07/10 Links Pt1: US House probe targets New Israel Fund over anti-Netanyahu meddling; Pro-Israel UK MP Ann Widdecombe, murdered; CPJ Staff Packed With Anti-Israel Agitators

From Ian:

Brian Cox: Hamas announced it is stepping down in Gaza. It’s time for Canada to step up

The Board of Peace that is tasked with managing the transition of authority in Gaza welcomed Monday’s announcement that Hamas has dissolved its government, yet the Board nonetheless insisted that its assessment will be “guided by actions, not promises, to meet the critical needs of the people of Gaza.”

If Hamas does not voluntarily disarm and refrain from a governing role in Gaza, these non-negotiable objectives may yet require overwhelming military force to achieve. This means the prospect of intense—even deadly—combat operations remains.

Despite the dangers on the horizon, the potential for this plan to finally achieve durable peace in Palestinian territories is worth the risk.

But doing so will require commitment, resolve, and skilled military capabilities. This is why the Canadian Armed Forces are especially well suited to the task.

One potential roadblock is the current strain in relations between Canada and the United States. Despite current tensions, the government still maintains that “Canada has had no closer friend and ally than the United States” for over 150 years.

And although the peace plan is an American-led initiative for which Trump is appointed chair of the fledgling Board of Peace, the United Nations Security Council has welcomed the board and authorized establishment of an International Stabilization Force (ISF).

This provides international legitimacy to the peace plan, which is a point the government can emphasize to the domestic constituency in light of current diplomatic tensions with America.

Last fall, the Carney government along with Australia, France, and the UK recognized the State of Palestine even though it doesn’t currently qualify for traditional criteria of statehood. Committing robust military capabilities to the ISF in Gaza represents an opportunity to pursue a credible two-state solution.

The Carney government insists that “Canada is a strong supporter of the Middle East Peace Process” and that its approach to the conflict “is guided by its historic and unwavering commitment to a two-state solution, with Israelis and Palestinians living side-by-side in peace and security.”

If Canada is genuinely committed to long-term peace while also supporting “free and fair elections in Palestine in which Hamas must play no role,” political rhetoric, humanitarian aid, and capacity building simply will not be enough.

The consequences of failure are predictable: perpetual conflict, resurgence of Hamas and other Iran-backed regional proxy militias, and eventually a repeat of the October 7 atrocities followed by catastrophic large-scale hostilities.

A coalition of the willing must seize this moment by demonstrating the resolve needed to convert wishes to results.

The time is now for Canada to step up, join in, and take on a decisive role to foster genuine peace in Gaza and beyond.

US House probe targets New Israel Fund over anti-Netanyahu meddling

Two influential US congressional panels have launched a major inquiry into the New Israel Fund (NIF), JNS reported on Friday.

According to the report, the House Judiciary and Ways and Means committees are examining allegations that the American-based leftist organization potentially violated federal tax laws by funneling non-profit capital into partisan political operations aimed at toppling Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

In an official warning obtained by JNS, Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) and Ways and Means Chairman Jason Smith (R-MO) detailed how NIF may have breached its 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status “by providing millions of dollars in funding to groups that engaged in political campaign activities in the 2019 Israeli elections."

US internal revenue laws strictly forbid public charities from intervening in foreign or domestic political races either directly or indirectly.

According to congressional investigators, the NIF covertly backed radical anti-Netanyahu networks.

“NIF provided approximately $356,000 to Zazim, an Israeli organization that ‘operated a transportation system that brought thousands of Bedouin voters’ to the polls that were part of the opposition party to Prime Minister Netanyahu," the lawmakers noted. They also revealed that the organization “also provided approximately $95,000 to Adalah, a group that ‘provided legal representation to the Joint Arab List,’ an alliance of Arab parties that centered their campaign around ousting Prime Minister Netanyahu in favor of his opponent, Benny Gantz."

Further compliance failures were flagged regarding a 2019 court filing indicating that the NIF actively interfered in the sovereign electoral map by securing signatures for a legal petition to block a right-wing legislative candidate. “When the Israeli Supreme Court banned the candidate, ‘NIF called it a victory for democracy,’" the chairmen noted.

The leftist organization has historically presented itself as an entity dedicated to bolstering civil equity, asserting that it has disbursed over $300 million to various left-wing frameworks since 1979. However, the prominent visual on their web portal showcases Arab MK Ayman Odeh, leader of the radical anti-Zionist Hadash-Ta'al faction.

Odeh, despite being an elected member of the Knesset, has made countless anti-Israel statements, including comparisons between Israeli hostages and Hamas terrorists.

Rep. Jim Jordan indicated to JNS that the evidence points to blatant meddling. “The law is the law. You’re not supposed to be using this for electioneering activity," he stressed. “It looks like they were.

Downstream of the Lie By Abe Greenwald

Via Commentary Newsletter, sign up here.
I’m not talking about the dupes who believe anti-Israel propaganda. I mean, rather, those Israel supporters who blame the shift in public opinion on Israel’s failed communications strategy over the past three years.

They act as if anyone else is doing a better job of getting populations to distinguish between lies and truth. Falsehoods and loony theories have come to proliferate everywhere at all times. Look at recent history: Most of the country believed that Donald Trump colluded with Vladimir Putin to win the 2016 election. Most bought into the story that Covid came from a wet market. The 2020 election showed that Americans generally thought Joe Biden was cognitively fit for office. As recently as 2024, Gallup found that a majority of Americans were opposed to banning “gender-affirming” care for minors. And most still think the government is lying to us about aliens.

In such cases of broadly shared misinformation, we tend to blame those peddling the lies, not those who just didn’t scream the truth loud enough. In fact, truthful protestations are repurposed by the liars as further proof of a cover-up.

Look, I don’t really think Israel lost the information war to begin with. As I’ve argued before, the information Israel needed to get across was that it’s not going anywhere and will do whatever is necessary to ensure its survival.

But what’s more important is that the psyop against Israel isn’t ultimately about Israel. It’s a disinformation nuke aimed at the heart of America. Just look at what it’s already done to our social cohesion. Same goes for the Charlie Kirk conspiracy theory, which is itself an anti-Semitic spinoff of the op against Israel. History shows that the promulgation of anti-Semitism can be a death sentence for free societies.

To save our country, I suggest we start looking abroad at who would stand to gain from this kind of crack-up. Never mind the incentive structure of clicks and views. That’s all downstream of the problem’s source. It’s the U.S. that’s losing the information war. And the way to win it is to take the fight straight to our enemies.

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The Abu Safiya Propaganda Campaign - all based on uncorroborated and unlikely descriptions of a man near death

This week produced a textbook coordinated campaign : Amnesty International, CAIR, CodePink, and Physicians for Human Rights Israel all escalated calls for the release of Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, echoed by the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention and carried by the Guardian, the BBC, and NBC News. 

Where did this come from? 

