Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Monday, October 06, 2025

10/06 Links Pt2: Eli Sharabi: A Hero Of Israel And The Jewish People; Qatar, Under Pressure From Trump, Pushes Al Jazeera To Curb 'Incitement' to Terror

From Ian:

Memoirs of a Mossad Mastermind

REVIEW: ‘The Sword of Freedom: Israel, Mossad, and the Secret War’ by Yossi Cohen
"People with no fantasy," the late Israeli politician Shimon Peres once observed, "cannot create the extraordinary." The Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence service, has become legendary for its extraordinary feats, some of which could be pulled from a James Bond novel. But as Yossi Cohen reveals in his new book, The Sword of Freedom: Israel, Mossad, and the Secret War, the agency’s stunning capabilities are the result of Israel’s unique place in the world.

The Mossad is uniquely capable because it has to be, Cohen notes. "We have the ultimate incentive to prevail, because our struggle is existential," he writes. And Cohen knows of which he speaks—he had a front row seat for events that shaped the region.

After a stint in the Israel Defense Forces, Cohen spent decades as a Mossad operative before he was chosen by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to serve as his national security adviser. In 2016, Cohen was appointed to lead the Mossad. During his nearly five-year tenure, Cohen oversaw the agency’s operation to steal Iran’s nuclear archive and served as one of the chief negotiators for the Abraham Accords.

Memoirs written by former spies—especially top spies—are seldom revealing. In fact, they shouldn’t be. Readers looking for a "tell all" book, divulging precious secrets and tradecraft, should look elsewhere. No former public servant worth his salt would write one anyways. Accordingly, Cohen is exceedingly careful in recounting his exploits and experience. He also largely refrains from partisan sniping and score-settling—no small feat in today’s hyper-partisan age, let alone in the maelstrom that is Israeli politics.

Yet this isn’t a dull book. Far from it.

Cohen’s account of the operation to retrieve Iran’s so-called nuclear archive is worth the price of admission alone. For decades, the Islamic Republic had been developing a nuclear weapons program. In 2015, the United States and others agreed to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), better known as the Iran Deal, which sought to curtail Tehran’s nuclear ambitions. Jerusalem suspected perfidy but required proof. Enter the Mossad.

Campus feminists have rebranded rape as ‘resistance’

A glance at the Feminist Library’s ‘statements’ page reveals that it rather likes making them. Its social-justice catalogue is not just limited to support for ‘Palestinian resistance’ – it also includes the entire range of middle-class left causes, from transgenderism to immigration. It remains rather silent on anti-Semitism, however – which is curious considering Goldsmiths admits it has an anti-Semitism problem, for which it has apologised. Due to the pro-Palestine ‘occupation’ of campus last academic year, members of Goldsmiths’ Jewish Society were too afraid to hold any events and effectively had to disband the society. With graffiti across campus featuring swastikas and the phrase ‘gas the Jews’, it’s not difficult to see why. An independent inquiry into anti-Semitism at Goldsmiths published in May provides a damning indictment of the prevalent campus culture.

Goldsmiths is not the only university whose best and brightest will this week don their keffiyehs on the anniversary of the deadliest attack on Jews since the Holocaust. Not a week after the Yom Kippur terror attack on a Manchester synagogue, students from Queen Mary, King’s College London, Strathclyde and Sheffield will partake in pro-Palestine rallies, marches and lectures.

It seems we are now seeing the culmination of years of ideological capture – and the results are sick-making. Students now issue calls to ‘globalise the intifada’, celebrate ‘Palestinian resistance’ on the anniversary of Hamas’s atrocities in Israel, and suggest that rape is sometimes, in some places, just a teensy bit justified.

In a statement issued after the Southport stabbings last year, the Feminist Library claimed that ‘we understand how fascists use faux concern for the “safety of women and girls” as cover for white-supremacist violence’. Perhaps it’s this faux anti-fascism that salves the conscience of these putative feminists as they turn a blind eye to the hundreds of women who, on 7 October 2023, were hunted, tortured and sexually humiliated, before being thrown into the backs of vans like cattle. One victim was raped by a Hamas militant who then passed her on to a friend. Together they sliced off her breast, threw it into the street and played with it. Another militant then raped her again, shooting her in the head as he ejaculated. This is the ‘resistance’ the Feminist Library and others will be proudly ‘remembering’ tomorrow.

Of course, It’s not just these student pseudo-radicals refusing to look barbarism in the face. It took the United Nations almost two years to concede, in the face of overwhelming evidence, that extensive sexual violence took place on 7 October. In the meantime, UN Women – supposedly the leading global body for ‘women’s empowerment’ – focussed all of its energies on pandering to Western men with pronoun confusion.

It was Maya Angelou who said ‘when someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time’. How many times, I wonder, can feminists excuse the rape of Israeli women before they cease to be feminists? How many times do our compatriots have to dance on Jewish graves before we believe they mean it?

It’s time to hold the media to account

The public has a right and a need to know that a dangerous fraud is being perpetrated upon it. Just as the government has required tobacco and alcohol companies to place warning labels regarding the potential harm their products may cause, the public should be informed about the dangers of misinformation from news sources that claim to be trustworthy but that have chosen to present jihadi propaganda as facts.

Consumers have a right to know what product they are purchasing, and when a product is misrepresented, consumers in a democracy have recourse through government entities like the Consumer Protection Agency or Better Business Bureau. They can also turn to the courts for redress. This, however, is no ordinary consumer matter. Issues of free speech play heavily against government intervention here. Who’s to say what’s propaganda and not just an alternative narrative? Who’s to prioritize “factual” over “narrative” journalism? Given the partisan ferocity currently prevalent, surely not the government.

On the other hand, this issue is unprecedented in the history of democracies and their foundational free press: the Fourth Estate. Our current “free press” consistently purveys the war propaganda of a movement profoundly hostile to any form of press freedom and joins them in their attack on the only participant in this regional conflict with a free press. Who could imagine that our news media would align their narrative with a jihadi propaganda campaign promoting a political culture that has eliminated any trace of a free press?

As we have painfully learned over the last 250 years of democracy, rights come with responsibilities. In order to claim the mantle of professional journalism, our “free” press needs to observe professional standards of scrutiny that their current approach systemically violates. At no time in the history of modern journalism has this happened on such a scale and for so long.

We have witnessed a devolution from professional war journalism to wildly unprofessional own-goal war journalism—from providing an honest check on the three branches of government to running enemy war propaganda as news, and from Fourth Estate to Fifth Column. How do we bring this startling inversion of the profession and the news it produces to the fore? How do we assess the danger to a free press that their advocacy constitutes? How do we counter so perverse a trend?

Congress not only has a role to play; it has a responsibility to bring this dangerous and shocking scandal to the attention of the American public. It is time to hold congressional hearings and hold the purveyors of this hateful propaganda to account. Let consumers see how often our journalists take staged footage, and edit and crop it to make it more believable. Let them see things the pack media won’t cover, like the shocking genocidal hate speech that pervades the Palestinian public sphere. And then let the heads of our news agencies explain why they consider these items unfit to print while simultaneously reporting Hamas lies.

