United Nations.”

Chag sameach!

For those who celebrate, have a chag Shavuot kosher v'samech!

I will not be back online until Tuesday night.

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

06/01 Links: Fake News: CNN, BBC Ran Unverified Claims Israel Killed Palestinians at Aid Site; Pro-Israeli protesters attacked with Molotov cocktails in Colorado

From Ian:

John Spencer: No one should want ceasefire in Gaza until clear defeat of Hamas

War is always tragic. But some wars are necessary. The just purpose of war is not vengeance—it is justice, deterrence, and the restoration of peace. But peace is not possible with an armed, fanatical regime in Gaza that seeks your destruction and views the murder of civilians as a divine duty. Wars of self-defense must end with unmistakable clarity.

Germany in 1918 was defeated militarily, but the war ended with ambiguity. The Allies allowed the German army to retreat intact. The result was the “stab-in-the-back” myth that fueled Nazism and led to an even more catastrophic war. In 1945, the Allies made no such mistake. Nazi Germany was not just defeated—it was destroyed as a governing entity. So was Imperial Japan. And just as importantly, the German and Japanese populations came to see and accept that their regimes had been defeated. Both societies underwent years of disarmament, reconciliation, and comprehensive deradicalization. Only then could Europe and the Pacific begin to rebuild in peace.

Israel faces the same choice today. Ending this war without defeating Hamas means condemning Israelis—and Palestinians—to unending conflict. It means October 7 becomes not a cautionary tale, but a case study in successful terrorism, lawfare, hostage taking, and wars of aggression.

Israel is currently achieving real, measurable success in its military campaign. Operation Gideon’s Chariot has transitioned from massed maneuvers to coordinated clear-and-hold operations across Gaza. The IDF has successfully seized and is now holding terrain in areas once dominated by Hamas battalions. Elite Israeli units continue to dismantle Hamas’s underground networks, rocket infrastructure, weapons production sites, and command centers—undermining the group’s ability to wage war.

In parallel, Israel has established a new humanitarian mechanism—the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation—to deliver food, water, and medicine directly to civilians without going through Hamas. This is critical. For years, Hamas maintained power not only through fear and force but also by monopolizing aid distribution and punishing dissent. That monopoly is now being broken. For the first time in nearly two decades, signs of civilian defiance are emerging: Gazans protesting Hamas’s theft, rejecting their authority, and calling them out publicly.

But let no one be mistaken—this is still a war, not a counterinsurgency. Hamas remains the de facto ruling power of Gaza. It still commands fighters, holds hostages, and exerts control over large swaths of the population. No one who has studied war—real war—should have expected that a terror regime that spent decades militarizing every inch of Gaza and radicalizing generations of civilians could be dismantled easily or quickly. Those calling for an immediate ceasefire either do not understand war, or do not want Hamas to lose.

This war must end not with a ceasefire, but with a clear and irreversible outcome: the defeat of Hamas as a military and governing power.

If the international community truly wants peace, it should focus not on saving Hamas, but on how it is first removed from power, disarmed, and dismantled—so that the long process of deradicalization and reconciliation can begin. This was the path taken after World War II, when defeating the regimes that started the war was recognized as the necessary precondition for lasting peace.

Israel cannot be the only party planning for what comes after Hamas. The international community must stop pretending Hamas can be part of the solution. It must become part of the solution itself: by supporting measures that accelerate Hamas’s defeat, such as the movement of civilians out of Hamas’s grasp, not refusing to participate in a humanitarian plan that delivers aid directly to the people Hamas has long exploited.

The hypocrisy must stop. The reality must be accepted: peace will never come while Hamas remains intact. There is no future in which Gaza flourishes while Hamas remains in power. There is no future in which Israelis or Palestinians are safe if October 7, hostage taking, lawfare, and human shielding are seen as a path to political leverage.

We would live in a very different world if the Allies had not pursued victory in 1945. We will live in a dark and dangerous world if Hamas is allowed to claim one now.

