07/20 Links Pt1: Benny Morris: Omer Bartov - What Went Wrong?; Deborah Lipstadt: UN ‘failing Jewish people greatly’; Iran FM says he has never met new supreme leader Mojtaba Khamenei

From Ian:

Benny Morris: Omer Bartov: What Went Wrong?

A review of Israel: What Went Wrong? by Omer Bartov; 243 pages; Farrar, Straus and Giroux (April 2026)
Late in the book Bartov describes a post-7 October visit to Israel and a meeting with Israeli students. He says he came away shocked. “They had not only internalised a particular view that had become commonplace in Israel—namely that the razing of Gaza … was a legitimate response … but had also developed a way of thinking that I observed many years ago when studying the conduct, worldview, and self-perception of German army soldiers in WWII [again, the comparison to the Nazis!] … Hamas as human animals—and of the wider [Gaza] population as less than human … Thousands of children were killed? It’s the enemy’s fault … If Hamas carries out a massacre in a kibbutz, they are Nazis. If we drop two-thousand-pound bombs on refugee shelters and kill hundreds of civilians, it’s Hamas’s fault for hiding under or close to these shelters … The way people’s eyes glazed over whenever I mentioned the suffering of Palestinian civilians … was deeply unsettling.” (I wonder whether Bartov’s eyes “glazed over” when he was told of the suffering of Hamas’s victims, many of them tortured and raped. But, of course, he has a point about the progressive Israeli dehumanisation of the Palestinians—but he ignores the coin’s other face, the parallel dehumanisation of the Israelis by the Palestinians).

Bartov’s descriptions of various episodes in the conflict are speckled with distortions and marred by tendentiousness; this is not a book scholars will excavate for facts. For instance, Bartov repeatedly states that the Zionist forces “expelled” the Palestinian population from the territory that became the State of Israel—when, in fact, most simply fled from the actual or potential battlefields (and some were ordered or advised to leave—as in Haifa on 22 April 1948—by their own leaders). The most that can be said is that the Israeli government refused to allow the refugees to return to their homes and lands after the war, not exactly the same thing.

The decades of British rule were characterised, Bartov tells us, by the “familiar processes of a settler colonial takeover of land and resources from the indigenous Palestinian population.” The American, South African, and Australian “settler-colonial” paradigms, to which he is alluding, featured brutal armed conquest and confiscation of indigenous lands. In Ottoman and British Mandate Palestine, the Jews acquired lands from very willing Arab sellers—nothing before 1948 was conquered. And the country had, and has, no “resources” to speak of.

But the sad truth is that Israeli internal demographic and political trends and the constant Islamist violence and genocidal threats have derailed the Zionist project, transforming it from a positive, moral enterprise to something teetering on the edge of an abyss. I wouldn’t go so far as to say, as in Bartov’s peroration, that Israel today is “bloody-minded … [and] paranoid” and is now “heading down the path of theocracy and apocalypse.” I would advise waiting a bit before making a definitive judgment. Let’s see what sort of government the Israeli general elections, scheduled for 27 October, wash up and whether they will alter the current downward spiral.

But one thing is already clear: Bartov’s book, and his journalistic “Israelis are genocidaires” campaign that preceded it, have, objectively speaking, assisted the Islamist terrorists in their effort to destroy the Jewish state. This is something he will have to live with.

Friedman: A Palestinian state will destroy Abraham Accords

Former U.S. ambassador to Israel David Friedman said in Congressional testimony released on Monday that efforts to create a Palestinian state would fatally undermine U.S.-led negotiations to achieve normalization agreements between Israel and Arab countries.

In a written statement submitted to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs’ subcommittee on the Middle East and North Africa, Friedman said that attempts to link the two issues were “destined for failure” after Oct. 7.

“Israel already has done the two-state experiment and that folly almost destroyed the Jewish state,” Friedman wrote. “Talk of a Palestinian state in the halls of Congress or the palaces of Europe is just wildly out of touch with the realities on the ground.”

The former envoy to Jerusalem argued that countries like Saudi Arabia that might seek to join the 2020 Abraham Accords agreement that normalized relations between Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco “understand those realities well.”

“A Palestinian state will not advance the Abraham Accords; it will destroy them,” he said. “It will consume the region with even more conflict and violence.”

“The fact that the Abraham Accords did not resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a feature, not a bug, of the deal,” he wrote. “The accords sent a clear message to the Palestinians that the days in which they held the Middle East hostage had ended.”

Khaled Abu Toameh: Iran's War on the Arabs: Time for the Gulf to Stand with Israel

Over the past week, the Iranian regime has demonstrated once again that its ambitions extend far beyond destroying Israel.

It is a war against the entire Middle East and, ultimately, against the United States and the West.

Tehran then launched missiles and drones not only against US assets but also against infrastructure in Arab countries across the Gulf, in addition to Jordan, presumably so they would pressure US President Donald J. Trump to call off US firepower and return instead to waste-of-time negotiations for a waste-of-time "deal" that Iran would not honor in the first place.

In reality, the negotiations have been worse than a waste of time... The negotiations actually caused harm. They gave the regime time to retrieve missiles it had hidden and to resume firing, with targeting assistance from China and Russia, on US forces and allies in the Gulf.

Iranian regime ideology rejects peaceful coexistence and normalization between Arabs and Israelis -- as does the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood, currently embodied by Qatar and Turkey.

Taken together, these terrorist organizations form what Tehran proudly calls the "Axis of Resistance." It is, in reality, an axis of terrorism. Its purpose is not just to destroy Israel. Its objective is to spread Iran's revolutionary Shiite Islamist ideology, undermine moderate Arab governments, expel American influence from the Middle East, and ultimately wage jihad (holy war) against the West.

The Arab states therefore have every reason to openly align themselves with the United States and Israel in confronting the Iranian threat.

This is not about choosing sides in someone else's conflict. It is about defending their own sovereignty, their own interests, their own citizens, and their own future.

The lesson of the past week: So long as the regime in Tehran remains committed to exporting its "Islamic Revolution" and maintaining its network of terrorist proxies, there can be no genuine security or stability in the Middle East.

Until the Iranian regime abandons its expansionist ambitions or loses the capacity to pursue them, the Middle East will remain trapped in recurring cycles of violence. Until then, the Arab states would be wise to recognize that this is their fight as much as Israel's.

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The Australian Islamophobia Report That Never Defines Islamophobia

When Australia's Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism Jillian Segal recommended adopting the IHRA definition of antisemitism in July 2025, the backlash arrived within days. The Jewish Council of Australia argued that Segal's plan entrenches a selective approach to racism that serves political agendas. UN Special Rapporteur Ben Saul and Greens Senator David Shoebridge said the definition's broad framing conflates legitimate criticism of Israeli government policy with antisemitism itself. Amnesty International warned that the plan risks weaponizing criticism of Israel to silence protest. We've discussed how meritless these arguments are - the IHRA definition explicitly allows criticism of Israel that is similar to criticism of any other country - but that doesn't stop the IHRA foes from making up their arguments. 

Even if the IHRA definition is vague in parts - and it is - it is at least a definition that can be argued about. It provides a basis for discussion. 

But how can one discuss Islamophobia without defining it?

 Special Envoy to Combat Islamophobia Aftab Malik wrote an entire  report on Islamophobia while explicitly rejecting any definition of what the report is about. It states in its opening pages that it "does not seek to define Islamophobia, but to convey its pervasiveness and impacts." Malik announces the absence in his introduction, as though declining to define the prejudice he was appointed to fight were a mark of rigor rather than a way of dodging the fight Segal had just walked into.

How can a government combat Islamophobia without first saying what it is? The report has no answer, only sixty pages describing effects and never the boundary that produces them. Does Islamophobia cover criticism of Hamas, a proscribed terrorist organization that governs Gaza in Islam's name? Does it cover calling Muhammad a pedophile, on the ground that Aisha was nine when the marriage was consummated? Does it cover criticism of Islamist ideology as a political movement, the way criticism of Christian nationalism or Hindu nationalism is treated as ordinary political argument rather than bigotry against Christians or Hindus? Nobody can answer any of these questions from Malik's report, because the report commits to no fixed test any of them could be run against. Every real or imagined objection raised against the IHRA definition — that it is political, that it is elastic, that it lets the aggrieved party decide unilaterally what counts as hatred of them — applies a hundredfold to a report that has no definition to be elastic about. A bad definition can be amended on the floor of Parliament. A missing one has nothing to amend, because there is nothing written down to point to.