We are calling for accountability—for light to be shed on a suicidal brand of journalism that any sane audience, exposed to their folly, can and will reject of their own volition. Let this suicidal, advocacy news media be exposed for their impersonation of journalism. And let the viewing public—the American consumer—choose whether they wish to ingest the poisonous and deeply unprofessional fare our current news media have to offer, or look for other, more honest and accurate sources to understand our current troubling times.

10/06 Links Pt1: Israel’s Forgotten Army; Hostage families endorse Trump for Nobel peace prize; Why do Jews’ warnings keep falling on deaf ears?

From Ian:

Israel’s Forgotten Army

A full, honest accounting of the post-Oct. 7 period would highlight the extraordinary accomplishments of the modern Israeli security forces as well as critiquing its failures and weaknesses. The dismantling of Iran’s regional proxy network, including Hezbollah, as well as the crippling of Tehran’s nuclear program both relied on the application of long-term deception plans and strategic power projection that would have made Ben-Gurion proud. In Gaza, the fusion of tactical early warning systems and advanced intelligence capabilities has accomplished a targeting and maneuver capability not seen before in modern wars.

Yet, despite the sacrifices and devastation of the past two years, the IDF has not yet achieved the total victory that Prime Minister Netanyahu has promised since the start of the war. Nor has it managed to fully evict Hamas as a ruling power in Gaza. Many IDF commanders have displayed the characteristic aversion to territorial control, routinely spending blood to conquer areas of Gaza only to relinquish them weeks or months later, dooming soldiers to repeat costly clearing operations.

Moreover, the IDF has not yet demonstrated the capacity, nor the will, to fully sustain its own operations. Instead, it continues to rely on the network of volunteer groups that it can neither fully deputize nor live without.

This in turn enables what has become a toxic relationship between the U.S. and Israel. Aryeh Leib Shapiro, a milluimnik born in the U.S. and a member of an Israeli organization called the Vision Movement, dedicated to what it calls the cause of Jewish liberation, spoke with me about how American Jews influence Israeli security. “The way that many American Jews want to contribute to the IDF’s success is by remaking them in their image. Just like in general Israeli politics, the Reform movement wants Israeli religious law and immigration law to reflect American Jewish sensibilities.The IDF is no different, except that these diaspora Jewish orgs no longer have much influence over the Knesset anymore so they’ve been putting more funding into education and the army.”

Much of that influence is exerted through what appears to be philanthropy. The way it works, said Shapiro, is “by sending our top and most promising commanders in the IDF to learn what it means to be a Jewish leader in the 21st century from the Wexner Foundation or at the Harvard Kennedy School.”

The IDF, greatly influenced by fashionable but disastrously misguided ideas that have been popular among the American ruling class, has turned its official partner in the American diaspora into a piggy bank to subsidize those ideas. The shiniest monument of this failed two-way konceptsia is the FIDF. The organization gives American Jews an illusion of helping that actually handicaps Israel.

The best scenario for Israel would be one in which it acts like an independent and sovereign nation by taking full responsibility for its military supply needs. Instead of relying on logistical backup from unregulated volunteers, it could then funnel diaspora support into less sensitive areas. That will require wisely analyzing the current political and security situation in its own region and at large, separate from the interests of its patrons. Having done so, Israel can then make plans that are founded on a realistic vision of the future, which would be one that does not assume that land will no longer be important in warfare or rest on other similarly dangerous hallucinations.

How Hamas’s hostage tactic checkmated Israel’s war strategy

Whatever happens now, there is one element that Israel and other Western states can learn from this stalemate, and that is to apply a set of preventive measures to make it less likely that any terror organization or rogue state (think Iran/Turkey/Yemen/Libya or others) will try to emulate the actions of Hamas in the future.

It is actually quite surprising that Israeli legislators have not yet found the time to address this burning issue. To be successful in preventing future strategic hostage-taking by its enemies, Israel needs to revise legal, military, political, and diplomatic practices. And it shouldn’t be doing it alone, since it is likely that other Western countries and their civilian population will be targeted by jihadi abductors as well.

Needless to say, yet difficult to achieve perfectly, Israeli security organizations must adjust intel collection, combat operations, and responses to prevent their enemies from abducting Israelis in Israel or abroad. This is mostly a matter of priorities within existing capabilities.

Legally, Israel needs to make it illegal and impossible for elected officials with executive power to fulfill the demands of terrorists in order to release hostages. Israel also needs to declare to its current enemies, neighbors, and detractors that the abduction of its civilians is an act of aggression that will be met with disproportionate and punitive measures that will extend well beyond the combatants who actually abducted Israelis. Anything and anyone that supports or facilitates the abduction or incarceration of Israeli hostages will be a legitimate military target.

A future Israeli government with better international standing should focus on building a global coalition to deprive terrorists of the benefits reaped from hostage-taking, which includes severe punitive measures against any state that supports such crimes.

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, Israeli leaders and institutions need to adapt to the reality that this and the next war will be fought and won primarily on the cognitive battlefield, where local, enemy, and international media, including and increasingly more on social media, is where reality is forged and decided.

Israel may be able to maintain its qualitative military advantage over its many enemies, but without monumental improvements in all facets of soft power, Israel will find it increasingly challenging to exist, thrive, and enjoy its past military victories.

Jonathan Conricus: Is Egypt on a collision path with Israel?

‘Just rhetoric?’
Wasserman Lande told JNS that the cessation of operations by the U.S.-led international force in the Sinai Peninsula is a great cause for concern.

According to Israel Hayom, the Multinational Force and Observers (MFO), the body entrusted with overseeing the terms of the Israel-Egypt peace deal, has stopped carrying out reconnaissance flights over Sinai or inspecting the contents of the tunnels in the peninsula ever since the Oct. 7, 2023, attack.

Wasserman Lande said that to prevent the situation from deteriorating further, the Americans, as guarantors of the peace treaty, must reinstate the mechanism of the MFO effective immediately. Moreover, Israel must insist that military presence in Sinai that exceeds the 1979 terms be dispersed, she added.

Additionally, to calm things down, the highest echelons in Israel must inform the Egyptians that Jerusalem has no interest in relocating Gazans to Egyptian territory. However, “it is an Israeli interest to have them potentially move via Egypt into third countries, with full Egyptian coordination and supervision that they don’t remain in Egypt,” the expert continued.

Lastly, “Israel must demand that the indoctrination of the Egyptian public [against Israel] ceases. This must be demanded by Israel without any concessions,” Wasserman Lande stressed.

Cohen enumerated five reasons why an Egyptian offensive is unlikely.

First, under the U.S. Arms Export Control Act, misuse of U.S.-delivered weapons can lead to suspensions and cancellations of further deliveries, which would harm systems requiring regular maintenance. Much of Egypt’s U.S.-made military equipment would be less effective if this were implemented.

Second, Egypt receives more than a billion dollars annually from the U.S. thanks to the 1979 peace deal. War would cut this revenue stream, to the detriment of debt-laden Egypt.

Third, the American role in the supervision of the peace deters Egypt from breaking it.

Fourth, war would further strain Egypt’s shattered economy.

An fifth, the Egyptian Armed Forces have not fought a real war since 1973. Despite its “propaganda videos,” Egyptian soldiers are largely inexperienced, Cohen said.