Let it be clear—to Hamas and to the world—that they lost this war. Anything less guarantees a future of endless violence.

JPost Editorial: Tom Fletcher's continued falsehoods on Israel prove he needs to resign

Tom Fletcher must resign. The UN’s under-secretary for humanitarian aid, tasked with supposed impartiality and accuracy in global crises, has proven himself yet again unworthy of the post he holds. His recent inflammatory accusations against Israel, specifically that it is subjecting Gaza to “forced starvation,” a war crime, are not only unsubstantiated but dangerously irresponsible.

In a BBC interview published on Friday, Fletcher claimed that Israel is deliberately starving the population of Gaza, implying intentional war crimes. “It is classified as a war crime,” he said, adding that courts and history will ultimately judge. These are no small words. They carry weight. They can inflame conflict. They can distort international discourse. And they must be based on facts, not ideological fervor or personal agendas.

Fletcher is not new to exaggeration. Just last week, he was forced to walk back a false and hysterical claim that 14,000 babies could die within 48 hours if aid was not allowed into Gaza. The UN itself later clarified that the figure, taken from a year-long projection on malnutrition, was grossly misrepresented. Fletcher admitted they were “desperate to get that aid in,” and thus loosened their standards of accuracy. That is not desperation. That is deception.

Even as Israel has opened aid corridors and worked with the US-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation to allow supplies through, Fletcher has refused to acknowledge any progress. Nor has he uttered a single word about the very real obstacles posed by Hamas. The terrorist group routinely hijacks aid convoys, reroutes them to its own warehouses, and sells food at extortionate prices to a starving population. This is a humanitarian catastrophe created by Hamas, but Fletcher has yet to acknowledge it.

Instead, he places the entirety of the blame on Israel. No mention of the Israeli hostages still languishing in Hamas captivity. No recognition of the terror group’s abuse of humanitarian infrastructure. No condemnation of Hamas’s use of civilian shields. Just relentless, blinkered criticism of the only side in this war that is both a democracy and a UN member state.

It is political theater at its finest, and another example of the utter uselessness of the United Nations.

Israeli Ambassador to Britain: We Are No Longer Willing to Jeopardize Our Security

Amb. Tzipi Hotovely interviewed by Tim Stanley (Sunday Telegraph-UK)
The problem with coverage of Gaza is that emotions run so high, every discussion ends up feeling like an interrogation - and the Israelis push back with force. What outsiders often forget is that beneath the rhetorical fireworks lies a deep pain. Israeli Ambassador Tzipi Hotovely tells me "everyone in Israel is traumatized" by the events of Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas invaded Israel, murdering and kidnapping more than a thousand people.

"We, as Israelis, have been through terror attacks in our coffee shops, on our buses, on our streets, but never in the past did we feel like our houses were not safe." This is their new "vulnerability: the feeling that you cannot protect your own children....I think that October 7th was a watershed moment...all across Israel. No one can say in Israel that he's the same person after."

Some governments still live in the mentality of "October 6th" - but Israelis have been shown "that if you have a jihadi, Islamist terrorist group that wants to destroy you on your doorstep, at the end of the day, it'll end up in a massacre." Think of it as living next-door to the "Third Reich." "The aims of the war are very clear to Israel. Hamas shouldn't exist as a political leadership and with military power after we finish."

"Israel's policy from the beginning of the war was to deliver aid to Gaza." Some "25,000 trucks of aid got into Gaza. This is not a starvation program, this is actually a flooding Gaza with aid program....The reason why it had to stop was because it was being looted only to feed the terrorists" or "to sell the aid that people were supposed to get for free." "As a Jew, as an Israeli, we value life very much. Unfortunately, our enemies don't....I think it's a clash of civilizations....I find that Western people find it very hard to believe that on the other side, there are people who are using their own children as human shields, but they do....Now, think about it. Do you think the UK would have continued living next to a terror organization that is a threat to your children in Kent? Or in London or in Liverpool? I don't think so."