The report does gesture towards answering some of these questions. For example, it says that its recommendations are not aimed at censoring "the dislike or critique of Muslims or Islam." But stating intent is not something that has legal teeth, and ultimately the report is meant to be implemented in law and policy. The surrounding text is next to worthless.

And the very next section demonstrated this clearly. It says that critique of Islam should be "grounded in respectful and lawful debate." what, exactly, does "respectful" mean? It is itself never defined. The cartoon of Mohammed wearing a bomb in his turban is not respectful. Does this document say that it is prohibited? The free speech implications are far deeper and wider than anything in the IHRA definition of antisemitism. 

Another ambiguous part of the report is the heckler's veto. It wants to prohibit prejudice and hate that "incite discrimination, hostility or violence." The sentence never says whose hostility, or against whom. The natural reading is hostility directed at Muslims. Nothing in the text rules out the opposite reading, in which a cartoon that provokes an angry or violent response has thereby incited the violence, and the cartoonist rather than the rioter becomes the source of the harm. Malik does not endorse that reading anywhere in the report but neither does he disagree with it.  If the Muslim  community is offended, there is little in the report to say that it is not presumed to be Islamophobic. There is nothing comparable in the IHRA definition. 

The clearest evidence that Malik's ambitions ran well past "Islamophobia" as any dictionary would use the word sits in two of his recommendations the Albanese government rejected. Malik asked for a Muslim advisory panel with standing input into how counter-terrorism law gets applied, a direct line into the operational judgment of Australia's security agencies. He also asked for a separate commission of inquiry into anti-Palestinian and anti-Arab racism, distinct from Islamophobia and expressly framed around the Gaza war. Bigotry against Palestinians and Arabs is not bigotry against Muslims; Malik's own report concedes the two intersect without being identical. A commission built around Gaza-war grievance, empowered by a report that already treats offended feeling as evidence of harm, could functionally have provided a state-sanctioned mechanism for relabeling criticism of Hamas, of Palestinian nationalism, or of Islamic Jihad rockets as a form of racism — chilling exactly the political speech, disproportionately Jewish and Israel-sympathetic, that such a commission would exist to examine. That they were proposed at all tells you Malik was reaching for something considerably larger than anti-Muslim bigotry, and that the Islamophobia part of the report is meant to be interpreted liberally and not narrowly. 

A definition is not an optional preface to a report on fighting a named prejudice. It is the precondition for the report meaning anything at all. Segal wrote hers and has spent a year defending it clause by clause. Malik skipped his and has spent the same period being praised for restraint he never showed, producing a document more sweeping than Segal's, more elastic than Segal's, and far more open to being weaponized than Segal's — because there was never a written purpose to be held to in the first place. That the government adopted two-thirds of it anyway, in the same month it is still absorbing the previous report's IHRA controversy, is the part that should be mystifying. 

A missing definition is not a safer definition. It is the one with no limit at all.

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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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07/19 Links: Another Wake-Up Call for America's Jews; US claims PA’s prisoner payments reform a con; Why are British MPs so insanely obsessed with Israel?

From Ian:

Another Wake-Up Call for America's Jews

REVIEW: 'The Jews and the Left' by Batya Ungar-Sargon

This book gathers momentum and goes into high gear in its final sections leading up to and including the October 7 "wake-up call" to Jews and through them to the rest of America. Concentrating on the universities, the media, and sectors of the American public that she knows best, Ungar-Sargon shows how the Left's worldview, once based on right versus wrong, was replaced by the ideology of oppressor and oppressed. "That is the source of twenty-first century leftist anti-Semitism." The many strands of anticapitalist, anticolonialist, Orientalist, and other critiques of America come together in common opposition to Jews, now mostly in Israel. As she exposes the ideologies and promoters of the anti-Jewish alliance, the author punctuates her rebuttal with frustrated cries of "totally false" and "They are simply wrong." Having shown why American Jews became Democrats in the first place, and how they were then betrayed by former allies, she invites her fellow Jews to speak out as she has done, "not as Republicans" but as proud Americans.

It is heartening to read this rally against "a uniquely left-wing form of anti-Jewish hate and violence that has all but replaced right-wing antisemitism in America," but Ungar-Sargon's history is flawed and her awakening is late. Here is Commentary critic Robert Warshow writing in 1947 on America in the 1930s, "when virtually all intellectual vitality was derived in one way or another from the Communist party. If you were not somewhere within the party's wide orbit, then you were likely to be in the opposition, which meant that much of your thought and energy had to be devoted to maintaining yourself in opposition." The Communist Party was by then already in full anti-Zionist mode, Stalin having supported the Mufti's jihad in Mandatory Palestine as the start of the Arab revolution.

Warshow was writing not about the small percentage of Jews in the party but about his entire intellectual cohort. Some of the Jewish Left felt free to support Roosevelt in the late 1930s only because the Soviets had authorized the formation of the Popular Front that encouraged the cooperation with liberals it had previously prohibited. The communist "ideal" penetrated this country much deeper than fascism and for long after the threat of fascism fell away as its excuse for condoning its repressions and failures.

By the late 1960s and early '70s, some of Warshow's liberals were ready to mock their former subservience. In the American Scholar, Lionel Abel, another of the New York intellectuals, described their voluntary submission to Leftist thought control:
One must in no case do anything that might be harmful to the Left. What if the projected action seems a good one? Then one must be all the more careful. One must consider every possible consequence, even the most remote. Many actions that at first might seem beneficent when looked at more closely turned out to involve a possible damage to the Left. What Left? Which Left? Never mind. And do not ask. Indeed there is need not to ask, for the very fact that we don't know what the Left is today means that whatever it be, its situation is precarious.

When Irving Kristol, speaking for that generation, defined the neo-conservative as a liberal who was mugged by reality, that "reality" took the form of the anti-Zionist Left.

This is just to say that there have been earlier important wake-up calls in the American history of Jews and the Left, and the excommunication of "the Right" was used to keep them in line. That Jews among other Americans do not know this history makes it so much sweeter to keep pulling that football out from under them.

Ungar-Sargon's warning comes after the red diaper babies of the 1960s had metastasized into legions of progressives and merged with Islamists, fueled by more overseas funders, hackers, and influencers than the old communists ever dreamed of. Her explanation for the relation of Jews and the Left is partial at best, but her warning may still be timely. She insists that Jews under assault have to lead the way in speaking the truth: "To hate Jews is to hate America. We are an inextricable part of this nation." This is a fight that all Americans must win.

Why are British MPs so insanely obsessed with Israel?

I can only imagine how bizarre it must be for the people of North Herefordshire, who thought they were electing a Green MP to talk about nature reserves and pollution, to hear Ellie Chowns mention Israel and Gaza a combined 50 times and North Herefordshire just 37 times. Astonishingly, she has mentioned Israeli settlements in the West Bank more times than the pollution of the River Wye – a key local issue that she promised to make her top priority if elected.

The frequency with which these MPs have used their platforms in the Commons to pontificate Israel has been dizzying – and their use of parliamentary procedure has been shameless. In just the past few weeks, there has been a backbench business debate on trade with Israeli settlements and a Westminster Hall debate about Israeli influence on British politics.

In the Westminster Hall debate, we had the extraordinary sight of multiple MPs who have been on Qatari-funded trips to Qatar complain about other MPs going on trips to Israel, even though these were funded by British donors to British organisations, such as through Conservative Friends of Israel or Labour Friends of Israel.

To be clear, it is entirely justifiable for parliamentarians to go on state-funded trips, provided they are declared and the MPs go with open eyes. But as John Lamont noted in his brave and powerful contribution to that debate, those MPs were not calling for a review of lobbying regulations or foreign-sponsored trips. They were singling out one country. I will happily leave it to the reader to guess why they were so eager to single out this particular country.

Fortunately, there are many brave MPs who have stood up to all this in parliament. But the fight is extraordinarily one-sided. For even the most ardently pro-Israel MPs, this issue will just be one of many they care about. For some, their motivation for speaking out may be more driven by their principled belief that some balance is needed, rather than from a deeply held, organic desire to talk about Israel. Contrast this with the multiple MPs on the other side, for whom this is what they got into politics for and what gets them out of bed every morning. It’s the same on Britain’s streets. While many view the anti-Israel hate marches with contempt and horror, a small, angry and laser-focussed minority have been able to dominate public discourse.

