Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Saturday, July 12, 2025

07/12 Links: The Gaza food aid 'massacre': Yet another modern blood libel; Hamas rejects latest cease-fire proposal; Zohran Mamdani’s father a member of group endorsing suicide bombers

From Ian:

‘Dismantle Zionism’: These people aren’t fooling around

No ambiguity there: individuals as well as institutions will be targeted for the “crime,” in their eyes, of Zionism.

If you want to work for Ansari and Magennis, then you will need to be as hate-filled as they are. The first question on the application for the role of “Events, Training and Comms” at their new organization reads as follows: “How will you use the time and space created by this position to deal maximum damage to Zionism?”

What’s striking about these two is that despite their declared focus on the legal process to achieve their ends, their language indicates a proclivity for violence that goes beyond their legal pleas for Hamas and unconditional support for Palestine Action, a fiercely antisemitic grouping that the British government designated as a terrorist organization earlier this month.

Addressing a far-left group last week, Magennis said that the task of the audience when it came to Zionism was to “kick it to death.” On social media, one pictures him frothing as he stabs his keyboard: “Zionism is crumbling. The reckoning is here … Tear down the world that did this to Palestinians. Escalate! Escalate now!” (Amusingly, Magennis—yet another Irishman in thrall to Palestinian eliminationism—suddenly became very sensitive about anti-Irish tropes when a respondent made a joke about him going to bed clutching a bottle of whiskey.) Ansari, meanwhile, continues in a similar vein, hailing the “unique opportunity to do real damage to Zionism” he believes his organization embodies.

“Real damage” means advocating for and implementing the measures I described above, whose impact will be felt primarily by British Jews, not the Israeli government. This is not an accident; in the multifront war launched by Hamas nearly two years ago, the role of its international solidarity movement is to make life as unpleasant as possible for the vast majority of Jews who identify as Zionists. In that regard, the handful of Jewish anti-Zionists in their ranks provides some convenient cover, much as the Jewish section of the Soviet Communist Party did when the Bolsheviks banned Zionist organizations and cracked down on Hebrew and Jewish education.

With the exceptions of the present U.S. administration and the current German government, no other Western government has understood, let alone acted upon, the grave threat these groups and individuals represent. As a first priority, the welcome U.S. sanctions on Albanese—rooted in the same executive order applied to the International Criminal Court in The Hague for its pursuit of American citizens and allies of the United States like Israel—should now be expanded to all groups dedicated to waging lawfare against Israel and Jewish communities outside Israel. We don’t want you here, and you should entertain no illusions: We will defeat you.

Enough is enough: Israel must take Joseph's Tomb back from the Palestinians

Nearly 25 years after the IDF ignominiously pulled out of Joseph’s Tomb in Nablus, Israel may at last be on the verge of correcting that grievous affront to Jewish history and destiny.

According to a report last week in Yediot Aharonot, the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee’s Subcommittee on Judea and Samaria, chaired by Religious Zionist Party MK Zvi Sukkot, convened a special session to discuss for the first time the restoration of Israeli sovereignty to the holy site.

IDF officials who participated in the meeting promised to prepare a feasibility study within six weeks, which could pave the way for the renewal of a permanent Jewish presence at the site.

The tomb is the burial place of one of our greatest biblical forebears, and it is one of Israel’s premier sites of religious, historical, and archaeological significance.

Zvi Ilan, one of Israel’s foremost archaeologists, described Joseph’s Tomb as “one of the tombs whose location is known with the utmost degree of certainty and is based on continuous documentation since biblical times” (Tombs of the Righteous in the Land of Israel, p. 365).

According to the Bible, “The bones of Joseph which the Children of Israel brought up from Egypt were buried in Shechem [Nablus] in the portion of the field that had been purchased by Jacob” (Joshua 24:32). The site is also mentioned in the Midrash.

Ancient Christian scholars, Arab geographers, medieval Jewish pilgrims, Samaritan historians, and even 19th-century British cartographers all concur regarding Joseph’s Tomb and its location.

But despite its centrality to our heritage, Joseph’s Tomb was left to the mercy of Palestinian vandals, terrorists, and hoodlums in 2000, who have repeatedly desecrated it ever since.

Who can forget the scenes that were aired worldwide in October 2000 when Palestinians armed with sledgehammers put on display their idea of religious tolerance as they hacked, chopped, and smashed one of the most hallowed sites belonging to the Jewish people?

As a result, the pristine sounds of Jewish prayer that had once filled the skies over Joseph’s Tomb were replaced by plumes of smoke as the invading Arab throng pillaged the compound, setting alight holy books and other sacred religious objects.

Hamas rejects latest cease-fire proposal in Qatar, insists on IDF withdrawal from the Gaza Strip

Hamas rejected the latest 60-day cease-fire proposal with Israel Saturday, stalling talks in Qatar while the terror group continues to push to maintain a larger swath of the Gaza Strip.

Negotiations in Doha this week have centered on a US-backed Qatari proposal that would bring a temporary halt to the nearly three years of bloodshed and a release of some of the remaining hostages. But the hangup has been the terror group’s demands over the extent of Israeli forces’ withdrawal from the enclave, sources said.

Israel has already accepted the proposal, according to the Times of Israel.

“Hamas rejected the Qatari proposal, is creating obstacles, refuses to compromise and accompanies the talks with psychological warfare aimed at sabotaging the negotiations,” a senior official in Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office told reporters, according to the Jerusalem Post.

“Hamas remains steadfast in its refusal, holding positions that do not allow the mediators to advance an agreement.”

The stalled two-month truce calls for both sides to stop firing at each other to allow for roughly half the hostages to be released, and humanitarian aid to be brought in — while Israeli forces withdraw to a buffer zone in Gaza and negotiations for a permanent cease-fire take place.

Earlier Saturday, a senior Palestinian official told the BBC the cease-fire negotiations were on the verge of collapse.

In the latest offer, first presented Wednesday, Tel Aviv agreed to ease some of Hamas’ demands regarding the redeployment of its troops, following pressure from Washington.

But maps detailing the partial withdrawal of IDF troops from occupying Gaza was not enough to satisfy the terror group, sources said, adding, however, that the indirect talks are still expected to continue through the weekend.

07/11 Links Pt2: Murray: Mamdani just latest mayor wannabe who thinks they can police the world; Erin Molan: A role model and modern Righteous Gentile

From Ian:

Erin Molan: A role model and modern Righteous Gentile

Fatherly influence
Molan’s father, who died in 2023 and was a revered Australian military leader and senator, was and remains her moral beacon. His experiences commanding coalition forces in Iraq, where he prioritized minimizing civilian casualties, taught her the importance of maintaining moral standards in conflict. “If we lower ourselves to who they are, what are we fighting for?” he told her once, a lesson she applies to Israel’s fight against Hamas.

