Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Wednesday, October 30, 2024

10/30 Links Pt1: Deterrence Is All That Matters; UNRWA has brought Israel together; UNRWA ‘payroll resembles a most-wanted list’

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: Deterrence Is All That Matters

So what’s the point of even trying to reinstitute a dead letter like Resolution 1701?

Here, though the Biden administration is unlikely to acknowledge it, Israel has actually provided the ray of hope. It’s possible that a ceasefire along status quo lines could now hold long enough for Hochstein to get a full night’s sleep. But that’s only because of Israel’s recent mop-up jobs in Lebanon and its strikes on Iran.

If—and it’s still a big if—the Lebanon-Israel border can be pacified, it will be for one reason and one reason only: deterrence.

The structure of the status quo in Israel’s north favors Hezbollah and Iran; the balance of military power favors Israel. Every so often, Israel is forced to use that military advantage because the UN and the international community allow Iran and Hezbollah to stay in position to start wars. The aim of all sides is to end those wars before they expand beyond south Lebanon—in other words, before Iran and Israel come into direct conflict.

Well, we’ve passed that particular line. And rather than drag the world into a great global conflagration, the ensuing skirmishes revealed the fact that Iran is wildly overmatched.

But deterrence isn’t only about getting in the enemy’s head. Israel destroyed all of the air-defense systems provided to Iran by Russia. IDF jets also crippled Tehran’s ballistic-missile development and reportedly some drone launch sites.

That means Iran cannot keep up this tit-for-tat even if it wanted to. Israel, however, could do this every day of the week and twice on Sunday, if it needed to.

Hezbollah is depleted and demoralized, and Iran is licking its own wounds. That’s why Amos Hochstein can ask everyone to go back to their corners.

The word for this is deterrence. It’s possible that Iran will still come out of its corner swinging despite its glass jaw and blurred vision. But the result of the recent conflict is that Iran’s next attacks would be necessarily weaker than the previous round, and Israel’s responses would be stronger.

No, UNIFIL isn’t going to disarm Hezbollah. Its peacekeeping forces aren’t capable of keeping the peace, and they are unlikely even to try. Hezbollah cannot be trusted to keep its end of an agreement. Iran does not seek peace and coexistence. US and European mediators are window dressing.

Israel’s display of force is the one and only factor. If there is quiet in the north, it’ll be because Israel reestablished deterrence, and anyone who thinks otherwise is living in a fantasy.

Mark Dubowitz calls for Israel to pursue political strategy after military successes

Mark Dubowitz, the CEO of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies think tank, is now calling for Israel to wrap up its major ground operations in Lebanon, with a longer-term goal of converting what he praised as significant battlefield successes into political achievements that will help consolidate recent gains.

“There’s a certain point where you hit the law of diminishing returns,” Dubowitz told Jewish Insider on Monday, noting that he had recently arrived at his conclusion while observing a growing number of Israeli soldiers who have been killed in Lebanon.

From a military standpoint, Israel “has maximized its gains,” he argued, warning that “further fighting without any sort of political strategy is likely to lead to more Israeli troop losses — and not necessarily to greater military advantage.”

“Now is the opportunity to undermine Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon and the ayatollahs in Iran, and through covert action and support for the people with continued military pressure, come up with more sustainable political achievements that are going to accomplish Israel’s overall strategic goals.”

His assessment marks something of a turning point in how pro-Israel foreign policy hawks have publicly reckoned with the ongoing turmoil in the region — as Israel has engaged in a widening, multifront war that has decimated Hamas, wiped out Hezbollah’s top leadership structure and exposed Iran’s military vulnerabilities.

But Dubowitz said his recent conversations with a range of Israeli government and security officials indicate that they agree with his push for a broader strategic pivot in the coming weeks or months.

“From the more cautious to the more aggressive, I think there was a sense of, ‘Yes, we need to start thinking about how to convert our impressive military achievements of the recent months into sort of sustainable political victories,” he told JI.

The Biden-Harris Administration, a 'Ceasefire' and a Palestinian State

There seem to be several reasons for the Palestinians' reluctance to reach an agreement about a two-state solution, and a lasting end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict:

Any Palestinian leader who has recommended an end to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict has been denounced by his people as a traitor and killed. That outcome would seem quite a disincentive. As the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat said, "Do you want me sitting up there having tea with Sadat?"