Needless to say, none of this actually contributes to improving the situation for ordinary Palestinians, or for anyone else in the Middle East. As Hamish Falconer, the Middle East minister, admitted, ‘An inevitable consequence of the actions announced from this despatch box is that the warmth of my relationship with my counterparts in Israel has indeed suffered’. Combined with the UK’s unconditional recognition of a Palestinian state, we have thrown away any leverage we had with the Israeli government and much of the influence we had over the Palestinian Authority. And we have done this merely to indulge a mob who do little more than make this a nastier, unfriendlier country for our small Jewish community – and indeed the rest of us.

Report: Israel suspects foul play after third Israir plane damaged at Luton Airport in under a year

Israeli aviation officials suspect foul play in an incident at London Luton Airport last week, when an Israir plane was damaged by the aircraft tug while it was being towed ahead of takeoff, Channel 12 reports.

According to the report, Israel suspects the damage was caused maliciously, with “nationalistic” intent, and is in contact with the relevant authorities in England to determine whether that is indeed the case.

Israir previously said it was the third instance of its planes being damaged at the London airport within less than a year, further increasing suspicion that it was not accidental.

The incident on Thursday evening left approximately 300 people waiting aboard the Israir plane as it sat on the tarmac for several hours.

The passengers had no air conditioning for part of the time, leading to “some medical incidents,” a passenger recounted after.

Israir blamed Luton for the three instances of damage, saying that “to our knowledge, no orderly investigation has been carried out by the airport’s management into these incidents.”

'Favorite Jewish uncle' and the limits of learning from Nazism

Few US Senate primaries this year carry greater implications for the Democratic Party's future than Michigan's August 4 contest. One of the race's leading candidates is Abdul El-Sayed, whose positions and endorsements place him squarely within the antizionist movement.

To many Americans, the fact that El-Sayed has affectionately referred to Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders as his "favorite Jewish uncle" would seem to settle any suggestion that his antizionism reflects anti-Jewish bigotry. El-Sayed plainly does not dislike Jews categorically. He admires one of the country's most prominent Jewish politicians and embraces him in explicitly Jewish terms.

That apparent exoneration reveals something important about how modern Western societies learned to recognize the villainization of Jews.

Since World War II, Nazism – which targeted all Jews for elimination – has been the West's definitive prototype of anti-Jewish bigotry. Measured against that prototype, an ideology that welcomes and even elevates Jews who share its own views appears disqualified from being anti-Jewish. Sanders's place in El-Sayed's political and personal imagination, therefore, appears to vindicate El-Sayed against any charge of villainizing Jews.

The prototype underlying that conclusion, however, was built on a fundamental mistake: treating anti-Jewish bigotry as inherently premodern.

The West traced a symbolic archive of images and accusations against "the Jew" back to centuries of religious hostility. Yet those origins tell us where the archive developed, not what the phenomenon essentially is.

Religion supplied the historical setting in which that archive accumulated around the Jew as the figure rejecting a supposed redemptive truth, but the Jew's role was portable. Once religious power gave way to modern secular forces, those forces inherited the archive, stripped it of God, and reconstructed it in the languages of race, psychology, and metaphysics.

But the West came to interpret anti-Jewish bigotry differently – as an ancient pathology that modernity had not yet eliminated. It therefore viewed Nazism as that pathology's definitive culmination, rather than as one modern form of anti-Jewish bigotry among others. Instead of remaining vigilant for other distinctly modern forms, the West built its postwar moral architecture around preventing Nazism's return.

After Auschwitz, Western societies rightly became extraordinarily sensitive to fascism, racial hierarchy, and explicit Jew-hatred. But the postwar order did not stop at recognizing Nazism's characteristics as dangerous. It went further and conferred moral authority on their perceived opposites. Anti-racism. Universalism. Internationalism. Nazism's traits became the map of evil, and the inverse of that map became the territory of good.

That framework overlooked a fundamental feature of anti-Jewish bigotry: it has never belonged to a single political ideology. Jews can be blamed for capitalism by one movement and communism by another, for racial inferiority in one context and racial supremacy in another, for refusing assimilation and for dissolving the nation, sometimes by the same accuser in the same decade.

Postwar Western culture trained itself to recognize the villainization of Jews primarily through Nazism's particular characteristics rather than through the role assigned to the Jew. In doing so, it sensitized itself to ideological form rather than symbolic function.

The consequence was that another modern anti-Jewish ideology could assume the shape of anti-Nazism – thereby not only avoiding being identified as anti-Jewish bigotry, but also acquiring moral authority within the postwar order.

That is exactly what antizionism did. Propagated by the Soviet Union and its Arab nationalist allies, antizionism reconstructed Zionism and Israel as enemies of humanity through a set of distinctly modern libels. Drawing on Nazi imagery and Holocaust inversion, it recast Jews as the new Nazis, perpetrators of the very evils – racism, colonialism, apartheid, and genocide – around whose rejection the postwar moral order was being built.

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Here's a new one: coding Jews as "deer" in a town council meeting

NJ.com reports that an antisemite spoke at a Ocean Township meeting, ostensibly complaining about deer, which was really meant as an antisemitic screed, using "deer" as a dog whistle for Jews.

Ocean Mayor John Napolitani said George used references to the township’s deer population as a metaphor for Jewish people, prompting the mayor to have him removed from a July 9 meeting.

The dispute stems from a meeting George attended in June, when the activist — who describes himself on social media as a Christian, public speaker and anti-Zionist — urged the township to curtail herds of deer he described as “out of control.”

In his statement, George suggested the township could move the deer to “Ocean County or upstate New York.”

“It’s impossible to distinguish one deer from another,” George said. “You can try to be friendly with them, but they’re extremely skittish.”

At the meeting, Napolitani and other officials said they would consider ways to address George’s claims, treating his comments as a genuine concern about wildlife.

Napolitani said after the meeting, he and his colleagues learned George’s references to deer were intended as a metaphor for Jewish people.

The speaker is Jeff George, who calls himself "JerseyGoy" online.

His Instagram and TikTok is filled with antisemitic garbage - often "anti-Zionist" as well. 

He has over 30,000 followers on Instagram.

George has spouted much more explicit antisemitic screeds to other local councils. In March he told the Long Branch council that the Jews "control the military industrial complex, the news media, the music industry, Hollywood, big tech, big pharma, and all the big banks and banks around the world. They control the ultraprocessed food industry, specifically designed to make us all sick. They own and control all the smut and filth used to subvert Christian society. They were responsible for both world wars. They were responsible for the attacks on 9/11. They were responsible for the COVID pandemic and the poisonous injection that they falsely labeled a vaccine. They were responsible for Jeffrey Epstein and the child sex ringing operation that was used to control US politicians, celebrities, and billionaires through blackmail. And it is more than apparent that international organized Jewry controls our Congress, our president, this council, this mayor, and the mayor's corrupt brother, Congressman Frank Pallone. Whether it be through blackmail or bribery, I cannot be certain, but it is obvious you people have been compromised. Your allegiance is to a foreign nation and not to America. "

Local council meetings have become a hotbed for antisemitism, introduced by anti-Israel speeches nationwide and now the right-wing antisemites are getting on the bandwagon. 

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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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07/18 Links: Is Israel Actually More Isolated Than Ever?; How Trump Can Avoid the Vietnam Trap; What Ro Khanna, Tucker Carlson, and Rahm Emanuel have in common

From Ian:

Richard Goldberg: Is Israel Actually More Isolated Than Ever?

Why do conservatives break against Emanuel’s claim of Israel being isolated?

Many of these conservative leaders have a lived experience under pro-Islamist, Marxist rule, which informs a world outlook that embraces a technologically innovative, culturally vibrant, and terrorist-fighting democracy like Israel. These leaders see Israel for what it is: a strategic asset. And when they come to power, strengthening bilateral relations with Israel is a Day 1 action item.

Here in the United States, support for Israel is an investment in helping secure another American century – one defined by winning the AI arms race, unlocking quantum computing, controlling the periodic table and mastering advanced energy solutions.