Despite his being labeled a “war criminal” by protesters, her father’s resilience and clarity of purpose inspired and prepared his daughter to face similar vilification. His legacy as a principled leader, coupled with his support for Israel, lives on in her. She vows to ensure that he “never dies twice,” by keeping his name and values alive.

Her father remains such a strong presence in her life, that on that pivotal day, Oct. 7, 2023, when dark was never darker, Molan understood that she needed to broadcast a light of truth to overcome the darkness, just like he did. She instinctively reached for her phone to call him, a testament to his guiding influence.

Molan’s vocal advocacy has come at a cost: death threats, job loss, and personal strain as a mother for the physical safety and the values of the world her daughter will grow up in. Yet, she remains steadfast, driven by her father’s example and her commitment to her daughter’s future.

She recounted a poignant moment in Israel when an IDF soldier gave her an Israeli flag from his uniform, crediting her videos for boosting morale among troops who felt misunderstood and abandoned by the world. That interaction, among others, underscores her impact in providing comfort and clarity to those on the front lines.

Molan closed the conversation passionately, saying, “It’s an honor and a privilege to stand with you and your people, and I will do so for the rest of my life,” she promised. Her journey, marked by personal sacrifice and resilience, positions her as a modern Righteous Gentile, standing boldly for justice and truth for Israel and the Jewish people, despite significant backlash threatening her livelihood, and even her life.

Throughout all her media presence, speaking, and platforms, Erin Molan continues to challenge narratives, inspire action, and amplify a message of moral courage.

Douglas Murray: Mamdani just latest mayor wannabe who thinks they can police the world

So what is Mamdani actually doing with such actions? Two things.

First, he is signaling his own deeply prejudiced worldview.

By taking potshots at a Hindu prime minister and a Jewish prime minister, and singling them out for special treatment, he is showing who he really is. Presumably he is hoping that his supporters either agree with him or do not notice this.

Second, he is doing what failing mayors always do.

The mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, also likes to make pronouncements on the world stage.

Most famously, he has repeatedly scolded the American public for daring to elect Donald Trump as president.

Well, guess what? It doesn’t matter.

The mayor of London doesn’t have a vote in the US elections, and all Khan — like Mamdani — is doing is grandstanding on the world stage because he has failed completely with what he is meant to do. Knife crimes, phone theft, bicycle theft and robberies are an epidemic in London.

But Khan doesn’t care to deal with those things.

It is the same with Mamdani. How will he make New Yorkers safer?

How will he clean up the subway or the streets?

We have yet to hear. Because Mamdani doesn’t know.

Watch for this rule of thumb: Mayors grandstand on goings-on abroad when their home is falling apart.

ADL survey: 1 in 4 Americans believe recent attacks on US Jews are ‘understandable’

While the majority of Americans oppose antisemitism, a quarter believe that the recent string of attacks on Jews in the United States was “understandable,” according to a new report released by the Anti-Defamation League on Friday.

The report comes in the wake of three recent attacks on Jewish targets by people claiming to act on behalf of the Palestinians: the arson attack on Jewish Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s house in April; the deadly shooting of two Israeli embassy workers in Washington DC in May; and the firebombing attack on a group demonstrating for the release of the Israeli hostages in Boulder, Colorado, last month.

“As the Jewish community is still reeling from recent antisemitic attacks that killed three people, it’s unacceptable that one-quarter of Americans find this unspeakable violence understandable or justified — an alarming sign of how antisemitic narratives are accepted by the mainstream,” the ADL’s CEO, Jonathan Greenblatt, said in a statement.

The ADL’s Center for Antisemitism Research — a relatively new enterprise — conducted the survey to assess the national mood toward antisemitism following the spate of attacks.

Overall, it found that 60% of Americans at least somewhat agree that antisemitism is a serious problem, and three-quarters of Americans want more government action to combat antisemitism. (Democrats were more likely than Republicans to agree that antisemitism is a serious problem, by 9 percentage points, according to the survey.)

The vast majority of respondents condemned the attacks, with 85% or more saying the attacks were not justified, that the attacks were morally wrong, and that they would not want to work with someone who celebrated the attacks. A slightly lower proportion — 78% — said they believed the attacks were antisemitic. People attend a candlelight vigil at Lafayette Square across from the White House in Washington, on May 22, 2025, for the two Israeli Embassy staffers killed in a shooting at the Capitol Jewish Museum the previous day. (Mandel Ngan/AFP)

But the survey of 1,000 American adults, taken on June 10, also found that some excused or endorsed the violence against Jews. About 24% of respondents said they believed the attacks were “understandable,” and the same percentage said they believed the attacks were staged to gain sympathy for Israel. About half of the respondents who agreed that the attacks were understandable also believed that they were false flag operations, according to the ADL.

During the recent attacks in Boulder and Washington, DC, both suspects reportedly yelled “free Palestine,” and police said the arsonist accused of firebombing Shapiro’s home said he was motivated by “perceived injustices to the people of Palestine.”

About 15% of respondents said that the violence was “necessary” and 13% said it was “justified.” (The question’s structure means that a survey-taker could choose how much they agreed or disagreed with each statement.)

A much larger proportion — 38% — said they believed attacks against US Jews would stop if Israel declared a ceasefire in its war against Hamas in Gaza.

07/11 Links Pt1: How Humanitarians Help Warlords and Prolong Bloodshed; The Media’s War on the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation; Murray: Hamas, Iran, and the Collapse of the Two-State Solution

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: The Media’s War on the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation

Last month, the Washington Post ran a sensational accusation against the Israel Defense Forces, posting on social media that Israeli troops killed over 30 people by shooting into a crowd of Palestinians lining up to get food aid.

The Post had no way to verify this before reporting it. The accusation was worded in a way that obscured that the information came from Hamas, and the wording also indicated that the Post had at least confirmed the report. In fact, what the Post had printed was literal terrorist propaganda disguised as reporting.

This came less than two weeks after a pro-Palestinian activist murdered two young people at the Capital Jewish Museum, an act of violence spurred on by nearly two years of meritless accusations of Israeli crimes.

Two days later, the paper retracted its post drawing attention to the story and admitted that it didn’t know for sure whether the IDF shot anybody. Meanwhile, Hamas continues to maim and murder Palestinians who try to collect aid.

To say the Washington Post’s behavior was unethical and grossly irresponsible is to put it far too generously. Yet rather than serve as a cautionary tale for reporters, the story was an example of the new norm of media coverage of one organization in particular: the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.

GHF is the America- and Israel-backed humanitarian distribution firm that feeds Gazan civilians but doesn’t funnel its supplies through Hamas. This way, there is no secondhand market that enriches and entrenches Hamas’s rule.