The spark was a single visit. On July 2, Abu Safiya's lawyer, Nasser Odeh, met with him and came away describing a man near death — unable to speak lucidly, beaten by more than five guards with hands, batons, and hammers, nearly losing consciousness several times during the meeting itself, telling Odeh he did not expect to survive.

Every outlet that ran the story ran Odeh's account, and only Odeh's account. No doctor examined Abu Safiya independently. No photograph or video from the visit exists. The Israel Prison Service denies mistreatment, calling the allegations false. The entire campaign — the Amnesty statement calling the reports "truly horrifying," the UN experts' demand for immediate release, the wire coverage — rests on one lawyer's description of one meeting, a lawyer who has every incentive to shade the truth, and nearly all of it describes Abu Safiya as a civilian pediatrician with no connection to the war beyond treating its casualties.

That framing has a hole in it. A 2016 photograph uncovered by NGO Monitor shows Abu Safiya in military uniform at a Kamal Adwan ceremony alongside senior figures of Hamas's Military Medical Services and National Security Forces, and multiple Arabic-language sources refer to him as a colonel. Abu Safiya's link to Hamas's governing apparatus is a matter of public record, not an Israeli fabrication invented to justify his detention after the fact — a detail the campaign coverage this week omits entirely.

When Israeli forces took Kamal Adwan Hospital that Abu Safiya led on December 27, 2024, they detained more than 240 people they identified as Hamas and Islamic Jihad operatives, including 15 tied to the October 7 attack, and later released interrogation footage of a detainee describing the hospital as a shelter used to stage patrols and move weapons. It strains credulity that the hospital he ran could host so many militants without his knowledge or approval. 

the publicity campaign also ignores the legality of Israel's detention of Abu Safiya. Israel is holding him under the Unlawful Combatants Law, and PHRI and the UN bodies describe that as arbitrary detention requiring either charges or release. But as retired military lawyer Brian Cox has argued, Hamas is not a High Contracting Party to the Geneva Conventions, so its fighters fall outside the POW protections of the Third Convention; the governing provision is Common Article 3, which covers non-international armed conflict and permits holding a detainee for the duration of hostilities without the judicial process that a criminal charge would require. The hostilities have not ended.

We cannot know how accurate Odeh's description of Safiya is. But it echoes testimony that surfaced months earlier from detainees released in February and March, and that testimony was, if anything, more graphic. Those detainees said Abu Safiya could not speak without repeating each word four times, that dogs had been set on him, that his weight had fallen to around forty kilograms. Read together, the two accounts describe a man who has spent the better part of a year under constant torture, beatings, and starvation, sliding steadily toward death.

There is one problem with that picture: the video from June 10.

Abu Safiya appeared before Israel's Supreme Court by video link that day, between the March testimony and Odeh's July account. He was gaunt, but not the emaciated, forty-kilogram figure described months earlier. In the five seconds of footage that circulated, he shows no visible difficulty breathing — sitting still, shackled, unremarkable.

Is it possible that Abu Safiya was near death in March, recovered enough by June to sit calmly through a hearing, and collapsed into near-death again by July? Possible, yes. Likely is a different question, especially once you notice that the lurid details are exactly what got Odeh onto the BBC, that nobody in this chain offers a claim about Abu Safiya's condition that doesn't ultimately trace back to somebody speaking on his behalf, and that the same coverage leaves out a documented military affiliation and a live legal dispute over whether his detention needs a charge at all.

Odeh has every incentive to make his client's case as urgently as he can to whichever outlet will run it, and there is nothing improper in that; it is what advocates do. The failure sits with the news organizations and human rights bodies that took a single uncorroborated account, matched it against no evidence but its own resemblance to an earlier uncorroborated account, and never asked what the one piece of footage actually showed, or what they were leaving out about who Abu Safiya is. A little more skepticism was available to all of them. They chose not to use it.

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Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon! Reclaiming the Covenant on America's 250th (May 2026) "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

 

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07/09 Links Pt2: Rahm Emanuel and the persistent delusion of failed policies; Jerusalem voted the seventh-best city in the world; Elie Wiesel’s hidden world of letters, loss and friendship

From Ian:

Jonathan Tobin: Rahm Emanuel and the persistent delusion of failed policies

Say this for Rahm Emanuel. He may have about as much chance of being nominated for the presidency in 2028 by the Democratic Party as he does of being elected pope. But he knows how to retain the attention of the national media by manipulating contacts inside the Beltway.

That’s the only way to explain why someone who is not even being included in way-too-early polls about presidential preferences could get the kind of massive coverage he got for a speech given this week in Israel, when those far ahead of him in the contest struggle to be noticed.

On July 7, The Washington Post devoted three full articles to previewing Emanuel’s July 8 talk at Tel Aviv University. The Post, The New York Times, CNN and the rest of the corporate press then followed up with even more coverage of the speech after the fact. Those articles not only depicted it as deeply relevant to the current debate about the U.S.-Israel relationship going on in his party, but also to the reality on the ground in the Middle East.

A rerun of failed ideas
But what made this public relations coup even more remarkable is the fact that the much-ballyhooed address consisted of little more than a recycling of the conventional wisdom of his long-past political heyday. Emanuel’s speech was more or less a rerun of what passed for foreign-policy establishment canon in 1995 and 2015, put forward as a formula for peace in the second quarter of the 21st century.

Once you strip away Emanuel’s attempts to claim both the credibility and credentials to demand that Israelis discard everything their lying eyes and ears have been telling them about their nation’s struggle to survive a multifront war launched by Iran and its terrorist auxiliaries, all you’ve got is what we might term a piece of political nostalgia.

Emanuel calls his big idea the “23-state solution” because it is based on the notion that the Arab and Muslim world can cajole the Palestinian Arabs to make peace. But that’s just window dressing for what is the same two-state solution that his former bosses, Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, foolishly expended so much political capital trying to force into being. Contrary to liberal myth, that formula was thwarted not by Israeli intransigence but by the stubborn refusal of the Palestinians—enabled by much of the Muslim and Arab worlds, in addition to Western leftists—to countenance any future but one in which Israel is erased.

The context here is the fact that the former U.S. ambassador to Japan (2022-2025), mayor of Chicago (2011-2019), White House chief of staff to President Barack Obama (2009-2010), U.S. congressman from Illinois (2003-2009), investment banker (1999-2002) and senior adviser to Clinton (1993-1998) believes that his already impressive résumé ought to be rounded out by a stint as commander-in-chief. The man renowned as a serious policy wonk, albeit one with a predilection for profanity and a notorious temper, may have much to say about a lot of different topics. Yet when it comes to Israel—a subject he claims intimate knowledge of—Rahm is nothing but a blast from the discredited past.