That Israel is a democracy with shared Judeo-Christian values whose fight against terrorism and unmatched intelligence service saves countless American lives remains true – but that is only the foundation of the relationship. The future primes more. Israel is a technological juggernaut that can help us preserve another American century is tomorrow’s promise. It is why, as America’s National Defense Strategy notes, Israel is a model ally.

It’s also why Israel’s position within non-traditional multilateral frameworks continues to strengthen. The Abraham Accords have expanded to include Kazakhstan, a Muslim-majority country. Turkey’s rise alongside U.S.-brokered peace between Armenia and Azerbaijan is bringing Yerevan and Baku closer to Israel. Greece and Cyprus are doubling down on their Eastern Mediterranean strategic partnership with Israel, too.

It might be a surprise for people to learn that Venezuela – just a few months ago the headquarters for Iran in the Western Hemisphere with no relations with Israel for a generation – welcomed Israeli aid into Caracas after last month’s devastating earthquake.

So, when Rahm Emanuel declares Israel more isolated than ever, why is it that we instinctively nod our heads and think it’s true? There are indeed alternate universes where it certainly feels true: the dystopian United Nations; the cadre of click-bait podcasters feeding a Marxist-Islamist-Nazi medley of talking points to young people with no living attachment to World War II and no memory of September 11; and the media coverage of Emanuel’s own party, which now openly embraces communists, terrorist sympathizers, and people with Nazi tattoos.

The socialist ascendancy within the Democratic Party is a very real phenomenon that threatens American support for Israel. An Islamist ascendancy in Western Europe is very real, too, with negative effects on relations with a Jewish state.

But from the Western Hemisphere to Europe to the Middle East to India, Israel is not as isolated as you think.

How Trump Can Avoid the Vietnam Trap

So far, this stage of the conflict with Iran has not gone as Trump had hoped. As he told Fox News, at the beginning of the year he thought regime change was possible. Much of the senior Iranian leadership died in the early stages of the air campaign, but the regime survived their passing. The blockade and continued bombardment inflicted significant damage to the Iranian economy and military, but Iran's closure of the Strait roiled global oil markets. Trump eventually settled for a lopsided MOU.

Thankfully, the setback with Iran is nowhere near as costly as in Vietnam. Fifty-thousand Americans lost their lives in Southeast Asia due to hostile action, whereas the number of American casualties in this conflict is far lower. This stage of the conflict with Iran has only gone on months, rather than years of ground fighting in Vietnam, and the effects of the war on the public have been much less grave.

But another defeat would nonetheless damage the country and Trump's presidency. Americans do not like to give important concessions to a weaker foe, especially one that is obviously bent on our destruction.

The Iranians appear to have determined that they have more to gain by reigniting the war than by continuing to negotiate. They are trying to block the Strait again and relaunching attacks on the Gulf Arabs and U.S. bases in the region. The Houthis in Yemen are also threatening to disrupt shipping in the Red Sea, the other route Saudi oil can take to reach Asia.

Trump has decided "the only way you can negotiate with these people is through strength." He described a series of increasingly painful strikes on Iranian infrastructure that will occur "unless they get to the table and negotiate." Those strikes are now underway, and the U.S. military is once again blockading Iran.

The Trump coalition will be demoralized if this new round of fighting keeps the price of oil high enough to hurt Republicans in the midterms and results in even worse terms than the MOU. But Iran can only take so much damage before its economy collapses and the mullahs face severe internal threats to their rule.

Trump can accelerate that process. Rather than bombing the Iranians into accepting American concessions, he should bomb them into offering new ones of their own.

Lee Smith: JD Vance’s Big Crashout

Blaming Jews for his failure is also evidence of a more organic problem with Vance: namely, his character. It’s a bad sign when elected officials evade responsibility for their own mistakes when the point of the job is to take on responsibility for the well-being of others—in his case, 350 million others.

NFL coaches and players typically spend Mondays reviewing footage of the weekend’s game to ensure they don’t make the same mistakes next Sunday. The VP should watch the game reel: What did you, JD, get wrong about the MOU? Well, maybe I shouldn’t have laid into all the Trump supporters who criticized my Iran deal, and probably I should have kept my validators from threatening American Jews by saying that if they didn’t like my moderate stance on Israel, wait till they got a dose of “real antisemitism.”

Then there’s my choice of outside mediators, like Asim Munir, the Pakistani field marshal. I talk a lot about how our interests diverge from Israel’s, but the same military Munir leads hid Osama bin Laden for five years. Maybe Pakistan’s interests don’t always sync with America’s? Was I wrong to take policy guidance from Trita Parsi, the Iranian-born think-tank expert whose work, said a U.S. district court judge, was “not inconsistent with the idea that he was first and foremost an advocate for the regime”? Maybe the whole idea of trying to make a deal with Iran was wrongheaded. After all, the people who most vocally supported my efforts had worked for Barack Obama and Joe Biden, and those guys have been trying to put the boss in jail for a decade.

Vance blames others for his blunders because that’s the emotional content of his 2028 presidential campaign: grievance and self-pity. He has to keep performing it for the young middle-class white men he hopes to attract, based on the theory that America has been waiting for a political movement for white kids who believe the country betrayed them because they had to settle for their safety school. In truth, it’s going to be hard to convince enough of the young white men at, for instance, Ole Miss—where Vance famously boasted that “this president isn’t controlled by Israel”—that they have it worse off than their fathers and grandfathers when they’re at a famous school with an SEC football team and a 97% acceptance rate where three-quarters of the student body is white and most of them are girls, which gives the boys a big and eager dating pool.

Shouldn’t someone tell Vance that privileged grievance is a losing message and that to win the imaginations of young white guys, he should draw from his biography? Hey, fellas, time to bear down, as I did. Go to school, work hard, there are lots of fantastic opportunities out there for smart, ambitious guys, especially now with the rise of artificial intelligence. It truly is a brave, new world! Don’t be a resentful loser. Respect women, meet a nice girl, start a family. And don’t smoke dope. My first book is about what substance abuse does to families. That’s why I won’t go on Rogan anymore—he’s a good guy, but a pothead. I don’t want any of you guys thinking he’s a role model, so I’m not going back on that show until he dumps his bong.

In the end, of course, all this is on the president. He can sideline Vance, who has been undermining him from day one on Iran and other matters, but he hasn’t. The fact is that it’s not just Trump’s problem but also a problem for 77 million other Americans who went out to the polls for him, and now time is running out. If he can’t get the job done, which includes disciplining his number two, odds are ever increasing that in two and a half years, millions of illegal aliens will be gathered at our southern border, waiting for the next far-left Democrat to be sworn in.

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07/17 Links Pt2: It is not ‘Islamophobic’ to stand up for Jews and Western civilisation; The DSA Is a Trojan Horse the Democratic Party Must Drive Out; Debating Peter Beinart on the Right of Return and Other Matters

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: Scapegoating the Jews

The ugly reality of a Democratic Party that’s now dancing to an anti-American, anti-Israel, pro-Islamist tune was on display this week with another visitor to Israel, the possible 2028 presidential candidate Rep. Ro Khanna of California.

In an outrageous PR stunt cooked up with radical Israeli anti-government activists, Khanna made an unauthorized visit to a sensitive area of the “West Bank,” where he claimed to have been detained, harassed and even threatened by Israeli security forces who sided with violent settlers.

As video footage subsequently revealed, there was no violence and no harassment. It was a stunt designed to further the agenda of turning Israel into a pariah state—a situation that Emanuel blames on Netanyahu but which has actually been created by a poisonous narrative of lies to which both Emanuel and Vance have contributed.

This unconscionable onslaught is now the driver of politics on the Wwestern left and in parts of the American right.

In Britain, Andy Burnham, who next week will become prime minister after a bloodless coup in the governing Labour Party, made a point of threatening further punishment of Israel over Gaza as his first statement on foreign affairs.

This week, he went one stage further. Having refused to spell out to the British public his intentions for government, Burnham gave an interview to podcaster and former sports broadcaster Gary Lineker, who left the BBC after sharing a post about Zionism that depicted a rat—a Nazi image for Jews. When Lineker referred to the “genocide” in Gaza, Burnham conspicuously failed to challenge him.

