Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Thursday, August 21, 2025

Even a glance at a map shows that everything being said about E-1 is a lie - or pure hypocrisy

Israel has given final approval for a controversial settlement project that would effectively cut off the occupied West Bank from East Jerusalem and divide the territory in two.

Construction in the E1 area has been frozen for two decades amid fierce international opposition. Critics warn it would put an end to hopes for a viable, contiguous Palestinian state.

UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy said the E1 plans would, if implemented, "would divide a Palestinian state in two, mark a flagrant breach of international law and critically undermine the two-state solution".

Let's go through the lies and hypocrisy:

A glance at a map shows that the West Bank is still quite contiguous. The "divided in two" rhetoric is absolute nonsense. Here is Peace Now's map of E1, Jerusalem and Maale Adumim from 2011:

Look at all that contiguity on the eastern half of the map!

Others point out that this will isolate the Arabs of east Jerusalem from the West Bank. Yet those Arabs, whether citizens of Israel or recognized as residents of Jerusalem, have more mobility than any Jew - they can go anywhere in Israel and anywhere in the West Bank. E-1 doesn't affect them at all.

Maale Adumim is never going to be evacuated in any possible peace plan. Israel has never conceded the area and every plan from Taba to Annapolis to even the unofficial Geneve Initiative had Israel holding on to Maale Adumim with at least a road between it and Jerusalem (in exchange for land swaps.) E-1 makes the land connection to Jerusalem wider but it does not change the contiguity issue. The only potential problem is that Palestinians would have to drive extra time to go around the area.

Except that this isn't true either.

In March the Knesset approved a road for Palestinians that would cut through the area and make it even easier for Palestinians to go from Bethlehem to Ramallah than they do today!

Again, map from Peace Now:

Peace Now calls this road built to make Palestinian lives easier an "apartheid road" - because Israelis wouldn't use it. Which means that it is "apartheid" because it, um, discriminates against Jews.

Now, let's talk more about contiguity in a Palestinian state. Clearly, Gaza cannot be contiguous with the West Bank. So a Palestinian state will always be fragmented. The "peace camp" has proposals to minimize that problem - building an elevated road or tunnel between Gaza and the West Bank.

Meaning, the exact same solution they propose to link two non-contiguous Palestinian areas is rejected when Israel proposes it in the West Bank to make it easier to link two already contiguous areas.

Let's step back further.

Who says contiguity is even necessary for a well-functioning state? There are bizarre borders in Europe like in Baarle-Nassau that has enclaves and counter-enclaves between Belgium and the Netherlands. In the US, Alaska and Hawaii are not contiguous with the other 48 states. And I once made this map to show the absurdity of the Palestinian demands that contiguity is necessary for viability.

The viability of a state is based on good governance and good relationships with its neighbors, and has little to do with contiguity.

Yet the same people who insist on contiguity have no problem insisting that Israel separate some of its citizens from others. Indeed, for 19 years, Mount Scopus was a completely separate Israeli enclave within Jordanian-annexed Jerusalem, where Jordanian troops did not adhere to the armistice agreement to allow free passage, and no one outside Israel really cared.

To be clear, I oppose a Palestinian state. I support E-1 as a necessary component to fully connect Maale Adumim to the rest of Jerusalem and not leave it open to the types of deadly attacks that isolated Mount Scopus and the Jewish Quarter were subjected to in 1948. (For some reason, contiguity is only considered important for Palestinians, not Israelis.)

When you get past all the lies and hypocrisy and poor arguments, there is only one point that Israel's critics are really making: E-1 makes it almost impossible for any part of Jerusalem to be the capital of a Palestinian state. Given that dividing Jerusalem is essentially an impossible task, the fact that a divided Jerusalem would endanger the lives of a lot of people, and that Israel already annexed Jerusalem and will never consider redividing it, E-1 doesn't change anything on the ground except the fantasies of people who hate Israel.

The Palestinian insistence on Jerusalem is not based on any historic connection or legal claim, but on the desire to separate Jews from their holiest sites. They didn't demand Jerusalem as their capital in their 1964 or 1968 PLO charters, and the first time I am aware of they issued an official document with that demand was in their 1988 "Declaration of Independence." It is not a long-standing demand - it is an attempt to cut the Jewish soul out of Israel.

And that is what Peace Now, the UN and the European critics of the E-1 plan really want to see. E-1 doesn't affect the nebulous prospects of a Palestinian state in the least. But it hurts the chances of separating Jews from their holiest places.

Everything else is a smokescreen.

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Sama News reports:

The UAE, in cooperation with the World Health Organization, carried out a new evacuation flight carrying 155 injured and sick patients, accompanied by their families, from the Gaza Strip. The flight departed via Ramon Airport in Israel and via the Kerem Shalom crossing. This brings the total number of patients and their companions evacuated and provided with medical care by the UAE since the beginning of the crisis to 2,785.

The Palestinian newspaper mentions coordination with WHO, but of course the UAE is also cooperating with Israel on these medical evacuations.

The patients aren't magically transported from Gaza straight to the countries like Italy and France that are taking them in. Everything needs to be coordinated with Israel.

How to jive Israel helping to save thousands of lives with "genocide" is anyone's guess.

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

08/20 Links Pt2: Yes, anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism; The Betrayal of Journalism in Gaza; World's first spinal cord transplant to take place in Israel

From Ian:

Brendan O'Neill: Yes, anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism

Let’s leave to one side Ms Sultana and take a look at the broader Israelophobic animus that has swept the West like a fever since Hamas’s fascistic pogrom of 7 October 2023. There is nothing more disingenuous than when leftist hotheads or liberal scribes say, ‘It isn’t anti-Semitic to criticise Israel’, because we are not talking about criticism of Israel. We are talking blind hatred for Israel. Hysteria about Israel. The fantasy of Israel’s death. The wild and demented conviction that Israel is the most murderous state in existence, if not the most murderous state ever, and that it wields staggering power over the obsequious nations of the West. That’s not criticism – it’s a species of madness, built on the foul belief that the Jewish State is the most nefarious, most bloody and most sneakily powerful state on Earth.