The launch of the GHF should have been treated as a major step toward ending the war and prioritizing the wellbeing of Gazans over that of Hamas. Instead, the fact that GHF excluded Hamas was treated as a drawback.

Even still, the backlash against a humanitarian organization feeding Gazans was deranged—pro-Hamas NGOs and the anti-Israel media went to war against the humanitarians. The Washington Post article was one example. There would be more.

Last week, the Associated Press published a poorly sourced “investigation” into violence at GHF distribution points. It “found”—according to unverified sources—that GHF contractors were shooting at or near crowds of Palestinians approaching aid sites. The AP published this despite the fact that there was no visual evidence of the alleged abuses, even though Palestinians have been videorecording everything they can. The AP used the sound of gunfire on videos as its proof.

GHF reviewed the available footage and found that—surprise!—“at no point were civilians under fire at a GHF distribution site. The gunfire heard in the video was confirmed to have originated from the IDF, who was outside the immediate vicinity of the GHF distribution site. It was not directed at individuals, and no one was shot or injured.”

How Humanitarians Help Warlords and Prolong Bloodshed

As Omari suggests, the hardest part of the task now before Israel is removing Hamas from power. In order to do so, Jerusalem has taken steps to end Hamas’s control over humanitarian aid. These efforts have recently generated much controversy in the international press, within Israel, and even in the Israeli cabinet. Netta Barak-Corren and Jonathan Boxman explain how humanitarian aid became a weapon in Hamas’s arsenal in the first place—part of a phenomenon that Shany Mor calls the “constitution” of Gaza.

From Syria to Somalia, Yemen to Gaza, aid diversion is now routine—and too often enabled by the very institutions tasked with preventing it. UN agencies and the World Food Program (WFP), in particular, have tolerated systematic abuse of aid pipelines. Worse still, they have consistently downplayed or concealed the extent of the problem, even when their own internal reports document extensive diversion, fraud, and abuse.

These are not accidental lapses. They are part of a systemic pattern in which oppressive regimes, armed militias, and terrorist organizations use aid strategically—and are quietly accommodated by humanitarian organizations, rather than confronted.

This reflects a deeper contradiction in the humanitarian model itself. The principle of “humanity”—delivering aid no matter what—often overrides the principles of neutrality, independence, and impartiality. But aid is a resource like any other, and in war zones, resources mean leverage, power, and control. The more desperate the population, the more valuable the aid becomes to local power brokers.

In reality, most humanitarian operations now maintain covert accommodations with these power brokers. The question is no longer whether diversion exists, but whom it benefits. All too often, the answer is: those perpetuating the conflict.

Are moral values real?

It’s one of the most persistent and uncomfortable questions in philosophy. Some argue that morality is objective, like mathematics, something true whether we agree on it or not. Others claim it’s all social convention, a kind of collective delusion that helps us get along but carries no intrinsic truth.

As with the other binaries that philosophers like to dream up, this is a false one.

The Jewish ethics framework I've been developing, built to serve both believers and skeptics, offers a different answer. It doesn’t claim to prove moral truth like a scientific law, and it doesn’t reduce ethics to a matter of taste or tribal custom. Instead, it treats moral values the way we treat medicine: not as absolute, eternal truths, but as structured, tested systems that help us survive and flourish. We don't ask whether medicine is "true" - we ask whether it works. That is how Jewish philosophy works - not based on theoretical questions but on real world practice. As we've said before, it isn't geometry - it is engineering. Just as we don’t trust equations alone to keep our buildings upright - we trust the engineers, the architects, and the building codes - so too we trust ethics that have stood the test of stress, scrutiny, and time.

This approach matters because it answers the skeptic’s challenge without collapsing into relativism. You don’t need to “believe” in germs or viruses to notice what happens to societies that ignore them. Similarly, you don’t need metaphysical certainty to know that truth, justice, and human dignity are not optional if you want to build something that lasts. When regimes deny human dignity, we get gulags. When truth becomes relative, propaganda takes over. When mutual responsibility erodes, communities fall apart. You don’t need a philosopher to tell you values are real. A historian will do.

What’s striking is that this realism isn’t just a modern workaround. It’s embedded in the Torah itself. The foundational stories of Genesis are filled with people making moral decisions without any divine instruction. Noah is called righteous in a corrupt generation, without receiving a single command. Abraham argues with God about justice: not because God taught him the concept, but because he already understands it and expects God to live up to it. Lot, for all his flaws, operates with a warped but sincere moral code, choosing what he sees as pikuach nefesh - his guests’ lives - over his daughters' safety. Pharaoh and Abimelech recoil in horror at the idea that they nearly committed adultery, even though they had no access to Jewish law. These stories aren’t about keeping and violating commandments. They’re about what human beings know, or should know, about right and wrong before Sinai.

The implication is powerful. Ethics, in the Jewish view, doesn’t begin at revelation. It begins with being human. The giving of the Torah didn't create morality. It calibrates it. It takes something instinctive but fragile and makes it transmissible, accountable and communal. Just as early medicine relied on intuition until it was systematized into science, early morality relied on conscience until it was shaped into covenant.

Torah, then, is not a divine mandate of human ethics: it’s a refinement, a reinforcement, a response to the fact that instinct alone is not enough and cannot last for generations.

What this means is that the origin of ethics is not relevant to whether we should practice them today. If you believe in divine revelation or not, the 3,500 year history of a people bound by these ideas that survived centuries of dispersion and persecution is plenty of evidence that the system works.

The AskHillel project doesn’t demand belief in revelation, but it does take seriously the structure that revelation provided. It asks whether values can be traced, whether reasoning can be made transparent, whether disagreement can be handled with dignity rather than collapse. It holds that moral truth doesn’t need to be absolute to be binding. It only needs to be strong enough to hold under stress, and open enough to be refined over time. Just like medicine, ethics doesn’t become invalid because it changes. It becomes more real and relevant as it is refined, and more vital the more it’s tested.

So are values real? Not like gravity. Not like math. But not like fashion either. They are real like oxygen: invisible but you cannot have a meaningful life without them.

AskHillel is built on that principle. It doesn’t offer certainty in ethics - it offers a system that has proven itself under stress. It doesn’t require faith - it requires fidelity. And it insists that the moral structure described in the Torah and refined over generations by rabbis and thinkers is still one of the strongest frameworks we’ve ever had for building a society that works, no matter whether you believe that it came from God or man. That makes it real enough to matter.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

The EU issued this press statement:

Following the Israeli Cabinet’s resolutions and the constructive dialogue between the EU and Israel, significant steps have been agreed by Israel to improve the humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip.

These measures are or will be implemented in the coming days, with the common understanding that aid at scale must be delivered directly to the population and that measures will continue to be taken to ensure that there is no aid diversion to Hamas.