The orientalist stressed, however, that after Oct. 7, no one can be certain about the future. “Threats with words can lead to threats with guns,” he said.

Hassan noted that Israel had recently begun to take “practical steps” against the peace treaty violations. Decisionmakers in Jerusalem have brought up the topic with Washington, and the IDF has openly commented on the repeated drone incursions from Sinai into Israel, he said.

But, he warned, while “Israel is taking the threat seriously, it is not taking it seriously enough.” The defense establishment still seems to dismiss Egypt’s threats as “just rhetoric that won’t materialize.”

Israel’s top security personnel have built up an assumption that “Egypt will never go to war against Israel because it would mean that Egypt would be destroyed …, [so] they start dismissing actual threats, saying, ‘This will never happen, everything is OK,’” Hassan said—“which is very similar to the ‘conception’ Israel had before the Yom Kippur War.

See you on Wednesday night!

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Ahmed Al-Darini writes about an unsettling experience he had in the major Al Masry al-Youm Egyptian newspaper:

A Jewish rabbi began circling around where I sat at the dining table, chanting his hymns, swaying his body forward and backward, appearing to be immersed in something spiritual. As if he were fortifying the place or summoning the celestial angels whom Jews believe possess extraordinary power to do anything.

Naturally, I felt uncomfortable while eating my meal in a Chinese hotel restaurant in the historic city of Samarkand, while a Jewish rabbi wandered around the dining hall spreading his recitations, calling upon angels or summoning demons, or even pretending or imagining that he was doing so.

Perhaps my sensitivity to the situation stemmed from the difference and what it stirs in the human psyche of suspicion toward "the Other," and perhaps my disgust arose from the Jewish Zionist crimes in Gaza, and perhaps because eating requires some peace and tranquility—not having to eat cheese and bread while your eyes follow someone circling around you making suspicious gestures, whether to the angels of hell or to the waiter.

Later, I learned that there was a celebratory event for an Israeli company to be held in the hotel's vast garden in a few days, with the rabbi blessing it or securing it preemptively.

The last thing I expected to encounter in Samarkand—deeply rooted in Islamic history—was a Jewish rabbi circling around me with his murmurings and incantations!

Maybe we should all send Al Adrini some nonsense Hebrew and tell him it is a Kabbalistic incantation that was designed just for him. He'll clearly believe it.

(Because I couldn't resist, I looked up what Israeli company this might have been. It seems a travel agency called Asia Travel Israel has helped create a non-stop weekly flight between Tel Aviv and Samarkand last May and it held celebrations, so this seems likely.)

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

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Here is how Amnesty-UK responded to an arson attack on a mosque in the UK:

Amnesty UK condemns the horrific attack on the East Sussex Mosque this weekend. We offer solidarity to Muslim communities who will be shaken by this act of violence.

This follows months of increasing hostility to racialised and migrant communities in the UK – boosted by anti-migrant rhetoric across the political spectrum and in the media.

According to @TellMamaUK there has been a significant rise in the number of Islamophobic hate cases in the United Kingdom between June and September 2025.
Not including the most recent horrific attack, there have been 17 reported cases that have involved attacks on mosques or Islamic institutions in this time period.
We are watching the real-life consequences of outpourings of hatred.
A year after the 2024 racist riots, there is an urgent need for a reset in our national debate.

The overall impression is outrage, and Amnesty blames the arson on increasing hostility to minorities by bigots. It ties it to increasing Islamophobia. It says that hatred leads to attacks like these.

Here is how the same group reacted to the deadly synagogue attack last week:

Amnesty International UK is deeply saddened by the news of this morning's attack at the Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation Synagogue in north Manchester. We condemn this horrific act of violence that has taken the lives of two innocent people and injured many more.

Our hearts are with the Jewish community and all those affected by this appalling attack on such an important and holy day in the Jewish calendar.

Acts of violence have no place in our society and only deepen division among communities. It is essential that politicians, leaders and the media ensure their actions in the following days do not stoke hatred and division further.

We must focus on the solidarity and humanity that connects us all.

- Sacha Deshmukh, CE Amnesty International UK

In this case the emotion is sadness, not anger.

Unlike the reaction to the mosque attack, Amnesty-UK doesn't blame anyone in particular. They don't mention rising antisemitism in the UK in recent years. They don't consider that anti-Israel protests might contribute to antisemitism.

Look carefully at who they are worried about stoking hatred: "politicians, leaders and the media." The word that is missing is "activists." This means that instead of warning about increased antisemitism - a word that is noticeably missing from the tweet - Amnesty's instinct upon hearing about an attack on Jews is to protect Muslims from backlash!

The tweet was posted after the anti-Israel, pro-flotilla protests in England that day. But Amnesty didn't warn the protesters not to do anything that might be used as justification to attack Jews. On the contrary, Amnesty is all for protests, and incitement to violence in (left-wing) protests are (as far as I can tell) never condemned. On the contrary, they oppose any restrictions on protests - including, implicitly, incitement to violence against Jews like "globalize the intifada."

For both tweets, Amnesty sent out a message to protect the Muslim community from violence - and for neither did they call to protect the Jewish community from violence. For Muslims, the violence is preventable; for Jews, the violence is simply a sad part of life that they must learn to live with.

Even when Amnesty tries mightily to sound like it is unbiased, the bias cannot be denied.

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Can Neturei Karta "wear" protest signs on Shabbat?

I saw this video where Nate Friedman visits an anti-Israel and communist protest in New York City.

He tried to interview the usual Neturei Karta crowd, who refused to speak to him because they didn't want to speak into a microphone on Shabbat. (Their leader told him this...on the microphone.)

I was more interested in their signs.

Carrying anything outside an "eruv" (enclosure) on Shabbat is strictly prohibited, but wearing clothing is permitted (obviously.) They "wear" the signs as if they are ponchos, with a hole in the middle for their heads.

But can protest signs be halachically considered clothing, even if "worn"?

Almost certainly not. No one would consider signs to be real clothing, even if "worn," and clothing is only permitted when it is used for the normal purposes of clothing: protection/warmth, decoration or modesty. "Decoration" is for jewelry and the like. These signs cannot be considered decoration, as no normal person wears anything looking like them.

So I cannot see a possible leniency that would allow these "religious Jews" to publicly profane the Sabbath. They are doing the equivalent of carrying something by putting it on a string, typing it around one's neck and calling it a "necklace" just to be able to carry it.

A more interesting question is the one Friedman asked them - how they came to Manhattan. They almost certainly didn't walk from Williamsburg, and in fact they probably couldn't cross the bridge on Shabbat. This means that they are staying in hotels or rent an apartment in Manhattan, both of which are quite expensive. So who is bankrolling them?

Given their meetings with the leaders of the Palestinian Authority, Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah, it seems likely that at least some of their funding comes from antisemites.

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

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L'Orient Today has an interview with an international legal expert who states unequivocally that Israel's naval blockade of Gaza is illegal.

1. Are these ship interceptions legal under international law?
First, we must highlight the fact that the blockade imposed by Israel on the Gaza Strip is totally illicit. It is indeed a unilateral, indiscriminate, punitive action targeting the civil population. This kind of action is a serious violation of International Law.

