Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Monday, August 11, 2025

08/11 Links Pt2: Europe Is Losing a War Against Reality; Hamas Is Winning the Culture War; Israel kills a terrorist and the British media goes into mourning

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: Europe Is Losing a War Against Reality

The hostages who would have been released during that cease-fire may not survive to the next, and Macron (and to some extent other European leaders, including Starmer) may have abetted their murder. So why did he do it? Reports the Times:

“Mr. Macron told [German Chancellor Friedrich] Merz that he was under immense pressure at home and would most likely recognize a Palestinian state at the United Nations in late September.… The next day, without telling the Germans, Mr. Macron announced his decision publicly.”

Behind the scenes, Merz was playing a delicate role. He has far more affection for the Jewish state and the wider Jewish world than either Macron or Starmer or nearly any other Western leader save Donald Trump. Alone among the three, Merz has a genuine desire to see the state of Israel survive. But he is also quite critical of Israeli policy of late and suspended some weapons sales after Israel’s announcement that it would pursue Hamas into Gaza City.

Macron acted out of panic and fear. He is not the only world leader under pressure to throw Israel under the bus, but he is a uniquely weak-willed one.

Merz, too, wants to see the establishment of a Palestinian state. But he is of sound mind, and he wanted to approach such a radical change with tact and caution and a sense of the long-term implications. When Starmer went public with his intent to follow Macron on a Palestinian state, the Times reports, Merz was less than pleased:

“Mr. Starmer’s announcement surprised the Germans. They already viewed Mr. Macron’s announcement as counterproductive, hardening Israel’s tone and Hamas’s stance in cease-fire negotiations in Qatar, which had collapsed.”

Events had taken place exactly as Marco Rubio said they did. The one thing everyone can agree on is that Macron did great damage to cease-fire efforts.

Thus we have a rare moment when the truth has emerged from the shadows: France’s announcement of its recognition of a Palestinian state sabotaged peace, prolonged the war, and may have signed the death warrants of Israeli hostages in Gaza. It is a moment that should be taught in international relations courses for decades to come; a cautionary tale.

The Times piece also contains an unintentionally revealing (and humorous) sentence: “Given its Nazi history and its status as one of Israel’s most important allies, Germany had always been unlikely to recognize a Palestinian state before it was established.”

Here’s another way of saying that Germany was unlikely to pretend that something existed until it existed. This sets it apart from France and Britain, and a growing list of Western countries which insist on going to war against reality.

Hamas Is Winning the Culture War

Go visit a public park in Birmingham or London or attempt to buy lunch in downtown Athens or Malmö, and it’s obvious that Europe is dying—its native populations, folkways, religions, and languages being replaced by people whose relationship with their host countries is marked most loudly by resentment, mixed with contempt. Terrified European elites, presiding over shrinking populations and dwindling resources, know no other way but to submit, while justifying their submission through ever-more elaborate rituals of pretense and denial.

Israel has no such privilege. To survive, it has just one path forward. First, it must realize that as land and humiliation are the only two viable currencies in the Middle East, it must reoccupy Gaza, reviving President Trump’s proposal to relocate the strip’s inhabitants to Egypt, the Gulf states, Ireland, France, and wherever else desires to take them. Relocation of populations as the result of war is not a barbaric offense practiced only by Nazis, as opponents shout; it is the common outcome of nearly every war in history. If shipping Gazans out of Gaza as a consequence of their defeat is somehow Nazi-like, then the list of Nazi states on the planet is long indeed: China, India, Pakistan, Vietnam, Poland, Germany, the Czech Republic, Ukraine, Russia, Austria, and France, for starters. The United States sent hundreds of thousands of Loyalists fleeing to Canada in the aftermath of the Revolutionary War, and not a single one has yet received compensation for their losses. That’s war.

Second, Israel must reject any notion of a future settlement that is absent a complete and total Palestinian surrender, not just in Gaza but in the West Bank as well. A Palestinian state is not the answer to the problems of either Jews or Arabs. It is a way for the world to guarantee a violent and bloody future for everyone in the region, by snatching victory from the jaws of defeat for Hamas. History has been very clear in its verdict that there is room at best for one state between the river and the sea, as the Palestinians and their Western partisans like to put it. Any sane person deciding between the existence of the State of Israel, a technologically advanced liberal democracy as well as the region’s leading military power, and the various Palestinian principalities that owe their existence to outside charity, should have an easy time deciding which state that should be. If your answer is Palestine, then you are either an Islamist or a nihilist. Either way, your values are not mine—especially given the scale of the murdering that your answer supposes, and the human desert that you propose to build on the resulting pile of bones.

Third, Israel must resist the enormous pressure that will result from European capitals, because the pressure is precisely the point. Britain is already facing a bubbling revolt of citizens enraged by decades-long concealment of Pakistani grooming gangs raping hundreds of defenseless young women, as well as by an even more insidious effort to arrest and silence people who point out the obvious on social media. The more vocal and violent the anti-Israel revolt in Europe grows, the more likely it is to force the continent’s feckless leadership into a reckoning that their policy of welcoming migrants is about to backfire in a very painful way.

It is the hope of European elites that by throwing Israel over the side of the ship, they might buy themselves perhaps another decade or two of relative social peace, during which they can believe whatever they want about human nature while eating gobs of Nutella. I believe these comforting assumptions about the efficacy of sacrificing the Jews will be a mistake for them. Either way, Israel can’t be part of it. Dying for Europe’s delusions of how it might buy peace with its own barbarians was the unavoidable fate of European Jews during World War II, an experience that made the necessity of a Jewish state clear to every sentient Jew and sympathetic or guilt-driven Western person on the planet. I am sad to say that our own century’s barbarians show no signs of being any friendlier to Jews than their European predecessors were.

Thankfully, having a state means that Jews are no longer compelled to sacrifice ourselves for the convenience of Europeans or the global left or deluded right-wing American podcasters or The New York Times or anyone else. Every other consequence of our national existence, however brutal or bloody, is painfully small by comparison.

Mike Huckabee, Yehuda Kaploun and Mark Walker: Silence is complicity

Peace cannot coexist with terrorism. So long as Hamas holds power, Gaza’s people will remain imprisoned by violence. Every moment they remain in control is another moment justice and stability are denied to Gazan and Israeli civilians.

In stark contrast to the silence and moral ambiguity of many global leaders, figures like President Donald Trump and U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio have shown bold clarity. They stand firm in rejecting Hamas’s legitimacy, demand the immediate release of all hostages, alive and dead, and refuse to soften their stance in the face of terror. Their leadership exemplifies what the moment demands: moral clarity and unwavering resolve.

Too many world leaders, obsessed with political calculation, have failed to act. This silence is not neutrality, it’s complicity.

This moment requires more than just political will. We call on religious leaders of all faiths—Pope Leo XIV, Muslim leaders, evangelical pastors, Jewish figures and others—to come together in shared outrage and shared purpose. The hostages are not political pawns; they are human beings whose lives hang in the balance.

Humanitarian organizations like the International Committee of the Red Cross and Red Crescent must be empowered to deliver aid, food, medicine and other essentials to those suffering in captivity. This is not a regional issue; it’s a human-rights crisis that demands a global response. Neutrality in the face of evil is not virtue; it is surrender.