The donations that the Palestinian Authority and Hamas have received since 1993 could have turned the West Bank into a thriving area, and Gaza into a "New Singapore" or "Dubai on the Mediterranean," however, the leaders evidently had other priorities for that cash.

One aim of Abbas seems to be to preserve his own wealth, estimated at $100 million, and the prosperity of his sons, who own the largest businesses in the Palestinian Authority. If donors keep throwing gigantic amounts of money at one -- especially unconditionally -- why not take it?

In a situation where every attempt to achieve peace turns into another bloody war-experiment, most Israelis have apparently concluded that they would be better off without such a "peace".

From the point of view of many Palestinian Arabs, and even some Americans, Jews can return to the other countries that wanted to kill them.

At present, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, praised as "The Churchill of the Middle East," appears determined to disable Hamas and Hezbollah politically and militarily so they will not be able to threaten the security of Israelis again.

Even with a supposed "ceasefire deal," Sinwar's successor will no doubt release the hostages as slowly as possible to allow more time for the Palestinians to rearm.

For a ceasefire, Hamas -- probably also including Qatar and Iran -- is asking for a complete Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, far from the smuggling tunnels under the border with Egypt. They are also asking for a "permanent ceasefire" -- meaning that they want the US administration and the international community to force Israel to stop fighting, but leave Hamas's leaders and terrorists free to rearm, regroup and ready to fight another day.

In 2023, Israel allowed extra work permits to the Gazans -- who then mapped out every house to attack, including "the names of the people, how many children they had and even which of them owned dogs."

At this point, whatever happens with a ceasefire or not, the region clearly does not seem ready for any kind of Palestinian state -- to say the least.

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

Kamala Harris didn’t actually call Trump a Nazi, but she might as well have. Echoing allegations by disgruntled Former White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, she declared that Donald Trump wants a military that will be "loyal to him personally" and "obey his orders even when he tells them to break the law or abandon their oath to the constitution of the United States."

Vice President Kamala Harris continued on, saying, "It is deeply troubling and incredibly dangerous that Donald Trump would invoke Adolf Hitler, the man who is responsible for the deaths of six million Jews and hundreds of thousands of Americans. All of this is further evidence for the American people of who Donald Trump really is."

And there it is, Godwin’s Law. The longer the election dragged on, the more inevitable it had been that someone would bring in the Holocaust. Not in the sort of, “We must never forget the Holocaust,” kind of way, but in the sort of, “He’s the author of the Final Solution, Adolf Hitler himself,” kind of way.

Harris running mate Tim Walz was happy to run with it, remarking that Trump’s alleged comment regarding Hitler’s generals “makes me sick as hell.”

“Folks, the guardrails are gone. Trump is descending into this madness — a former president of the United States and the candidate for president of the United States says he wants generals like Adolf Hitler had,” said Walz, who has lied about his military service.

Walz said he was a retired command sergeant major, but he wasn’t. He claimed he carried weapons “in war,” but never saw combat. In truth, he skipped out on his battalion only months before they were deployed to Iraq. J.D. Vance, among many others, condemned these falsehoods as “stolen valor.”

This is something to keep in mind when weighing the credibility of those Walz “orange Hitler”-style slurs. But it gets worse with Walz. Much worse, in this Jewish writer’s opinion.

From The Hill:

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, the Democratic vice presidential nominee, compared former President Trump’s Sunday rally at New York’s Madison Square Garden in to a 1939 pro-Nazi event.
“Donald Trump’s got this big rally going at Madison Square Garden,” Walz said at an event in Henderson, Nev. “There’s a direct parallel to a big rally that happened in the mid-1930s at Madison Square Garden.”
An American Nazi Party held a rally at Madison Square Garden in February 1939 that lured 20,000 supporters to the iconic New York City landmark.
“And don’t think that he doesn’t know for one second exactly what they’re doing there,” Walz said.

When Walz speaks, he draws a picture. We can see that pro-Hitler rally in our minds. It hits you right in the kishkes.