That’s why the truly significant aspect of the speech and the massive coverage it generated isn’t what it says about the 2028 race, efforts to prevent the Democratic Party from becoming the anti-Israel party or even the one that is comfortable with antisemitism. Rather, it points toward the fact that while Israelis have absorbed the lessons of the last 33 years of history, including the Oslo Accords disaster, the Second Intifada, the fruits of the withdrawal from Gaza and the horrors of Oct. 7, 2023, supposedly smart people, including those like Emanuel who know a thing or two about Israel, have learned nothing.

Adam Louis-Klein: Rahm Emanuel’s shocking speech to fracture the bond between Israel and the diaspora

Emanuel does not share a fate with Israelis, and certainly not with the "Zionists" whose forced exodus from social networks, whose professional discrimination in the academy and elsewhere, he frames as a the natural consequence of Israel itself. He speaks from a thousand miles above, insulated from the antizionist abuse that is raging across the West.

His open attribution of collective guilt toward Jews – discriminatory in its very essence – is hardly surprising. It's increasingly treated as the common sense of liberal politics. “Netanyahu is harming Jews” is a common refrain, even though it lacks all logical sense. Netanyahu could be Hitler – as antizionists daily imagine him to be, as they mouth old Soviet slogans – yet targeting ordinary Jews as “genocidal” would still be unacceptable, and blame would lie with those who did so.

The casual rhetoric of blame reflect a deeper problem: the systematic concealment of antizionism, of Israel-hate, as something that could actually be the structural cause not only for changes in Israel's “reputation,” and not only for the violence against diaspora Jews, but for the crises in the Middle East themselves. Why, exactly, is Israel in a permanent state of war, which includes occupation and ongoing reciprocal violence? Why, exactly, does the question of whether the United States should be entangled in these wars come up in the first place? Violence against Israelis here is taken as natural and given.

While Emanuel claims to want Arab states to recognise Israel's right to exist, to integrate Israel into the region, he seems uninterested in the moral stakes of anyone seeking to annihilate a state in the first place. He seems oblivious to the social media accounts with millions of followers screaming with joy at the sight of Iranian missiles falling on Israeli civilians. Somehow none of that causes any moral outrage, since he has saved it all up for “Netanyahu” – the villain of his decadent fantasies.

The absence of any actual engagement with global antizionism is not merely a lacuna in the discourse: it is one that serves to reproduce that violence itself. By refusing to name the cause, and refusing to hold its principal actors accountable, ongoing wars are continually given justification, while blame is displaced onto Israel. This ongoing habit of evasion and non-accountability around antizionism – including refusing to say its name – causes harm to Israelis, Jews, and Palestinians alike.

Emanuel's politics does not seek peace; it seeks moral legitimacy and it exploits Israel as a tool to achieve it. His tone of superiority is not incidental. Like the old German Jews who looked down upon the traditional Eastern “Ostjuden” with contempt in the early 20th century, the liberal American Jew, insulated from antizionist abuse on the ground, now proclaims their civilisational superiority to the primitive Israeli.

I doubt that such a relationship is meant to lead to a memorandum of understanding.

Chief Rabbi urges Church of England to reject ‘genocide’ report ahead of Synod vote

The Chief Rabbi has urged the Church of England’s governing body to reject a controversial report accusing Israel of genocide, warning it threatens decades of Jewish-Christian relationship-building.

Sir Ephraim Mirvis spoke out before next week’s General Synod debate on whether the Church should formally engage with A Moment of Truth: Faith in a Time of Genocide, also known as Kairos II, as part of its efforts to better understand the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The report, produced by Palestinian Christian organisation Kairos Palestine, describes Israel’s military campaign in Gaza as a “genocidal war” and claims the Jewish state is a “colonial enterprise built on racism”. It also accuses Israel of apartheid and settler colonialism.

In a statement published on X following reporting by The Times, the Chief Rabbi said: “The content of Kairos II is deeply concerning, and I would hope the Synod will see it for what it is. While it is important to recognise the suffering of Palestinian Christians, this document does so in a way which can only harm the cause of peace.”

He added: “It presents a one-sided account of a complex conflict, downplays the historical experiences and legitimate concerns of Jewish people, and offers little more than political activism dressed up as theology.”

Mirvis continued: “It is truly shocking that a document which purports to speak in the name of truth contains so much falsehood – using extreme rhetoric to challenge the very concept of a Jewish state, and to oppose existing peace agreements in the region.”

He warned that “at a time when Christian-Jewish relations require nuance, trust and a willingness to engage with complexity, Kairos II risks undermining decades of careful relationship-building.”

The Chief Rabbi concluded: “Meaningful progress begins when the dignity, aspirations and suffering of all peoples are acknowledged. Kairos II takes us further away from that goal, not closer to it.”

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07/09 Links Pt1: BHL: Post-Oct. 7 isolation of Israel a ‘historic moral failure’; Israel’s ‘medical malpractice’; Australia’s Treatment of Jews Is a Warning to the World

From Ian:

Bernard-Henri Lévy calls post-Oct. 7 isolation of Israel a ‘historic moral failure’

The diplomatic isolation of Israel during the war in Gaza following the Oct. 7 Hamas massacre will go down in history as a moral failure and a defeat of humanity, French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy said on Thursday.

“The absence of support for Israel will be considered by future historians as a moment of huge disgrace for the West,” Lévy told JNS in an interview in Tel Aviv. “It is a defeat of humanity and a moral defeat. It is the loss of any moral compass.”

Lévy, who lives in Paris, rushed to Israel the day after the Oct. 7 attacks and the following year penned Israel Alone, a book about the lack of diplomatic support for the Jewish state in the West.

“I was beyond shocked,” he said.

He was back in Israel on Thursday to deliver the keynote address at the annual conference on contemporary antisemitism hosted by the Comper Center for the Study of Antisemitism and Racism at the University of Haifa. The gathering is the largest annual academic conference on modern-day antisemitism, drawing an estimated 550 participants, including 250 in-person presenters, with others joining virtually from abroad.

The 77-year-old French intellectual, commonly known as BHL, decried the surge in antisemitism, which he called “unprecedented in my lifetime,” noting that he rarely gives lectures in France for security reasons and that the only safe place for him to speak in the United Kingdom is a synagogue.

“Even if I come to speak about philosophy or non-Jewish issues, the only safe place for me in the U.K. is a synagogue,” he said.

Lévy noted that he has lived under police protection in Paris for more than two decades, since the publication of his book about the 2002 murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in Pakistan.

Mindful of the growing exodus of Jews from Western European cities, Lévy said he is determined to fight back.

“Europe would have no future if Jews stepped back,” he said, blaming a toxic mix of “stupid, illiterate, and barbaric anti-Semites” and a French leadership whose stance on Israel often adds fuel to the fire.

“The situation gives me the will to resist, to fight, and to win,” he said.

Amb. Michael Oren: Israel Is Not Isolated, Not Bloodthirsty

I was asked if Vice President JD Vance was right in saying that, apart from the U.S., Israel has no friends in the world. I answered "no," and listed the many friends Israel has in South America, Africa, the Arab Gulf, and India, a country with a population four times that of the U.S.