Have we become so desensitized that images of tortured civilians and terrorized families no longer move us to action? The world’s silence is deafening. We must ask ourselves: If not now, when? If not us, who?

We are standing at a moral crossroads. To ignore what is happening in Gaza, to look away from the true nature of Hamas, is to forsake our shared humanity. The real truths are not buried in policy papers or press releases; they live in the faces of the victims, in the voices of grieving families and in the hollow eyes of hostages still waiting for rescue.

Every day we delay, every moment of hesitation allows more suffering. The cost of inaction is measured in lives lost, dignity denied and a future destroyed. We must stand united, not as political factions, but as human beings. Against Hamas and for the innocent.

The real truth is this: We must not allow Hamas lies to become truths.

08/11 Links Pt1: The Mirage of Palestinian Statehood; The Rules Only Israel Has to Follow; Why Does Gaza have so many Hospitals?; Doubts Over Viral Story Of Boy Killed At GHF Site

From Ian:

The Mirage of Palestinian Statehood

Here there is no avoiding the brute fact that there is no independent Palestine to recognize. Its territory is divided across the Gaza Strip and West Bank, with Israel wedged in between. Gaza has been reduced to ruins and its population depleted, uprooted, and displaced, while the West Bank is honeycombed with Israeli settlements and infrastructure defended by Israeli arms. Insofar as there is any Palestinian authority left in Gaza, it is the remnants of Hamas cowering in underground tunnels beneath the apocalyptic ruination above. Having destroyed Hamas as a military force, the Israeli government is now contemplating reoccupying the Gaza Strip in its entirety.

To extend diplomatic recognition to Palestine in such circumstances is worse than a mistake; it is to trade in illusions, to offer Palestinians the mirage of statehood. Palestinian delegates will get to participate in international fora, attend international conferences, exchange diplomatic pleasantries, and enjoy the hospitality at international conferences. It will do nothing for ordinary Palestinians. It will not prevent the Israeli occupation of Gaza nor end the construction of Israeli settlements in the West Bank. It will not result in independent institutions of self-government, nor will it enhance state capacity in the occupied territories. Nor will it provide relief or restore functioning public services.

What is worse, this mirage of statehood will encourage Palestinians to evade the reality of their military and strategic defeat at the hands of Israel. Middle class protestors on Western campuses can afford to indulge in political moralism; such idealism is suicidal for the cause of Palestinian independence. Western states have their own, mostly cynical reasons to extend recognition to Palestine in order to placate vocal Muslim minorities and undercut the radical left. Whatever violence may or may not be legitimate in establishing national independence, we can be sure that violence that establishes fictional states—states whose only existence is on the NGO conference circuit—is not only morally reprehensible but also politically futile.

What does recognizing Palestinian state mean, and does it change anything on the ground?

That being said, even if Canada, the UK, France, Australia, and potentially others choose to go ahead and recognize a Palestinian state at the UN General Assembly next month, what, if anything, will change on the ground?

International recognition of a Palestinian state does not automatically lead to the state’s creation.

There are still no internationally-agreed upon borders, no capital city, no army, and no set government. Gaza is in the middle of a war, and there is yet to be discussion on significant minutiae such as land swaps, what happens to Jewish settlements in the West Bank, what happens to Israeli Arabs, and the like.

Recognition is mostly symbolic. It is not an order or a plan. If anything, it is designed to put pressure on Israel to end the war and to ramp up humanitarian aid provision to the Strip.

This was made evident in UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s July 29 speech in which he said that the recognition of a Palestinian state would go ahead “unless the Israeli government takes substantive steps to end the appalling situation in Gaza, agrees to a ceasefire, and commits to a long-term, sustainable peace, reviving the prospect of a two-state solution.”

In other words, recognition – at least on the UK’s part – is a bargaining chip for cajoling Israel into acting in line with international consensus on how the war should be carried out.

International law regarding the creation of a state is generally based on the Montevideo Convention of 1933. This lists four specific criteria in order for something to qualify as a state.

First, it must have a permanent population. Second, it must have a defined territory. Third, a government. And fourth, the capacity to enter into relations with other states.

Palestine does not necessarily meet all of these four criteria. While it is generally considered to have a permanent population, it doesn’t have a stable government (the Palestinian Authority has only limited control over the West Bank and no control over Gaza) and has disputed borders.

As the Israel Democracy Institute recently explained, the traditional position in international law is that a state either exists, or it does not: “If it does not meet the factual conditions for statehood, recognition of it has no meaning.”

Additionally, Article 10 of the Montevideo Convention states that “The primary interest of states is the conservation of peace. Differences of any nature that arise between them should be settled by recognized peaceful methods.”

Critics have argued that this will not be upheld by a future Palestinian state.

Amb. Alan Baker: In recognizing Palestinian statehood, Canada has betrayed Israel

Palestinians' empty commitments
• In predicating his intention to recognize a “State of Palestine” on “the Palestinian Authority’s commitment to much-needed reforms, including… commitments to fundamentally reform its governance, to hold general elections in 2026 in which Hamas can play no part, and to demilitarize the Palestinian state,” the prime minister is surely fully aware of the fact that Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas made the same commitments in the Oslo Accords, commitments that to this day have not been realized and have been continuously violated, together with most of the Palestinian commitments in those accords.

In welcoming Abbas’s “renewed commitment to these reforms,” Carney is knowingly deceiving both himself and the Canadian people by paying valueless lip service to empty commitments that no leader of the Palestinian Authority is able and genuinely willing to implement.

Canada’s empty commitments
• In informing the president of the Palestinian Authority that Canada will “increase its efforts to promote peace and stability in the region, and work closely with regional allies toward this goal,” Carney is voicing a totally empty, meaningless, and misleading commitment.

Joining such regional allies as France, Russia, the UK, Norway, Ireland, Spain, and others – in ganging-up against Israel in the United Nations and unilaterally recognizing a non-existent Palestinian state – undermines the Oslo Accords – and the Palestinian commitment to negotiated resolution of the conflict. It also undermines the obligation of the very states that signed the Oslo Accords as witnesses to maintain the integrity of the accords.

As such, the prime minister’s promise to Mahmoud Abbas is the very antithesis of promoting peace. It encourages the Hamas terrorist leadership and their PA partners in their stubborn refusal to free the Israeli hostages, and in their determination to continue their terror campaign against the Jewish state. And it encourages the other states in the UN, as well as the international public, in their continued hostility to Israel and their overall antisemitism.

With this irresponsible statement, as well as the policies that it describes, Carney has blatantly abandoned Canada’s traditional support for Israel – a support that has consistently been based on a solid commonality of political, security, economic, and cultural interests between Ottawa and Jerusalem.

Indeed, former prime minister Stephen Harper declared in 2014 in the Knesset that Canada will always have Israel’s back: “Through fire and water, Canada will stand with you.”

Regrettably, and to the contrary, Canada under Prime Minister Carney – and his predecessor Justin Trudeau – has stabbed Israel in its back and continues to do so.

One may ask if this ill-advised policy really serves the genuine interests of Canada, its society, and people. This begs the question of whether the damage that has been caused will ever be repaired.