Regarding the competence of a State over the sea, there is a basic principle stipulating that a State is only allowed to take action within the limits of its territorial sea of 12 nautical miles from the coastline [baseline].

On the one hand, the flotilla was heading towards Gaza and not Israel. But most importantly, on the other hand, the flotilla’s boats were intercepted at 43 nautical miles from the Gaza shore, which is in International Waters. Israel has, hence, violated International Law norms.

According to the Montego Bay Convention on the Law of the Sea, no state has the right to scuttle any other ship, even military ships, non-aggressive, of course, in the High Seas. The Israelis have the right to board foreign ships only in their own territorial waters. This is an application of the sacred principle of the Freedom of Navigation, the seas belonging to all.

Israel has violated all the norms of the International Law of the Sea. It scuttled foreign boats in the High Seas, especially since these boats were on peaceful humanitarian missions, and even in territorial waters, they would have had the “right of innocent passage.”

It turns out that even the UN stated, unequivocally, that Israel's 'naval blockade of Gaza was legal - in 2011.

This was in the Palmer Report, discussing the Mavi Marmara incident, which occurred far further from the Gaza shore than the "Sumud Flotilla" - 75 nautical mile away.

The Palmer Report said:

The first issue we consider is the legality of the naval blockade imposed by Israel.

The Panel notes in this regard that the uncertain legal status of Gaza under international law cannot mean that Israel has no right to self-defence against armed attacks directed toward its territory. The Israeli report to the Panel makes it clear that the naval blockade as a measure of the use of force was adopted for the purpose of defending its territory and population, and the Panel accepts that was the case. It was designed as one way to prevent weapons reaching Gaza by sea and to prevent such attacks to be launched from the sea. Indeed there have been various incidents in which ships carrying weapons were intercepted by the Israeli authorities on their way to Gaza.

Israel was entitled to take reasonable steps to prevent the influx of weapons into Gaza. With that objective, Israel established a series of restrictions on vessels entering the waters of Gaza. These measures culminated in the declaration of the naval blockade on 3 January 2009.

As a final point, the Panel emphasizes that if necessary, the civilian population in Gaza must be allowed to receive food and other objects essential to its survival. However, it does not follow from this obligation that the naval blockade is per se unlawful or that Israel as the blockading power is required to simply let vessels carrying aid through the blockade. On the contrary, humanitarian missions must respect the security arrangements put in place by Israel. They must seek prior approval from Israel and make the necessary arrangements with it. This includes meeting certain conditions such as permitting Israel to search the humanitarian vessels in question. The Panel notes provision was made for any essential humanitarian supplies on board the vessels to enter Gaza via the adjacent Israeli port of Ashdod, and such an offer was expressly made in relation to the goods carried on the flotilla.

The Panel therefore concludes that Israel’s naval blockade was legal.

The Panel is satisfied that extensive and genuine efforts were made by Israel to facilitate the delivery of humanitarian supplies from the flotilla to Gaza thus obviating the need to challenge the blockade and thereby avoiding the prospect of violence.

For Israel to maintain the blockade it had to be effective, so it must be enforced. That is a clear legal requirement for a blockade. Such enforcement may take place on the high seas and may be conducted by force if a vessel resists. To this point in the analysis no difficulty arises.

This is unequivocal. The naval blockade is legal and Israel has maintained it, as it is required to do for it to remain in effect. It has the right to impose the blockade to stop weapons transfers to Hamas. It has the right to intercept any Gaza-bound boats on the high seas. Anyone who wants to bring aid to Gaza must coordinate with Israel.

The legal logic has not changed in 14 years.

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10/05 Links: Trump: Hamas faces ‘complete obliteration’ if it clings to power; Howard Jacobson: The left are 'responsible' for antisemitism rise in the UK; Eli the Survivor

From Ian:

Dr. Mordechai Kedar: The Central Obstacle to Peace between Israel and the Palestinians Isn't Politics

While Palestinians declare they want statehood in the West Bank and Gaza, they make abundantly clear that their real aspiration isn't independence but the destruction of Israel, regardless of its borders.

Hamas - an Islamist, jihadist, and fundamentalist movement - took over the Palestinian parliament in January 2006 democratically and Gaza in June 2007 violently. Hamas's religious ideology complements the national ideology of the PLO, injecting a religious element into the conflict. The result is that what might otherwise be a solvable problem of borders and demographics takes on almost cosmic meaning as a struggle between Islam and Judaism that began in the 7th century between Mohammad and the Jews of the Arabian city of Medina.

Given the strength of the religious element, and the weakness of the national element, it is almost impossible for Palestinians to accept a two-state solution. National independence has limited appeal, and anything short of a complete victory over the Jewish state fails to satisfy the need for a victory of Islam over Judaism.

Westerners tend to ignore the religious element when dealing with the Muslim world, viewing it as secondary or purely rhetorical. In truth, even groups like Fatah - which often employs secular nationalist rhetoric - are deeply informed by Islamic beliefs and ways of thinking. For Palestinians, national and religious aspirations are inseparable, and, for many, Hamas's affinity with Islam grants it greater legitimacy as a political movement.

Hamas and other groups associated with the Muslim Brotherhood have a fixed set of ideas about Jews and Judaism that make any compromise or mutual recognition with a Jewish state anathema. The advent of Islam in the 7th century CE rendered Judaism void. The adherents of this superseded faith do not constitute a nation or people. Therefore, there is no logic or legitimacy to the existence of a Jewish state.

Moreover, once land comes under Muslim rule, it ought to remain Muslim in perpetuity. Islamists believe this to be true of Sicily, the Iberian Peninsula, and Greece, but especially true of the territory of Mandatory Palestine and its holy sites. The Balfour Declaration and subsequent decisions by the League of Nations and the UN granting sovereignty to Jews in this land are thus an offense to Islam.

The spectacle of a return of Judaism - in which the Jews regain their land, pray where the Temple once stood, and act as a sovereign people rather than a scattered religious minority - strikes many Muslims as an intolerable offense. As long as Israel continues to exist in any form, the affront remains, and it must be combated through jihad.

This religious perception also underlies the hostility towards Israel among the rest of the Arab peoples and Muslims more generally. Thus, Palestinians feel that recognizing Israel as the state of the Jewish people would be a betrayal of Islam that would earn them the contempt of their coreligionists.

Benny Morris: Nothing from Israeli-Palestinian History Suggests Trump's Peace Plan Will Work

President Trump's peace plan to end the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza implicitly proposes Israeli-Palestinian peace on the basis of a two-state compromise. Yet since 1937, the Palestinian leadership has successively rejected numerous international and Israeli peace plans, believing that all of Palestine belongs to the Arabs, and that the Jews have no right to sovereignty in any part of it.

Trump's plan is a non-starter because the raison d'etre of Hamas is the destruction of the Jewish state and the Islamization of Palestine (as expounded in the group's foundational Charter of 1988). More importantly, Hamas - like Lebanon's Hizbullah - has from the first said it will never give up its arms.

Trump's plan nowhere explains how Hamas will be disarmed or who will do it. Few observers believe that any Arab force will engage in battle against Hamas to disarm it. Any who try to do so will immediately be branded by their own people as "collaborators" with Israel. It is also a matter of "honor," a very important concept in the Arab world; you do not give up your Kalashnikov in the face of a mortal enemy.