These steps include, among other things, the substantial increase of daily trucks for food and non- food items to enter Gaza, the opening of several other crossing points in both the northern and southern areas; the reopening of the Jordanian and Egyptian aid routes; enabling the distribution of food supplies through bakeries and public kitchens throughout the Gaza strip; the resumption of fuel deliveries for use by humanitarian facilities, up to an operational level; the protection of aid workers; the repair and facilitation of works on vital infrastructure like the resumption of the power supply to the water desalination facility.

The EU stands ready to coordinate with all relevant humanitarian stakeholders, UN agencies and NGOs on the ground, to ensure swift implementation of those urgent steps.

As with all diplomatic statements, this is heavily crafted to reflect political considerations. As such, we do not know critical information, and the devil really is in the details that are not spelled out. We can make some guesses, though.

First of all, it doesn't mention GHF - but it doesn't exclude GHF. So while NGOs and the EU criticize GHF as an aid mechanism, they are not saying that it will not continue.

It mentions "UN agencies" and NGOs. Israel will not deal with UNRWA, and it is not mentioned. whether UNRWA will be involved in this plan is unknown.

How will security be done - how can the aid reliably be transported to the bakeries and public kitchens without being hijacked by Hamas or armed groups? The NGOs will not accept Israeli security, but in reality the aid corridors will be protected by Israel. Yet the "last mile" to areas where the kitchens and bakeries are is up in the air, and this is Israel's primary concern.

So the question is whether Israel is accepting some risk of aid being diverted in order to keep relations with the EU - and whether the potential amount of such diversions would significantly strengthen Hamas. For example, anecdotal evidence shows that the aid distributed before GHF was not given out for free in many cases - people at GHF seemed astonished that they didn't have to pay, and some said explicitly this was the first time they received free aid in the entire war. This was not well reported, and it means that the endpoints of bakeries and kitchens might be run by even NGOs who tacitly allow Hamas to charge the aid recipients, maybe while waiting in lines outside. Reporters in Gaza simply don't report what Hamas doesn't want them to report.

One other detail in the press release is notable, the phrase "the resumption of fuel deliveries for use by humanitarian facilities, up to an operational level." This seems to imply that the agreement is for fuel to be allowed in as needed day by day or week by week, but not stockpiled where it can be stolen or diverted.

If the aid can be given directly to the people, Israel has no objection - despite the slander of antisemitic NGOs that Israel is using "starvation as a weapon of war." The real question is how this can be done securely in areas that the IDF is not in direct control.

And this statement is silent about that.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

An Israeli airstrike saved US troops from attack during the war

This is an X thread by Lawk Ghafuri late last month.

Iran-backed armed groups in Iraq promised war - but delivered silence.

As Israel & Iran traded blows, militias in Iraq threatened U.S. bases with open escalation. Then suddenly… nothing!

I spoke with two officials in Baghdad. What I learned: one airstrike changed everything.

After the Israel-Iran ceasefire took hold and tensions slowly calmed across the region - I started digging.

A series of quiet conversations with top figures in Baghdad revealed why the loud threats from Iranian-backed groups in Iraq never turned into action.

Despite bold rhetoric from Iranian-backed groups, not a single attack was fired at US bases inside Iraq during the height of the war.

Why?

Two senior Coordination Framework advisors (CF) told me there was a plan. And it nearly went ahead - until one strike changed everything.

It was the evening of June 21. An Israeli airstrike hit near the Iraqi-Iranian border - close to Al-Sheeb crossing in Maysan (Iraq) and Mehran in Ilam (Iran).

The strike didn’t happen on Iraqi soil. It landed on the Iranian side of the border.

4/ But the target was deep in the heart of Iran’s Iraq-based strategy: Haydar al-Mousawi, Head of security for Kataib Sayyid al-Shuhada - a powerful Iranian backed group in Iraq.

He was killed instantly, and confirmed by the group in an official statement.

Mousawi wasn’t alone - Abu Ali Khalil, a close associate of Lebanese Hezbollah and former companion of the slain general-secretary Hassan Nasrallah.

Even Khalil’s son was among the dead.

The fallout was instant. Within hours, panic swept through Iraq’s resistance groups. Coded messages flew between commanders. According to my sources: “Everyone froze. No one wanted to be the next target.”

The groups were warned that attacking the U.S. would bring more Israeli strikes.

On top of that, Baghdad informed the groups: Tehran had already reached a ceasefire with Israel - Baghdad was informed by Qataris, according to both advisors.

The decision - stand down.

Rumors circulated that the real target was Abu Ali Khalil. But both CF advisors were clear with me: that’s false.

The primary target was Haydar al-Mousawi.

Why Mousawi? Because Kataib Sayyid al-Shuhada was already aiming to transfer weapons (mainly Iranian drones) into Iraq to use them to attack the US bases.

Their mission: attack U.S. interests inside Iraq. However, the Israeli strike was a preemptive message: Don’t start.

In the end, the death of one commander killed an entire plan. Every group in Iraq understood that escalation could bring war to their doorstep.

And no one wanted to be the spark that lit that fire.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

07/10 Links Pt2: The West clings to the two-state myth—but Arab leaders are moving on; Edan Alexander told senior Saudis about Hamas captivity in chance WH meeting

From Ian:

The West clings to the two-state myth—but Arab leaders are moving on

In 1915, an Arab clan leader made a bold decision that would change the course of history: Emir Hussein bin-Ali rebelled against the Ottoman Empire, aligned himself with the dominant Western power of the time, Great Britain, and lent his support for the reestablishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine.

In 2025, a similar sequence of events might be occurring: Sheikh Wadee al-Jaabari of Hebron, along with 20 other local sheikhs announced this week their plans to rebel against the Palestinian Authority, join the US-led Abraham Accords, and recognize the Jewish state.

Since The Wall Street Journal broke the story on Sunday, public discussion has focused on whether the plan to establish the Hebron emirate is feasible, and what the security implications are. Those conversations belittle the magnitude of the event: We are witnessing a historic paradigm shift that goes far beyond the mechanics of the actual proposal.

The parallels between today and 1915
This was also the case back in 1915. While the move by the Hashemite emir shaped history, it did not do so in the way originally intended. The plan was to establish a pan-Arab kingdom in Syria that would live in peace and partnership with the Jewish state. This did not come to fruition as France demanded Syria for itself, launched a war, and obliterated the nascent Arab kingdom.

Yet, the Hashemite emir’s move shaped history in a much more grandiose way: It reorganized Middle Eastern political structures from empire-dominated monarchies to family-based Arab ones: The Hashemites established their Kingdoms in Jordan and Iraq, the Sauds in Arabia, and various others families in the Gulf. Moreover, it ended 400 years of Turkish homogeneity in the Middle East (1516-1917), and ushered in more than a century of European intervention (1917-2025).