The UJA Federation of New York wrote something surprising:

UJA’s longtime partner IsraAID — Israel’s largest nongovernmental humanitarian aid organization — has been extending critical relief inside Gaza, already reaching more than 100,000 Gazans.

Before October 7, IsraAID’s work focused entirely on global natural disasters and conflicts beyond its borders — arriving under the Israeli flag to offer lifesaving aid after earthquakes, floods, wildfires, epidemics, and displacement. They were, for example, central partners in our Ukraine crisis response.

After October 7, for the first time, they used their hard-earned expertise to meet needs across Israel.

And now, they’ve turned to Gaza, where they’ve built deep working relationships with the IDF unit responsible for aid in Gaza (COGAT), as well as highly reputable global aid organizations on the ground, positioning them to ensure the effective delivery of relief.

This week, we allocated $1 million to IsraAID to support their efforts in Gaza, specifically to provide food, medicine, and the installation of filtration systems to enable safe drinking water for displaced families.

IsraAID represents the very best of Israel — and of us.

Gazans definitely require aid. That being said, I am not so sure if it makes any sense for Jews to be providing that aid.

I am willing to give IsraAID the benefit of the doubt. I am willing to believe that they came up with a mechanism, together with COGAT, to provide aid directly to Gazans who need it in such a way that Hamas does not have a chance to steal or hijack the aid. .

IsraAID, probably for political reasons, says nothing about its aid to Gazans on its website. But I found an article on eJewishPhilanthropy where IsraAID's CEO Yotam Polizer discusses what the NGO has been doing.

For over a year and a half, the Israeli humanitarian relief group IsraAid has been quietly providing assistance to Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, first by serving as an adviser and go-between, helping international aid organizations coordinate with the Israeli government and military. In recent months, this has increased to more direct assistance by creating a logistics hub for partners on the ground.

JAG: The obvious question is how you ensure that this aid and assistance doesn’t make its way to Hamas or other terrorist groups.

YP: Honestly, there’s no perfect solution in such a condensed war area, where Hamas is embedded within the population. But what we do know works better than anything else is close coordination and communication. And it goes back to the vetting process, making sure basically that all of these partners do not have team members affiliated with Hamas, making sure that everything they bring is scanned properly.

Also, Israeli policies have changed during this war. In the beginning, the declared policy of the government was that nothing would come in from Israel. And then Israel opened its crossings, and now the preferred route is to bring aid from Israel into Gaza.

At some point, we also realized that we should work on a higher level, too. During the ceasefire [in January and February], Israel agreed to allow 600 trucks into Gaza each day. And I remember, we worked in close coordination with the IDF to make that happen together with the U.N. and the many other aid organizations. And I know we all hear about the toxic relationship between Israel and the U.N., but I can tell that I saw that it was a very productive collaboration on that mission.

Politzer says that other Israeli NGOs are getting involved, and he thinks that the many Israeli Arab doctors can play a role in a future Gaza.

He also says that IsraAID is involved in aid for Druze in Syria and also in other Arab countries he cannot name.

Things in Gaza are bad - not as bad as the NGOs and media are saying, but still bad. It is Hamas' fault. I can understand how organizations do not want to abandon Gazans, and also how IsraAID is uniquely qualified to help other aid organizations work more effectively in Gaza.

But there is always a political aspect to aid, and IsraAID giving aid to hungry people in sub-Saharan Africa or potential Abraham Accords partners would probably gain more goodwill for Israel than anything they can possibly do in Gaza. I know that aid shouldn't be conditional on a "thank you" but it could be prioritized on that.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

From the Prime Minister of Australia:

Australia will recognise the State of Palestine at the 80th Session of the United Nations General Assembly in September, to contribute to international momentum towards a two-state solution, a ceasefire in Gaza and release of the hostages.

How does this work. How does recognition of "Palestine" contribute to a ceasefire in Gaza? How does it help release hostages?

It does the opposite. It makes Hamas more intransigent and it gives them much less incentive to release hostages. It is like saying "I will accept alchemy as a science because that will allow me to manufacture gold from inexpensive chemicals." Declaring it doesn't make it true.

Since 1947, Australia has supported Israel’s existence. In that year, Australia’s Foreign Minister Evatt chaired the UN committee that recommended the creation of two states side by side.

Then, as now, the international community understood a two-state solution was the basis of peace and security for the peoples of the region.

Australia was the first country to raise its hand at the United Nations in support of Resolution 181, to create the State of Israel – and a Palestinian state.

More than 77 years later, the world can no longer wait for the implementation of that Resolution to be negotiated between the parties.

What happened in 1947? The Palestinian Arabs rejected the deal. They rejected statehood. Between the partition and 1948, they didn't do anything to build an Arab state in Palestine. Between 1948 and 1967, they didn't do anything to achieve independence from Jordan and Egypt. Since 2000, they rejected numerous offers for statehood.

Israel didn't stand in the way - the Palestinian leadership did.

What more does the world need to realize that Palestinians never wanted a state of their own, except as a means to destroy Israel? How many billions has Europe spent to help Palestinian governance - and what has it accomplished beyond a kleptocracy? If Palestinians wanted a state for their people to be free, why do they insist that they have the "right of return" to Israel where they would supposedly be second class citizens?

Most importantly, why is no one in the West asking these quite basic questions?

Hamas continues to damage the prospects of a two-state solution and rejects Israel’s right to exist. Hamas must release the hostages cruelly taken on October 7, 2023 immediately, unconditionally and with dignity. The Australian Government has consistently made clear there can be no role for Hamas in a Palestinian state.

OK, great. Now, presumably, the Palestinian state would be a democracy. What does Australia do when Hamas wins the elections? Because it has consistently outpolled Fatah in every poll since October 7 (as well as before.) Is democracy no longer a value?

This is what happens when wishful thinking and groupthink defeat actual thinking. The world is saying "things are bad, maybe this will solve it" without even considering "maybe this will not only make things worse, but the decisions we make today cannot be undone."

It is idiocy and will promote terror, but the only people who will be murdered initially as a result of these decisions are Jews, and who cares about them?

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

At the end of July, I and others reported that according to UN figures, some 85% of aid to Gaza - by weight - was being stolen by armed gangs, Hamas or "hungry people."

Unusually, the story actually was picked up and published by various media outlets.

So one would expect the UN would have done something to better protect these shipments, right?

On the contrary. The problem is getting worse.

While the NGOs are starting to pick up aid that has been sitting at collection points - for the past two weeks, it collected more aid than entered Gaza - the percentage of aid collected that gets looted has been increasing.

According to UNOPS data. for the week ending August 3, 94% of the aid was stolen.

For the week ending August 10, 96% of the aid was stolen.

That's not all that the UN has not been telling us. For the first two weeks in June, 100% of all aid shipments picked up by NGOs to be distributed were looted. That was 838 tons of aid for the week starting June 2, and 4,104 tons for the week of June 9 - every bit of it stolen.

For months, the IDF's COGAT unit has insisted that enough food was being imported into Gaza to feed everyone. For months, the UN insisted that not enough was reaching the people. They were both right - but the UN hid the fact that this was all because of its own incompetence.