Two years later, October 7 remains an ongoing trauma for Israel and world Jewry

Only Jews are told to suffer in silence because others oceans away suffer more. For their friends, sympathy; for their enemies, suffering is always relative. It is only one side that offers a bridge of empathy, acknowledging the pain of Palestinians living in a battlefield. Still, it has never crossed the other way to accept the suffering of Jews and Israelis.

Others lie, saying that the suffering was self-inflicted, creating alternate realities that drive all to madness. They gleefully try to rewrite the events that left the wound on Jewry's body, and though it aches and bleeds, we're told that it was never there.

Jews bear the wound, desperate to have their experience acknowledged so as to affirm their sanity in a world gone mad, but acknowledging Jewish suffering is treated as ground ceded in a battle. When it suits such people, then October 7 was a necessary means toward a just end, to right a grocery list of grievances whose debt the entire world couldn't pay.

Those murdered, mutilated, or beaten were settlers, soldiers, or Israeli. No matter what, there is always another justification for the abuse of Jews. When the abuse is denied, and the victim devotes all their effort to maintain the truth, it is impossible to fully grasp what one has endured. The issue is the same when the pain is belittled because it is inconvenient to the war effort. While there are some righteous among the nations, by and large, the suffering of Jews is a Jewish concern.

It is impossible to make those who deny, justify, or diminish the ongoing trauma of October 7 understand why the wounds go so deep. They don't care that in Israel, everyone knows someone who was killed, or maimed, or has one degree of separation from those taken hostage.

Israel is a small country, and it is impossible not to have been impacted by the pogrom even in some small way.

Every day, the impact seeps deeper as October 7 continues to unfold. The Diaspora is not disconnected. Israel is smaller than the Jewish nation at large, but not by much. The ties that bind have become ties of loss for a great number of Diaspora Jews. Family, friends, colleagues; everyone has an October 7 story that no one hears.

I don't know when the Sukkahs were removed in Kissufim, but it had to have happened eventually, when the site was relatively secure and the residents returned home. They were temporary after all, but their end date had become uncertain.

In war, nothing is certain except for uncertainty, according to the common refrain bandied about in my reserve company. The Jewish people are still at war, and so the right time to address the trauma is unclear. When reminders are constant, when there is no time to mourn properly, when the merit of sacrifice is in question, when you are hounded and then gaslit about the persecution, then the point at which one can move on becomes obscured.

It is uncertain when October 7 will end, but that day is not today. It is still October 7.

82% of American Jews do not feel entirely safe. The @WashingtonPost didn't think it was worth mentioning.

The Washington Post published a poll of American Jews, but the most important finding was left out of the article—and what they did highlight was deeply misrepresented.

They led with this headline grabber:

“Many American Jews sharply disapprove of Israel’s conduct of the war in Gaza, with 61 percent saying Israel has committed war crimes and about 4 in 10 saying the country is guilty of genocide…”

But what the Post doesn't say is that 24% of respondents do not identify as religiously Jewish, and of the remainder, 29% say they have no religious denomination. That means 46% of respondents are either not religious or religiously unaffiliated - a group whose connection to Jewish identity is often cultural or nominal.

Only 32% of the full sample said being Jewish is “very important” in their lives.
That raises an obvious question: If a large portion of respondents don't feel particularly Jewish, why are their opinions treated as authoritative “Jewish” perspectives on Israel?

We’ve seen this framing tactic before: use low-attachment Jews to imply that “the Jewish community” is turning against Israel. But the real trend is this: many American Jews are turning away from Judaism, and their views on Israel are more reflective of that disaffiliation than of Jewish identity itself. These Jews get their news from the mainstream media that has been emphasizing false stories of Israeli war crimes and "genocide" - of course their opinions will reflect the biased coverage they read from outlets like the Washington Post.

Meanwhile, the most sobering number in the entire poll was completely ignored in the Post's article.

To the question: “How safe do you feel as a Jew in the United States today?”

Only 18% said “very safe”
51% said “somewhat safe”
26% said “not too safe”
6% said “not at all safe”

The poll results aggregate “very” and “somewhat” into a deceptive “net safe” category - but since when is “somewhat safe” good enough for any American citizen?

This isn’t abstract geopolitical opinion - it’s first-person emotional reality, and it tells a clear story: By more than 4 to 1, American Jews do not feel completely safe in their own country.

That’s a headline.
That’s the real story.
And the Washington Post buried it.

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

At @Harpers, Houthis are heroic

Harper’s Magazine has turned contempt for America and Israel into an editorial reflex, where ideology routinely trumps evidence.

The magazine asked Seth Harp to cover the 250th anniversary of the US Army celebration in Washington DC in June. Harp's first paragraph tells us how brilliant he is.

After the midair collision in January over the Potomac River between an Army helicopter and a regional jet packed with young figure skaters and their parents flying out of Wichita, Kansas, and considering the ongoing travails of the Boeing Company, which saw at least five of its airplanes crash last year, I was so concerned about the state of U.S. aviation that, when called on by this magazine to attend President Donald Trump’s military parade in Washington, on June 14, 2025, I decided to drive all the way from my home in Austin, Texas, even though it cost me two days behind the wheel and a gas bill as expensive as a plane ticket.

No matter how you slice it, the chances of dying in an air crash is between 100 and 1000 times lower, depending on how you calculate it, than dying in a car crash for a 1,500 mile trip. Thus Harp immediately establishes himself as someone who has no idea how to interpret events.

The same disdain for evidence that led him to generalize anecdotes about air travel into making manifestly stupid decisions also shapes his view of the Middle East.

Which explains his later gratuitous mention of Israel:

The day before, Israel had bombed Iran, opening yet another front in the apartheid state’s war against its Muslim neighbors.

Iran shot rockets at Israel in April 2024, more than a year before the parade, in retaliation for Israel striking military targets near the Iranian consulate in Damascus. Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, the Iranian-aligned Syrians and Iraqis, and the PA-controlled West Bank all attacked Israel before Israel struck them. But to oh-so-intellectual writers like Harp - for whom pesky things like facts must never interfere with the story - it was simply an Israeli war against Muslims.

One would think editors would do basic fact checks. But, this is Harper's, where they are so intellectual that mere facts re not relevant to their much higher standards of the truth as they prefer to pretend it is.

But even that doesn't hold a candle to Harp's almost orgasmic description of the Houthis:

Just one month before Trump’s parade, in May, our armed forces suffered a humiliating loss against a tiny but fearless adversary in Yemen, one of the poorest countries in the world.

The Houthi rebels, also known as Ansar Allah, have been defying the United States, Saudi Arabia, and Israel ever since they first emerged as a military force in 2004 protesting the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the Israeli occupation of Palestine, and the quisling Yemeni regime’s collaboration with the Bush Administration. After Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, the Houthis, who had endured nearly a decade of starvation under a U.S.-backed Saudi blockade of their ports, tried to force Israel and its allies to lift the siege of Gaza by using their scrappy speedboat navy and homemade arsenal of cheaply manufactured missiles, drones, and unmanned underwater vehicles to choke off maritime traffic in the Red Sea. In response, the Biden Administration, invoking the threat posed by the Houthis to freedom of navigation, launched a wave of air strikes on Yemen and dispatched a naval fleet to reopen the Bab el-Mandeb Strait. The campaign did not go well. .... The tough, ingenious (and dirt-poor) Houthis, protected by Yemen’s mountainous interior, fought back with the tenacity of drug-resistant microbes. They downed hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of Reaper drones; nearly managed to shoot several F-16s and an F-35 out of the sky; and evaded air defenses to strike Israel with long-range drones, all the while continuing to harass commercial shipping in the Red Sea, which plummeted by 60 percent.