For Britain’s incoming prime minister to use such an anti-Jewish dog-whistle—and as a priority—is an ominous signal indeed.

The surreal prominence of the Israel issue in domestic politics is due to a poisonous cocktail of factors, including Islamist influence, the dominance of the intersectional left and the West’s loss of its own cultural bearings, including the notion of objective truth.

What’s becoming ever more apparent, however, is that political leaders are scapegoating Israel because things are going wrong for them, both at home and abroad, and they cannot understand why. Refusing to acknowledge what they’re up against, they blame the Jews.

Israel, America’s indispensable ally, is now making plans to develop its own independent weapons supplies and nurture other alliances against the danger of a possibly hostile future U.S. administration.

Emanuel came to Israel to lecture it that it was in danger of losing America. In fact, with the iron having entered the soul of the Jewish state as a result of Oct. 7, America is in danger of losing Israel.

Brendan O'Neill: It is not ‘Islamophobic’ to stand up for Jews and Western civilisation

The whole report is crazy. It analyses 3,733 Speccie articles about Islam and related issues. It found that 57.4 per cent of them were ‘biased’ or ‘very biased’. Bear in mind that this includes me calling Hamas cunts. It mauls Spectator writers for ‘delegitimising the idea of Islamophobia’ (guilty as charged), for using the phrase ‘Islamic terrorism’, and for obsessing over ‘so-called “grooming gangs”’. Keep up – they’re called rape gangs now, given the reams of evidence we have that these gangs of mostly Pakistani men raped hundreds of white working-class girls. Seems it’s not only ‘anti-Muslim hostility’ to be outraged by the mobbing of an Israeli woman but also by the subjugation of English women.

The report wangs on about me, Douglas Murray, Julie Burchill, Gavin Mortimer, Rod Liddle – fine company! Burchill – who’s also a spiked columnist – rattles the pious pricks because she ‘defends the right to make jokes about Islam’. Call the ayatollah! ‘We’re always told that making jokes about Islam is “punching down”’, she wrote in March 2023. ‘But tell a migrant worker-slave in Qatar or a gay man in Dubai or a spirited woman in Iran that the world’s wealthiest and fastest growing religion is powerless.’ The CfMM’s fun-sponge scribes accuse her of ‘invoking human-rights abuses’ in ‘three separate state contexts’ and ‘attribut[ing] them collectively to Islam as a unified religious force’, which has the effect of reinforcing a moral ‘asymmetry’ that is… oh, I can’t go on. The humourlessness is asphyxiating. Guys, someone disagrees with you. It’s fine. You’re going to give yourselves a hernia.

It’s so telling which articles of mine get on their wick. I’m criticised for saying there has been an ‘orgy of anti-Semitism’ in the West since 7 October. I’m slammed for saying the keffiyeh classes are motored less by ‘concern for Muslim life’ than by ‘contempt for Israel’. I’m accused of using the word ‘Islamist’ in a ‘broad, undefined’ way. O’Neill is too vague in his piece on ‘what he calls the “Jew hunt of Amsterdam in 2024”’, the report says. Erm, it wasn’t me who called it a ‘Jew hunt’ – it was the anti-Semitic mob itself, which expressly hit the streets in order to ‘hunt’ the ‘cancer Jews’ who had travelled to watch Maccabi Tel Aviv.

And of course I’m told off for my pieces on the rape gangs. Especially a 2017 piece in which I commented on the ‘palpable reluctance’ of the state and polite society to ‘confront the particular problem of some Muslim men’s disdain for white working-class girls’. Apparently that’s Islamophobic. It isn’t. I stand by every word. The safety of working-class girls matters to me infinitely more than your feelings.

There’s a side-splitting irony in this bonkers report. It quotes a phrase of mine from a Spectator piece I wrote 11 years ago. It quotes it three times, including in the foreword, which is written by Peter Oborne. That phrase is ‘dainty sensibilities’ – I was criticising the cloying offence-taking of the professional misery guts who stink up our activist classes. How dare you say we are exhibiting ‘dainty sensibilities’, asks this 146-page report about the mean media and its mean words. You couldn’t make it up. But the CfMM is right about one thing: I am making a ‘civilisational judgement’. I judge that Hamas is morally inferior to Israel, that Islamism is morally inferior to secularism, and that shitting your pants when you read something you don’t like is morally inferior to just laughing it off. And everyone is welcome on my civilisational side: Christians, Jews, Muslims, ex-Muslims, non-believers, everyone. Because we don’t discriminate against people, only against ideas.

The DSA Is a Trojan Horse the Democratic Party Must Drive Out

Nowhere is the DSA’s radicalism more dangerous than in its commitment to anti-Zionism. For the DSA, opposition to Israel’s existence is not a secondary foreign-policy debate; it is a litmus test anchored in its governing text.

Analysts note that the DSA functions as a strict ideological enforcement mechanism: any candidate or member who deviates from its anti-Zionist platform or affirms Israel’s right to exist faces swift expulsion or denial of endorsement. Its platform explicitly names Jerusalem as the capital of a Palestinian state, hardcoding anti-Zionism as a fundamental tenet.

This hostility is a proxy for animus toward Western civilization and American global leadership. By aligning with hostile anti-Western regimes under the banner of “anti-imperialism,” DSA drags mainstream politics into a dark arena.

This dynamic is bigger than any one candidate. New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani built an agenda that strips antisemitism protections from Jews unless they renounce their connection to Israel, while Kiros pledged to end all military assistance.

For the Jewish community, the danger is immediate: the DSA’s rise is tied to an effort to strip antisemitism protections from Jews unless they renounce their connection to the Jewish state.

The Trojan Horse and the “Dirty Break
The DSA’s core deception is presenting itself as part of the Democratic Party while advancing ideas at odds with the party’s values. It does not see itself as a wing of the party; it sees the party as a host organism to be drained and discarded. As documented by political journals like City & State New York, today’s DSA organizers are explicitly executing what they call the “dirty break.” They use the Democratic Party’s ballot access, volunteers, and credibility as tools of convenience while building an independent Marxist-aligned infrastructure designed to break away and destroy the party from within.

The organization’s youth wing formalized this as an official strategy in a 2022 convention resolution. Even former DNC Chairman Jaime Harrison put it bluntly to DSA candidates: if you don’t support the party, don’t use its ballot line, volunteers, or resources to get elected.

Political reporting confirms this “party surrogate” or “party-within-a-party” model. Through structures like the “Socialists in Office” committee, elected DSA officials are bound to caucus weekly, coordinate legislative action, and vote as a unified socialist bloc answering to an external organization rather than the Democratic Party or their broader constituency.

Time to Purge the Poison
For years, the Democratic establishment has responded to this insurgency with quiet accommodation, fearful of alienating a vocal activist base. Every act of appeasement has only legitimized a group working toward the party’s dissolution. The victories in New York and Colorado prove that the time for polite disagreement has passed.

I have spent years arguing that antisemitism is never only about Jews – it is a leading indicator of a society’s broader institutional and moral health. The DSA’s rise fits that pattern. Hatred of Jews has historically been the ideology radical movements borrow when they need a common enemy to attack the liberal establishment.

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07/17 Links Pt1: Sa’ar: Radical left, terror groups form ‘operational alliance’; Ro Khanna uses Jewish lives as fodder for presidential ambitions; IDF kills Oct. 7 infiltrator, Hamas platoon commander in Gaza

From Ian:

Jonathan Tobin: Vance is the variable in the partisan divide on Israel

America’s two major political parties were given an opportunity this week to show where they stood on the alliance with Israel and gave the nation a clear answer to the question. In a vote on a proposal put forward by Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) to cut all military aid to the Jewish state, the partisan split was stark.

Massie, who was defeated in a GOP primary earlier this year, was the sole Republican to back the idea of ending support for Israel, with every other one of the 215 members of the caucus opposing it. A majority of House Democrats joined him in voting for the proposal. In all, 103 Democrats voted in favor of it, with 98 opposing and 10 others voting “present.”

A stark partisan divide
The vote made it clear that national polls revealing the decline in backing for Israel—largely driven by partisanship—are reflected in Congress. At a time when antisemitic blood libels about Israel committing “genocide” in Gaza or being an “apartheid” state have been mainstreamed by liberal publications like The New York Times and routinely endorsed by many Democrats, the overwhelming majority of Republicans reject these lies and still support Israel. There are now votes on record in both the House and the Senate that show the majority of Democrats support ending the alliance with the Jewish state, while, other than outliers like Massie, all Republicans oppose the idea. It means there is no avoiding the conclusion that the Democrats are on their way to becoming the anti-Israel party, if that hasn’t happened already.