"What did October 7th prove? First of all, unfortunately what we've seen is big support among Palestinians towards the massacre." One poll found 86% of West Bank residents sympathized with the pogrom. The concept of a two-state solution "was rejected by the Palestinians again and again. Israelis had hope [in it] in the 1990s and were willing to compromise, but...every time there was some type of negotiation, there was more terrorism....So Israelis are no longer willing to jeopardize their security any longer."

Community is the unspoken engine of morality (including Shavuot tie-in)

In my last post on the topic of Jewish ethics for the world, I discussed the importance of community in the context of extending “kiddush Hashem” to the world, and noted that community is a missing piece of most universal ethics models.

I didn’t go far enough.

Community is an essential component for any truly universal ethical system to work.

For a philosophy to work for everyone, it cannot only be a list of values. It needs to give people a reason to adopt the system.

Too often, with universalistic ethics, that can turn the ethical system into a coercive system - which itself is immoral. But how can you incentivize people to choose to adopt a morality system when the only choices are either to force them or to allow them to leave at will?

The answer is to look more closely at how Jewish ethics works.

Unlike Christian or Islamic ethics, Jewish ethics were not built with the entire world in mind. It was created for Israel and the Jewish people, who view themselves as a small, defined tribe or family. In other words, a community.

In Judaism the mitzvot (commandments) are commonly divided into two categories: those between man and God (bein adam l’Makom) and those between people (bein adam l’chaveiro.) What is not often mentioned is that while the obligations between man and God are covenantal, so are those between people - in a different way. There are covenantal style obligations and expectations between the individual and the community. The community takes care of its members and the members take care of communal needs.

When secularizing Jewish ethics, the covenantal piece between man and God obviously does not apply. But the concept of covenant bridges the gap between coercive ethical systems and those with no penalties for ignoring the values. People feel obligated to their communities naturally, a secular equivalent of the Talmudic phrase “All Israel is responsible for one another.”

In the Jewish context, the covenantal nature of the two are linked closely. A celebration, mourning, prayer all require a quorum of people (a minyan) to be considered complete. Community is not just convenient but sacred.

For the secular world, community isn’t quite that essential - but it is pretty close. There is a reason why prisoners are punished with solitary confinement. There is a reason why we regard senior citizens who cannot physically leave their homes as tragic figures. Losing community means losing a part of the self. A covenant does not have to be with God - it is also any ongoing, mutual pledge that binds people in shared purpose and accountability.

Ethics itself is largely dependent on being around other people. Much of ethics are built on the assumption that the person has relationships with others. The missing piece is understanding how critical community is to everyone - and how community provides the incentives for doing good that universalistic systems simply cannot match. A hermit is not an ethical person because a hermit has few ethical challenges.

Telling someone that they must do good for the betterment of mankind comes across as utopian and, to an extent, close to false. Dropping litter on the ground is not going to materially affect the world, and even knowing the consequences if everyone would do the same doesn’t affect the personal calculus in making that ethical choice. But if this is your community’s space, and one of your fellows will be the one who must pick it up, and you are not holding up your end of the deal - which is the covenant - then you are more likely to think twice and do the right thing.

It is difficult for people to feel responsible for the world. It is natural for people to feel responsible for their fellows.

When the universalist ethical systems fail, it is not because their values are bad. Most of them have values that are praiseworthy. But that is not enough - you need the framework, you need an engine, and the covenant that goes along with belonging to a community is the engine that allows one to practice these values, willingly.

What about those who can’t join the community for whatever reason - shut-ins, the sick, the mentally ill?

Jewish ethics, again, offers the answer: the true test of a community is how it seeks to include those on the margins. Commandments like bikur cholim (visiting the sick), pidyon shvuyim (redeeming captives), and the countless laws of hospitality and compassion place the burden of inclusion on the community itself. The real test and greatness of a covenantal community is not how it celebrates the joiners, but how it seeks, honors, and embraces those least able to participate.