Show me one other anti-war movement that called not only for an end to war but for the end of an entire nation. ‘We don’t want two states / We want ’48!’, cry the keffiyeh-adorned bigots of America’s Ivy League to signal their desire to return to 1948 before the modern State of Israel existed. Shorter version: obliterate that filthy country. Which other nation is referred to as ‘the pigs of the Earth’, as ‘uniquely murderous’, as a ‘scum state’, as ‘the new Nazi state’? Name another country whose annihilation is feverishly envisioned by that unholiest alliance of radical Islamists calling for the army of Muhammad to return to slaughter every last Jew and Israel-sick leftists screaming ‘From the river to the sea’.

And name one nation – just one – that is not only lambasted for its actions but also finds its entire right to nationhood ceaselessly called into question. ‘Fuck Zionism’, protesters cry. Zionism is ‘a cancer to the planet’, they say. Destroy the ‘Zionist entity’, mobs wail, like that’s normal; like it’s normal to pine publicly for the erasure of a nation of nine million souls. Until someone shows me footage of hundreds of thousands of fuming Westerners hitting the streets to say ‘Fuck Turkish statehood’ or ‘Destroy the Pakistani entity’, I will entertain not one single protestation that anti-Zionism is just ‘criticism of Israel’. No, if you have sworn yourself solely to the upending and elimination of the project of Jewish nationhood, then you can’t be too surprised if someone calls you a Jew hater.

Criticism? Please. We’ve now reached a point where I struggle to envision what ‘criticism of Israel’ would even look like. We never see it. We only see a savage and violence-tinged loathing for Israel that long ago left the plane of geopolitical critique and now exists entirely in the realm of bigotry. Everything they once said about the Jews – they love to let blood, they love to kill children, they’re all-powerful, they’re a cancer on humanity – they now say about the Jewish nation. Some people might accept that this is entirely coincidental – I am not one of those people.

The Betrayal of Journalism in Gaza

While it might seem obvious that uniformed military personnel would not be considered journalists, CPJ seems all too willing to grant ununiformed terrorist operatives who perform equivalent military functions for their respective militant groups that very title, artificially inflating the number of journalists killed and undermining the contributions of actual media professionals who make the ultimate sacrifice in the line of duty.

Finally, there have been several individuals who operated as journalists for reputable news organizations while moonlighting as full-fledged combat operatives for terrorist groups. Unlike the previous group, these were no mere propagandists, but rather key members of rocket launching squads, snipers, and commanders of combat battalions.

Anas Al-Sharif, whose death last week triggered the current wave of international opprobrium, was such an individual. While both CNN and the BBC have confirmed that he previously served as a Hamas propaganda operative, he went on to join Al Jazeera, becoming a recognizable face to millions in the Arab world as he broadcast from Gaza throughout the current war.

In October 2024, the IDF released a ream of personnel files, salary records, and other documents captured in Gaza proving that six Al Jazeera employees were active Hamas and Islamic Jihad terror operatives. Al-Sharif was identified as the commander of a Hamas rocket launching squad and a member of the group’s Nukhba Force — the elite unit that spearheaded the October 7 attack — and was shown to be on Hamas’s payroll. Al Jazeera angrily rejected the charges, claiming that they were being used as a pretext to target its journalists, and continued employing Al-Sharif and the others.

After Al-Sharif and his colleagues were killed in an Israeli airstrike, CPJ CEO Jodie Ginsberg declared the killings to have been unlawful. “International law is very clear on this point that the only individuals who are legitimate targets during a war are active combatants,” she told the BBC. “Having worked as a media advisor for Hamas, or indeed for Hamas currently, does not make you an active combatant,” she added. Her comments were later echoed by Foreign Press Association President Ian Williams, who told CNN’s Bianna Golodryga that he “[doesn’t] care if Al-Sharif was in Hamas or not,” saying that “Hamas is a political organization” and “we don’t kill journalists for being Republicans or Democrats or, in Britain, Labour Party.”

But that comparison is plainly ridiculous and it is simply untrue that only “active combatants” can be targeted in wartime. Under international humanitarian law, an individual who performs a continuous combat function (CCF) is viewed as having lost his or her civilian status and is indeed considered a legitimate military target. In point of fact, that standard has been applied in numerous conflicts — from the Kosovo War to the Iraq War to the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine — to justify the targeting of propaganda officials and functionaries whose activities contributed directly to war efforts. Even a “media advisor” for Hamas — or a propaganda operative for one of its media outlets, like the individuals discussed above — could indeed be targeted if he or she had a CCF, meaning he or she was fully integrated into the terrorist group and was continuously engaged in hostilities.

Yet according to the evidence produced by Israel, Al-Sharif was no mere “media advisor” — he was an actual combatant on behalf of a recognized terrorist group, having commanded a rocket squad and served as a member of Hamas’s commando force. There is no question, then, that he was a legitimate military target.

Which begs the question: Why are media organizations and journalists’ associations defending terrorists?

Radical U: Professors as architects of the campus Palestinian resistance

In the span of a few years, American academics have escalated their support for the Palestinian “resistance” from rhetorical to material.

For decades, academics have fostered a friendly territory for radical groups and fertile ground for anti-Israel propagandists, though few actually endorsed terrorism. It’s safer to massage the language, twist a metaphor or two, and figure out a way to excuse violence without actually endorsing it—or at least use language, often abstruse or cryptic language, to provide a degree of deniability.

But all that has changed.