Due to retirements and primary results, the number of anti-Israel Democrats will be far larger in the next Congress. That leaves the GOP, which will be rid of Massie next January, in a position to claim that anyone who cares about Israel ought to be looking at them as their only viable political home.

Yet there is one reason for holding off on describing the debate about Israel and antisemitism as one in which partisanship is the key indicator. And his name is Vice President JD Vance.

While House Republicans were holding the line against the tide of anti-Israel sentiment sweeping the country, Vance went on the most-listened-to podcast this week and made it clear that he is not to be counted among those who share that position.

In a three-hour interview on the “Joe Rogan Experience” that spent as much time discussing the July Fourth White House UFC extravaganza and the fact that one of the fighters there called former first lady Michelle Obama a “man” as it did policy questions, the vice president nevertheless demonstrated that he was not among those who value the alliance with Israel. To the contrary, he was eager to blame Israel, its government and its American friends for the fact that his excursion into foreign policy with a Memorandum of Understanding with Iran has become a fiasco.

Vance nods to the ‘groypers’
Given a chance to demonstrate his mettle as a negotiator in what appeared to be a new version of President Donald Trump’s “The Apprentice” reality show, Vance’s performance bore comparisons to his predecessors in the Obama and Biden administrations. He not only stubbornly defended the ludicrous notion that the Islamist terrorists running Iran could be enticed to rejoin the civilized world by means of Western bribery and diplomacy, but scapegoated the Israelis and the pro-Israel community for his failure.

In a clear pitch to what might be considered the “groyper” antisemitic wing of the American political right, he said: “I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that there have been people within the Israeli government who are trying to, like, actually shift us away from [negotiations] because they want to continue the military campaign.”

He acknowledged the downward trend in support for Israel in the United States. But then, as veteran conservative commentator Rod Dreher noted in The Free Press, Vance’s position “sounds like scapegoating; a contemporary version of the ‘stab in the back legend’ (Dolchstosslegende) that German generals conceived and spread in 1918 to blame Jews and socialists for Germany’s World War I defeat and their own leadership failures.”

Vance rightly rejected the ridiculous charge that it was Israel’s fault that Trump chose to pursue a longtime U.S. foreign-policy goal by attacking Iran to prevent it from gaining nuclear weapons and spreading terror. And yet he still cited stories about efforts by Israelis and supporters of Israel to influence public opinion in the United States as evidence that this is undermining the administration. He considers criticism of his Obama-like appeasement of Iran to be somehow wrong, while not acknowledging that frenemy nations like Qatar spend exponentially more to spread support for Islamist ideas and hate for Israel in America than Israel’s backers.

It was a dismal performance by the vice president, whose record when it comes to standing against the post-Oct. 7 surge of antisemitism has been, at best, equivocal. While he is on record for opposing Jew-hatred, his public statements have shown him as unwilling to confront or oppose antisemites as Democratic leaders such as former Vice President Kamala Harris.

Tom Barrack promotes Middle East trade alignment cutting out Israel

U.S. Ambassador to Turkey Tom Barrack on Friday promoted a new regional trade and security alignment in the Middle East centered around Iraq, Turkey and neighboring Arab states, appearing to sideline a similar regional project including Israel.

Speaking at the U.S.-Iraq Business Summit, Barrack told attendees that Iraqi Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi, who visited with President Donald Trump at the White House this week, is considering a transformative agreement “that will make the Strait of Hormuz” — which has been effectively shut down due to the Iran war and continued hostilities — an “afterthought in two years” by shifting trade that usually passes through the waterway to overland routes.

“What this young leader [al-Zaidi] has in mind — aligned with Syria, Jordan, Turkey, Lebanon, Egypt — is a program that will make the Strait of Hormuz an afterthought in two years,” Barrack said. “We’re going from just-in-time delivery on boats through these minor straits to just-in-case delivery going the other way.”

The proposal appears to serve as an alternative framework to the stalled India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC), which has faced roadblocks following regional turmoil and the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terror attacks. While the original IMEC agreement included Israel as a vital transit point connecting India to Europe via the UAE and Saudi Arabia, the newly envisioned corridor relies instead on a coalition featuring Syria, Lebanon and Jordan.

The State Department also released a statement on Friday welcoming the announcement of cooperation between Iraq and Syria on the “rehabilitation and reconstruction of the Iraq-Syria crude oil pipeline as a priority infrastructure project of bilateral and regional strategic significance.”

“We feel the chaos on one side, but actually, what’s happened is a brilliant realignment of security and strategic alliances in the region,” Barrack said in his remarks, with “Iraq being at the forefront of a new strategic security alliance.”

Bruce Pearl: Ro Khanna uses Jewish lives as fodder for presidential ambitions

California Congressman Ro Khanna announced last weekend that “Israeli settlers, brandishing American made M4s, detained me & other Americans on my trip to Palestine. When the IDF arrived, they sided with the settlers & continued our detention.”

Khanna was trying to turn 90 minutes on an Israeli road into political capital, asking supporters to imagine what Palestinians endure every day if even a member of Congress could be treated this way.

Powerful politics. But an incomplete story.

Khanna’s office says his trip to Israel was financed with campaign funds. Before it began, his staff reportedly told the Israeli Embassy it would be a private visit, with no official meetings.

According to a source involved in the planning, Israel nevertheless offered meetings with survivors of the Oct. 7 terror attack and others affected by the conflict.

Those offers, the source said, were declined.

Apparently, Khanna’s delegation was more interested in reinforcing a conclusion about the Jewish state than testing one.

I’ve assisted in taking members of Congress through Judea and Samaria (West Bank) with the US-Israel Education Association. Serious congressional delegations coordinate these visits carefully.

When we visit predominantly Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria, we travel with Jewish guides and buses marked with Hebrew lettering. When the itinerary includes lands with mostly Palestinian Arab populations, we switch to Arab guides and buses clearly marked in Arabic.

For Khanna’s delegation to move through an Israeli-populated area relying on a single Palestinian Arab activist as a guide was an invitation to exactly the kind of confrontation that followed.

Not because of “Israeli apartheid.” Because of Israeli funerals.

During the Second Intifada, Palestinian suicide bombers turned Israeli buses, cafés and family restaurants into terrorist targets. Israel’s security architecture was built in response to that harrowing reality.

To debate the checkpoints without recalling what produced them is to explain the lock while forgetting the burglar.

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Adam Smith seems to have caved to anti-Israel pressure - and calls it principled

Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.) explained his vote this week to support Massie Amendment #8, cutting $3.3 billion in military assistance to Israel. His reasoning is where it gets interesting.

He opens as a genuine supporter of Israel — not the coded kind. "I am a supporter of Israel, and I recognize they are under profound existential threat. We should not forget October 7th or the reality that Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran want to eliminate Israel." He names, without euphemism, what's been done to him for holding that view: his home vandalized, a fire set in his driveway, his neighbors' nights disrupted by demonstrations, his town halls shut down, a staff member physically assaulted. He calls this "a dangerous form of corrosive politics that seeks to intimidate those who disagree." 

Then, in the next paragraph, he votes to cut the aid anyway, framing it as "my effort" to "get the attention of the Netanyahu government to force them to change their actions" — as though the vote were his own independent judgment rather a response to the arson and harassment.

Let's pretend that the intimidation campaign did not sway him and take him at his word. Smith's theory is that cutting aid will push Netanyahu to change course — specifically, it seems, to rein in or remove Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir, the ministers Smith names that "appalled" him. But Smotrich and Ben Gvir aren't obstacles standing between Netanyahu and a policy he'd otherwise prefer. They're the coalition. Netanyahu's government exists because their parties are in it; without them, there's no majority and no government. Weakening Netanyahu doesn't give him more room to break with his coalition partners, it gives him less — a prime minister facing external pressure can survive it by holding his coalition together even tighter, and cannot survive it by shedding the votes that keep him in office. A vote meant to pressure Netanyahu into abandoning Smotrich and Ben Gvir is a vote for the one outcome that vote cannot produce.