The holiday of Shavuot is almost upon us. We tell the story of the ultimate outcast - Ruth. She loses her husband, her homeland, her people, but she wants desperately to be part of a covenantal community. She tells her mother-in-law, “Your people shall be my people, and your God my God.” She took on both covenants, that between Jews and God and between Jews and the Jewish community. Even so she is an outcast and lonely, not welcomed as a full member of the community - until the kindness of a Jew brings in this outsider from Moab into the Jewish community where she ends up the ancestor of a family of kings. There are many lessons in the story of Ruth, but the importance of community and welcoming the marginalized into the community is a constant theme throughout.

So we have a third way in moral systems: not coercive universality, and not opt-in universalism, but a covenant of shared responsibility between the individual and their fellows.

The Jewish ethical view of communal responsibility is arguably much more demanding. The phrase I quoted above, “All Israel is responsible for one another,” can be translated as “All Israel are guarantors for one another.” That is a much higher bar for one’s obligations to community.

As we mentioned previously, community can be defined however one wants. Communities can be groups of people with similar interests, people who went to the same school, people who were born in the same neighborhood, people who join the same health club. Even online, people can help each other in many ways (although they are no substitute for physical community.)

Modern psychology and sociology confirm what tradition knows. Meaning, purpose, and ethical action flourish in belonging to something greater than oneself. Rules and values are resilient only when communities enforce, model, and celebrate them.

Not only that, but modern moral philosophy proves this as well. The most successful examples of modern ethics in action are not universal cases but those that are geared towards specific communities. Professional codes, like those for journalists, doctors or lawyers, work precisely because of members of these professions belong to a community. Breaking the ethical codes results in making the violators pariahs besides the professional consequences.

Similarly, co-ops, unions, trade guilds, fraternities - all of these are communities that create ethical codes for their members. The codes are not meant to be universal but particular - which is the entire reason why they work while their universalistic counterparts fall apart so easily.

Community isn’t an optional component of people’s lives and relationships. It is central, even more important to most people than their shared humanity with the entire world. Community provides the impetus that make people want to act morally, and the underlying reason is the unstated covenant between the community and the individual, to everyone’s benefit.

This is why a truly universal ethical system must be covenantal, and in the secular world this means it must be lived in community.

This is not just a Jewish insight. But Jewish interpersonal ethics is based on being part of a community, which is why it is successful. This can - and indeed must - be an axiom of any universal ethical system.

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

The Gaza "starving children" meme, which only ACCELERATED since millions of meals have been distributed, is an orchestrated blood libel against Jews

The New York Times published a photo essay and article about supposedly starving Gazans, describing children there as "emaciated."

According to the Gaza health ministry, the number of people who have starved to death in Gazasince October 2023 is 60. And we've already seen that every one of those sixty who have been described by name in the media had other health problems that were their main reasons for death.

Let's compare the number of people who have starved to death in Gaza with other areas.

More children die in Ethiopia and Angola every day from starvation than have died in Gaza over 20 months.

Yet out of the New York Times tweets mentioning Ethiopia over the past two years, not one mentions starvation. One does point to an article that has one sentence about famine among reporting on its fighting, but there are more tweets about Ethiopian marathon runners than children starving.

I don't see a single article about Angola's starving children in the past five years of tweets - even though Biden administration officials, and Joe Biden himself, visited Angola in 2024.

There are four New York Times tweets that mention "famine" and "Sudan" over the past year. Compare that to 15 tweets that mention "Gaza" and "famine."

There are two New York Times tweets over the past year with both "Sudan" and "starvation." For Gaza, there are ten.

Far more people die in the US from starvation - 20,500 in 2022 - than in Gaza. Most of them are elderly, not children, but how many articles are about them? In fact, the only 2022 article I could find on hunger in America in the New York Times trumpeted how things were getting better, and did not mention a single death.