Oct. 7 triggered something in many academics, who suddenly no longer felt constrained. Rather than stopping just short of applauding terrorism against Israel, they adopted Hamas’s slogans and defended its attacks. Colleges and universities today have effectively taken the place of the Palestinian terrorist organizations as the primary disseminators of anti-Israel propaganda to Americans. Middle Eastern studies departments and programs in particular have transformed academia into the vanguard of anti-Zionism in a sick perversion of philosopher John Stuart Mill’s vision for higher education—turning students into “capable and cultivated human beings.”

Along the path to academia’s shocking embrace of Hamas, some moments stand out. The 2006 war with Hezbollah, coupled with military operations against Hamas in Gaza in 2008-09 and 2014, brought new adherents to the BDS movement. However, it was the 2021 Hamas war that inspired many academics to graduate from observers to self-described participants in the Palestinian cause.

Coming a year after the Black Lives Matter-George Floyd riots in the summer of 2020, with most college classes still being taught via Zoom, the brief conflict that lasted 11 days in May 2021 riled a pandemic-restless academia. And so, members spontaneously exploded with a flurry of nearly identical statements and petitions defending Hamas and blaming Israel for the war.

Of the more than 300 “solidarity statements,” one of them, titled Palestine & Praxis: Open Letter and Call to Action, by “Scholars for Palestinian Freedom,” became the manifesto of a new movement. It provided a language to mimic and a template to follow. The word praxis (Greek for “practice,” as opposed to theory) became the jargon term du jour identifying this new movement, and every anti-Israel academic with an axe to grind found a fashionable praxis angle.

Some took to “archiving praxis in Palestine,” while others explained the “praxis of Palestinian democracy.” The Palestinian Feminist Collective developed a “Feminist Praxis for Academic Freedom in the Context of Genocide in Gaza.”

In the fall 2022 publication of the Association for Jewish Studies, Atalia Omer, a professor of religion, conflict and peace studies at the University of Notre Dame, called for “a praxis of restorative justice” that would “interrogate historically the Zionization of Jewishness.”

In 2023, an organization called Radical in Progress, whose “goal is to equip aspiring activists with the vocabulary, knowledge and strategies they need to radically reimagine the future,” published a “Praxis study guide” to Rashid Khalidi’s 2020 book The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine.

In the spring 2024 encampment semester, Students for Justice in Palestine sponsored an anthropology conference at Princeton University titled “Palestine as Praxis, Still.”

Whatever else the term implied, it meant action. The scholars boldly declared in their calls to action that “the critical theory we generate in our literature and in our classrooms must be backed in deed.”

08/20 Links Pt1: TRIGGERnometry: Asking Benjamin Netanyahu The Tough Questions; Trump admin imposes sanctions on four ICC officials; The Moral Collapse of Megyn Kelly

From Ian:

Israel’s High Court of injustice and the Red Cross

Israel’s High Court of Justice has once again revealed its misplaced priorities. And that’s putting it delicately.

In a hearing on Monday about National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir’s policy to bar Red Cross visits to Nukhba terrorists in Israeli prisons until the organization gains access to the hostages in Gaza, the judges made their outrage clear. But their fury was not aimed at Hamas or the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), which has utterly abandoned its humanitarian mission. Instead, it was directed at their own government and prison authorities.

The ex parte session was spurred by a petition on behalf of the terrorists. It was submitted by the usual left-wing “suspects”: the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, Physicians for Human Rights, HaMoked (the Center for the Defense of the Individual) and Gisha.

These NGOs pulled a typical fast one. They first acknowledged that “Hamas doesn’t provide information about those it holds in captivity, and refuses to allow Red Cross visits to the hostages … in Gaza [among whom] are those who were murdered in Hamas captivity.”

They then went on to get to the crux of their foul maneuver to equate victim and perpetrator, by stating that “Israel’s obligations toward those it holds do not change because of Hamas’s war crimes and crimes against humanity.”

As if Israel’s “holding” of mass murderers is comparable to Hamas’s “holding” of innocent captives.

Not surprisingly, Justice Yitzhak Amit, the self-anointed president of the Supreme Court, agrees with this twisted logic. But the reasoning that he proffered during the hearing went beyond woke politics to focus on his personal reputation and that of his hallowed perch in the international arena.

“Right now, what’s … being publicized abroad [is] that there is starvation, that dozens of prisoners are dying, that it’s basically the Israeli Guantánamo,” he bellowed, banging on his table. “And you’re putting us, the court, at the forefront, on the front line.”

His colleague, Justice Daphne Barak-Erez, fretted about families of terrorists not knowing what’s become of their loved ones. You know, being a sensitive woman and all.

She went as far as to bemoan that each incarcerated individual has been reduced to nothing more than an anonymous title of “prisoner X.”

Though like the petitioners, she conceded that the Oct. 7 terrorists indeed “committed heinous acts,” she expressed horror that their families have no clue where they are. “Even in the harshest times, there was never such a situation,” she asserted. “A writ of habeas corpus requires that information be provided, and there was always compliance. Suddenly, zero information is being conveyed.”

Boo-hoo for the parents who raised their kids to boast about killing Jews with their bare hands.

Trump admin revokes security clearance for 37 intelligence professionals

Tulsi Gabbard, U.S. director of national intelligence, announced the revocation of security clearances on Tuesday of 37 current and former intelligence officials, “who have abused the public trust by politicizing and manipulating intelligence, leaking classified intelligence without authorization and/or committing intentional egregious violations of tradecraft standards.”

“Being entrusted with a security clearance is a privilege, not a right,” Gabbard wrote. Members of the intelligence community who “put their own interests ahead of the interests of the American people have broken the sacred trust they promised to uphold.”

The list includes several individuals with ties to Israel affairs, including Maher Bitar, a former White House coordinator for intelligence and defense policy at the U.S. National Security Council under the Biden administration.

Bitar was a leader of Students for Justice in Palestine and worked for UNRWA, the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, which Israel has said is deeply infiltrated by Hamas.