And the media treated COGAT like they were the liars.

But this is worse than that. The UN's silence on the aid distribution problem hints at a much darker motive: it prefers that the world attack Israel than ensuring that Gazans get the food they need.

After all, the much criticized Gaza Humanitarian Foundation offered to the UN to secure its aid shipments - and the UN refused. pretending that there was a principle involved in not cooperating with a militarized force. Yet the UN cooperated with Hamas for years.

When the UN insists that more aid is needed, and it knows that nearly all of it will go to Hamas and other armed gangs, it is making a decision to fund Hamas and encourage theft. The NGOs are saying that they prefer the propaganda victory of accusing Israel of withholding food to actually delivering the food that they are responsible for.

The entire point of aid is to give it to those who need it most - women, children, the injured, the poor. The UN and NGOs are making a conscious decision that they prefer a lawless Gaza where the food is stolen and sold only to those who can fund these terrorists, or given freely to those who join terror groups - fighting age men.

These "humanitarians," in their hate for Israel, prioritize the anti-Israel "starvation as a weapon of war" and "genocide" propaganda over helping hungry Gazans. And the more pressure they put on Israel to increase the amount of aid without doing a thing to secure it, the more they encourage Hamas to steal the aid.

The numbers don't lie. The UN and NGOs are not even trying to ensure that the food they bring in reaches those who need it. They cannot be considered humanitarian when their actions are enabling and rewarding terror, violence, extortion, theft, and keeping food out of the hands of the people who are at the greatest risk.

The UN and NGOs are part of an assembly line to bring in aid and give it to terrorists.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

Hezbollah becoming politically isolated within and outside Lebanon

Hezbollah has been losing support of its political allies in Lebanon.

L'Orient Today notes that Hezbollah has been criticizing Saudi Arabia in recent weeks, even though the Saudis are the ones who are most likely to spend the billions needed to rebuild Lebanon. The reason?

But according to political scientist Karim Bitar, what particularly troubles Hezbollah is “the pressure the kingdom is putting on the last remaining allies of the party,” namely Faisal Karameh and the Frangieh family. Both had aligned with the “Resistance” for years but have now begun to distance themselves — a real blow to Hezbollah after the gradual withdrawal of support from the Free Patriotic Movement (FPM).

A year ago, the Hezbollah bloc controlled 53 seats in Lebanon's 120 seat parliament. Today, it appears to be down to about 29, with some reported frictions with its main secular ally Amal that would cut that number in half if they split.

So it isn't that Hezbollah has lost some of its military power, but also it has lost much of its political power as well.

There is further anger in Lebanon because six soldiers were killed trying to dismantle an explosive device in a Hezbollah weapons depot in southern Lebanon last week.

The "strong horse" theory seems pretty compelling in Lebanon, and Hezbollah's influence has gone diwn in proportion to its perceived military might.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

08/10 Links: Netanyahu: ‘No choice’ but to complete defeat of Hamas; Shoah survivor dies weeks after being wounded by Iran missile; How ‘Haaretz’ built a false campaign about Gaza ‘starvation’

From Ian:

Shoah survivor dies weeks after being wounded by Iran missile

Holocaust survivor Olga Weisberg, 91, from Rehovot, collapsed and died on Saturday, shortly after her ending hospitalization for serious wounds sustained in an Iranian missile attack during June’s 12-day war.

According to the MyRehovot local news site, she underwent multiple surgeries in the wake of the missile assault and was recently released from the hospital to recover further at a hotel. However, on Saturday, she took a turn for the worse.

Weisberg reportedly left behind a husband who is also a Holocaust survivor, as well as a daughter, grandson and great-grandson. Her funeral was set to take place Sunday at Rehovot’s New Cemetery.

On July 28, an 85-year-old Israeli who was moderately wounded in a missile attack during the war with Tehran succumbed to his wounds.

The slain victim, who sustained injuries when a residential building in Rehovot in took a direct hit on June 15, died at the city’s Kaplan Medical Center.

Last month, the Philippine Embassy in Israel announced that Leah Mosquera, a Filipina caregiver working in Israel, died on July 13 of wounds sustained in the same June 15 missile attack.

Mosquera was rushed to Shamir Medical Center in Be’er Ya’akov, where she underwent many surgeries and spent several weeks in the intensive care unit. The embassy noted that Mosquera would have turned 50 on July 29.

Iran’s missile attacks in June have now killed 31 people in Israel, while wounding more than 3,000 and displacing over 13,000 others.

Gaza recalls ancient antisemitic tropes

While Hamas commits atrocities against its own people, uses its children as human shields, hoards humanitarian aid, and starves Israeli hostages like Evyatar David — forcing him to dig his own grave — the international community blames Israel.

Meanwhile, genuine humanitarian crises elsewhere are met with near silence: Uyghur Muslims detained in Chinese camps, Christians slaughtered in Nigeria, Yazidi women enslaved by ISIS, Rohingya Muslims driven from Myanmar, and mass killings in Sudan. These tragedies barely register in the headlines, let alone spark sustained outrage. There are no emergency sessions of the UN, no massive street protests, no cultural boycotts.

The spotlight seems to shine only where it serves a pre-existing bias, selectively illuminating one nation while leaving vast fields of human suffering in the shadows. This is a double standard which is yet another blatant expression of antisemitism.

The truth is that never in the annals of warfare has a nation supplied its enemy with food and aid while its own citizens are still under fire. In the aftermath of WWII, the United States did feed Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan — but only after their surrender. Yet Israel, astonishingly, has allowed 1.8 million tons of aid to enter Gaza during the ongoing war.

Much of that aid lies idle, as my grandson Eitan Fischberger, who was embedded on the scene, noted in The Wall Street Journal. It has been blocked by a United Nations that refuses to facilitate its distribution — insisting that only Hamas’ Blue Police, not Israel or even a U.S.-backed group like the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, can be trusted to deliver it. As Fischberger wrote, “put simply, the UN would rather work with Hamas than the Israelis or the Americans.”

Some claim Israel has lost the battle for global opinion. Perhaps there is truth in that. But Israel has articulate and capable spokespeople making its case. The deeper reality is more sobering: the truth is irrelevant to those who are unwilling to hear it. Much of the world, still infected by an ancient hatred of Jews, has closed its ears.

They join the long line of accusers who, over centuries, have condemned Jews as the scourge of civilization. In time, history has exposed the lies behind those charges. So too, in time, will the truth come out and condemn the defamers of today — those who, under the guise of human rights advocacy, are resurrecting and amplifying the oldest hatred in the world.

George Brandis: Recognising Palestine now only rewards Hamas, the side with clear genocidal intent

The chilling irony of the debate about the Gaza War – in Australia, as elsewhere – is that those who most volubly condemn Israel for genocide are acting, wittingly or unwittingly, as apologists for Hamas, whose very raison d’etre is genocide.

Like “fascist” before it, “genocide” has become the go-to word of abuse for the left, a denunciation invoked with such indiscriminate carelessness that it has become unmoored from its true meaning. International law defines “genocide” in the 1948 Genocide Convention as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical [sic], racial or religious group”.