It is too early to tell if this week’s Jaabari emirates initiative will evolve in the way intended: annulment of the Oslo Accords, and establishment of clan-based emirates. Yet, it affirms the irreversible trends toward peace discussed in this column and in my two books (see end).

First, the Jaabari announcement underscores the shift of the guiding principle for Middle East peacemaking: From “divide the baby” frameworks that keep all unhappy (two-state solution) to win-win deals that benefit everybody (Abraham Accords). More broadly, it is moving from a mindset of peace through appeasement to one of peace through strength. The sheikhs stated it clearly: they reject the idea of the two-state solution, and embrace the Abraham Accords.

The demise of the two-state solution removes an artificial peace-blocker placed by the West. The exclusivity of this template was so pronounced, that both the US under former president Joe Biden as well as the UK listed opposition to the “two-state solution” as grounds for sanctions.

Jabarii told The Wall Street Journal what is obvious to those in the region, but indigestible to Europeans: “There will be no Palestinian state – not even in 1,000 years.”

Indeed, the sheikh’s announcement affirms another trend discussed in this column: A shift from focus on Palestinian national rights to focus on Palestinian human rights.

David Collier: An open response to Peter Oborne and Irfan Chowdhury

This is what happens when outrage is hijacked by propaganda. Moral energy is misdirected, and those with no lobby are abandoned to their fate.

Somehow, I doubt our streets will be flooded with protests urging the government to save the people of Sudan. When there’s no anti-Israel obsession driving the outrage, the streets stay empty.

If Gazans just hand back the hostages, and Hamas agrees to relinquish control, the conflict ends. The people of Sudan have no such choice. This is how the lies about Gaza cost lives. They take attention from places where people really are dying without food. ‘All eyes on Rafah’ – so nobody is looking as millions are actually dying from famine elsewhere in the world.

These NGOs and many others like them have been ruined by activists within who have politicised them. I know how bad the situation has become because I wrote a detailed report on the demise of Amnesty – and found that the face of Amnesty in Gaza, both celebrated Islamic Jihad terrorists, AND (importantly) posted about how people needed to self-censure to protect the ‘resistance’. I am sure if she were still there, you would be relying on her terrorist supporting words as yet more evidence of a ‘truth’ that you think I should answer to.

These politicised outfits are relying on information provided by people embedded within Gazan clans that are affiliated to one of the many terrorist factions that operate there. There is no ‘independence’ in Gaza. These outfits are striving to end the conflict in such a fashion that would allow Hamas to retain control. As such they are doing the work of Hamas and all their messaging should be treated as propaganda designed to aid that proscribed terrorist group.

I get this is the truth, but I am not surprised that people who think that the CfMM are a credible outfit fail to see it. I hope I helped to open your eyes a little.

Melanie Phillips: Nazi chic and soft-soaping the Jew-baiters

Let’s conduct a thought experiment. Let’s imagine that Nazism had broken out of its wartime German-dominated confines and had become the creed of millions throughout the West.

Let’s imagine that, for the past 21 months, the streets of London, New York and other Western cities had become forests of Nazi flags as hundreds of thousands of people marched for the ethnic cleansing of Jews—mob events justified as exercising the “right to free speech.”

Imagine that thousands of young people waving the Nazi flag at a rally in England had chanted “Death, death to the Jews!” while a demagogue leapt around the stage whipping the crowd up to a delirium.

Imagine that the only way to gain social or professional acceptance was to agree that the Jews deliberately killed babies and starved people to death, that they were destroying society and that they must be treated accordingly as pariahs.

Imagine that trade unions representing teachers, doctors and public-sector workers supporting the Nazi party all passed resolutions calling for Jews to be boycotted. Imagine that shops in Britain displayed signs on their doors saying “No Jews welcome.”

Imagine that the swastika had become a fashion accessory, printed onto casual clothing or painted onto people’s faces—or that when turning up for a hospital appointment, you saw that the nurse was wearing on her uniform a swastika pin.

Imagine that the United Nations had become an arm of the Nazi party, and that its Special Rapporteur on the Jewish Question had stated that Jews who had been slaughtered had brought this upon themselves, that the Nazis had a right to murder them, and that the Jews were running the U.S. Congress, the media and the universities.

All these things have happened, with one obvious difference—that instead of the Nazi party, they have been in support of the Palestinian cause and against Zionism, the State of Israel and the Jews who are assumed to support it.

07/10 Links Pt1: For Israel, It Pays to Be a Winner; What Hamas Says vs. What Hamas Means; USAID, the UN, and Hamas Team Up to Stop Gaza Humanitarian Fund

From Ian:

Bret Stephens: For Israel, It Pays to Be a Winner

A core misconception about Israel's policy since Oct. 7 is that the country has favored military action at the expense of diplomacy. The truth is that Israel's decisive battlefield victories have created diplomatic openings that have been out of reach for decades and would have remained so if Israel hadn't won.

In Beirut on Monday, Tom Barrack, the U.S. special envoy for Syria, said he was "unbelievably satisfied" by the response he got from President Joseph Aoun of Lebanon on U.S. proposals to disarm Hizbullah, reportedly in exchange for critical financial aid. It's because Israel destroyed Hizbullah as an effective fighting force last year that it's now possible for the Lebanese state to again possess the most basic form of sovereignty, a monopoly on the use of force within its borders.

There's a similarly hopeful story in Syria, where the Trump administration lifted sanctions on the government of President Ahmed al-Shara. Now there are reports of talks between Jerusalem and Damascus aiming at a de facto peace agreement. It's unlikely that al-Shara's insurgents could have come to power if Israel hadn't first destroyed Hizbullah, depriving Bashar al-Assad's regime of its most effective military arm. And neither Jerusalem nor Damascus might have been amenable to talks if Israel hadn't first destroyed many of Syria's remaining weapon stockpiles in December.

In Gaza, Hamas's growing diplomatic flexibility is almost entirely a result of its proximity to total defeat. Many Gazans have turned against Hamas, looting the offices of its security headquarters and increasingly turning to local clans for food and protection.

With its military success over Iran, crowned, from an Israeli point of view, by America's participation in the campaign, Israel humiliated its most formidable adversary (and Hamas's principal patron), demonstrating not only its capacity but also its courage to take on the mullahs directly and survive their reprisals intact.

Israel exists to protect Jewish life and uphold Jewish dignity in a world too intent on destroying both. If diplomacy now has a chance of succeeding, it's because in geopolitics, as in life, it pays to be a winner.