Bitar is currently chief counsel and national security adviser to Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), a staunch opponent of U.S. President Donald Trump.

Andrew Miller, former deputy assistant secretary of state for Israeli-Palestinian affairs for the U.S. State Department, also had his security clearance stripped. He previously served as a senior policy advisor to Linda Thomas-Greenfield, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations under the Biden administration, covering the Middle East and North Africa, counterterrorism, political-military affairs and intelligence. He was also director for Egypt and Israel military issues on the National Security Council during the Obama administration.

Since his departure from the State Department, Miller has become a vocal critic of U.S.-Israel policy. He’s currently a senior fellow in the National Security and International Policy department at the Center for American Progress.

Germany charges Russian national with plan to attack Israel embassy in Berlin

German prosecutors have charged a Russian national they suspect of planning an attack on the Israeli embassy in Berlin and of trying to join the Islamic State terrorist organization, they said on Wednesday.

Prosecutors believe the accused, identified only as Akhmad E. in line with German privacy rules, obtained instructions from the Internet on how to make explosives, but the plan failed as he could not get the components he needed.

“From the beginning of February, he planned to carry out an attack in Germany, for example on the Israeli embassy in Berlin,” said federal prosecutors in a statement.

He has been detained since his arrest at Berlin airport in February. Prosecutors suspect he was on the way to Pakistan for military training with ISIS and that he funded the trip by selling expensive smartphones that he obtained by signing up for mobile phone plans.

He is also accused of translating propaganda into Russian and Chechen for IS, said the statement.

Prosecutors charged him on August 7 with preparing and incitement to commit a serious act of violence endangering the state and, as a minor, of trying to join a terrorist group abroad.

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

When more than 80 self-described Modern Orthodox rabbis signed a public letter accusing Israel of failing to prevent starvation in Gaza, the result was not “moral clarity,” as the document’s title claimed. Instead, it provided a dangerous boost to Hamas propaganda at a time of unprecedented hostility toward the Jewish state.

The statement, “A Call for Moral Clarity, Responsibility, and a Jewish Orthodox Response in the Face of the Gaza Humanitarian Crisis,” insists that while Hamas is guilty of heinous crimes, Israel bears responsibility for preventing hunger in Gaza. Cloaked in the language of compassion, the letter distorts reality, undermines Israel, and arms its enemies with new talking points.

Jewish law holds leaders to the highest standards of truth in speech. Yet this letter repeats claims that collapse under scrutiny. Though it does not have to, since May, Israel has facilitated the entry of nearly 183,000 tons of humanitarian aid into Gaza. The United Nations, by contrast, reports just 67,000 tons—a discrepancy of more than 115,000 tons. The explanation is simple: Hamas steals, hoards, and diverts supplies, while the UN amplifies those manipulated figures. In fact, since the start of the war, Israel has facilitated the entry into Gaza of almost 2 million tons of aid.

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Instead of consulting Israel’s Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), which publishes daily data on aid deliveries, the signatories embraced Hamas-tainted statistics and then presented them as an Orthodox moral imperative. This feels more like moral confusion and cluelessness than moral clarity.

Aid entry data is published regularly on a dedicated website.

It provides a daily breakdown of the number of trucks entering Gaza, categorized by crossing point and type of goods.

The data presented on the site reflects the full and accurate picture of the aid that Israel… pic.twitter.com/UwGattKdbK
— COGAT (@cogatonline) August 19, 2025

The harm goes far beyond numbers. Anti-Israel media outlets in Turkey and the Arab world immediately broadcast the rabbis’ statement as proof that even Orthodox leaders accuse Israel of starving Gaza. The familiar weapon of “even Jews say” has now been upgraded: even Orthodox rabbis say.

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Such messaging hands Hamas and its allies exactly what they need—Jewish voices validating their narrative—while antisemitism continues to surge globally.

Those who hold the title of rabbi carry an obligation to weigh the impact of their words. Their statements reverberate far beyond their intended audience, particularly in times of war and rising antisemitism. To sign one’s name to a letter that repeats propaganda is not an act of conscience but a failure of responsibility.

Rabbis are expected to serve as witnesses for the Jewish people, not to echo the accusations of those who seek the destruction of the Jewish state. At a minimum, Jewish leaders must confirm the facts before attaching their authority to public pronouncements.

The rabbis who signed this letter may not intend to harm Israel. But intentions do not negate consequences. By repeating distorted figures and equating Israel with Hamas, they have lent credibility to falsehoods that endanger Jews everywhere.

This is not moral clarity, nor is it an Orthodox response. It is, at best, naïve—and at worst, a dangerous gift to Israel’s enemies.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

Antisemitic vandalism in France proves Bibi right, Macron wrong

From Times of Israel:

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu upbraided French President Emmanuel Macron on Tuesday, charging that the latter’s move to recognize a Palestinian state fuels antisemitism, drawing a combative response from Paris.

The premier went on to call on Macron to confront antisemitism in France, saying he must “replace weakness with action, appeasement with resolve, and to do so by a clear date: the Jewish New Year, September 23,” known as Rosh Hashanah.

The Elysee Palace slammed the accusation as “abject” and “erroneous.”

France “protects and will always protect its Jewish citizens,” the Elysee said, adding that Netanyahu’s letter “will not go unanswered.”

Oh, they answered the letter all right.

Haredi families from Britain who came to vacation in the village of Chatel, which is located in the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region of France and is located in the Shabla region, on the French-Swiss border, discovered that an unknown person had sprayed anti-Semitic graffiti on at least 4 of their vehicles, reading "Free Palestine."

Or as the mayor said:

"It is not uncommon to see people of the Jewish faith spending their holidays here. They are very recognizable by their clothing, and the perpetrators of these acts could not have made a mistake. I hope that the ongoing investigation will reassure them, as they are used to spending their holidays in our resorts in complete peace ."