The forcible occupation of territory may be a violation of international law, but it is not genocide. Israel’s announcement last week that it intends to deploy armed personnel to secure Gaza City is not a threat of genocide.

The elimination of the state of Israel would, however, undoubtedly be an act of genocide. Every protester accusing Israel of genocide, while mindlessly chanting the mantra “From the river to the sea …” , is either too stupid to understand this truth or too hypocritical to admit it. (I suspect few of those marching on the Harbour Bridge last week could tell you what sea – let alone what river – this undergraduate slogan refers to, let alone the implications of its demand.)

The current pressure for the recognition of a Palestinian state began last month when President Emmanuel Macron announced France’s intention to do so. He was swiftly joined by Britain and Canada. (Germany’s position – so far – has been more nuanced.) The rationale was condemnation of Israel’s interference with the delivery of humanitarian aid to Gaza – including shocking evidence of starvation among Palestinian children, and instances of the killing both of aid workers delivering food supplies, and those needing them.

The UK Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, was explicit in linking the two. On 29 July, he said: “[T]he UK will recognise the state of Palestine by the United Nations General Assembly in September unless the Israeli government takes substantive steps to end the appalling situation in Gaza, agree to a ceasefire and commit to a long-term, sustainable peace, reviving the prospect of a two-state solution.”

As Starmer’s statement makes clear, he, Macron and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney are using the immediate recognition of Palestine as a threat, to pressure Israel to desist from its current policy in Gaza.

This is appallingly ill-judged diplomacy. Condemnation of Israel’s actions – however justified – is no basis for reversing those nations’ long-held position that it is a precondition of recognition – a necessary ingredient of the two-state solution – that a Palestine state must accept Israel’s right to exist and agree not to threaten its security.

The profound inconsistency in the French, British and Canadian positions is revealed in Starmer’s choice of the word “unless”. According to this logic, if Israel were to accede to the demand, Palestinian recognition would continue to be withheld. If it does not, it would be granted. Yet on either scenario, the inability of the Palestinian Authority to give the guarantees upon which the two-state solution depends – and the continuation of Hamas’ genocidal intentions – remain exactly as before.

The change of policy, couched in terms of support for the two-state solution, in reality undermines its rationale. Two states may be recognised, but the “solution” element – the use of recognition as a tool to leverage a solution to the conflict – will have been effectively abandoned. It may linger as a rhetorical trope, but nothing more – undercut by the very leaders by whom it was invoked as cover for a diplomatic demarche that already looks to have failed.

And it also means that those who perpetrated the massacre of innocents on October 7, 2023 will have succeeded.

Israeli intelligence has kept countless Australians, including Bob Hawke, safe over the years

In the early 1970s, Palestinian terrorists tried to build a network of Australians sympathetic to their cause and saw Australia as a soft touch, not least of which because of then prime minister Gough Whitlam’s policy of neutrality in the Middle East notwithstanding the Palestinian program of terror that had up to then included the Munich Olympic Games massacre, the assassination of the Jordanian prime minister and plane hijacks across Europe.

At the Sydney Town Hall on in May 1973, Whitlam said: “Australia’s policy towards the Middle East is one of neutrality and of sympathetic interest in a settlement.”

Future prime minister Bob Hawke, then president of the Australian Labor Party, bravely wanted none of it.

“I know that if we allow the bell to be tolled for Israel it will have tolled for me, for us all,” he told the Zionist Federation in a Sydney meeting in January 1974.

“For me”? If only he had known. Palestinians were already arranging his assassination.

One of their agents, posing as a journalist, was given a visa to enter Australia in 1974. Munif Mohammed Abou Rish arrived here that year and planned to return to Australia the following year with a hit list that included Hawke, the then Israeli ambassador to Australia Michael Elizur, prominent Jewish Australian Isi Leibler and my old mate, and this newspaper’s one-time foreign editor, Sam Lipski.

Israeli intelligence warned Australia about the risks. One Palestinian was expelled and the rest were watched.

The man who planned to assassinate Hawke, Munif Mohammed Abou Rish, was provided with fake passports by Australian supporters.

Later, he was “accidentally” killed by Israeli security forces.

I am coming up on this blog's 21st anniversary, but as my readers know, I am increasingly moving from this pro-Israel project towards my philosophy project.

I honestly think that I have a chance to make a big difference in the world. And I feel compelled to spend more time doing that, especially since there are so many good pro-Israel advocates out there nowadays.

I just came up with what looks like a good workflow to write my book on "Derechology," a meta-ethical framework that literally solves or dissolves every major problem in moral philosophy. It proves that many of the basic assumptions of philosophy from Aristotle to today have been flawed, and the Jewish ethical philosophy systems has been thriving and solving problems far more flexibly and effectively than all the others (at least in the Western world.)

And the major case study that proves that Derechology is a superior is in how the other systems either tolerate or promote antisemitism.

I have a good handle on the scope of Derechology (I hope, it keeps expanding.) I have a great model architecture of a specific ethical system, a secularized version of Jewish ethics, that I am now calling secular covenantalism (SC.) (My AskHillel chatbot is only the beginning.) I have shown how Derechology can be applied to -and vastly improve! - disparate systems like journalistic ethics, educational philosophy, jurisprudence and AI ethics. Not to mention political science, the study of history, philosophy of the mind - pretty much every human endeavor in existence. I don't think I have even scratched the surface.

It's really that big.

And it is all because Jewish moral philosophy is so rich and well integrated - and had been all but ignored in the academy. All I did was extract it from the rest of Judaism and formalize it.

The insights may be able to be used within Judaism itself - I can use derechological concepts to identify consistent "derech" threads in the Torah and other Jewish writings, in an algorithmic way, that AI can automate. On Friday, I had my AI contrast how two major 20th century poskim issued their rulings. This is mind blowing stuff.

As you can tell from the podcast I did a couple of weeks ago, I am very excited - and the framework is now much stronger than it was even then.

The research I'm doing is also spinning off in other directions. I have been working on an AI tool to identify bias in text that can be used by media companies, media watchdogs and journalism classes. I have been playing with another AI sandbox that ranks the seeming reliability of its own sources to reduce hallucinations and help ensure AI does not use sources that are problematic in its answers.

So if I don't post as much as I normally do, forgive me.

I'm trying to save the world in my spare time.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

The "Independent Commission for Human Rights" was established in 1993 by a presidential decree from Yasser Arafat.It is supposed to be a truly independent Palestinian institution for monitoring and reporting on human rights and violations by both Israel and the Palestinian leadership.

Recently, it issued a report on 11,200 people still supposedly missing in Gaza.

The report itself is not yet available on the site, so I have no idea where it got that number from. But it is identical to the number of missing persons that has been published by Palestinian Civil Defense in Gaza - which is Hamas - in January.

Since then, hundreds have been recovered from the rubble, the Red Cross has re-united thousands of families, the number of "missing under rubble" has been found not to be anywhere close to the estimates and even the UN stopped referring to the higher numbers.

The Palestinian Civil Defense that is the source for this number also claims that 2,840 of the missing bodied were "melted" and left no trace. How they could come up with an exact count of invisible bodies is a remarkable achievement, and how Israel built a weapon that vaporizes bodies leaving not even bone fragments or shoes is another remarkable fact. Yet these 2,840 are apparently included in the 11,200 cited by NGOs.