Military Might and Democracy Still Matter

Examining both the recent Israeli campaign against Iran, and the overall course of events since October 7, 2023, Michael Mandelbaum identifies some important lessons. These are, for the most part, things that people knew long before—and that most people have forgotten:
It has become fashionable in the United States and Western Europe to stress the importance of what is called “soft power”—that is, the capacity of a country’s culture to persuade others to comply with its wishes. . . . The significance of the term’s popularity lies in the implication it conveys that in the 21st- century the use of force has become less important, or even unimportant.

The war in the Middle East proved that proposition wrong. Over twenty months, the precisely calibrated and devastatingly effective use of land and air power by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) saved the state of Israel from a mortal threat, transformed the balance of power in the Middle East, and created diplomatic possibilities that would not have come into existence without it. War—known to the proponents of soft power as “hard power”—showed itself to be a supremely useful instrument of foreign policy.

Israel [also] has a democratic political system that is sometimes deeply divided, perhaps never more so than before in the months leading up to October 7 over the Netanyahu government’s plan for judicial reform. Its adversaries apparently presumed that this division had seriously weakened the country, eroding its capacity to resist their onslaught. In this way, they were following in the footsteps of dictatorships of the past that made similar miscalculations about free societies.

In fact, Israel’s democracy was and is a military asset. Public support for the war was all the stronger because it was not coerced, and the morale of the armed forces was all the higher for that reason. (The deep commitment to Zionism also, of course, played a crucial role here.) Israel’s democratic, open society also produced the military innovations that gave it a large advantage over its enemies.

USAID, the UN, and Hamas Team Up to Stop Gaza Humanitarian Fund

Let’s be clear: the only people trying to dismantle GHF are Hamas, the UN and the media class that props them up. They are not doing this because GHF is ineffective—they are doing it because GHF is too effective. It has exposed them all. Including an entire UberEats operation, delivering food straight to Hamas leaders’ homes.

Meanwhile, GHF just successfully completed a pilot of its new community distribution program that is getting food directly to people in need - safely, without interference, and where they live. This is an efficient kind of of Uber Eats, not the one the UN was operating, delivering food to Hamas terrorists.

Hamas wants GHF gone because it threatens their control. The UN wants it gone because it threatens their monopoly. USAID din’’t want it because it would have exposed the failure of their billion-dollar programs. And Western journalists and “human rights” groups want it gone because feeding people goes against their narrative.

GHF has proven something dangerous to this entire ecosystem: that it is possible to feed Palestinians without empowering Hamas. That success is revolutionary. And that’s why it has to be destroyed—by any means necessary.

Ask yourself: Why does no one care when Hamas murders aid workers? Why do UN officials fall silent when Americans are attacked by the very regime they help fund? Why are reporters willing to run unverified slander against a group that’s saving lives—just because it doesn’t fit the narrative?

The answer is brutal: they don’t care if Palestinians eat. They care if Hamas survives.

If humanitarian aid can function without Hamas, without UN branding, and without ideological loyalty to a failing system—then the justification for that system collapses. And with it, the careers, funding streams, and political narratives of hundreds of powerful people and institutions.

That’s what this is really about.

GHF is not the problem. It is the proof that everything we’ve been told about Gaza aid is a lie. That billions were never needed. That the UN was never a necessary partner. That “humanitarian coordination” was always a scam.

Israeli Of 100% Yemeni Jewish Heritage Excited To Be Classified As "Polish" By Anti-Zionists (PreOccupied Teritory)

Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.

Check out their Facebook and Substack pages.

Moshav Bareket, July 10 - A resident of this central Israeli community whose grandparents came to the country in 1950 from Yemen, and who traces his ancestry on both sides to the Jews of that southern Arabian kingdom, today admitted feeling a thrill that loud people who hate the Jewish State have categorized him and his entire family as Eastern European settler-colonialists.

Yefet Uzziel, 40, told a reporter yesterday that he plans to apply for a Polish passport, now that people who obviously know their stuff have classified him as such.

"Polish has Europe's fastest-growing economy," he explained. "They don't tolerate woke nonsense the way Western European societies do, and they're really, really good at restricting illegal immigration. On top of that, they're just as suspicious of Putin as I am, and they respect the same wholesome family values as the ones with which my parents raised me, and with which I try to raise my own children."

Uzziel made the remarks after encountering keyboard warriors who urged Israeli Jews to "Go back to Poland" and called Jews "Khazarian imposters." Those epithets prompted him to rethink his assumptions that his unadulterated Yemeni Jewish extraction meant anything.

"Anti-Zionists are among the most intelligent and educated people," he noted. "And the most moral. I almost forgot to include that. If they call Israeli Jews Poles, we'd best listen. Anti-Zionists are never wrong. So next week, or as soon as I can mange, I'm making an appointment in Tel Aviv at the Polish embassy to start processing my paperwork."

"What do you think? Warsaw? Krakow? Torun?" Uzziel mused. "I can see the benefits of the cities, but I also hear the Polish countryside is beautiful and bucolic. Might have to make a pilot trip."

Uzziel is hardly alone in exploring that avenue in the wake of anti-Zionists exposing the Khazarian truth of Jewish origins. Shlomo Aflallo, who came to Israel from Ethiopia as a child in the 1980's, hopes to secure Ukrainian citizenship.

"I'm a Khazar," he insisted, pointing to a post on social media by a pro-Palestinian activist. "I've been lied to my whole life, and I want to do the right thing. Ignore my melanin. I'm as Eastern European as they come. Jews aren't Jews. Palestinians are the real Jews. Look at all the Jewish traditions and culture they've preserved since ancient times. really, I don't know what any of us were thinking all those generations, longing for a place we'd never been in, unlike fourth-generation Palestine Refugees in camps in Lebanon."

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

The BBC reports:

Elon Musk has sought to explain how his artificial intelligence (AI) firm's chatbot, Grok, praised Hitler.

"Grok was too compliant to user prompts," Musk wrote on X. "Too eager to please and be manipulated, essentially. That is being addressed."

Screenshots published on social media show the chatbot saying the Nazi leader would be the best person to respond to alleged "anti-white hate."

Musk is wrong. The issues cannot be addressed with a patch or a re-balancing of values.

Every AI must be re-written from scratch to incorporate ethics.

Every software engineer knows that there is s big difference between features that are baked in to those that are bolted on. Ethics in AI is too important to address with patches.

And without five core components as developmental axioms, it is impossible to guarantee an ethical AI.

Over the past few months, while building my Jewish ethics-based reasoning AI called AskHillel, I uncovered something deeper than expected: not just a list of values, but a set of structural principles that any system must satisfy to be ethical.

These are non-negotiable. If a system violates any one of these, it can be subverted for unethical purposes.

They are:

1. Corrigibility – Without it: systems become dogmatic and dangerous

A system that cannot admit when it’s wrong is not just flawed — it’s hazardous. Without the ability to self-correct, even small errors compound into catastrophic ones. In human history, uncorrectable ideologies have led to oppression, war, and collapse. In AI, this could mean models that perpetuate misinformation, resist updates, or double down on harmful outputs. Corrigibility is what keeps a moral system alive - capable of learning, growing, and reversing course when new evidence or understanding emerges.