Jews - not Israelis, not Zionists, but identifiably religious Jews - were targeted with "Free Palestine" graffiti.

I have yet to find a single "pro-Palestinian" activist quoted in news articles distancing themselves from the vandalism.

Because everyone knows the truth: "Anti-Zionism" is nothing but a rebranding of antisemitism.

And anyone who thinks that rewarding the people that cheered October 7 will bring peace, and not embolden Jew-hatred, is a complete idiot.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

Omer Bartov, genocide scholarship, and the betrayal of truth

Remember this headline from the New York Times last month?

It was an op-ed by Omer Bartov - the second since the Gaza war started - declaring that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.

But here's what Bartov said at a lecture a few months earlier:

“Genocide is a legal term… I use that term in debates now because I know, I see the immense urge to deny… But for the people in Gaza, do you think it really matters if you call it genocide or war crimes? We need to use that terminology because we are talking to another public… For the people in Gaza… who cares what you call it.”

In other words: he adjusts his use of the word “genocide” based on the rhetorical impact he wants. forget legal precision or academic consistency. He wants impact ..

That’s a serious red flag - especially from someone who titled his article “I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It.”

Bartov has now published two New York Times op-eds arguing that Israel is committing or is on the verge of committing genocide. He uses the same selective quotes from Israeli officials - ripped from context - that we've seen before and ignores the extensive counter-evidence. The second article even got him a featured interview in the same newspaper about the “fallout.” In other words: it made a splash.

And that’s the point.

The New York Times op-ed page is the holy grail for pundits. Bartov didn’t land there twice because he made a nuanced legal argument. He got there because he’s an Israeli Jew willing to say Israel is guilty of the worst crime imaginable, only decades after the Holocaust. That breaks the narrative, flips expectations, and generates buzz.

Had he held the mainstream position shared by most genocide scholars, that Israel's actions don’t meet the legal threshold, he wouldn’t be published in the Times at all. In fact, the only op-ed the NYT published saying that the accusations of genocide were wrong came from their regular columnist Bret Stephens. No Holocaust scholar was approached or approved to write an opposing opinion. (A rare counterexample is this op-ed in the Washington Post by scholars Norman J.W. Goda and Jeffrey Herf.)

This is the media-intellectual feedback loop: and it’s not about truth.

Media outlets chase clicks. Pundits chase prestige. When those goals align, the system rewards hot takes, outrage, and moral drama, especially when it comes from someone “unexpected.” The more a claim subverts group identity or shocks the audience, the better it performs.

The result? Truth becomes a liability.

Nuance doesn’t go viral. Careful legal arguments don’t get op-ed space at the NYT. What rises instead are loud, emotionally loaded, and often distorted takes, especially when they break ideological or tribal norms.

This isn’t an isolated case. It’s a media-wide problem.

Decades ago, journalism was built on trust, reputation, and accuracy. Now it runs on per-article performance metrics. That means buzz, not balance. Reporters and editors are rewarded for virality, not verification. And scholars willing to bend or amplify their message to fit the emotional needs of the moment find themselves with platforms - no matter the cost to their credibility.

Bartov himself once recognized this dynamic. In a 2000 review of Norman Finkelstein’s The Holocaust Industry, he wrote:

“Finkelstein views himself as innocent of any desire to exploit 'The Holocaust' for his own ends… The fact that his sensational 'revelations' and outrageous accusations draw a great deal of public and media attention is no fault of his own... From his Mount Sinai, everything is clear and obvious. It's just that his voice is too faint to be heard in the valley.”

Bartov isn’t as dishonest as Finkelstein - but the echo is unmistakable. He once critiqued the exact performative dynamic he now appears to be enacting. That’s not just ironic. It’s a warning sign of how the pursuit of visibility can erode the very integrity that once anchored public scholarship.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

The UN only counts about 25% of the actual food coming into Gaza

The IDF's COGAT unit wrote in its newsletter:

Since May, according to UN data, only 3,553 trucks entered the Gaza Strip. In reality, Israel facilitated the entry of nearly 9,200 trucks. This represents a gap of almost 6,000 trucks - 2.5 times the volume of aid that the UN claims actually entered. The fact that the UN presents only part of the aid actually transferred misleads the international community and creates a false picture of the situation, directly influencing global media coverage and shaping the positions of international decision-makers regarding the humanitarian situation in Gaza.

The UN publishes its figures through a public dashboard that purports to present a full picture of all humanitarian aid, but in practice it includes only the trucks facilitated by UN agencies and a small number of aid organizations working with them. The dashboard fails to include aid delivered by other actors in the humanitarian system, including various states, additional international organizations, the private sector, airdrops, and the distribution centers of the American company.

The truth is even worse than COGAT says.

Since August 1, according to the UN, 14,778 tons of food entered Gaza. (Total aid was 21,500 tons, but nearly all of the rest were vehicles.)

In that same timeframe, COGAT counts 61,100 tons of food aid.

That means that the UN is only counting 24% of the actual food aid entering Gaza for this month.

For July, the UN counted 19,704 tons. COGAT counted 53,671 tons - 2.4 times the UN figures.

Keep in mind that this is aid entering Gaza, not aid delivered. So far in August the UN only counts 1,609 tons that was not intercepted on its way to the people - only 11% of the aid that entered Gaza counted by the UN. COGAT does not count the food that makes it to the people, but we can assume the vast majority of the difference in aid entering Gaza is through the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, from which very little food if any is intercepted (some might be stolen by Hamas as people leave the distribution sites.)

We can conservatively estimate that 40,000 tons of the GHF food made it to the people in August so far, which means that Israel via GHF is providing 25 times the amount of food to hungry Gazans that the UN and its partners are directly providing. (Of course, most of the food stolen en route does end up in the mouths of Gazans - after they pay Hamas for the privilege of eating food meant as free aid.)