The 11,200 figure from January seems to be the source for the ICHR assertion in July. Which means that the ICHR is not at all interested in reporting the truth, but in parroting whatever ridiculously high numbers anyone makes up to make Israel look evil.

The Ramallah-based Palestine Central Bureau of Statistics also repeats the 11,200 number as fact, today. For a statistics bureau to accept obvious lies makes one wonder about the entire organization that the world relies upon for official Palestinian statistics.

Yet they aren't the worst offenders.

Save the Children issued a press release in mid-2024 estimating 21,000 missing children. Their methodology was to add a complete guess by the UN spokesperson to a separate made up number by Hamas.

No one believes there are 21,000 missing children in Gaza - since even the UN no longer believes the 11,000 total figure.

But has Save the Children updated their estimate in the past year? Of course not.

NGOs are quick to believe the most unsourced, made up statistics to maximize incitement against Israel and extremely reluctant to correct their data when it is shown to be wrong.

NGOs have a "halo effect" that makes questioning them sound like sacrilege. Yet as we see clearly, their interest in telling the truth is next to zero when they have a political reason to exaggerate.

The ICHR is an active member of the Global Alliance for National Human Rights Institutions (GANHRI) with "A" accreditation. Save the Children is globally respected and achieves high charity ratings.

Which tells you something about the quality of human rights NGOs in the world.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

The anniversary of the deadly 1929 riots that killed over 100 Jews in Palestine is coming up.

Nesan.net has an article about 1929 painted in glowing colors and lies:

The "Buraq Revolt" was the first Palestinian uprising against the attempts to Judaize Jerusalem during the British Mandate. Large-scale clashes broke out between Arabs and Jews at the Buraq Wall (the western wall of Al-Aqsa Mosque) on August 15, 1929. The revolt culminated on August 23, 1929, with dozens killed and wounded.

The Buraq Revolt erupted when Jews organized a massive demonstration at the Buraq Wall on August 14, 1929, to mark what they called the "anniversary of the destruction of Solomon's Temple," claiming it was a place reserved for Jews alone.

The next day, August 15, 1929, they followed it with a massive demonstration through the streets of Jerusalem, reaching the Buraq Wall. There, they chanted, "The Wall is ours," and sang the "Zionist national anthem," while simultaneously insulting Muslims.

The British police had been informed of the demonstration in advance and sent large forces to escort the Jewish demonstrators.

On the third day, Friday, August 16, the anniversary of the Prophet Muhammad's birthday, Muslims rallied to defend the Buraq Wall, which the Jews intended to seize. Violent clashes erupted between the two sides, sweeping across much of Palestine .

The revolt saw clashes between Palestinians on one side and Jews and Mandate forces on the other in Hebron, Safed, Jerusalem, Jaffa, and other Palestinian cities, lasting for days.

The Palestine Bulletin at the time shows that the only violence in the first days were by the Arabs against a single Jew - a shammash, or beadle - who didn't flee the Kotel on that Friday:

Many have previously noted the parallels between the 1929 atrocities and October 7. Women raped, their breasts cut off, children murdered, men castrated, unarmed Jews burned alive by a bloodthirsty Arab crowd in an orgy of antisemitic violence.

But it is not only Jews who draw the parallel - Arabs do as well. The Arabic Post wrote about 1929 also in glowing terms, exactly thirty days after October 7, to cement the idea that they were both glorious rebellions against the Jews.

Since October 7, the Al-Aqsa Intifada, Gaza City has been witnessing a war that has resulted in the deaths of more than 10,000 people and the injury of more than 30,000 in just one month. Some have described the war as a genocide of the city's population by the Israeli occupation army.

However, this uprising was not the first in the history of occupied Palestine. The year 1929 witnessed the first uprising against the Jews in the city of Jerusalem, which is also called the Three Martyrs' Uprising or the Buraq Revolution .

The Buraq Revolution was the first Palestinian uprising against the attempt to Judaize Jerusalem during the British Mandate.

In both cases, the Palestinians consider the attackers, rapists and child murderers to be heroes.

Let's give them a state!

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

08/09 Links: Israel must end the ‘Palestinian exception’; AOC organizer arrested for terrorist threat; London: 466 Palestine Action supporters arrested; Montreal: Jewish man attacked in broad daylight

From Ian:

Israel must end the ‘Palestinian exception’

The “Palestinian” refugee crisis is not an accident. It is a design. A permanent grievance factory engineered by the Arab world (or the KGB, depending on whose narrative you prefer), canonized by the United Nations and subsidized by the West, all to sabotage the Jewish state.

But this hostile Arab population is not Israel’s responsibility.

It never was. It is not moral to keep Arabs trapped under the Palestinian Authority or Hamas. It is not moral to keep Jewish families next to people trained to slaughter them.

It is not moral to sacrifice Jewish soldiers or prolong a war Israel has the power to end, if only it stops asking permission.

The world has mechanisms for dealing with refugees. But Israel itself prevents those mechanisms from working, by being the only country that stops the process before it starts. By asking “Where will they go?” Israel keeps millions trapped—not just inside Gaza, but inside a miserable weaponized identity that serves only those who profit from Jewish blood.

Tiny Israel absorbs every Jewish refugee, not just from Europe and Africa and the Middle East, but from every corner of an increasingly hostile planet. Let the Arab League, with its 22 member states, massive wealth, and expansive territories, reabsorb their ethnic kin.

Let the 53 Muslim nations show even a fraction of the decency and responsibility the Jewish state has shown by integrating their brothers and sisters of the ummah. Let the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, representing over 2 billion people and claiming to “safeguard and protect the interests of the Muslim world in the spirit of promoting international peace and harmony,” actually live up to its mandate.

Or let any of Israel’s accusers, from Ireland to South Africa, demonstrate that “Palestinians” mean more to them than just excuses for antisemitic blood libels and fulminations. There are abundant options, all of which are more humane and make more sense than the infernal status quo.

Israel was carved out of a historic Jewish homeland, 80 percent of which remains, to this day, ruled by colonialist Arab regimes in which no Jews are permitted to live. It is time for Israel to stop being the Arab world’s toxic waste facility—a dumping ground for generations trained to kill us and to die doing it.

And if anyone dares ask Israel, “But where will they go?” the answer must be: “Great question; you figure it out. Because it’s not our problem anymore; not after Oct. 7. We tried everything—aid, land, coexistence; we even uprooted our own people by force, but they chose murder. You created these monsters; fed them, funded them, taught them to hate, paid them to kill. Now you deal with them.”

Israel must stop being the only nation on earth expected to feed, house, shelter and empower those sworn to destroy it.

But first, Jews must stop asking the question that no country on earth ever asked about us: “But who’s going to take them?”