There is no famine in Gaza. There is hunger and food insecurity to be sure, and Israel is taking this very seriously - building aid distribution centers and their associated infrastructure takes time and effort, of which there is no parallel in the countries listed above and the many others that have thousands who die every year from starvation.

The new Gaza Humanitarian Foundation initiative has already distributed 4.7 million meals - yet virtually every story in the media does not mention that but repeats false Hamas claims of people being killed at those distribution sites and quote "experts" on how the GHF is not doing enough.

The "starvation" and "famine" articles and posts are nothing less than a blood libel. And the uniformly negative reactions to the successful GHF rollout in mainstream media - uncritically publishing Hamas lies and downplaying the incredible success of GHF - shows that this is a orchestrated campaign to slander Israeli Jews.

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

Reuters reports:

On Saturday, aid groups said dozens of World Food Programme trucks carrying flour to Gaza bakeries had been hijacked by armed groups and subsequently looted by people desperate for food after weeks of mounting hunger.
"After nearly 80 days of a total blockade, communities are starving and they are no longer willing to watch food pass them by," the WFP said in a statement.

But Houthi media quote the head of the umbrella group of Palestinian NGOs saying Israel was protecting the armed hijackers:

The Director General of the Palestinian Non-Governmental Organizations Network, Amjad Shawa, announced that armed gangs robbed 86 aid trucks, under the protection of Israeli drones, most of which were loaded with flour in the southern Gaza Strip.

He pointed out that the enemy changed the route of the convoy at the last minute from the Netzarim axis to the Kerem Shalom crossing, as the road there is unsafe.

The trucks were forced to enter a red zone, evacuated of residents, amid intense drone flights to protect the gangs from any possible pursuit by security forces and police forces in Gaza.

Don't laugh - this will be in the Washington Post in a week or two as a credible possibility.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

05/31 Links: Where have all the Jews gone?; Iran secretly enriching enough uranium for nine nuclear weapons; Radiohead’s Thom Yorke condemns ‘cynical’ Hamas

From Ian:

Where have all the Jews gone?

Just as in the past, American Jews are moving away from urban cores – where violence and now anti-Semitism are more obvious. Historian Arthur Hertzberg estimated that between the end of the Second World War and 1956, one-third of all Jews left the urban centers for the suburbs. When you think of Jewish communities, particularly outside orthodoxy, you think not of the Lower East Side but Long Island and Westchester. In LA, Boyle Heights has been supplanted first by the San Fernando Valley and increasingly the Conejo Valley even further from Downtown. In Greater Baltimore today, three-fourths of all Jews live in the suburbs.

The same forces – crime and rising anti-Semitism – have also prompted many Jews to move to the South. Long seen as too conservative and Christian fundamentalist, the South is now the ‘it’ place for Jews, both in terms of basic safety and economic opportunity. Demographer Ira Sheskin notes that while the north-east’s share of US Jews has dropped from 68 per cent in 1955 to 41 per cent today, the South’s share of the US Jewish population has soared from a mere eight per cent in 1955 to 24 per cent. The ‘hot’ cities for Jewish growth include Dallas, Houston and Atlanta, as well as Miami.

More and more Jewish young people are choosing colleges on similar grounds. For generations, the dream of Jewish parents was to send their offspring to the Ivy League, or the great public universities like Berkeley or UCLA. But today, the leading destination for Jewish students is the University of Florida, with the University of Central Florida ranking third.

The reason for this shift is simple. Jewish young people are safer in the South. According to one study ranking universities’ level of hostility toward Jewish students, Columbia, the University of Pennsylvania and three University of California campuses were among the most hostile. The least hostile environments included Tulane in New Orleans, Washington University in St Louis and five colleges in Florida.

Jews may be in the depths of despair, as their havens throughout the West sometimes seem to be turning into an anti-Zionist, Jew-hating hellscape. But they have hope, too. After all, Jews have survived outside Israel for two millennia by adapting, shifting their locales and their political loyalties to fit changing realities. We may be horrified by recent events. But in the face of those who yearn for our destruction, we will persevere.