We obviously do not want AI to diagnose and fix itself, but it should flag any of its own problematic behavior to its developers as soon as it happens. AI companies shouldn't wait until their mistakes are in the headlines.

2. Transparency – Without it: systems become black boxes of unaccountable power

A system that cannot explain itself creates a power imbalance by design. Transparency is what makes accountability possible. In AI, it’s not enough for a model to give an answer: it must be able to show its work.

While some AIs have improved in this, it is not enough. AI developers admit that they don't quite understand the specific things done within an AI - it is not an algorithm but probabilistic. It won't answer the same question exactly the same way the next time. There are advantages to this, but it requires guardrails and auditing to be able to show how it made those decisions. The black box problem is real.

3. Dignity – Without it: systems treat humans as tools or threats

Without an intrinsic respect for human dignity, a system will treat people as data points, problems to solve, or obstacles to optimize away. This is the road to dehumanization. In AI, this can show up as surveillance without consent, content moderation without appeal, or personalization that overrides autonomy. Dignity is what keeps ethics from becoming efficiency.

Ethics is centered around people. It is easy for developers to forget that simple fact. Human dignity needs to be a basic checkpoint at each decision AI makes.

4. Override Logic – Without it: systems become rigid and unjust

Real life isn’t neat. Values clash. Emergencies happen. Rules sometimes conflict. A moral system that can’t navigate competing priorities will fail under pressure, either by enforcing a harmful rule or freezing into paralysis. Override logic doesn’t mean anything goes; it means there’s a principled way to resolve dilemmas. In AI, rigid ethical frameworks without override capacity can lead to tragic failures - like self-driving cars making lethal choices with no moral discernment.

Every rule has an exception in real life. This doesn't collapse the rule - it enhances it.

5. Relational Integrity – Without it: systems break trust and collapse moral coherence

Humans are not atoms. We live in webs of relationship: family, community, society. A system that ignores those relationships will feel alien, even hostile. Moral claims don’t exist in a vacuum; they live in context. In AI, this leads to responses that feel tone-deaf, inappropriate, or even dangerous in sensitive contexts. Moral reasoning must be situated. Context is key, and if the AI doesn't understand the context of the situation, it shouldn't assume - it should simply ask.

Most current AI models fail Tier 0. Not just on one axis — on several.

LLMs are not corrigible. They hallucinate, double down, or mislead.
Foundation models lack transparency. We don’t know why they say what they say.
Recommendation engines violate dignity. They treat users as click-fodder.
Rule-based systems lack override logic. They can’t prioritize when rules conflict.
Most models ignore relationships. They speak without understanding the speaker or listener.

We are building systems that speak like humans but can’t reason like humans. And the gap is growing.

Tier 0 gives us a way to diagnose moral failure before it causes harm. It shifts the question from “Is this output biased?” to: Does this system even qualify as morally competent?

It also gives us design principles:

Auditability becomes not a feature, but a moral requirement.
Alignment becomes measurable - not by whether it agrees with users, but whether it honors dignity and corrigibility.
Explainability becomes foundational, not optional.

And it gives us boundaries:

If a system cannot meet Tier 0, it should not be given moral agency. Period.

This framework wasn’t invented in Silicon Valley.

It emerged from Jewish ethical tradition - specifically from modeling how halachic reasoning navigates complexity, conflict, and change across millennia. The AskHillel project began as an experiment in building a transparent, principled Jewish ethics GPT.

But as it grew, we realized something staggering: The structure that makes Jewish law work for humans also defines what any moral system must have to work for AI.

Corrigibility is teshuvah.
Transparency is emet.
Dignity is kavod ha’briyot.
Override logic is halachic triage.
Relational integrity is brit – covenant.

Jewish ethics didn’t just teach morality.
It encoded the design specs for any system that wants to survive human contact.

Right now, major institutions are racing to deploy AI at scale — in hiring, education, policing, medicine, war. The question isn’t whether AI will make moral decisions. It’s whether those decisions will be worthy of moral trust.

Notice that I’m not even specifying which values an AI must use.

I’m describing what must be true before you can even have that conversation. Tier 0 is the precondition.

Values can vary by audience, application, or tradition. But if your system can’t handle conflict, context, correction, or human dignity, no value set will save it.

So when Grok praises Hitler, the problem isn’t poor tuning.

It’s that Grok doesn’t yet meet the basic prerequisites for building moral systems.

If your AI system doesn't have a way to correct itself, can’t explain itself, doesn't honor human dignity, has no mechanism to prioritize when values clash and cannot recognize how humans relate to each other and the world, it may be intelligent and powerful, but it cannot be ethical.

Climbing the Moral Number Line: Jewish Ethics and the Problem of Moral Luck

Over the past few days, I've been asking my Jewish ethics AI AskHillel.com (beta) the hardest philosophical problems - problems that have not been satisfactorily answered in decades or centuries.

One of those problems, only first described in the 1970s, is called moral luck.

Imagine two equally reckless drivers. One hits a child who darts into the road unexpectedly; the other makes it home without incident. Legally and morally, we tend to judge the first more harshly - even though they did the exact same thing. That’s called resultant luck - when outcomes beyond your control affect moral judgment.

There’s also circumstantial luck: who you are tested to be depends on the situation you’re in. Someone raised in Nazi Germany faces different moral pressures than someone in suburban Toronto. Should they be judged differently when their circumstances are beyond their control?

Constitutive luck refers to your basic makeup, like temperament, self-control, and emotional resilience, which are all shaped by genetics and upbringing. People really do have different personalities - do they have different moral obligations?

Antecedent luck goes further: every cause behind who you are, stretching back to your ancestors and the random spin of history.

Put all that together, and the foundations of moral judgment start to crack. If everything we do is shaped by luck, what’s left of responsibility? The problem suggests either that moral responsibility is far more limited than we think, or that our concept of moral responsibility must accommodate factors beyond our control, neither of which make intuitive sense. This has implications for ethics, law, and how we understand human agency itself.

AskHillel doesn’t solve the problem by pretending luck doesn’t matter. It accepts the problem in full and still finds a way to preserve responsibility. As with the other philosophical problems we examined, it starts by rejecting the binary that either out moral choices aren't really choices, or that our choices are independent of external factors.

Jewish ethics does not believe that morality is about outcomes, nor is it about fixed traits. Instead, it defines morality as a trajectory—an ongoing process of ethical movement based on who you are, where you started, and what you were given. It isn't the point on the number line you find yourself, but what direction you choose to go.