If his stated reasons make no sense in real life, it suggests the theory was constructed after the vote, not before it. Smith doesn't explain, because there's no available explanation, how cutting American military assistance forces a change in Israeli cabinet composition rather than simply making the current one more entrenched. What he does offer, clearly and in his own words, is an account of two years of frustration and, immediately preceding the vote, a documented campaign of vandalism, arson, and assault against him and his staff. The more parsimonious reading of the statement isn't that Smith found a clever lever. It's that he capitulated to the pressure and then wrote himself a policy rationale to stand in front of it.

That rationale leans on a distinction that's become the standard exit for Democrats in this position — "I don't oppose Israel, I oppose Netanyahu" — and a piece published the same day supplies the test for when that distinction is actually honest. Daniel Pomerantz's framing is simple and hard to argue with: "Imagine saying, 'I don't oppose America, I just oppose FDR for fighting Hitler.'" Fighting Hitler wasn't an idiosyncratic FDR preference other Americans might reasonably have opposed on the merits — it was the thing nearly the entire country wanted, which means opposing it wasn't opposition to one president's judgment call, it was opposition to America's actual position. The test he proposes is whether the specific policy under attack is something genuinely contested inside Israeli politics, in which case criticizing "Netanyahu" over it is honest, or whether it's something with real Israeli consensus behind it, in which case the Netanyahu framing is doing cover work for a broader objection.

Military assistance used against Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran fails that test cleanly. It isn't a Netanyahu idiosyncrasy Israelis are internally split over judicial reform, Haredi enlistment, or his personal culpability for October 7th's failures. It's close to the one thing nearly all Israelis, across the political map, actually agree on: that the threats named in Smith's own opening sentence are real and have to be met. A vote to cut the funding used to meet them isn't a vote against Netanyahu's discretionary choices. By Smith's own stated premise about the threat, it's a vote against the position Israel holds as something close to a whole country, dressed in language aimed at one man because that's the version of the vote that's easier to defend to constituents and easier, perhaps, to live with.

None of this requires assuming Smith is lying about his frustrations with the current Israeli government, which read as genuine and are shared by plenty of Israelis themselves. It requires only noticing that the vote he took doesn't reach the target he named, reaches instead a policy nearly the whole country supports, and followed months of arson and assault rather than preceding them. A statement that opens by naming intimidation as dangerous and corrosive, and closes by doing what the intimidation demanded, isn't an account of independent judgment. It's a record of what the pressure achieved, written in the voice of someone who would rather not describe it that way.

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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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07/16 Links Pt2: Australian antisemitism 'passed point of no return; How Amnesty International lost its way; Jew hatred is back in the pulpit at the Church of England

From Ian:

Australian antisemitism 'passed point of no return,' Jewish leader tells 'Post' after emigrating

Australian antisemitism “has passed the point of no return,” former president of the Australian Jewish Association, Dr. David Adler, told The Jerusalem Post on Thursday. Adler recently relocated to Israel, citing the surge in antisemitism in Australia.

While the family only arrived on July 9, Adler told the Post that aliyah has been in “preparation for a long, long period of time.”

“We’ve seen a general deterioration in Australia for a long time,” he told the Post. “Australia has essentially outsourced its manufacturing. Its defense capacity is down. National identity is being lost. Education standards are down. There is a crazy socialist activism, left-wing activism. Those things have been building gradually. But no doubt October 7 unleashed a level of antisemitism and anti-Israel extremism that I didn’t think could occur in Australia.”

“On October 8, there were some leaders of the Muslim community and some Muslim groups in Australia celebrating on the streets. On October 9, we had the riots in front of the Opera House.”

What Adler found the most shocking was that the authorities “failed to act” after these incidents.

Australia passed point of no return, 'all downhill'
“There was not a single arrest from the riots at the Opera House, despite a number of laws being broken. And that area, I know from security experts, is covered by high-definition CCTV. However, the authorities chose not to act and instead warned the Jewish community not to go there,” he explained.

Since then, Adler said it’s “been all downhill.” He said he has lost track of the number of threats made against him, including death threats.

This led him to arrive at the viewpoint that the trends in Australia “have passed the point of no return.”

“The tipping point has been reached and passed. And even though there’s a Royal Commission running at the moment, and it’s doing a good job in exposing some of the accounts and evidence of antisemitism, I do not have confidence in efficient action being taken to deal with it.”

Adler told the Post that anti-Jewish violence is predominantly coming from Islamic extremism, but that “Australia has taken nowhere near enough action” to combat this. “It should do things like expel the hate preachers, deport the hate preachers, close down mosques that are teaching extremist and radical views, and in fact has done some things in the opposite.”

“The whole antisemitic, anti-Israel extremism is on a level that no one forecast.”

Nicole Lampert: How Amnesty International lost its way

There was a lot of internal discussion about how to retain and attract progressive donors, many of whom were critics of Israel, Malekar adds. “I clearly recall that sections in Western Europe and the USA saying we were losing ground and membership because we were behind others in progressive circles who were criticising Israel.”

“Until then, Amnesty had held to its core values of judging things on international and humanitarian laws, but slowly I saw how the line was being blurred as the work became more politicised and standards went down.

“The organisation became more and more led by political ideologies such as theories around colonialism and seeing everything through the lens of the victim vs the oppressor. Younger people were joining from universities who were imbued with these political theories in which Israel is only ever viewed as an oppressor.”

In 2021, Amnesty became a champion of the politically charged Black Lives Matter campaign, a source of further controversy. Tim Gudgion, a former Amnesty member, says he resigned his membership at this point, regarding its involvement as “very, inappropriately, political”.

Then, the following year, an Amnesty report claimed there was apartheid across Israel and the occupied territories. It caused huge anger in Israel.

“Even if you agree the occupied territories are using a form of apartheid, none of us would accept that it is the same in the state of Israel,” says Malekar, who is one of a number of whistleblowers featured in a report by the campaign group, EiGHT, on alleged double standards by human rights organisations in their approach to Jews and Israel. “And we tried to argue that in making these two territories one land, they were actually joining hands with the most Right-wing Israeli politicians who want to annex the occupied territories.”

The head office in London didn’t appreciate the Israeli branch’s pushback, she says. “These are people who are very committed, and it surprises them if someone would dare to question them.”

And what happens when the perceived oppressor becomes the victim, as it did on October 7, 2023?

Malekar recalls an exchange of emails between head office and other department heads as she hid in bomb shelters not knowing how bad the war was going to get. “One of the things I remember from that horrible night was communicating with London as they considered how to phrase their condemnation. They could never just say, ‘this is wrong’. Not even for one minute. There were discussions over how to frame the narrative.”

Must Durham’s miners be forced to celebrate Palestine?

The Durham Miners’ Gala – ‘the big meeting’, as locals still call it – took place last week. Once, every coalfield had its gala. Now Durham’s is the last great survivor. But survival is not the same as relevance.

In recent years, the question hanging over the ‘big meeting’ has become harder to avoid: what is it for, and who does it now belong to? That question became sharper still after County Durham, long impregnable Labour country, turned into something much closer to a Reform UK stronghold in last year’s local elections.

The gala itself remains organised around a politics that belongs to another century. It is caught between three worlds: the culture of the old industrial working class, the socialist politics of the 20th century and the activist liberalism of the contemporary left. Add to that the visible support for Reform among the families and descendants of Durham colliers, and the contradiction becomes impossible to ignore. The big meeting can no longer pretend that these tensions are merely background noise.

Over the past few years, the Gala has become less a living expression of working-class politics and more a stage for the narrow concerns of the Corbynista activist class. A clip from this year’s event made the point brutally. The ‘Palestine Bloc’ – around 30 (mostly white) activists carrying Palestine flags and wearing the keffiyeh uniform of the modern protester – moved through Durham behind a few dancers in traditional Palestinian dress. They shouted ‘free, free Palestine’. Some in the crowd clapped. Others booed. John Cleese posted a video of it on X, with the observation that it would not be out of place in a Monty Python sketch. He’s right.

This wasn’t the first time the gala has embarrassed itself. The flashpoint last year was the invitation to Husam Zomlot, the Palestinian ambassador to the UK. It seems that every year the gala is dragged into another controversy because the activist left insists on making it speak the language of identity politics and middle-class luxury beliefs. As a result, the working class has been turned into a costume, a backdrop, a set of banners and brass bands to lend moral weight to causes that often have little to do with the people whose history is being borrowed.