The problem is not, and never has been the amount of aid into Gaza. The problem has always been distribution and security of the transport. The UN blames Israel for that - but when Israel comes up with a better system, however flawed it might or might not be (I do not believe for a minute the Hamas figures of over a thousand killed by the IDF at GHF sites), the UN is more interested in dismantling the system that works in favor of the system that it uses where the vast majority of the food goes to Hamas and other armed gangs.

The websites are public. Anyone can check my figures. Including the media.

But the media is more interested in promoting Hamas lies, UN misinformation and anti-Israel propaganda than the truth. And this propaganda directly feeds antisemitism which endangers Jews worldwide - but who cares about them?

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

The BESA Center report from July gives an excellent summary that describes why the IDF is not only legally allowed but tactically and morally obligated to destroy so many buildings in Gaza cities:

The fighting amounts to a deadly game of hide-and-seek. In order to clear the areas and reduce the ability of the terrorists to hide, IDF tactics now include much more vigorous destruction of buildings than previously.

The terrorists, Hamas and others, are using the buildings as fighting posts. They shoot from a building, move to another, shoot from that one, then move again, while placing remote-controlled bombs and booby-traps inside any building they believe the IDF will enter. ...Many buildings contain weapons caches, allowing individuals to move between them unarmed, enter a building, pick up weapons, use them, then return them before moving on to another location. Many buildings also feature tunnel shafts built into their lowest floors, which allow the terrorists to move between them without exposing themselves on street level and to replenish stocks of weapons, ammunition and explosives in these caches. Even when a building has been entered and cleared by the IDF, terrorists often return after the Israelis have exited to plant bombs or hide inside and shoot out at them. A significant proportion of IDF casualties occur during building clearing operations.

Buildings damaged by the fighting are also hazardous. In at least two instances, damaged but seemingly stable buildings have collapsed on IDF units resting inside them, leading to the death and injury of soldiers. The collapses occurred long after the buildings had been damaged due to the gradual failure of the foundations.

Destruction of tunnels often also damages the buildings above or adjacent to them, especially the foundations, making them unstable even if they seem undamaged above ground. Given the extent of the tunnels in Gaza, huge hazardous zones have been created above them. The underground system consists of 500-700 kilometers of tunnels that crisscross the ground underneath residential areas. For comparison, the London Underground is about 400 kilometers of tunnels and the underground portions of the New York City subway are about 700 kilometers. The urban areas of Gaza, under which Hamas deliberately concentrated its tunnel system, cover less than half the Strip’s territory and are approximately a tenth the size of urban London and an eighth the size of New York City.

Because so many of the buildings are unstable, the safest tactical choice for the IDF is to completely demolish most of them as it advances through the urban areas. It is also safer for returning civilians that these structures be entirely demolished, as damaged buildings pose a serious risk of collapse (particularly when the winter rains begin). Because this takes a lot of time and effort and is not always feasible under fire, offensive operations are very slow.

As to legality, all IDF activity is vetted by the IDF’s legal advisors. There is nothing inherently unlawful here. It is legal to target any civilian site used for combat operations; there is no obligation to check every room of a building for signs of military use, especially once civilians have been evacuated.

As with everything else in this war, things that the IDF is blamed for as being immoral are a necessary moral, lifesaving response to Hamas' actions that endanger lives and use Gaza civilians as their main line of defense.

(h/t Irene)

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

08/19 Links Pt2: Soviet twins: Anti-Israelism and anti-Judaism; Subliminal Blood Libels: The Hamas Campaign to Destroy Christian Zionism; ‘The Green Prince’ and the truth about Hamas

From Ian:

Soviet twins: Anti-Israelism and anti-Judaism

Modern anti-Judaism and anti-Israelism are twins. The womb from which they awakened to life was Soviet, which soon denied Jewish and Israeli individuals and groups even the smallest merit and strength of their reasons. Even today, Soviet-inspired political societies do not value an Israeli winner or a traditional Jew with a synagogue, culture, science, business and so forth. They are silenced; when they cannot be, lies are fabricated about everything they do. The focus falls on an alleged standard of living. The flag of privilege and injustice toward others is held aloft. Which others? Everyone.

Unquestionably, each nation-state can choose its elites and philosophies through its internal struggles, as a rule made up of betrayals and not of love for the people. But with such a reddish light, Israel makes no sense and nor do the Jews. There is no other example in history of a people returning home after two millennia, much less when this had long been predicted by their prophets. In that sand, where a few decades ago poor people rode on camels, there is now a scientific power that drinks from the sea, thrives in agriculture and exports food, medicine, security and technology.

Surrounded by enemies since its foundation, trampled by noisy majorities on the stages of supranational political organizations, the permanent target of delegitimization, dehumanization and application of double standards, condemned by celebrities and boycotted in all forms, this small nation without natural resources continues on its way without fearing anything or anyone. Many empires have disappeared before their eyes; Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Romans and all those that history has recorded up to the Nazis and the Soviets.

This is something that does not make sense, according to materialistic philosophies. Perhaps there is a people with an existence that makes sense. Influence, settlements and bellicism cannot explain everything. Israel and the individual and collective Jew should have disappeared if only matter counted. But no. The Jew exists, lives, suffers, dies and rises, sustained in tradition and bringing their dead back to life—in memory, in identity, in strength, in prosperity and courage.

The same is true of Israeli Jews. If the current logic prevailed, the nation would not be as strong as it is—nor would it be able to blow up enemy missiles in midair, monitor in real time the security of the Jewish Diaspora, create the most unbelievable devices or seek out Nazis thousands of miles away to bring them to justice. It does all this, and is still evaluating producing legislation with extraterritorial application to combat global antisemitism, which is practiced freely, and often in the most blatant way by the elites themselves.