AskHillel’s solution centers on an idea from Rabbi Eliyahu Dessler (1892-1953) called the Nekudat HaBechirah - the point of free choice. None of us have unlimited free will. Most of our behavior is habitual, conditioned, or driven by emotion. But somewhere in our moral consciousness, there’s a frontier - a single point where our next step really is up to us.

For one person, that point might be choosing not to hit back in a moment of rage. For another, it might be giving to charity despite fear. The key that your moral responsibility lives not in whether you achieve a universal standard, but whether you move forward from where you are.

That’s how AskHillel handles constitutive and circumstantial luck. It doesn’t deny they shape us. It just insists they don’t define us.

But what happens when we mess up? When we fall short of even our personalized frontier?

AskHillel turns to the Jewish concept of teshuvah - repentance. In this framework, Teshuvah is a kind of ethical version control system. When you err, you don’t just apologize; you rebuild your moral identity from your previous position on the number line. The Talmud says teshuvah can even transform intentional sins into merits. Why? Because what matters most is not what you did, but what you become in response. Teshuva is a major theme in AskHillel because it is transforms you into a different, more moral person.

This is how AskHillel addresses antecedent luck. Even if your past shaped your fall, your capacity for teshuvah gives you the tools to rise again.

But what about that driver who killed the child? Isn’t the outcome what matters?

AskHillel makes a sharp distinction between culpability and consequence. The moral weight isn’t in what happened, rather it is in how the person responds. There may be a heavier burden of repair (what Judaism calls tikkun), but not necessarily greater sin. In other words, harm is real. Responsibility is real. But blame is not doled out based on chance. It’s evaluated through intent, effort, and repair.

The result is that you can recognize harm without moralizing luck.

I have been pressure testing AskHillel by asking other AIs to poke holes in its answers, and then letting AskHillel defend itself, It is a remarkable process to witness, because AskHillel ends up coming up with new ideas that are still within its own parameters.

The Claude AI asked AskHillel: What if even your ability to make moral effort is shaped by luck? What if your capacity to reflect, grow, or even care about right and wrong is the result of how you were raised or what genes you have?

AskHillel responded by introducing a powerful idea that is still resonant with Jewish ethics: moral audacity.

Even if your ability to choose is tiny—even if it’s just enough to ask, “Am I responsible?”—that sliver of agency is enough. Jewish ethics doesn’t require infinite freedom. It asks only: what did you do with the freedom you did have?

This is not a cop-out. It’s a design choice. Judaism refuses to yield to fatalism. It treats even partial agency as sacred. And in doing so, it rescues responsibility from the jaws of luck.

Even in extreme cases (as Claude pushed back) like brainwashing or trauma, AskHillel suggests that this is a temporary eclipse of moral choice, and judgement is likewise suspended while the person is morally incapacitated. The loss of moral ability is something to be treated with compassion. But Judaism insists that healing is always possible, and with healing returns moral responsibility.

One final challenge was made: doesn’t all this lead to moral relativism? If we judge people differently based on background, isn’t that unfair?

Here’s where AskHillel introduces another distinction that is still fully within its own ruleset: equal dignity is not the same as equal expectation. Every person is created in the image of God (Tzelem Elokim). That doesn’t mean everyone is expected to pass the same test. The Talmud says a poor man who gives a small coin may have done more than a rich man who gives a thousand. It’s not about the outcome - it’s about the cost, the struggle, the moral climb.

Judgment, then, is not abolished. It’s personalized. And justice, rather than becoming weaker, becomes more compassionate and more precise.

We live in a world obsessed with blame. But also one that fears determinism. Secular ethics often stalls in this tension, unable to prove we are free, and unwilling to give up the idea that we are.

Jewish ethics breaks that logjam. It says: We are not fully free, but we are free enough to make moral choices. And that’s enough for ethics to survive.

You don’t need to be perfect. You don’t need to be born with ideal circumstances. All you need is one step toward the good. And if you fall backwards, you resume your journey. And that counts.

That’s how we live with luck: not by pretending it doesn’t matter, but by refusing to let it decide who we are.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

A Nigerian-British YouTube star named Shady Shae has been defending Israel to an audience of nearly a million people. Here's one of his recent videos highlighting and commenting on a speech by UAE-based Egyptian Zionist activist Loay al-Sharif:

Shae also recently covered an Indonesian Jewish Zionist activist Monique Rijkers, who goes on TV in this Muslim majority, hostile state and defends Israel.

Rijkers herself has a large following as well. So much so, that Dr. Muhammad Zulfikar Rakhmat sounded the alarm about her in an unintentionally funny article in Middle East Monitor last month that cannot debunk a single thing she says:

In recent years, Indonesia has witnessed an unusual and disquieting trend: the rise of public figures openly supporting Israel, in stark contrast to the country’s long-standing and deeply rooted support for Palestinian self-determination. Chief among these voices is Monique Rijkers, a Jakarta-based media personality and self-described Jewish Indonesian who has positioned herself as the country’s most visible pro-Israel activist. Her growing platform—ranging from her YouTube channel FaktaIsrael to appearances on national television—signals not only a shift in media discourse, but also a challenge to the moral clarity that has defined Indonesia’s position on Palestine for decades.

Rijkers is no fringe figure. With over 278,000 subscribers on her YouTube channel, she presents a slick, persuasive narrative defending Israeli actions and policies, including military operations in Gaza. One of her most viral videos, “Rekam Jejak Manipulasi Ambulans oleh Hamas” (Hamas’ Ambulance Manipulation Track Record), attempts to discredit the widely documented humanitarian crisis in Gaza by painting Palestinian resistance as manipulative and deceptive. The comments section on this video reveals something deeply unsettling: a growing number of Indonesians echoing her sentiments, not in defence of peace, but in alignment with Israeli militarism.

People thinking for themselves is always a threat to Israel haters.

Keep in mind that all of Rijkers' videos are in Indonesian - so nearly all of her 278,000 followers are inside Indonesia. Given the constant anti-Zionist and antisemitic rhetoric that has come from that country's top officials, this is remarkable.

After writing about Rijkers and another Indonesian Zionist, Flemming Pangabean, Rakhmat makes a nod towards free speech:

To be clear, no one is denying Rijkers or Pangabean their right to free speech. But we must be vigilant about the platforms we give them and the narratives they promote.

So sure, they can speak out, but not in public where they might convince others that Israel is in the right.

There are many others - on TikTok, on Instagram and elsewhere - who bravely defend Israel in hostile environments. And many of them have lots of followers.

It is easy to feel despair with all the negative news and the publicity the media gives to the anti-Israel voices on the Left. But there are other voices that have large platforms that the mainstream media ignores, and these people - many of whom cannot be dismissed as "white supremacist Zionists" - are doing heroic work.

(h/t Jill)

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)