If I was asked "is JD Vance right when he said that Israel 'can't just kill (its) way out of solving every single national security problem that [it has]?'" - the answer is even more adamantly: "No!"

The charge that Israel uses brute force to resolve all its security problems is firstly and historically false. This is the country which, in 1949, signed armistice agreements with four Arab countries that only a year before had tried to destroy us. In 1967, that same country offered to return almost all of the sizable territories we captured in the Six-Day War in return for peace with the Arab leaders who once again sought to annihilate it.

This is the country, Israel, which returned the Sinai peninsula, an area more than three times its size, in return for peace with Egypt. We are the nation that signed a peace agreement with the arch terrorist Arafat who for decades specialized in murdering Israelis. He soon went back to murdering Israelis and still we sought peace with him.

Israel is the country which, arguably more than any other in the world, has done more to avoid having to kill our way out of our security problems. Still, there are some problems that Israel has no choice but to address with force. As Vice President Vance knows full well, there is no diplomatic solution for Israel's problems with Hamas, Hizbullah, and Iran - enemies sworn to wipe us off the map.

Though we must never cease striving to preserve our crucial alliance with the U.S., we must respectfully but forcefully correct American leaders when they spread falsehoods about Israel, defame our national character, and distort our history. Israel defends itself when it must but makes peace whenever it can.

Ruthie Blum: Israel’s ‘medical malpractice’

Israel ought to have its head examined. Its bleeding heart could use a check-up, too. Because something is clearly wrong with a country that repeatedly deploys its extraordinary medical expertise to preserve the lives of people who later dedicate themselves to harming it.

The latest diagnosis comes courtesy of an astonishing revelation this week by Avi Shushan, former spokesman for Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center-Ichilov Hospital, on the Channel 14 program “Sheva” with co-hosts Yehuda Schlesinger and Yaakov Bardugo.

According to Shushan, about seven years ago, when Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was gravely ill, the Mossad requested that an Ichilov specialist be dispatched to Ankara to treat him. The physician, Shushan said, did not travel as a private citizen offering personal assistance. He went, rather, “on behalf of the State of Israel.”

If true, the story is remarkable enough on its own. Israel, a country Erdoğan has repeatedly vilified, extended a helping hand when he needed one.

The gratitude wasn’t exactly forthcoming.

Turkey and Israel aren’t officially enemy states. They maintain diplomatic ties, even if relations have deteriorated dramatically. But Erdoğan’s words and deeds have long placed the neo-Ottoman-emperor wannabe firmly in the camp of Israel’s adversaries.

He has transformed Turkey into a political home for Hamas leaders. He has hosted members of the terrorist organization’s senior ranks and defended them as “freedom fighters.” He has backed flotillas aimed at breaching Israel’s blockade of Gaza. He has accused the Jewish state of crimes against humanity while embracing some of the most vicious antisemitic rhetoric in the international arena.

After the Oct. 7 massacre, when Hamas terrorists murdered, raped, burned and kidnapped innocent men, women and children, Erdoğan did not condemn the perpetrators. Instead, he portrayed Hamas as a legitimate resistance movement and attacked Israel for defending itself.

The man who, according to Shushan, was kept alive by an Israeli doctor, repaid Israel with hostility.

But Erdoğan isn’t an anomaly; he’s merely the latest patient in a long-running Israeli medical drama: a country that keeps curing those infected with a lethal hatred of the Jewish state.

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Amnesty Israel's rebuttal to the "genocide" slander

When Amnesty issued its "genocide report," Amnesty Israel published a rebuttal. It was hardly a pro-IDF analysis, but it showed how the "genocide" charge was without legal basis.

Amnesty never responded. Instead, it dismantled the Israel branch of Amnesty. 

As a result, the amnesty.org.il domain is gone and so is Amnesty Israel's rebuttal.

While I disagree with much of its analysis, the refutation of Amnesty's genocide charge is as good as any you are likely to see.  And since it is no longer available via search engines, I'm publishing the entire report here.

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Anti-Zionists think American military leaders are stupid

Section 224 of the FY2027 National Defense Authorization Act, since renumbered 219 in the House, creates a "United States-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative." It directs the Secretary of Defense to appoint an executive agent to synchronize joint work on missile defense, counter-drone systems, AI, autonomous platforms, and cybersecurity, and to move that work faster from research into production. Its text derives from the stalled U.S.-Israel FUTURES Act, folded into a must-pass bill.

Anti-Zionists are livid.

It is true that no other country has quite this arrangement with the U.S. military. The provision shifts a deepening relationship out of the annual appropriations process, where each year's aid faces a vote and conditions, and into Pentagon procurement channels that are harder to see and harder to unwind. That's a real risk that needs to be weighed against the benefits.

But critics are  going past the logical objections into antisemitic conspiracy theories. 

Khanna posted, "We cannot integrate our military with Israel's and lose our sovereignty." How does that work?

The United States runs AUKUS with Australia and the United Kingdom, a submarine and advanced-technology pact deeper than anything Section 224 contemplates. It shares co-development across NATO. Foreign components run throughout the F-35 supply chain by design. None of that is said to cost America its sovereignty, because they plainly do not. No amount of technical cooperation changes who sits in the Pentagon and decides how to defend the country; command, acquisition authority, and classification rules stay in American hands, as they do with every ally. For "lose our sovereignty" to mean anything, you need an unstated premise: that partnering with this particular party can somehow override the judgment of American leaders and bend their decisions against American interests. That the mere presence of Israelis in the process corrupts the process. That premise is not an argument. It is a spell.

Khanna is only the beginning. Joe Kent, former director of the National Counterterrorism Center, warned that opening sensitive technology to Israel means "back doors and spyware can be installed that will most certainly be used by the Israelis to influence U.S. policy." Not "might be" but "most certainly," a categorical prophecy that Israeli technology inside American systems will function as a hypnotic device operating on American policy itself. This is the sovereignty spell restated in software: contact with Israeli code does not add a supplier to be vetted, it plants a mechanism that overrides American will.

The other headline objection is quite different from Kent's. Josh Paul of the Arab Center presses it hardest: Israel will use its access to steal American technology, pursuing espionage against the systems it now touches. 

Paul adds another fantasy: "Israel will be able to threaten to withhold, or actually withhold, subcomponents or software updates that might be key to the operability of future US weapons systems, essentially holding US military capabilities hostage."  

Then there are the simultaneous social media accounts popping up with the single word: "merger." They are claiming that this bill would merge the US and Israeli militaries into a single force. This has become a major theme in recent days, from CAIR to BDS to lots of social media "news" sites. This is too stupid for words. 

Another objection from Eli Clifton and Ian Lustick in The Guardian spins an amazing conspiracy theory that has to be read to be believed. Describing the people behind the FUTURES Act, they say:

Their vision is of “New Jerusalem” (the US) wedded to “Old Jerusalem” (Israel) on the basis of both having been divinely chosen for the mission of saving civilization from the “red-green” (Marxist-Muslim) alliance.