Up next is Hillary Clinton. The former (failed) 2016 presidential candidate picked off where Walz left off, continuing on with the same “Trump is a Nazi” narrative, claiming that Trump with this rally was reenacting the infamous Nazi rally, held in that very same space. “Trump [is] actually re-enacting the Madison Square Garden rally in 1939,” said Clinton to CNN’s Kaitlin Collins.

“President Franklin Roosevelt was appalled that neo-Nazis, fascists in America were lining up to essentially pledge their support for the kind of government that they were seeing in Germany,” said Former President Clinton’s wife never-to-be-president Clinton.

"It is clear from John Kelly's words that Donald Trump is someone who I quote 'certainly falls into the general definition of fascist.' Who in fact, vowed to be a dictator on day one, and vowed to use the military as his personal militia to carry out his personal and political vendetta,'" said Clinton.

Harris, meanwhile, is not better than Walz or Clinton, only more boring—she doesn't believe her own rhetoric but is determined to get to the top with her gleaming eyes and maniacal laugh. She’s not even original. In fact, she’s a yawn. And frankly, unintelligent.

“I invite you to listen and go online to listen to John Kelly … who has told us Donald Trump said, why — essentially, ‘Why aren’t my generals like those of Hitler’s, like Hitler.'

“The American people deserve to have a president who encourages healthy debate … and certainly not comparing oneself in a clearly admiring way to Hitler.

“This is a serious, serious issue. And we know who he is. He admires dictators.

“The American people deserve to have a president who encourages healthy debate, works across the aisle, not afraid of good ideas wherever they come from, but also maintains certain standards about how we think about the role and the responsibility, and certainly not comparing oneself in a clearly admiring way to Hitler.”

Asked if Trump were a fascist, Harris' bluffed right on through. “Yes, I do,” she said. “Yes, I do.”

There was something in her smile. Something sly in it for that tiny split second.

Well, what else could Kamala Harris, famous for her word salads, do to win at this point but smear her opponent? She wants to be president, but has done so little to articulate her policies. Or rather, she’s articulated many words that go good with Thousand Island dressing.

As November 5 draws nearer, Harris seems to have stopped even trying to outline what it is she intends to do if elected president. Instead, she has begun this slow crescendo of hateful tropes, each day ranting and raving about Donald Trump ever more vigorously, insistently and repeatedly telling us that Trump is a very bad person.

There is a name for this. It’s called negative campaigning. Whether or not smearing one’s opponent is an effective strategy is up for debate, but it certainly seems the coward’s way out of articulating an actual policy. Something Harris can’t and hasn’t done.

We have seen Kamala Harris a lot these past weeks, Tim Walz, less so. I think they hide him. He’s scary. He has crazy eyes. And I did not like the look of hatred that flashed on his face, that downturn of the mouth when Walz was asked by a reporter about the hostages in Gaza—it was so quick I had to watch the exchange a few times to confirm it. Then the mask came down and Walz was Mister Friendly Guy once more—all smiley like he didn’t hear the reporter’s question. But we all saw it. I saw it. I saw Mr. Evil Man rear his ugly head for that little almost undetectable blip in time.

I dread the thought of Walz in a position of influence. Kamala is a power-hungry puppet who will not be kind to Israel should she win, but she is too stupid to craft or carry out policy, and that’s where others come in.

Will Walz distinguish himself as an advisor? Will he have a voice? More likely Walz is a signal to Israel-hating voters: Here is someone in Kamala’s corner.

Someone who hates the Jews.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

Netflix removes Palestinian videos whose licenses ran out. So of course it is accused of "supporting genocide!"

CodePink, and others, complained to Netflix over its removing over a dozen "Palestinian Stories" films last week.

Haaretz adds that Israel haters are freaking out:

Social media users are intensifying their calls for Netflix to reinstate the Palestinian films, with some labeling the platform a "genocide supporter" and accusing it of "a blatant attempt to erase the history of Palestine." Alongside canceling subscriptions, many are voicing their outrage and condemning the platform's actions as an erasure of Palestinian narratives.

Anyone who uses Netflix knows that they remove videos all the time. And Netflix responded to the unhinged complaints:

“We launched this licensed collection of films in 2021 for three years. Those licenses have now expired. As always, we continue to invest in a wide variety of quality films and TV shows to meet our members’ needs, and celebrate voices from around the world,” said the platform in response to a query by Deadline.