NYPost Editorial: Hamas’ cease-fire ‘counteroffer’ is just a demand for Israel to give up the war

Witkoff’s latest offer would have Hamas turn over 10 living hostages and a dozen or two bodies, in exchange for 125 terrorists serving life sentences plus another 1,000-plus jailbirds and a 60-day ceasefire and ongoing talks toward a full peace settlement.

But Hamas knows full well that Netanyahu won’t end the war until the terrorists are all dead, surrendered or expelled from Gaza: He refuses to allow for any possibility of another Oct. 7, and Israeli public opinion so far supports him.

So the terror group’s counteroffer is to demand some kind of guarantee that Washington won’t let the IDF resume operations when the 60 days are up, as well as the resumption of aid entering under UN or similar auspices, without Israeli controls.

As things stand, Hamas is toast within months.

To get hostages returned, Israel will allow it a respite — and so risk some development (Netanyahu’s ouster, a drastic shift in the region, Washington concluding it needs the war ended; who knows?) that would let the terror group hang on in Gaza.

Unless Team Trump decides to overrule Israel’s unchanged war goals, Hamas will have to settle for that hope of a lifeline, or no deal is happening.

Iran secretly enriching enough uranium for nine nuclear weapons, IAEA report says

Iran carried out secret nuclear activities with material not declared to the UN nuclear watchdog at three locations that have long been under investigation, the watchdog said in a wide-ranging, confidential report to member states seen by Reuters.

The findings in the "comprehensive" International Atomic Energy Agency report requested by the agency's 35-nation Board of Governors in November pave the way for a push by the United States, Britain, France, and Germany for the board to declare Iran in violation of its non-proliferation obligations.

A resolution would infuriate Iran and could further complicate nuclear talks between Tehran and Washington.

Using the IAEA report's findings, the four Western powers plan to submit a draft resolution for the board to adopt at its next meeting the week of June 9, diplomats say. It would be the first time in almost 20 years that Iran has formally been found in non-compliance.

Tehran says it wants to master nuclear technology for peaceful purposes and has long denied accusations by Western powers that it is seeking to develop nuclear weapons.

Iran said that a report by the UN nuclear watchdog on Saturday is "politically motivated and repeats baseless accusations", state media reported.

Iran said it will "implement appropriate measures" in response to any effort to take action against Tehran at the IAEA governors' meeting.

While many of the findings relate to activities dating back decades and have been made before, the IAEA report's conclusions were more definitive. It summarized developments in recent years and pointed more clearly towards coordinated, secret activities, some of which were relevant to producing nuclear weapons.

It also spelled out that Iran's cooperation with IAEA continues to be "less than satisfactory" in "a number of respects." The IAEA is still seeking explanations for uranium traces found years ago at two of four sites it has been investigating. Three hosted secret experiments, it found.

05/30 Links Pt2: Phillips: Diaspora Jews under siege; The Anti-Israel Right Joins the Pro-Iran Left; Dishonest reporting kills: DC antisemitic murders are a wake up call

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: Diaspora Jews under siege

It’s not what it actually is: a uniquely murderous and deranged creed that all people of conscience must oppose. Unbelievably, for the Western liberal, antisemitism has become a moral obligation. The destruction of the Jewish homeland and the abuse of Jews have become an expression of liberal conscience.

And that’s why the entire humanitarian establishment—the United Nations, the International Criminal Court, the International Court of Justice, the whole apparatus of human-rights law, and NGOs like Amnesty and Human Rights Watch—all of this is focused on singling out Israel and the Jews to be demonized and dehumanized.

It’s why the most “progressive” countries—Britain, Canada and Australia—are the most viciously hostile to Israel. It’s rank, murderous, racist bigotry, all in the name of conscience and justice.

It’s as if Stalinism and Nazism are finally winning against civilization, destroying the Jews through frying the Western brain. This is why so many feel they have stepped through the looking-glass into a living nightmare.