For Israel, this means not just ruling all the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, but dominating the Middle East, launching wars of “prevention” against all potential adversaries (including Turkey, Iran and even Egypt) and, with Britain and France succumbing to the influence of foreign immigrants and the disease of “European secularism”, serving as the US’s most important ally in its global struggle to preserve “civilization” – labeled either “Jewish-Christian” or “western”.

The extravagance of such ideas clearly marks the origins of the project, exposing the influence of well-funded dark-money groups and thinktanks exerting their influence on behalf of Israel’s government.

Not coincidentally, Clufton and Lustick are releasing a book in August titled "Israel’s Lobby: America in the Grip of a Foreign Power."

The assumption behind each objection is that Israel is inherently an evil power hellbent on world domination leveraging America as its unwitting slave. 

In the end all of these criticisms are not just assuming Israeli brilliance and duplicity, but also American naivete and stupidity. 

In reality, US military and political leaders don't enter agreements that are bad for America. They have every ability to rebuff Israel and that all-powerful "Zionist Lobby" when they feel that their interests diverge. And they have, repeatedly.

In the real world, nations extensively test weapons systems and software before adopting them. In the real world, the harm from being discovered to install spyware far outweighs any benefits. In the real world, nations sign agreements for each shared technology to impose real penalties for anyone who breaks the agreement.  In the real world, any implementation of technology would include controls to ensure that the risks of depending on a single component are mitigated (i.e., with source code included with the software.) These are all risks that armies (and even regular corporations) know how to handle. 

And notice what none of them address: the benefits to the US of such an agreement. Why would it even be entertained if the US didn't see a real advantage of adopting Israeli technologies and share information that might give them new ways to attack known problems? 

When you refuse to even acknowledge the benefits along with the risks, then it is not a serious analysis. It is the retroactive justification for the pre-designed anti-Israel opinion. Which explains why so many different critics come up with so many different yet equally bizarre objections - because the point isn't a coherent argument, but the appearance of one.  Something for other anti-Zionists to grab onto and think, look, this "expert" says what I want to believe.. 

As I said, there are reasonable arguments against the act. Ro Khanna even says some of them separately. But when the rhetoric reaches into conspiracy theory and the assumption of American incompetence to hold onto its own sovereignty, we are no longer dealing with responsible argument.

We are looking at age-old antisemitism swapping the Elders of Zion with "Zionists."

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Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon! Reclaiming the Covenant on America's 250th (May 2026) "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

 

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The antisemitic assumption behind anti-Zionist libels

Wendy Bacon is one of the most decorated investigative journalists Australia has produced. She won a Walkley Award, the country’s highest journalism honor, in 1984 for exposing police and official corruption in New South Wales; her reporting on the bribery and attempted murder of a detective became the basis for the acclaimed ABC series Blue Murder; she worked for Fairfax, Channel Nine, and SBS before spending two decades as Professor of Journalism at the University of Technology, Sydney. She has been arrested some eighteen times for causes she believed in, from anti-censorship fights to environmental protests. She now writes for Michael West Media, and she describes herself openly as an investigative journalist who is also a political activist, one who wants her work to be useful to those resisting abuses of power.

Bacon would strenuously deny that she holds any antisemitic opinions, and she would be completely sincere in the denial. So would many of the prominent activist-journalists she works among. But as this piece will demonstrate, their arguments are antisemitic on two levels at once. Every judgment they reach consistently slants against the Jewish community and the Jewish state, and every claim rests on a shared, unspoken assumption of Jewish duplicity and inherent malice. They would deny this too, and point to Jewish friends they admire and Jewish allies they cite. An objective look at the structure of their position shows a pattern too consistent to be accidental.

Let’s go through Bacon’s recent interview on Bogan Intelligentsia, because it canbe generalized to much of the Leftist anti-Zionist thinking.

The interview makes three main points. The first is that ties between the Australian medical community and Israel are growing and that this should alarm us, because Israel is committing “medicide,” the deliberate destruction of Gaza’s healthcare system as an instrument of genocide. The second is that the Australian Jewish community is working to silence pro-Palestinian voices in medicine, chiefly by pushing hospitals and regulators to adopt the IHRA definition of antisemitism. The third is the case of Professor Peter Macdonald, the St Vincent’s cardiologist suspended after a single comment, offered as proof of how the machinery punishes dissent.

Each point sounds like reporting. Each depends on an implicit assumption: that Jews support genocide and scheme to silence anyone who objects. Remove the assumption and all three points dissolve. Keep it, and the interview coheres into a single seamless narrative of Jewish power and Jewish malice.

Bacon never has to argue the assumption, because she trusts her audience to supply it.

The whole edifice rests on the word “medicide.” For those who bother to look, it is well documented - video, photos, first person testimony - that Hamas uses Gaza’s hospitals for military planning and attacks, it builds tunnels adjacent to and underneath the same hospitals for fighters, it held hostages in hospitals and it uses ambulances to transport terrorists. Both international law and basic morality allows targeting medical facilities that lose their protection by being used for military services. There is no “medicide” - there is only Hamas cynically using hospitals to defend its military. I’m not making this up, it is in the Geneva Conventions: “The protection to which civilian hospitals are entitled shall not cease unless they are used to commit, outside their humanitarian duties, acts harmful to the enemy.” “Medicide” assumes Israeli (and Jewish) intent to specifically harm the medical infrastructure, and Hamas’ use of that infrastructure is what endangered it.

The next floor is built using the same trick. In 2023, the New South Wales Liberal health minister signed a five-year memorandum of understanding between NSW Health and Sheba Medical Centre, Israel’s largest hospital and one of the ten best-rated in the world. St. Vincent’s hospital bought Israeli health software Datos.

The interview never answers a basic question: exactly how does partnering with an Israeli hospital or buying Israeli medical software endanger patients? An Australian hospital runs on its own clinical governance, its own ethics committees, its own regulators. For an Israeli MOU or a piece of Israeli scheduling software to harm anyone, you would have to believe that Australian hospitals are so bad they have no policies of their own to protect patients, or that their policies are so poorly written an outside consultant can twist them into murdering undesirable patients. The mechanism is never named because naming it would expose the assumption underneath. This is classic slander by association — the very fact that there is an Israeli involved is enough to make the entire enterprise suspect, and the means doesn’t even have to be described, because the Jews are assumed crafty enough to figure out how to get around any obstacle.

The alarm is selective because it was never really about conduct. It is Deadly Exchange logic, the campaign Jewish Voice for Peace launched in 2017 claiming that American police who trained with Israeli counterparts were importing Israeli brutality into American streets. The American Jewish Committee identified it as an antisemitic trope, and JVP itself eventually admitted the campaign “furthers an antisemitic ideology.” Swap police for hospitals and the mechanism is identical: contact with Jews spreads Jewish malevolence, so partnership becomes contamination.