How scrappy and resourceful the Houthis are! Maybe he can't yet say out loud how much he also admires Hamas for 10/7 and Al Qaeda for 9/11, but how can he not? They are just as successful at fighting the evil Israeli and American capitalist machines! Screw human rights - they are fighting on the right side of history!

If the Houthis weren't anti-American and anti-Israel, Harp wouldn't say a positive word about them. But their "death to America, death to Israel, damn the Jews" slogan is irresistible to the privileged (NYU Law School, Columbia Journalism School, lawyer at Kirkland and Ellis), and very white, Harp.

This is the state of today's progressive intelligentsia, and I use the word advisedly. Harp, and Harper's, are smug and condescending while they don't have a clue about how the world actually works and cherry pick the facts that fit their preconceived and hateful ideas. In that sense, they are absolutely no different from the far-Right conspiracy theorists they profess to despise.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

10/04 Links: Eli Sharabi: ‘Break my ribs again, just give me food’; After Manchester, there can be no doubt – anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism; BBC doc ‘ignored Hamas killed Gazans in aid queues’

From Ian:

‘Break my ribs again, just give me food’: Hamas hostage on his desperate plea to captors

I am going to meet the saddest man in the world, or so I think. On October 7 2023, Eli Sharabi lost his wife and two daughters as Hamas terrorists rampaged through their kibbutz near Israel’s southern border, burning, beheading, gleefully slaughtering. The sorrow is unimaginable. But it gets worse. Eli was taken hostage before his family were murdered. For the next 491 days, most of the time spent in a tunnel beneath Gaza, he was sustained by the thought that, if only he could survive, he would be reunited with Lianne, who was born and brought up in Bristol, and their beloved girls, 16-year-old Noiya, and Yahel, just turned 13. “I’ll come back!” he shouted as the brutes dragged him away.

And he was as good as his word. There is a heart-stopping moment in Eli’s book, Hostage, where he returns from the underworld, literally almost half the man he was, and, suddenly, he knows. The social worker who welcomes him at the hostage handover point says his mother and sister are waiting for him. Eli says he wants his wife and daughters, and the social worker says his mother and sister will explain.

“It’s all clear in that moment, right there, standing in front of her. I understand everything. I understand it in my bones. I understand it from head to toe. I understand it, and I feel the pain pulsating through my broken body, a pain without a name and without form, and nobody needs to say another word.”

He made it, and they did not. Eli’s book, one of the most compelling and unflinching you will ever read, is dedicated to the memory of Eli’s girls and to Yossi, his brother, who was also taken hostage and was killed. Yossi’s body is in Gaza, one of the 48 remaining hostages, 20 of whom Israel believes are still alive.

I was apprehensive about meeting Eli (pronounced “Ellie”, the Hebrew pronunciation) because this will be a tough interview, maybe the toughest I’ve ever done. But I needn’t have worried. The short, compact figure who walks briskly into the hotel suite, which has a glorious view over a beach a few miles outside Tel Aviv, exudes determination and quiet confidence. In neatly pressed clothes and wearing a yellow hostage ribbon in a pendant around his neck, Eli looks together, not broken. The face is solemn in repose, dark eyes a little haunted maybe, but he breaks into a wide grin when I hand over the crumpets.

BBC documentary ‘ignored evidence Hamas killed Gazans in aid queues’

A BBC documentary on the deaths of hundreds of Palestinians queueing for food aid in Gaza has been accused of ignoring a report claiming that some had been killed by Hamas.

The Panorama documentary, called Gaza: Dying for Food, reported that more than 1,300 Palestinians had been killed while queueing outside aid centres.

It told viewers that most of those who died outside the centres between May and Sept 12 were killed by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), according to a report it used to inform its own despatch.

But it has now been claimed that the documentary, broadcast on Sept 22, ignored evidence in the report that Hamas fighters were responsible for some of the deaths.

The report, by the US-based research group Armed Conflict Location and Event Data (ACLED), was written in the wake of the deaths outside and near the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) aid distribution centres.

Jeremy Bowen, the BBC’s international editor, told viewers: “Since the GHF began its operations, at least 1,300 Palestinians have been killed at or around its sites. Mostly, according to ACLED data, by IDF fire.”

The research group’s own report, released on Sept 17, had made a similar claim. However, it also listed three other categories of “armed actor involved” besides the IDF, describing them as “unidentified Palestinian gunmen”, “Hamas” and “contested actor”.

In contrast to what Bowen said, the report described the presence of Hamas gunmen outside the GHF aid distribution centres, stating: “Eyewitnesses on the ground report that individual Hamas members may also have been among those collecting aid for their families.”

The research group quoted Anas Baba, a Gaza-based producer for the American National Public Radio (NPR) news website, who said: “At the GHF site, I saw people I am certain were Hamas members, based on their dress, taking food for their families.”

Brendan O'Neill: After Manchester, there can be no doubt – anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism

Anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism. It’s the main form Jew hatred takes in the Western world in the 21st century. It is the uncanny likeness this ancient hatred wears in these supposedly post-racist times. You expect me to believe it is purely by chance that the activist class now says about the Jewish State all the things that fascist scum once said about the Jewish people? Israel, they say, is uniquely murderous. It’s a bloodletting entity. It derives pleasure from the murder of children. It wields staggering levels of global power. It has even mighty states eating from the palm of its blood-stained hand. Zero out of 10 for originality – every one of these libels was feverishly issued against the Jewish people before you co-opted them for your campaign of demonisation against the Jewish State.

Consider the sheer fixation with Israel. I have opposed wars fought by America, Britain, France, Turkey, Russia and Rwanda, but not once did any of those states occupy my every waking thought. Not once did I call for their violent obliteration from the family of nations. Never did I obsessively visit campuses, write articles, make videos and stand on street corners to say not only that ‘Turkey is wrong to bomb the Kurds’ but also that ‘Turkey is the most demonic, bloodthirsty entity in existence and the whole of humanity is fucking doomed until this vile so-called “country” has been wiped from the face of the Earth’. You know why I didn’t say that? Because I am not racist.

Here is the key commonality between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitsm – both ideologies hold some Jewish thing, whether the Jewish nation or the Jewish people, to be the true source of evil in the world. That is always what distinguished anti-Semitism from other forms of racism – the fact its fuel was not merely prejudice and bigotry but also a conspiratorial derangement that sees the Jews as the corrupters of the Earth, the spoilers of men’s souls. And it is what now distinguishes anti-Zionism from politics, from the realm of reasoned discourse that the followers of this ideology falsely claim to inhabit – it, too, finds a Jewish phenomenon, the Jewish State, guilty of manifesting evil, of sullying our species, of letting the blood of innocents and warping the minds of Westerners. It, too, sees ‘the Jew thing’ as the poison in the well of humanity.