So what is to be done? Clearly, the Jewish world is up against the old evil, but of an unprecedented type and scale. And, of course, against such derangement, reason doesn’t work.

It’s important, though, to put the facts into the public domain for those who are not immune to reason but are simply ignorant of Judaism, the Middle East and the history of the Jewish people. That, unfortunately, includes many Jews.

As for the haters who are indeed beyond rational argument, there is a strategy that would be effective. This involves recognizing their Achilles’ heel.

What they most care about is not the oppressed Palestinian Arabs whose cause they so noisily proclaim. They care, above all, about their image to themselves and to others as moral, compassionate and smart. There’s no point calling them out for antisemitism. And playing defense is worse than useless because it’s to argue on the mind-twisting terms they have set out and so is bound to fail.

Israel’s defenders should instead put these people on the back foot by calling them out for being the very things that they purport to hate.

So, for example, they should be accused of promoting imperialism, in supporting the Arab conquest of another country and extinguishing the rights of its indigenous people; of being stupid, sloppy and credulous in writing and broadcasting manipulative falsehoods; and of being racist.

Arabs comprise about 20% of Israel’s population. By demanding that the “settlers” be removed from the disputed areas of Judea and Samaria because this supposedly prevents the creation of a state of Palestine, the Israel-haters are supporting ethnic cleansing and promoting a doctrine of racial purity. They should be told that their progressivism is bogus.

Jews in America and Britain should stop presuming to lecture Israel about what it should be doing. If they don’t live there, they have no right to do so. Their task—and it could not be more urgent—is instead to start educating Diaspora Jews about Judaism and the Jewish people, and then take the fight to the enemy in a far smarter and more strategic way.

Stephen Pollard: The Left don’t care about racist attacks when the victims are Jews

The hate marches which are now a regular feature of city life are suffused with anti=Semitism. Backing for Palestinian ‘resistance’ – terror – is ubiquitous. Support for Hamas and Hezbollah – both of which are prescribed – is repeatedly on display. Calls to ‘globalise the intifada’ – are the norm.

You want to globalise the intifada? Start at Hampstead underground station – after last week’s murders in Washington DC.

But it’s not the perpetrators of hate who are dealt with. It’s those who oppose it. Last week, for example, the Telegraph reported that a Jewish counter-protester was arrested and charged after he was seen holding a placard satirising Hassan Nasrallah, the former Hezbollah leader. In his police questioning he was asked over and over again if he agreed that the image would offend “clearly pro-Hezbollah and anti-Israel” activists. No one who follows the police’s actions – last year the Met pinned down a counter-protestor carrying a banner reading “Hamas is terrorist” at a march and then arrested him – will be remotely surprised by this. At a march in Manchester after the October 7 massacre, for example, a banner reading “Manchester supports Palestinian resistance” was protected by police standing alongside it.

Open anti-Semitism is rarely met by action, but it is often accompanied by drivel, the most frequent example of which is the phrase repeated ad nauseam by politicians that “There is no place for anti-Semitism”, followed by the name of a city or an organisation which has just proved there is every place for anti-Semitism in its fold.

In December, for example, after an expose of truly shocking examples of open anti-Semitism from NHS staff, health secretary Wes Streeting came out with the usual words: “There is no place for anti-Semitism in the NHS”. The expose had shown that there is in fact a warm welcome for anti-Semitism in the NHS, with none of the NHS Trusts or managers having done anything about it. The same phrase falls regularly from the mouths of Yvette Cooper and Sir Sadiq Khan, but only after an incident which has proved the opposite.

This time, after Monday’s attack on three Jewish boys on the Underground, they can’t even be bothered to be as unbothered as before and trot out some meaningless platitude. Jews hate? Assault? We really don’t care.

The Anti-Israel Right Joins the Pro-Iran Left

Donald Trump says he is going to fight to end antisemitism and the left-wing delegitimization and hatred of Israel that has plagued college campuses since Oct. 7, which led to the murder last week of two Israeli embassy employees. Standing in the way of his efforts to rid America of a violent and deadly scourge are the radical left, Democrats, federal courts, and university presidents who are determined to protect pro-Palestinian terrorists from his deportation campaign.