Next comes Bacon’s claim that the Australian Jewish community is weaponizing antisemitism to protect Israel. The reality is the reverse of what Bacon describes. Jewish medical staff have faced open hostility inside Australian wards, colleagues wearing Palestinian flags while treating patients, WhatsApp groups organizing to target them, and a steady erosion of any sense of institutional safety. The campaign to adopt the IHRA definition is a response to that. Bacon inverts it, casting the IHRA definition as a gag on Palestinian doctors and a chilling of speech. The definition does nothing of the kind. It silences no one; it supplies a tool for recognizing when speech has crossed into antisemitism, which is a different thing entirely and threatens only those who would prefer antisemitism go unnamed.

Which brings us to Macdonald. At a public forum he declared it a “no-brainer” that Mossad, not Iran, was behind the firebombing of Melbourne’s Adass Israel synagogue and the arson at a Sydney restaurant, contradicting ASIO and the Prime Minister, who had named Iran. He blamed Jews for attacking Jews, a false-flag fantasy that is antisemitic on its face. He was suspended for seven weeks and then reinstated, and the reinstatement is the part Bacon cannot fit into her frame, because it happened for a principled reason: his comment, made off duty as a private citizen, did not breach hospital policy. His later lecture invitation was withdrawn for an equally principled reason. He has every right to voice an antisemitic conspiracy theory, and an institution has every right to decline to hand him a prestigious platform and absorb the reputational cost of doing so. Speech is free; employers are not obligated to platform it.

Every one of these judgments runs in the same direction. The Israeli army is presumed guilty of a crime that its enemy’s conduct explains. Israeli hospitals are presumed complicit in a policy no evidence connects them to. Australian Jews demanding protection from documented harassment are presumed to be faking it in service of a foreign government. Real antisemitism, the firebombed synagogue, the fifteen thousand threats against a Jewish businessman that Bacon pauses to wonder aloud might not “actually” be antisemitic, gets downgraded, explained away, or reassigned to Mossad. The assumption cuts one way only. Jews scheme, Jews lie, Jews manufacture their own victimhood, and anything they say in their defense is evidence against them because they are presumed liars.

That one-directional flow is the whole structure, and it is built like a house of cards, each claim resting on the one before it. There is no medicide, so there is no genocidal policy for Israeli hospitals to serve. There is no link between an Israeli cardiac unit and a battlefield decision, so partnering with one endangers no one. Australian Jews are genuinely under attack, so their demand for protection is not a covert operation against Palestinians. Pull the bottom card and the tower falls, because every floor above was supported only by the libel beneath it, and every libel was supported only by the assumption that Jews lie and scheme at each stage. Without that assumption, nothing stands.

Naming this is not weaponizing antisemitism, the charge always leveled the moment anyone points it out. It is the opposite. It exposes the antisemitism that was load-bearing all along, the belief in Jewish malice that anti-Zionism of this kind needs at its foundation and works hardest to keep out of sight. When you remove that assumption, the entire anti-Zionist argument falls apart.

Wendy Bacon may be sincere, but sincere hate is still hate. And the only throughline that makes sense during her entire interview is that of Jewish deception at the national, institutional, and personal levels. Underneath the human-rights vocabulary sits the oldest assumption there is, asking only that no one look directly at it.

(h/t Jill)

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Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon! Reclaiming the Covenant on America's 250th (May 2026) "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

 

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07/08 Links Pt2: Foreign donors ‘funding hate on Britain’s streets’; Platner suspends campaign; The Democrats’ Real Red Line; Israel extends Venezuela aid mission after request from interim president

From Ian:

Top New York Times Editor Joe Kahn Distances Newsroom From Kristof Dog-Rape Column—‘Wouldn’t Have’ Run It

The highest-ranking news editor at the New York Times, executive editor Joe Kahn, is publicly distancing himself and the paper’s 2,200-person newsroom from a May 11 Times opinion column that accused Israel of using dogs and carrots to rape Palestinian prisoners.

The article, by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, whose father served on the Nazi side during World War II, was denounced by the Israeli foreign ministry as "Hamas propaganda," "fabricated," and a "baseless blood libel." It also generated a legal threat from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and a formal condemnation from the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. The piece relied largely on anonymous or Hamas-affiliated sources.

"It wasn’t edited by the newsroom," Kahn said in a podcast interview with the media and technology journalist Peter Kafka released Wednesday, July 8. Asked whether he would have published the article in the news pages, Kahn first replied, "we probably wouldn’t have." Then he provided a more definitive answer: "No, we wouldn’t have done that exact piece."

Kahn’s statement seems to put him publicly at odds with—and certainly struck a different tone from—Times opinion editor Kathleen Kingsbury, who, in a May question-and-answer-format column, defended the article. Asked, "Given the volume of the critical response, do you stand by this column?" she answered, "Yes. … Before publication, Nick’s reporting underwent a rigorous vetting process by Opinion’s fact-checking department to ensure that every testimony and anecdote he personally reported was supported by independent sources, as is the case with all sensitive pieces. The Times’s standards and legal teams also reviewed the column and offered feedback. After publication, we reviewed the factual challenges that readers and others raised, as is standard practice with any published piece. Editors found no errors."

Kingsbury did also make the point that "The Times’s news staff in the Middle East played no role in Nick’s column."

Federal judge rejects CAIR bid to block Florida terror designation

A federal judge declined on Monday to block Florida’s planned designation of the Council on American-Islamic Relations as a domestic terrorist organization.

CAIR and its Florida chapter sued last week after Gov. Ron DeSantis announced plans to designate the organization under the statute, arguing the law violates the First Amendment and the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The plaintiffs also sought a temporary restraining order to prevent enforcement pending the outcome of the case.

U.S. District Judge Mark E. Walker denied the request, writing that he was “not persuaded that relief must be afforded before defendants are heard.”

On Tuesday, CAIR and CAIR-Florida asked Walker to reconsider, arguing the designation could take effect as early as July 8 and would force the organizations to “shut down their operations in Florida and will substantially impair CAIR’s ability to pursue its mission nationwide.”

CAIR is represented by attorneys from the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation and the Southern Poverty Law Center, which was recently indicted on charges including wire fraud, false statements to a bank and conspiracy to commit money laundering over its alleged use of donor funds to pay informants embedded in extremist groups.

UK group hosts speakers who celebrated October 7 attacks

The UK’s largest Palestinian cultural centre hosted two speakers who have openly celebrated the October 7th terror attacks, Metro can reveal.

Palestine House in central London platformed Latifa Abouchakra and Batool Subeiti at a ‘Lessons of Resistance’ panel event last week.

The controversial activists have both praised the deadly October 7th attacks on Israel by Hamas in 2023, calling it a ‘moment of triumph’ and ‘unprecedented revenge’.

Subeiti, a pro-Iranian political commentator, was also given a central role in Palestine House’s educational programme for children on ‘resistance’ and history.