To my mind, anti-Zionism is like a laundering scam. It is the passably political belief system that allows certain sections of society to launder their fear of Jews and present it as ‘criticism of Israel’. From England’s upper classes, who’ve long been iffy about Jews, to radical Islamists, who openly hate Jews, anti-Zionism has become the cloak under which they might spirit their Jew suspicion into everyday life. From far-right filth to leftists drunk on the old Socialism of Fools, anti-Zionism is a mask for the lingering, latent belief that there is something noxious, something unholy, about Jews.

To sow so much rancour for the Jewish nation and then reach for the smelling salts when Jews are demonised – no. We aren’t having it anymore. The reason ‘Zios’ – Jews – are getting it in the neck is because you have polluted public life with the fanatical, chauvinistic belief that Zionism is evil and everyone who supports it is evil. That Israel is uniquely cruel and everyone who backs it is cruel. That the Jewish State is the most despicable state, so much so that it deserves to be destroyed, ‘from the river to the sea’. Only Jihad Al-Shamie is responsible for the barbarism at Heaton Park. But here’s what you are responsible for: rebirthing in pseudo-political language the medieval derangement about evil Jews. After Manchester, I, for one, am devoted to the complete defeat of anti-Zionism.

10/03 Links Pt2: Qatar, Not Israel is Taking Control of D.C.; Ben Shapiro: Trump’s peace deal, Charlie Kirk’s legacy; Uni of Maryland Student Govt. Passes BDS Res. on Yom Kippur

From Ian:

Mossad reveals role in arrest of Hamas-linked cell in Germany said plotting to kill Jews

The Mossad was involved in Wednesday’s arrest of a Hamas-linked cell in Germany that planned to carry out attacks against Israeli and Jewish targets, the agency announced Friday.

The Israeli foreign intelligence service said the arrest was possible because of close coordination between the Mossad and Germany’s security and intelligence services.

German prosecutors said on Wednesday that they arrested three suspected foreign operatives of Hamas they believe were preparing a serious act of violence in Germany.

The three men are suspected by prosecutors of being involved in procuring firearms and ammunition for Hamas since at least the summer of this year, to be used for assassinations targeting Israeli or Jewish institutions in Germany.

“In the course of today’s arrests, various weapons, including an AK-47 assault rifle and several pistols, as well as a considerable amount of ammunition, were found,” said the federal prosecutors in a statement at the time.

The three, identified in line with German privacy laws only as German citizen Abed Al G., Wael F. M., born in Lebanon, and German citizen Ahmad I., were arrested in Berlin on Wednesday.

Anti-terrorism investigators had been surveilling the suspects for some time before operational forces nabbed them at a weapons handover in the German capital.

Police intervened in the exchange and discovered arms, including an AK-47 assault rifle, a Glock pistol and large amounts of ammunition, the prosecutor’s office said.

The Mossad said that the effort to stop the cell spanned several countries, and was “part of an extensive Mossad effort throughout Europe during which weapons caches were located and further arrests were made of operatives suspected of terrorist offenses.”

MSNBC Host Ayman Mohyeldin Attends Festival Featuring Former PLO Spokeswoman

A longtime MSNBC host last month attended an anti-Israel gathering alongside a long list of Hamas cheerleaders, social media posts reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon show.

Ayman Mohyeldin, an Egyptian-born MSNBC personality, appeared in an Instagram post at the London "Together for Palestine" music festival with British actor Khalid Abdalla. Also at the festival were a former spokeswoman for a designated terrorist organization, a United Nations official currently under U.S. sanctions, and disgraced former MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan.

Between musical numbers, the audience heard from people like Diana Buttu, a former Palestinian Liberation Organization spokeswoman, who has spent more than a decade defending Hamas. She described the Oct. 7, 2023, attack as the "natural consequence, unfortunately, of 56 years of military occupation and the denial of freedom."

On the day of the massacre, Buttu said, "When you punch your abuser in the face, it feels good. The first reaction was elation—we saw that both in Gaza and in the West Bank."

She has also praised Hamas as a "movement for freedom, for liberation," and lauded its former leader, Yahya Sinwar, who was killed in an IDF operation in October 2024.

"The Israelis will never understand what it means to die a hero," she said.

Francesca Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, who has been under U.S. sanctions since July, also spoke at the festival.

"For nearly a century, the Palestinian people have lived under the weight of a brutal settler colonial project, a perpetual occupation justified as security—security of whom?—and enforced through apartheid," Albanese said.

The Trump administration sanctioned Albanese over the series of letters "riddled with inflammatory rhetoric and false accusations" she sent to a long list of companies in an effort to pressure them against doing business in Israel. The State Department also noted that Albanese claims to be an "international lawyer" despite never having been licensed to practice law.

Former MSNBC anchor Mehdi Hasan delivered a fiery sermon on behalf of Palestinian "journalists," many of whom have collaborated with Hamas.

MSNBC canceled Hasan’s show in November 2023 after the former host spent the weeks after Oct. 7 defending terrorism. He notably pushed the discredited idea that Israel bombed al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza, an explosion that turned out to have been caused by a misfired Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket. Hasan has compared non-Muslims to "cattle" and blamed Hamas’s attack on Israel as well, and has previously been accused of plagiarizing a column he wrote in defense of spanking children.

Henry Hamra, a Syrian Jew living in US, running in elections for new Syrian parliament

Henry Hamra, who fled Syria to the US in 1992, is running for a seat on Sunday in Syria’s first legislature since the December ousting of longtime ruler Bashar al-Assad.

If elected, Hamra, who is running for a seat representing the Damascus district, would be the first Jewish representative to enter parliament since 1947, according to Syrian historian Sami Moubayed.

In the Jewish Quarter of the Old City of Damascus on Friday, an AFP photographer saw posters on walls bearing Hamra’s image alongside the Syrian flag and reading: “Candidate for Damascus for the Syrian People’s Assembly.”

A flyer published on Hamra’s campaign account on X reads: “Towards a flourishing, tolerant and just Syria,” while his program sets out pledges including bringing together Syrian Jews, protecting Syria’s heritage and cultural identity, and working with US Syrians to abolish the US “Caesar Act,” which imposes economic sanctions on Syria without conditions.

Electoral commission spokesperson Nawar Najmeh told AFP that Hamra is an “official candidate for the elections and announced his election program like any other candidate.”

Two-thirds of Syria’s 210-seat legislature will be selected by local committees, while the rest will be nominated by Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa in a selection process that has been criticized as undemocratic.

Hamra fled the Syrian capital to the US with his father, Rabbi Yusuf Hamra, at the age of 15 in 1992, the year Assad’s father and predecessor, Hafez, removed restrictions on Jews’ travel abroad.

The elder Hamra is a leader of Brooklyn’s Syrian Jewish community and is the brother of the late Rabbi Avraham Hamra, the last Syrian chief rabbi, who fled to Israel in 1994 and settled in Holon.

In February, Henry Hamra and his father visited Damascus from the United States, participating in a group prayer for the first time in more than three decades in the Old City’s Faranj synagogue.