Brendan O'Neill: In defence of whataboutery

Brilliantly, some non-Europeans are rising up against Gaza myopia. Luai Ahmed, the Yemeni-born writer who lives in Sweden, has directly confronted the UN on its Israelophobic mania. In a speech at the UN Human Rights Council earlier this year, he asked: ‘What about Yemen?’ Half a million souls have perished there these past 10 years, he said. Yemen suffered one of the worst famines of the modern era in the wake of the Saudi-Yemen war. ‘Why does no one care when half a million Yemenis die?’, he demanded. You can envisage the moral preeners of the keffiyeh classes clubbing together to denounce this pesky Yemeni for his crime of whataboutery, for polluting their self-serving ‘Gaza genocide’ narrative with the inconvenient fact that there have been worse wars this very decade.

Even history must now bow to the Gaza delirium. Britain’s independent MP Zarah Sultana tweeted this week about the 80th anniversary of the nuking of Hiroshima. That was a ‘crime against humanity’ that ‘killed tens of thousands in an instant’, she said. Then, like a Pavlov’s dog of Palestinianism, she said ‘We also remember Gaza’, where Israel has dropped ‘five times the power of the atomic bomb’ that was launched over Hiroshima. ‘[This] is genocide’, she cried.

This is a kind of madness, isn’t it? Yes, with hilarious unwittingness Sultana actually made Israel’s case for it: that Israel has apparently dropped more firepower on Gaza over two years than America did on Hiroshima in a split second, and yet the casualities in Gaza are fewer than in Hiroshima, rather proves that this is not a genocide but a war on Hamas. But there’s a moral frenzy here, too. There is a class of people who think of nothing but Gaza. It colonises their every waking moment. It brutally blocks out all other political concerns, domestic and international. It casts its shadow over the present, the past and that starving child in Nigeria. Every human being, alive or dead, now finds his pain measured against Gaza. Ninety thousand human beings burnt to a crisp in Hiroshima? Okay, but what about Gaza? This isn’t activism – it’s hysteria.

I know what they say: it’s because our own governments support Israel that we are angrier about the Gaza conflict than any other. Bollocks. Our governments supported the Saudis too, yet I don’t remember you bawling in the streets every Saturday for the dead of Yemen. Our governments, via the aid industry, are catastrophically failing Nigeria and Sudan, yet you raise not one word. More to the point, the BBC – not to mention CNN, AP and the rest – are meant to be neutral news-collectors, not anti-government leftists. So why are they infected with the malarial Gaza fetish that ails the left and the cultural establishment?

Something else is going on. And we all know it. We all know that hating Israel has become the key source of moral virtue for the influential of the West. We all know Gaza is the issue through which high political society distinguishes itself from ‘the unenlightened’. And we all know that the consequence of this fetishisation of Palestine to the end of boosting the moral fortunes of time-rich, virtue-hungry Westerners is that black Africans and the Slavic victims of Russian imperialism are callously cast aside. That’s my charge: your swirling, one-eyed Israelophobia has nurtured a collective culture of abject indifference to our suffering cousins in Africa and elsewhere. So, tell me – what about them?

Palestine recognition ‘shows Hamas that killing people pays off’

His concern is that, in the eyes of both Hamas and Moscow, violence has been validated by the Western world.

“If Hamas can see that killing pays off, that they [Palestine] will be recognised, they will survive. Russia – similar. If they feel that the international community is willing to recognise that aggression pays off, Putin will not stop there.”

And, with Estonia bordering Russia, the threat feels immediate. “We are getting closer to a much more dramatic and turbulent world,” he said.

“Those forces that have played a decisive role in keeping stability in the Middle East are not today ready or able to make a difference. I mean, first and foremost, the US.

"The situation is difficult. The US is not able to be the unique power player. Nowadays, you have China, Russia, Iran, North Korea. Their aim is to destroy or redefine the current world order.”

After October 7, Mihkelson visited the sites of the Hamas massacre in southern Israel, including Kibbutz Be’eri and the Nova music festival. “It made me understand very deeply the consequences of the past and what could happen next,” he added.

He acknowledged the terrible suffering of Palestinians in Gaza, but also suggested that images of the conflict are being used dishonestly to sway public opinion. “The optics – what is coming out of Gaza – can be used as a manipulative tool. But also without any manipulation, you can see the suffering of civilians is horrible.”

While Estonia voted in favour of a UN General Assembly resolution last year calling on Israel to end its occupation of Palestinian territories, Mihkelson said future steps must focus on results not symbolism.

“Our position has been for a long time similar – we don’t exclude the full recognition of independence of a country… but our first and most important principal here is: if we do so, do we help to bring peace into the region? Will this be more than a political declaration? How will this resonate with what happened on October 7?

"Isn’t this recognition of Hamas, a terrorist organisation that still has as its primary goal to destroy Israeli statehood and kill Jews?”

Likewise, he supports a two-state solution, but said that October 7 pushed the prospect of peace further away. “Estonia’s position has been the same as other countries – agree with two-state formation – unfortunately, there is a very limited will specifically from the Palestinian Arab side to achieve this peace.

"October 7 was a major turning point that pushed that goal of two states living next to each other in peaceful terms further into the future.”

But, despite numerous meetings with the Palestinian Authority, he said he encountered “a lack of courage, leadership and the will to break with a violent past and build something different within the Palestinian state”.

08/08 Links Pt2: The media front in the war against civilization; What Real Decolonization Looks Like; Dems move from Joe Lieberman to Mamdani

From Ian:

Melanie Philips: The media front in the war against civilization

All journalists in Gaza work on terms dictated by Hamas. Arab reporters and photographers who supply Western media outlets with material either fear or support Hamas. Any Gazan reporter or photographer who steps out of line faces being removed or killed.

Yet the media have never once publicly acknowledged that every report or image from Gaza is produced under Hamas censorship. As Friedman noted in 2014, it’s why AP would censor certain information from Gaza because Hamas had threatened the agency’s reporters if it appeared, but failed to inform its readers about those threats and told them instead that Hamas was “becoming more moderate.”

News desks collude in these lies because they are ravenous for the story their Gaza fixers, stringers or photographers provide—the story of “Palestinian” suffering and Israeli evil.

Not one of their reports or images from Gaza can ever be assumed to be truthful, because their sources are all Hamas mouthpieces or sympathizers.

On today’s Gaza battlefield, the risks posed by this media corruption, both to Israel’s security and to the truth, are magnified many times over.

It’s not just that opening up Gaza to Western journalists would mean even more Hamas-dictated propaganda bamboozling even larger swaths of the Western public, and playing into their own innate prejudices against Israel and the Jewish people.

Given the obsessive and malignant partisanship by Western journalists in support of the “Palestinian” cause, they might well pass on to Hamas information they discover about IDF positions, intentions or army units.

The despicable behavior by the Western media is not some marginal sideshow. The media is itself an active front in this war, a crucial weapon being wielded by the Islamic world against Israel through Hamas, the Palestinian Authority, Qatar and Iran.

This axis has been waging a cognitive war against Israel by suborning and weaponizing the entire liberal internationalist establishment through the United Nations, human-rights law, international courts, NGOs, the universities and, above all, the Western media.

Whether they realize it or not, all have been harnessed to the same cause—to bring about the darkest and most deeply embedded desire of the West to knock the Jews off their moral pinnacle and cast them instead as the cancer of the world.

The Western media must therefore be regarded as an enemy force in the service of a great evil. Rather than giving it more access and privileges, it must accordingly be fought, along with the Islamic forces that have deployed it as a key front in the war they are waging against civilization itself.