During the event last Thursday, panellists appeared to defend a Palestine Action activist convicted of criminal damage, while Subeiti spoke about ‘martrydom’ as a form of ‘victory’.

The Community Security Trust (CST) called Abouchakra and Subeiti’s role in the evening ‘deeply troubling’ while a representative of October 7th victims said it was ‘heartbreaking’ they were given a platform.

Palestine House is a six-storey building in Holborn, central London, which opened in 2025 as a ‘cultural embassy’ and ‘gathering hub’ for Palestinian identity.

The centre regularly speaks out on political issues, with founder Osama Qashoo erecting a ‘Stop the Genocide’ flag at the building earlier this year.

Last Thursday, Palestine House and Shia student society Absoc for Justice held an event exploring how the death of Prophet Muhammad’s grandson, Imam Hussain, in 680CE ‘continue[s] to inspire resistance to injustice today, including in the context of Palestine’.

However the decision to invite Abouchakra and Subeiti to the event has sparked outrage from antisemitism campaigners because of their history of support for October 7th.

On that day in 2023, Hamas killed 1,200 people in Israel and took more than 250 hostage, sparking years of conflict in the Middle east.

To get the latest news from the capital, visit Metro's London news hub.

Abouchakra, a presenter at the banned Iran-backed channel PressTV, told viewers on the day of the attacks that the violence was ‘the homecoming of at least 1,000 Palestinians from the resistance factions into the fragile Zionist entity’.

In an Instagram post on the same day, she said: ‘Nothing will ever be able to take back this moment, this moment of triumph, this moment of resistance, this moment of surprise, this moment of humiliation on behalf of the Zionist entity.’

ITV News was forced to apologise later that month after they platformed Abouchakr as British Palestinian concerned about prejudice without explaining her background.

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07/08 Links Pt1: US strikes 90 Iranian military targets, hours after Trump says ceasefire a ‘waste of time’; Rahm Emanuel’s anti-Israel bash won’t win over the jew-hating Dems

-From Ian:

JPost Editorial: Trump must not abandon his promise to people of Iran as collapse of Tehran deal looms

Trump is right that dealing with this regime is a waste of time. He is also right that a regime that shoots protesters in the street cannot be trusted to reform itself through polite diplomacy.

The conclusion, though, cannot be to abandon the Iranian people until the next round of negotiations collapses or the next oil shock alarms global markets.

The conclusion must be that regime change in Iran is not the only strategic and moral horizon that fits the reality before us. Such change cannot be imposed by outsiders; it must be Iranian-led.

It must respect Iran’s people, history, culture, and future but must be supported by the free world with sanctions on killers, technology to break censorship, documentation for accountability, diplomatic isolation of regime officials, and refusal to reward Tehran for surviving crises of its own making.

A free Iran would not solve every problem in the Middle East, but it could transform the region in ways no memorandum with the Islamic Republic ever will.

It could weaken Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, and militias sustained by Tehran’s money and ideology. It could allow one of the region’s great civilizations to rebuild.

This is not something that can be done by one power alone; it requires collaboration, and must remain the clear goal of every actor involved.

In January, the Iranian people were told help was coming; six months later, they deserve more than silence, bargaining, and regret.

JO Investigation: Massive Gaza Archive Targeting Israelis is Being Run by "American" in Saudi Arabia

Key Findings:
An anonymous operator claiming to be American but based in Saudi Arabia runs one of the largest Gaza “war crimes” archives—82,000+ videos and images—whose authenticity and chain of custody remain unverified.
The operator feeds purported evidence to the Belgium-based Hind Rajab Foundation, which has been linked to the Hezbollah terrorist organization.
Despite claiming American identity, the operator calls Americans “complicit in genocide,” urges U.S. soldiers to disobey orders, and demands U.S. officials stand trial at The Hague.
The operation runs from Saudi Arabia—a kingdom that has received extensive U.S. and Israeli security assistance, including protection during the 2026 Iran conflict.
The archive’s sophisticated infrastructure—dual websites, 2.4 terabytes of torrents, encrypted submissions, Icelandic privacy protection—suggests resources beyond typical grassroots activism.
The operator’s language shifted from singular “I” to plural “we,” raising questions about who is actually running the operation and whether it represents a coordinated network.

Seth Mandel: Karim Khan and the Perils of Anti-Israel Obsession

Khan’s case against Israel was a sham—he canceled important fact-finding trips in order to file the warrants before he could be outed as an office pest. The ICC report establishes “the accuser’s credibility,” which puts all past testimony and reporting in an even more damning light. The internal investigation also found Khan’s belated denials to be “devoid of credibility.”

From the Times, which obtained the internal report:
“First, she said, there was overfamiliarity during a work trip to London, then incidents in his office in which ‘he would grab and paw at her breasts, try to access her pelvic area, and suck on her ear or neck,’ according to a summary of the U.N. investigation’s findings obtained by The Times.

“Eventually, she said, the advances progressed to unwanted sexual activity. She told investigators that ‘the power dynamic between them meant that she could not say no.’”

Now, why would someone with access to this report want to ensure that such details saw the light of day before the ICC made its final decision on Khan’s job?

Most likely, the answer is: because there is reason to worry that court members’ anti-Israel fervor is such that they may still try to protect him. But now the public knows what the ICC believes Khan did, and it would destroy the court to leave him as chief prosecutor.

It is yet another example of the dangers of the world’s obsession with Israel. the UN’s refugee agency has been coopted by Hamas. The Committee to Protect Journalists is facing an internal revolt over the possibility that the organization might stop referring to Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorists as “journalists.” The International Committee of the Red Cross’s callous disregard of Israeli hostages and its participation in Hamas’s own public mistreatment of those hostages has disgraced its work.

Unfortunately, I could go on. But the point should be clear. Allowing anti-Zionist radicals to hijack human-rights groups has left genuine humanitarianism and genuine justice hobbled. This is the destruction left in the wake of an industry that destroyed itself because it was solely focused on destroying Israel.

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Spokane "human rights" leader forced to resign after antisemitic comments

From the Spokesman-Review (Spokane, WA):

Under fire for alleged antisemitism, Spokane pastor Luc Jasmin II has resigned from the state Human Rights Commission.

In a March 2025 meeting of the commission, Jasmin accused Jewish people of “crying” over discrimination during debate on a resolution condemning antisemitism. Jasmin’s comments came under scrutiny more than a year after they were made when video of the meeting was posted in June on the Commission’s YouTube channel.

“This word ‘antisemitism’ has been around since the Jewish got trampled by Hitler, and it seems like the Jewish people keep on crying and crying and crying and crying and crying – always crying with the antisemitism,” Jasmin said in the meeting. “And today there are many other groups who are subject to mistreatment, who are even subject to mistreatment by the Jewish, and they’re not crying so much.”

The meeting is remarkable. For nearly 20 minutes, Jasmin insists that Jews are not being victimized, and in fact that Jews are attacking millions of others.