At its peak, Syria’s millennia-old Jewish community numbered some 100,000 people, but today, only a handful remain.

10/03 Links Pt1: Israel’s War, Europe’s Surrender; Synagogue terrorists father praised Oct.7, worked for ICRC; Hamas agreement to release all hostages is just a ‘smart way’ to reject Trump deal

From Ian:

Israel’s War, Europe’s Surrender By Abe Greenwald

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The UK is a leading example, but it’s hardly an outlier. As we approach the second anniversary of the October 7 attack on Israel, it’s clear that Hamas set off a chain of events that not only ensured its own demise but also sped up the slower demise of the West. European leaders such as the UK’s Keir Starmer and France’s Emmanuel Macron are busy recognizing a Palestinian state that doesn’t exist while ignoring the ones taking shape in the countries they govern.

But—here we go—it’s actually worse than that. Ignoring what Seth Mandel calls “The Palestining of the West” would be bad enough. But liberal Western leaders are actively encouraging it by endorsing false claims of Israeli genocide, turning a blind eye to their own Islamist enclaves, threatening to arrest Benjamin Netanyahu, and rewarding terrorists with an imaginary state.

European leaders have worked out an accommodation with their jihad enthusiasts. While the mobs multiply and murder, the governments will continue to pretend that it’s all about Israel. The problem is that there’s no endgame, and the arrangement is sure to outlast Israel’s war.

But for the vigilance of the Trump administration’s efforts to crack down on anti-Semitism and its support for Israel, the U.S. would doubtless be playing a similar game by now. Both Kamala Harris and Joe Biden declared that the chanting mobs had a point, and the last administration’s turn against Israel was well underway by the time Biden left office. And that was before the Mamdanization of the Democratic Party.

What comes after Mamdani’s probable election as New York City mayor and after Donald Trump’s presidency, I couldn’t tell you. But most of the modern West is obsessed with spotting the early-warning signs of historical crises ever on the horizon—dictatorship, fascism, world war—while ignoring, excusing, or fomenting the concrete horrors of the present day. For forward-looking Israel, at least, there will be peace.

Telegraph Editorial: It is time we all stood up to anti-Semitism

This cannot go on. It seems clear that what we are witnessing is the tragic consequence of this normalisation of hate. The vicious anti-Semitism that has infected Britain’s body politic has run unchecked, and produced the inevitable result.

As the investigation into the attack unfolds we will learn more about the man responsible and his motivations. Now, it is worth reflecting that hatred always demands its toll; it is at the heart of how a great deal of modern terror works. The temperature is raised, and raised again, until someone, somewhere, acts upon the impulse; they, in turn, provide the model for copycat attacks.

Today’s violence followed the same wretched playbook as so many others across the West in recent years: normal implements of daily life, cars and knives, repurposed into weapons of terror in a manner the authorities will always struggle to halt completely. It was, however, foreseeable.

The spate of anti-Semitic violence gripping France had provided ample illustration of where the continual ratcheting of rhetoric in Britain might lead. Having allowed this ancient hatred to take root again, we must now eradicate it.

Keir Starmer: Respect the grief of British Jews this weekend

A horrific attack like this reminds us of the dangers Jews face simply because of who they are. Our thoughts remain with the victims and their families, as well as the wider community. Our gratitude goes to the first responders and emergency services, as well as those brave people who prevented this from being an even greater tragedy.

Across the country, people are reaching out in sorrow and solidarity. We stand firm in saying this is not who we are, and this is not what we stand for. Our Jewish neighbours are part of our communities and our country – the attack yesterday was an attack on us all.

For the government, that means taking action to guarantee your security. The police will provide a more visible presence around places of worship, transport hubs and schools. We will continue to work with the Jewish community, listening to their concerns and making sure that protection is as strong as it can be.

I know that planned protests over the weekend, just a few days before the anniversary of the October 7th attacks, as well as in the shadow of the Manchester attack, will cause distress.

Peaceful protest is a cornerstone of our democracy – and there is justified concern about the suffering in Gaza – but a minority have used these protests as a pretext for stoking antisemitic tropes.

I urge anyone thinking about protesting this weekend to recognise and respect the grief of British Jews this week. This is a moment of mourning. It is not a time to stoke tension and cause further pain.

This is still the country that was proud to be a refuge during World War Two.

This is still a country that prides itself on its values of tolerance, diversity and respect.

A country that welcomes all people, no matter their faith, to stand under the same flag together, as neighbours and friends. It is our flag that flew over Bergen Belsen concentration camp as it was liberated, a symbol of safety and freedom That is who we will always be – and hatred and violence will never win.

The final word must remain with those who lost their lives and those who mourn them. Adrian Daulby and Melvin Cravitz. May their memories be a blessing.

Jake Wallis Simons: Spare us your crocodile tears, Starmer and Corbyn

Which brings me to his successor. Last week, Sir Keir Starmer was basking in the adulation of Hamas after he recognised a Palestinian state without any preconditions. While this week’s Trump peace plan boxed the jihadis in, Starmer’s policy did the same to Israel.

Trump was clear: he wants Israel to win. He demanded the release of the hostages and the surrender of Hamas as a precondition for any ceasefire. As for Starmer, well, he may have not wanted Hamas to win, but he certainly wanted Israel to lose.

This was part of an overall stance that condemned Israel as the guilty party, rather than the jihadis of Hamas – the group, that is, who started the war and is refusing to release the hostages and stop the ‘genocide’ to which it is supposedly being subjected.

Does this make Starmer a ‘friend’ of Hamas terrorists? From their celebratory response to his decision to recognise a Palestinian state, it would certainly seem like they see it that way. So spare us your condolences, prime minister. Stay away from our synagogues. You, I’m afraid, are part of the problem.

Too strong? Perhaps. But then came a further trapdoor, in the form of violent pro-Palestinian protests that defaced London, Edinburgh and Manchester – Manchester! – in the hours after the attack last night.

One photograph has been haunting me since. It was taken in the aftermath of 7 October 2023 and shows a mob of Gaza activists marching through the city behind a banner that says: ‘Manchester says one solution: Intifada revolution.’ You didn’t think they meant it, did you?

Not so fast. With the investigation ongoing, we have no idea whether Jihad al-Shamie was influenced by such things, though it is likely perhaps. What we do know, however, is that for two years, the climate of Jew-hate in Britain has been intolerable, and the protests have been at the heart of it.

It was in the week of the 7 October attack that the Jewish Chronicle, which I edited at the time, revealed that many of the key organisers of the marches had significant past links to Hamas, with some even pictured with jihadi leaders in Gaza. Difference, as they say, it made none.

Which brings us to where we are today. Trapdoor after trapdoor, all the way down. It is sickening to see all those leftist politicians who have smeared Israel with their every breath for two years suddenly using the Manchester attack to try to sanitise their reputations. It is sickening to see the baying mobs on the streets, without so much as a whisper of ‘not in my name’.

It is sickening to see so many people not even bothering with the mask anymore, or being satisfied with the thinnest of disguises. Why not? In Starmer’s Britain, that is all that is required.

Shame on them. Shame on all of them. The Jews have always stood up for Britain, including serving with distinction in the Second World War, as my grandfather did. Shame on Britain for not standing up for the Jews.