The main cause of the Jewish and Israeli question was always spiritual. The very symbolism of the State of Israel reveals the shield of David’s kingship and the candelabra that once stood in the Holy Temple of Jerusalem. The materialist may think well and write better, but his bases are all wrong. He dreams of the boulders in space and attributes no logic or meaning to them. The materialist denies the rationality that surrounds the universe, its meaning and its destiny. Everything is reduced to weak assumptions about energy, history, ego, power and justice. This is the creeping intelligentsia in which we live. This is the moral compass that tries to define reality in its own way. This is the amorphous mass that meditates on national interest in multiple countries. At no time does divinity cease to be a myth, and Jewish success escapes indifference.

The Kabbalistic sap of the Hebrew alphabet leaves bold marks in all civilizations. Emet, the Hebrew word for “truth,” stands upright, since it is written with two-legged Hebrew letters, and it is enough to exist. Sheker, the Hebrew word for “lie,” loses its balance because it is composed of letters with only one leg and requires constant balance and maintenance, obsessive insistence, theatricality, unfolding in the emotion of hatred; and matará, the word “intention,” reveals how and to whom the last fruit will be served.

Other societies come and go, but the Jews remain with Israel as their homeland.

Boyne’s The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas combines Keneally’s and Styron’s elisions – non-Jewish rescuer, non-Jewish victim – to invent a non-Jewish rescuer and victim in the form of one child: Bruno, the son of the commandant of Auschwitz. It is a novel of stunning omission.

Boyne writes about two nine-year-old boys, German Bruno and Jewish Shmuel. At Auschwitz, Bruno meets Shmuel, the most un-Jewish Jewish child in fiction, and a prisoner. They realise they have the same birthday: “We’re like twins,” says Bruno. Shmuel agrees: “A little bit.” Boyne’s conceit is this: their fates might have been reversed. The German child could have been the victim; perhaps the Jew could have been the perpetrator. (When I am cynical, I wonder if this is a cautionary tale about being friends with a Jew. When I am yet more cynical, I wonder if Shmuel planned the whole thing.) In any case, they are the same boy. Bruno climbs under the fence to help Shmuel find his (presumably dead) father, puts on a pair of striped pyjamas, and is gassed to death with Shmuel.

The reader accepts Shmuel’s fate: he is already dead. (Another Jewish inmate mirrors this: when Bruno asks how long he has lived in Auschwitz, he says, “I think I’ve always been here.” He is one of Spielberg’s fated dead.) But we cannot accept Bruno’s death, because Boyne has used his skill to make us love him. You feel grief for him, because his fate is awry: he is not meant to be dead.

Shmuel is alive to nothing. He feels no anger, just placidity, and the reader feels no sadness, or guilt. Speech itself has been removed from Shmuel: his description of living in Auschwitz is: “It’s not very nice.” When Bruno causes him to be beaten, he says, “It’s alright, I don’t feel it anymore, I don’t feel anything anymore.” Bruno thinks the name Shmuel “sounds like the wind blowing”. I gagged at this: dust thou art, and unto dust thou shalt return.

The novel – and the story of popular Shoah culture - can be told in one scene. “I came home one day,” Shmuel says, “and Mama said we couldn’t live in our house anymore.” “That happened to me too!” shouts Bruno.

The more contemporary novels treat Auschwitz as a painted curtain, or Oz. Little Dorothy could always go home, she just didn’t know it. They are mindless.

John Donoghue’s The Death’s Head Chess Club (2015) has a Jewish chess player in Auschwitz play for his life. At the end, he says Kaddish for the SS because – well, they suffered too. Sophie’s Choice, the film The Zone of Interest (2023), and The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas all discuss the anguish of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss. It wasn’t easy being in Auschwitz in 1942 – for anyone! Heather Morris’s The Tattooist of Auschwitz (2018) should have been a musical comedy. “I’m just a number,” the tattooist’s lover tells him. “You should know that. You gave it to me.” It is also, entirely accidentally, funny. At one point someone says: “Where is everybody?” Well, quite. Morris wonders why a Sonderkommando elects to live: “He too has chosen to stay alive for as long as he can, by performing an act of defilement on people of his own faith.” As in – one less life?

Ellie Midwood’s The Girl in the Striped Dress (2021) is “mostly based on a true story”: how the Slovakian Jew Helena Citrónová was beloved by the Waffen-SS soldier, Franz Wunsch, who protected her. In the novel the leading villain is a Jewish Sonderkommando, and Midwood has Helena marry Franz. In reality, Helena refused to speak to him after the war, moved to Israel, and married an IDF soldier.

This is only a small part of it, of course: it is an overwhelming glut, and it mirrors Primo Levi’s dream in Auschwitz, “varied in its detail but uniform in its substance: they [survivors] had returned home and with passion and relief were describing their past sufferings, addressing themselves to a loved person, and were not believed, indeed were not even listened to”.

The dreams were true. The glut exists because it is easy: in the end I think people are just too afraid to hear the truth. But you cannot love Jews if you refuse to understand what happened to them, and why; if you write myths around them and call it art. Still, it is what happened. We are everywhere and nowhere; we are fictional and real.

This is an extract from Shameless: Exploiting the Holocaust, Tanya Gold’s essay for the Jewish Quarterly, out August 22.

Subliminal Blood Libels: The Hamas Campaign to Destroy Christian Zionism

Since Israel’s latest war began, Hamas and the global forces of anti-Semitism have engaged in a three-pronged propaganda campaign to cripple the Jews and Israel: (1) fool gullible leftists into supporting the victims of “genocide”; (2) rally Muslims throughout the West to terrorize Jews while pressuring supine governments; and (3) encourage Christians to withdraw their support for Zionism.

While many secularists have long ago discarded any sympathy for Jews or Israel—partly thanks to disinformation from the KGB in the last century and from the legacy media today—Hamas’s propagandists and their allies at The New York Times are well aware that the last major bastion of Western philo-Semitism is Christian Zionism. Therefore, they have embarked on a campaign to convince Christians that the Jews are the aggressors—even the persecutors of Christians themselves—in the cause of breaking the Christian-Jewish alliance.