Everyone wants Trump to lose. This includes certain self-proclaimed MAGA influencers, who are obsessed with the idea of Israel as a uniquely evil force in world history and American Jews as a malignant fifth column. The influencers are joined by Trump officials trying to reorient the president’s Middle East policy and negate the successes of his first term. Both camps now find themselves on the same side as the globalist institutions they say they despise: the United Nations and other world bodies that threaten national sovereignty, America’s as well as Israel’s.

Since Oct. 7, the United Nations has used its monopoly on aid distribution to bring Israel’s military campaign to a halt and save Hamas. The international body has also been the leading voice in what Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described as the “blood libels against Israel,” baselessly accusing the IDF of genocide and creating a climate that led to the murder of the two embassy employees. On May 20, the day before the attack, the United Nations’ under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs Tom Fletcher said, “There are 14,000 babies that will die in the next 48 hours unless we can reach them.”

But there is no famine—only an ongoing series of reports, many produced by the same organization, warning of famine since almost immediately after Oct. 7, without ever having produced one starvation victim. It’s a blood libel meant to incite antisemitic violence, and it’s also a pro-Hamas propaganda campaign. Call it the famine hoax. It began even before Israel entered Gaza, and was designed to reshape the rules of war in ways that would ensure Hamas’ survival.

On Oct. 16, 2023, nine days after 1,200 were killed and hundreds taken hostage, the World Health Organization warned of a “catastrophe” in Gaza, claiming that there were only 24 hours of water, electricity, and fuel left. “You cannot use aid, or food and water, as an instrument of war for any political or military ends,” said Marwan Jilani, director general of the Palestine Red Crescent Society. “There is an urgent need to alleviate the suffering of Palestinian civilians in Gaza,” said Egypt’s foreign minister. But back then, Israel hadn’t invaded Gaza yet. Egypt controlled the Rafah crossing—and was fully capable of getting food into Gaza. But it didn’t. Needless to say, no international tribunals threatened Cairo with war crimes charges, nor did Palestinian activists accuse the Egyptians of genocide.

In late December 2023, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification issued a famine warning and claimed that at least a quarter of people in Gaza were experiencing famine-level forms of deprivation. In mid-March 2024, the Biden White House’s USAID administrator Samantha Power said that Gaza was at a “serious risk of famine,” meaning that the famine predicted four months previously had not materialized. She called to “dramatically surge” humanitarian aid “as conditions continue to deteriorate.” Again, there was no famine.

That didn’t stop top Biden administration officials from using words like famine and starvation, any more than Israel’s record-low urban warfare casualty rates have prevented celebrity activists like Mark Ruffalo from repeatedly claiming that Israel was committing “genocide.” It seems Biden’s vice president didn’t understand the difference between a famine and a report forecasting a possible famine. “People in Gaza are starving,” said Kamala Harris. “The conditions are inhumane, and our common humanity compels us to act,” she continued.

In reality, of course, the people who were being starved in Gaza for the past two years were Israeli hostages who were fed a quarter of a pita per day while their captors gorged themselves on stolen food aid. After the Palestinians put their captives on parade, Trump expressed revulsion. “It looked like many years ago, the Holocaust survivors,” said the president, “and I don’t know how much longer we can take that when I watch that.”

Famine, starvation, and genocide are simply keywords in an information campaign whose goal is to generate enough outrage among the public and policymakers to ensure Hamas’ survival through Western aid packages, and thereby to ensure that Israel loses its war in Gaza. For instance, a few weeks ago, Iran regime lobbyist Trita Parsi posted a picture of what he claimed was a young Gazan girl who had died of starvation. In fact, it was a photo of a child who was being treated at a UAE hospital for a rare disease that left her emaciated. The veracity of the picture was irrelevant. The point was to advance the famine op.