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07/16 Links Pt1: Is Trump Ready to Win Yet?; The PA's Army Threatens Millions of Israelis; Karim Khan’s sex abuse accuser goes public; Vance’s Bridge to Nowhere

From Ian:

JPost Editorial: The warning signs for Israel in Washington can no longer be ignored

Vance, who is seen as a prime contender to be the Republican nominee for president in 2028, also waded into the conspiracy surrounding Jeffrey Epstein, the late convicted sex offender. Epstein “clearly had connections to the highest levels of Israeli intelligence,” he said, reiterating a claim that has been refuted and discredited.

The embrace by such a senior Trump administration official of conspiracy theories about Epstein’s ties to Israeli intelligence, which have proliferated in the years since his death and often have veered into antisemitism, is part and parcel with Vance’s increasing alignment with the far Right base populated by the likes of Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes, and Candace Owens.

Taken separately, the vote in the House of Representatives and the Vance interview are worrisome signs that the “special” relationship between Israel and the US is on life support at best. Taken together, they should be an alarming wake-up call that the days of the “kishkes” identification test with Israel – as exemplified diversely by the late Lindsey Graham and former president Joe Biden – are long gone.

Although it’s easy to place the blame elsewhere – and there are a plethora of strong arguments to be made in retort to both Democratic and Republican detractors of Israel – we must also look inward and see what can be done to reverse the tide of sentiment against us.

We can surely criticize the headline-provoking gambit by US Rep. Ro Khanna (D-California) last week, who chose to only hear and see the Palestinian side of life in the West Bank. But we can also acknowledge that vigilante Jewish groups are patrolling the area in a heavy-handed and lawless fashion that creates potentially lethal friction points and does irreparable damage to Israel’s image.

We can criticize Rahm Emmanuel for haughtily coming to Israel and warning us about what needs to be done to repair the US-Israel relationship, while acknowledging that some of his points were spot-on and unfolding before our very eyes in the House vote and Vance interview.

Jerusalem can no longer ignore or downplay the growing trends in the US of having to endorse the “Israel is genocide” trope to become a candidate, or of blaming Israel for getting the US entangled in Iran. The unsettling news this week demonstrates that with stark clarity.

Lee Smith: Is Trump Ready to Win Yet?

Trump is angry the Iranians violated Vance’s MOU to open the strait. But virtually no one believed it had any chance of success, except Vance and the influencers he courted to write articles and social media posts that he could take to his boss to show that the base could be fooled into thinking it wasn’t like Obama’s deal.

And those who said the deal was as bad as Obama’s were excoriated by the brash youths who populate Vance’s comms apparatus. “Cool, Ted,” White House validator Alex Bruesewitz tweeted at MOU skeptic Sen. Ted Cruz. “No one asked you, bro. Stop trying to undermine the President and his administration.” Bruesewitz gave more of the same to another Trump ally, journalist Mark Levin: “Sit back and stop trying to undermine the President and his team.”

Vance saved for himself the privilege of screaming at Israeli officials who doubted the prospects of his deal’s success. “If I was in the Cabinet of the Israeli government,” Vance said last month, “I might not be attacking the only powerful ally that I have anywhere left in the entire world.”

Vance’s name is now attached to a loss because Trump’s return to war is proof that everyone Vance and his communications team hectored was right and Vance was wrong. Accordingly, Vance’s associates are messaging that the vice president never really had that much invested in the MOU’s success. As one ally of the vice president recently told reporters, “All that really mattered was him being seen as attempting to bring the war to an end.”

In the new version, Vance’s talks with the Iranians, the rapport he boasted of building with Iranian Parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, were more like diplomacy theater: If the MOU didn’t work out and made the White House look foolish when the Iranians inevitably violated it, that was still pretty good material for JD’s 2028 campaign. At least he proved to isolationists—i.e., pro-Iran think tankers and journalists whispering in Vance’s ear and pro-Russia podcasters whining into their microphones—his opposition to the neocons’ latest war for Israel.

The issue is that whatever version of Vance’s efforts is correct—he believed he could secure a deal or he didn’t have much confidence he could secure a deal—the result is the same. The Trump team spent down prestige by negotiating with a side determined to humiliate it, while it stiff-armed domestic allies on whom it depends for political support. And that support could come in especially handy now as the administration returns to a war that is likely to become increasingly unpopular as long as the president fails to devise a strategy to win it.

Perhaps even more consequentially, the vice president, ever keen to highlight how U.S. interests diverge from Israel’s, beat up on a partner it is likely to need if it decides to win the war. Otherwise, the administration is likely on course for another long conflict in the Middle East, what Trump refers to as a “forever war.”

A journalist asked Vance in the press briefing last week if that wasn’t essentially the condition the administration had created with its phony cease-fires, fruitless negotiations, and tit-for-tat exchanges of fire. “So far the Iranians are not showing any signs of wanting to give what you want them to give,” said the journalist. “The plan right now is basically when they misbehave to keep bombing.” Vance disagreed. “It’s not a forever war if the Iranians violate the terms of the agreement and shoot commercial shipping, and we respond to it,” said the vice president, seemingly without understanding he was just rephrasing the question.

But that’s precisely the stuff America’s forever wars have been made of: the continuation of hostilities without defining victory and making decisive moves to obtain it. The reason America doesn’t win wars is not that it wants to turn tribal confederations into liberal democracies or teach surrealism to veiled schoolgirls or sow corruption abroad and reap the profits. Those are all effects of the fundamental problem, which is deciding, for whatever reasons, not to win.

For Trump, the choices are stark: either preside over another American war without resolve and go down in history as the American president who forfeited America’s postwar birthright and lost the strait, or decide to win.

Khaled Abu Toameh: The Iran-Backed 'Decisive Campaign' To Destroy Israel and the West

The documents, recovered by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) in the Gaza Strip and published by the Amit Terrorism and Intelligence Research Institute, reveal that Hamas had meticulously planned the October 7 massacre more than a year before it was carried out. They also expose Sinwar's unwavering commitment to Hamas's founding objective: the destruction of Israel through mass murder and conquest.

The operational planning was astonishingly detailed. Sinwar envisioned breaching the border simultaneously at 25 locations using approximately 2,500 terrorists in the opening assault.

Sinwar estimated that approximately 10,000 "well-trained fighters" would eventually be required to carry out the operation successfully. Each Israeli community was assigned specific assault teams. Military bases were designated for destruction. Strategic road junctions were mapped and allocated to specialized units. Every aspect of the operation had been carefully calculated.

These were not defensive plans. They were invasion plans.

Perhaps the most disturbing revelation concerns Sinwar's own understanding of the consequences of his actions. He fully anticipated that Israel would respond with overwhelming force. "The enemy will not hesitate to use all the means and weapons at its disposal," he wrote. "It may even use a nuclear bomb."

Despite this extraordinary assessment, Sinwar concluded that the invasion should proceed because "this campaign is a battle of life or death."

He deliberately chose to launch the attack because advancing Hamas's ideological objective – the destruction of Israel – was more important to him than the lives of the Palestinians under his rule.

This is perhaps the clearest evidence yet that Hamas has never been a national liberation movement primarily concerned with improving the lives of Palestinians. Rather, it is an Islamist terrorist organization prepared to sacrifice its own people in the pursuit of its ideological war against Israel.

The lesson from these documents is that Hamas remains committed to the same objectives that guided its founders nearly four decades ago: eliminating Israel through violence and replacing it with an Islamist state.

Hamas is but one component of a broader Iranian strategy aimed at undermining American influence and destabilizing pro-Western Arab governments throughout the region, apparently to drive US forces out of the region, thereby leaving the run of the Middle East, unimpeded, to the ruthless Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps now ruling Iran.

The October 7 massacre was not an aberration. It was the realization of a strategy, reportedly conceived seven years in advance. Preventing another October 7 requires more than temporary ceasefires or diplomatic initiatives. It requires ensuring that Hamas can never again function as either a military force or a political authority.

Anything less invites more catastrophes, as we have seen for 47 years, from Iran's attacks on Israel, Arab neighbors, brutalized citizens, the United States, and the West.

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