What Real Decolonization Looks Like

Jewish and American Indian cooperation isn’t as novel as people may think. In an article in American Jewish History, historian Avery Weinman documents a forgotten moment of solidarity between American Jews and American Indians. From Nov. 20, 1969, to June 11, 1971, the IAT, or the Indians of All Tribes, occupied Alcatraz Island as a full-throated protest and expression of “Red Power.” They stood for “rejection of assimilation, renewed interest in tribal sociocultural and linguistic traditions, and staunch advocacy for American Indian self-determination and legal autonomy on ancestral lands.”

In 1969, Joel Brooks and Rabbi Roger E. Herst, prominent members of the American Jewish Congress at the time, christened a boat Shalom I and sailed it to Alcatraz. Arriving on the fourth day of Hannukkah, Rabbi Herst had brought his own hanukkiah and shared a feast in solidarity with the occupiers, declaring Hannukkah “a Jewish holiday of national liberation.” They broke a challah, ate Jewish food, exchanged Hanukkah gifts, and engaged in “Jewish and Indian folk dancing.”

At that heady juncture of American radical history, where liberation movements had sprung up overnight during the agitation of the ’60s, Jews and Native Americans found a lot of common ground in their retrospective experiences and histories. According to Weinman, these commonalities included “historical themes in three main categories: survival of extreme oppression (including attempted genocide), preservation of socioreligious and linguistic traditions, and strong connection to ancient ancestral lands.”

Uninterrupted and consistent ethnic, spiritual, and cultural ties to the land of Israel go incontestably to the Israelis. Their presence as a people has been documented in the Late Bronze Age. Their story in the land is subsequently chronicled from the Iron Age onward, in their own textual corpora over the centuries, in those of the nations that fought against them, and in the archaeological record. The first temple is under the mosque of the Dome of the Rock, signifying historical primacy. The nation of Israel, as self-declared by Jews, predates the Palestinian cause—it’s not a nation yet—by approximately 3,400 years.

The Palestinian people cannot claim such a pedigree. Which begs the question, is their identity Indigenous so much as it is ethnic and pan-Arab? If the colors of the Palestinian flag are any indication, Palestinian identity is not tied to the land itself so much as to Islamic and pan-Arab identities. Take the Palestinian flag, for instance. Flown since the 1920s, it directly reflects pan-Arab roots. A variant of the 1917 flag of the Arab Revolt, the flag has colors that represent the main dynasties of Arab Islamic history. The Palestinian movement, in other words, was conceived as part of a pan-Arab, not nativist, movement. It has been so since its inception.

To even raise these arguments around the pro-Palestinian mob, however, is to be shouted down, and generally with the same robotic settler colonialist rhetoric, if you can get them to speak. As Izabella Tabarovsky has pointed out time and again, framing Israel as a settler colonialist, apartheid state is vintage propaganda from the Soviet politburo; it was crafted in the ’60s, then circulated robustly across the Soviet Union and through the Middle East. So it is no wonder to find it so readily rolling off the tongues of Islamic extremists and Hamas-supporting Columbia University graduates. It has been around for a while.

It’s the turgid illogic of these narratives that has led some Native American, First Nations, and Aboriginal peoples to subject them to a smell test. As actual suppressed peoples with a history of forced settlement, land theft, and genocide, they know a true colonialist when they see one. This gradual awakening of allyship began at the fringes but is now slowly making its way into the mainstream.

Take Jason Watson, for instance, a Native American activist who is a member of the Chickasaw Nation. Married to a Jewish woman, he lives in Israel and now writes columns and regular blog posts for The Times of Israel. He is also actively involved in restorative justice programs that foster dialogue between Israelis and Palestinians.

In a June 11 blog post, he addressed the anniversary of Israel’s Six-Day War in light of the current conflict in Gaza. Watson noted the Colorado terror attack days earlier, where several elderly protesters were set on fire by an Egyptian asylum seeker yelling, “Free Palestine.” The same chant shouted by Elias Rodriguez after murdering Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim with a handgun two weeks before that. It’s a phrase that has been robotically chanted thousands of times in the streets of every U.S. city and on every major Ivy League campus since October 2023. Rodriguez’s tone and cadence were indistinguishable from those of any pro-Palestinian protester.

For Watson, the current toxic rhetoric, the escalation of hostility against Jews, and the Six-Day War are profoundly connected: “At first glance, these events may seem unrelated. They are, however, connected by a deeper thread: the misuse of history, the moral confusion around terrorism, and the erasure of real Indigenous voices in the name of activism.”

He continued, citing his own work with Native American issues and their misappropriation by pro-Palestinians: “I have watched our struggles be co-opted by others. At recent immigration protests, signs reading ‘No one is illegal on stolen land’ were waved alongside Palestinian flags and chants of ‘intifada.’ The implication is clear: that American immigration enforcement, Zionism, and colonialism are all one and the same. It is a neat narrative, though not a true one.”

Watson’s analysis is sobering, but it does not shrink from the stark realities and moral clarity that are required to truly address the issue of Israel’s survival. This starts with recognizing a shared history between Indigenous groups and Israelis. Watson ultimately envisions a world where honest dialogue, divested of harmful rhetoric and mendacious revisionist history, opens the possibility for bridge building.

“Indigenous survival is rooted in reality, not rhetoric,” he concludes. “We do not exist to be used as moral cover for other people’s ideologies. When Indigenous pain is invoked to justify terrorism against Israeli civilians, that is not solidarity. That is erasure all over again.”

Seth Mandel: Sinwar the Symbol

The death of Yahya Sinwar in October of last year was a revelatory moment in the West. After key campus groups like Students for Justice in Palestine and Columbia University Apartheid Divest mourned Sinwar’s death, celebrated his life, and built verbal monuments to his status as a martyr, there was nothing left to learn about the tentifada protests across America and beyond: The motivations behind these groups were evil.

Because Sinwar was pure evil. There was no other side to him, no complexity to his character or his contributions to life on earth.

Which is why, though it might sound like a silly thing at first, the news of the rising popularity of Yahya as a baby name in the UK is to be lamented.

Obviously “Yahya,” apparently a name for John the Baptist but not a variant itself of “John,” is far from unheard-of as an Arabic name. But it is not exactly a dime a dozen. I suppose it’s impossible to prove a correlation between the increase in babies named Yahya in 2024 and the attacks of Oct. 7 and the ensuing war. But… come on.

The larger point is less about names and more about the fact of an evil man’s beatification. The coming generation of Yahyas is only going to serve as an unavoidable reminder.

But perhaps that reminder won’t be needed anyway. Progressive activists in the West—who will no doubt soon be walking the streets of hipster Brooklyn with their labradoodle puppies named Yahya—don’t beat around the bush.

“The news regarding the great commander has left our hearts heavy and out [sic] chests breathless,” students at the City University of New York published after Sinwar’s elimination. “Today, we mourn the loss and celebrate the martyrdom of the lion of Al Quds, the beloved Commander, President, Fighter, his eminence, Yahya Sinwar…Every kuffiyeh drawn on the neck of a CUNY student is tied to the neck of the great commander who woke up the world from their deep daze.”