Jasmin spouted this hate at a human rights commission meeting, and he remained a member of the commission for over a year afterwards even after the other members heard his hate themselves. Two of them tried to reason with Jasmin, but he disqualified himself from the commission at that moment.

Interestingly, the minutes of the meeting do not say a word about Jasmin's outburst. 

This is not only the story of one antisemitic human rights commission member who was forced to resign. It is a story about the three other commissioners and members. While they voted to condemn antisemitism over Jasmin's objections, they kept him on for 15 more months.

That is the real scandal. 

Jasmin does not admit he did anything wrong and insists this is all political. 

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Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon! Reclaiming the Covenant on America's 250th (May 2026) "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

 

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07/07 Links Pt2: Anti-Zionism Is Repackaged Antisemitism; How the NYT's Boosted Graham Platner; Mamdani’s wife co-hosting pricey pro-Palestine retreat in Corsica — after skipping July 4

From Ian:

Anti-Zionism Is Repackaged Antisemitism

Yes, anti-Zionism is antisemitism. Unless one believes, in the spirit of John Lennon's "Imagine," in a world without any nation states, denying the Jewish people the right to a state - where more than 10 million live today and which is roughly the size of Wales - goes far beyond political disagreement. It signals deep-seated prejudice.

There are 193 UN member states. Only one - Israel, the lone Jewish-majority nation - has its legitimacy routinely questioned. That is ironic, since very few states can match the longevity of the Jewish people's ancestral link to a specific territory, stretching back more than three millennia.

The Hebrew Bible is replete with place names that existed in ancient times and endure today, beginning with Zion - a hill in King David's Jerusalem - and Jerusalem, the ancient and modern center of Jewish national life and capital of Israel. The Christian Bible builds on the Hebrew Bible, and its geography is inseparable from Jesus, the Judean Jew. The seventh-century Qur'an contains more than 40 references to the "Children of Israel."

Wars imposed on Israel since its rebirth in 1948 by those who rejected any Jewish national presence led to conflict. But Zionism's core purposes are to ensure Jews are no longer dependent on the goodwill of others for their survival; to provide a safe haven after centuries of persecution; to serve as a "light unto the nations"; and to establish a state at peace and in coexistence with its neighbors.

Israel rests on multiple layers of international recognition of a Jewish national home in the land. Compare that to the "legitimacy" of other states. What precisely are the foundations of legitimacy for the U.S., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand? In historical terms, they rest on conquest and subjugation of indigenous populations.

Most states derive legitimacy from the simple fact of their existence: they exist, therefore they are. Only Israel is persistently required to relitigate its right to exist in the face of persistent anti-Zionism - even 78 years after its rebirth and 77 years after joining the UN.

Palestinian Culture of Anti-Normalization Is a Central Obstacle to Peace

Were all Palestinians supporters of Hamas, or were there Palestinians who opposed the massacre and longed for a different future? My search for the answer led me to Moataz Al-Mansi in Gaza. "The future of Palestine is not built on hatred or on the dreams of cancelling the other," he wrote. "I dream of a relationship based on good neighbors, shared interests, and mutual respect."

I invited him to appear on my podcast, "Conversations at the Peace Table." Moataz told me he had lost both of his businesses during the war. His children had not attended school in years. Yet he refused to abandon his belief that Israelis and Palestinians must one day live as neighbors rather than enemies.

My friend Inbal, who worked closely with Palestinians in the West Bank for years, often told me that many Palestinians quietly desired coexistence but were afraid to say so publicly. Those who engaged with Israelis risked being labeled collaborators or traitors. Again and again, I heard the same story: Palestinians who sought dialogue often faced pressure from their own society, while Israelis who sought partnership struggled to find counterparts who could safely engage.

This helped me understand a central obstacle to peace: the culture of anti-normalization. Anti-normalization discourages dialogue, joint initiatives, business partnerships, cultural exchanges, and even personal friendships with Israelis or Jews. A Palestinian who speaks publicly about cooperation can be accused of betrayal. The result is that peace becomes socially dangerous and the public square becomes dominated by those who reject coexistence.

Two days ago, Moataz contacted me again. An article had appeared in a Gaza newspaper calling him a traitor. He believed the danger to his life had become immediate. He asked me to tell his story. "If something happens to me, it is because I chose peace."

Peace must first become socially acceptable among ordinary people. That requires protecting those courageous enough to see humanity in the other side. The ideology that condemns Moataz for reaching across the divide is the obstacle to peace. Until Palestinians who seek coexistence are free to do so without fear, and until activists stop treating anti-normalization as a moral virtue, those yearning for peace will continue to pay the highest price.

Solomon’s Pools: How the Palestinian Authority Neglected a Historical Treasure

To the north of the Israeli town of Efrat, and to the south of Bethlehem, lie Solomon’s Pools. The pools were part of an extensive water infrastructure originating in the Judean hills that supplied water to the Jewish Temples in Jerusalem. Whether the pools are those referred to by King Solomon in the Book of Ecclesiastes (2.6), who wrote, “I made myself pools from which to water the forest of growing trees,” remains a subject of debate.

In the Oslo Accords, Judea and Samaria were divided into three areas, which can generally be defined as follows: Area A – mostly under the complete jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority, subject to overriding Israeli jurisdiction to combat terror; Area B – joint control with the PA holding jurisdiction for civilian affairs and Israel holding security jurisdiction; Area C – full Israeli jurisdiction.

Each area in which Israel transferred jurisdiction to the PA – i.e., every area that would become part of areas A and B – was carefully delineated on agreed maps, with area C being the remainder.

The Oslo Accords never envisaged a situation in which Areas A and B would be off limits to Israelis. Rather, the accords included specific provisions regarding both the treatment of Israelis present in those areas and the manner in which the PA treated Jewish historical sites that were included therein.

The Israeli participants in the talks with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and the Israeli authors of the accords certainly did not anticipate a situation in which this area would become dominated by hostile PA forces and other Palestinian terrorist organizations, and that almost every entry of a Jew into those areas would potentially be accompanied by mortal danger.

Here, it should be stressed that the danger posed in areas A and B is only to Israeli Jews. Israeli Arabs – i.e., the millions of Arabs Israeli citizens – are free to enter, study, and even live in areas A and B.

Since the classification of an area as Area A, B, or C was not meant to be a hindrance to access, the Oslo negotiating sides saw no obstacle to including Solomon’s Pools within Area A. The inclusion of this specific site within area A, did, however, present a unique challenge to the PA.

According to the PA narrative, Jews are modern-day European colonizers of “Palestine,” a state that never actually existed. Jews, according to the PA, have no history or connection to the area. For the PA, the statement in the 1922 League of Nations Mandate for Palestine, in which “recognition has thereby been given to the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine and to the grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country,” was simply wrong and baseless. The PA narrative is so dogmatic that it even outrageously denies any Jewish connection to the Temple Mount.

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