In order to accomplish this rupture, Hamas propagandists and their mainstream media messengers have weaponized historical Christian prejudices, iconographic motifs, and sensitivities, some nearly 2,000-years-old. With many Western Christians on high alert against leftist assaults on their faith, especially since 2020, there has never been a more opportune time for Hamas-affiliated anti-Semites to plant seeds of doubt about Christian sympathy for Jews. And the enemies of Jews and Israel have had decades of practice, and success, on which to bank.

Pallywood
Nearly 25 years ago, arguably the most famous child on the planet was Muhammad al-Durah, a 12-year-old Palestinian boy reportedly shot to death by a hail of Israeli bullets in a cross-street gun battle on September 30, 2000. The riveting video, narrated by Charles Enderlin of France2, depicted a firefight near Netzarim Junction in Gaza, culminating in the child’s death, huddled behind his father Jamal. “Here Jamal and his son Muhammad are targets of gunfire from the Israeli position,” narrated Enderlin. “Muhammad is dead, and his father grievously wounded.”

The result was a rabid, international wildfire of anti-Semitism, producing some of the first riots in which “Death to the Jews!” could be heard shouted in the streets of post-war Europe—all with Muhammad al-Durah as their sacrilegious saint. Only 12 days after the incident, two Israeli reservists who had accidentally wandered into Ramallah were brutally lynched and ripped into pieces to chants of “Revenge for the blood of Muhammad al-Durah!” Usamah bin Laden even produced a recruiting video calling Muslims worldwide to jihad on behalf of the boy who “died at the hands of the Jews.” The infamous (staged) image of Muhammad al-Durah. (Talal Abu Rahma / France2 via Al Jazeera)

Only later was it revealed that the video of Muhammad and his father, indeed much of the footage shot that day, was fake. Meticulous analysis of the raw tapes showed instance after instance of men spontaneously falling down “wounded” and then being hurled into waiting ambulances; likely uninjured youths dripping in fake blood; nonchalant bystanders watching the action—even a “dead” man lying in the gutter talking on his cellphone—just yards from where Muhammad was “killed.”

Historian Richard Landes, then a professor of medieval history at Boston University, coined the term “Pallywood” as a result of his groundbreaking investigations. His 2005 short film Muhammad al-Durah: Birth of an Icon makes clear what was again confirmed years later in a French court: that the tape not included in the France2 broadcast was indeed staged and showed a living child pretending to be dead. Landes later called the contrived image “the first blood(less) libel of the 21st century.”

“Israel is losing me”
The al-Durah hoax was probably the most successful single piece of international war-time disinformation in history; but, outside the Muslim world and its immigrant enclaves abroad, especially in Europe, it mostly evoked anti-Jewish hatred from Western socialists keen on erasing generational shame over the Holocaust by replacing the Nazis with the Jews. It did not engender comparable Christian fury, and American Christian Zionism largely held steady throughout the first decade of the new century.

This war, however—the longest in Israel’s history, and with Arab Christian communities constantly in danger from Hamas using them as human shields during Israeli incursions—has proven different. On multiple occasions, Hamas operating in areas of Gaza containing churches has resulted in structural damage and the accidental deaths of Christian bystanders, beckoning medieval blood libel archetypes back into the open.

08/19 Links Pt1: All or nothing: Why Israel should stand firm, avoid phased hostage deals; UN massively undercounts Gaza aid trucks; Netanyahu: Aussie PM is ‘weak,’ has ‘abandoned’ Australian Jews

From Ian:

Jake Wallis Simons: How the West is amplifying Hamas propaganda

As we have seen far too often, such propaganda now holds great influence even within the Jewish community itself, certain segments of which are now competing with the mainstream in their Israelophobia.

It is also exerting a draw on Israeli society, not just on the Left but also in parts of the defence apparatus.

The irony of it all is that the one thing that would save us all from falling victim to such propaganda is proper journalism based on facts, scepticism and resolve.

Our tendency to side with our enemies is all very well when it is limited to denigrating our history or paying reparations, but it is an entirely different matter when it comes to supporting those who will behead us. Or it should be.

In an appearance on Saudi television last week, I was faced with another iteration of this attitude. “I think we can both say it is propaganda from both sides,” the presenter said, “from Hamas and Israel.”

I was left to explain the moral bankruptcy of drawing an equivalence between the jihadis of Hamas and the Middle East’s only democracy.

Afterwards, it really hit home. Such has been the success of the propaganda that huge numbers of people just don’t see why supporting Israel in its war against Islamist terror is the only ethical position to hold.

It is a sobering reminder of the malleability of the human mind. And it doesn’t make Jews feel particularly safe.

Yisrael Medad: Jewish support for Hamas: A new sacrificial idolatry

As Genesis records the incident in its Chapter 22, our forefather Abraham was tested. A test to the extreme. He was instructed to bind his only son, Isaac, and to prepare to sacrifice him when a heavenly voice told him, “Do not stretch out your hand against the boy, or do anything to him. For now, I know that you fear God.”

Abraham proved his allegiance, but it would appear to most, if not all of us, that there was no need for his commitment to serving God to be carried in such a soul-wrenching manner as sacrificing his own child.

Isaac lived to originate the Hebrew people’s genealogy until this day, a people proscribed, as we read in Leviticus 18 and 20, from “giving children to Moloch,” the practice of child sacrifice.

In a contemporary setting, a new generation of Jews seems to have forgotten or is ignoring that lesson by being willing to participate in an activity that would harm fellow Jews.

They appear to be willing to participate in a new form of sacrificial idolatry. Not only do they lend support to those of Israel’s enemies who intend to kill our children and infants in the name of “Free Palestine,” but they further extend their backing to a terror group, Hamas, which does not mind sacrificing its own children, callously furthering that goal to achieve their political goals.