But the haters are insisting that Netflix spend the money to reinstate the films on their platform, because, um, genocide or occupation or "erasing history" or something.

The thing is, if people were watching the films, Netflix almost certainly would - assuming the distributors wanted them to. Their letting the license expire without renewal tells us that these 19 films were not very popular on the platform.

The Israel haters want Netflix, a for-profit company, to spend its own money to make them feel better.

Interestingly, an Arab Haaretz writer/editor reviewed "Palestinian Stories" three years ago when they first were put on the platform. And she didn't like them because every one was simply anti-Israel propaganda which did not explore Palestinian identity outside that perspective.

What’s in these movies and short films? Everything. The occupation, arrests, imprisonment, torture, checkpoints, humiliation, airstrikes on the Gaza Strip, refugeeism, and much, much more.

Each of the eight films or shorts I watched is built on the same narrative of victimhood, with identical pacing, tone and cinematic language, as if they were all cloned.

...The occupier and their actions were the focal point in all of the films I watched. They all left the consequences of the occupation and the actions of the occupier that worked their way into the Palestinian psyche outside of the cinematic and political discourse. This cinema does not engage in a “Palestinianism” that was forged because of the occupation; it engages in a narrative tussle with the Israeli narrative.

....They are blindly faithful to the national narrative and, accordingly, offer up the clichéd, superficial content that places the Israeli occupier not only at the heart of the Palestinian narrative, but also exclusively at the heart of the Palestinian cinematic oeuvre.

If this is true, the world didn't lose much with Netflix removing the films. They were simply anti-Israel propaganda, not works of art exploring humanity through a Palestinian prism.

Which would explain the crazed reactions by the usual suspects: CodePink, CAIR, and so on.

Or maybe, just maybe, Palestinian identity really doesn't exist outside demonizing Israel?

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

In 2022, over 20,500 Americans died from malnutrition, according to the Centers for Disease Control.

That's about one in every 16,000 Americans, and more than double the previous years.

During the 12 months of the war in Gaza, 37 Gazans have died of malnutrition, according to Hamas.

That's one in every 56,000 Gazans.

The death rate from starvation in the US is more than triple that of Gaza.

France's death rate from starvation (as of 2020) is even worse than the US.

How many articles have you read about the risk of people starving to death in America or France?

How many about Somalia, Mali or Eritea, which really do have widespread starvation with thousands of deaths?

And how many have you read about "imminent famine" and "starvation" in Gaza?

No one says life in Gaza is easy, but don't pretend that the news media and UN spokespeople really care about starvation when they talk about Gaza. As usual, it is just a convenient club with which to bash Israel.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

Literally everything Israel does to minimize harm to civilians in Gaza is harshly criticized. Evacuation orders, creating humanitarian zones, facilitating aid deliveries - they have all faced withering opposition.

And so has the latest idea floated, of hiring private security contractors to secure the delivery of aid to Gaza so it doesn't get stolen by Hamas. Criticism is mounting, as usual, without anyone coming up with a better idea that doesn't fortify Hamas.

Right now, hundreds of trucks filled with international aid are sitting in the Gaza side of Kerem Shalom, waiting for the UN to pick them up. Over the past few days, according to COGAT, Israel has facilitated hundreds of trucks into Gaza while the UN typically retrieves less than half of them earmarked for UN agencies.

If the reason for not getting the aid to the people is security, why doesn't the UN itself hire private contractors for securing aid and personnel?

The UN regularly hires outside security contractors in other areas of the world. In Iraq and Afghanistan, these private contractors protected aid routes and aid warehouses. The UN has current contracts and relationships with the British-based Control Risks Group and G4S, for example.

It also has several multimillion dollar contracts with the UAE-based Hart Security Ltd in Somalia.

A UAE-based group would seem to be ideal as a partner in Gaza. They know the culture, Israel would probably not object, and they have experience as an armed security service to facilitate delivery of humanitarian aid.

The UN, and UNRWA specifically, never stop complaining that the security situation prevents them from providing the services Gazans need. But their actions seem to indicate that they prefer to complain and condemn Israel than to do any actions to protect Gazans, humanitarian services and that aid. (Their resolute opposition to allowing Gazans to flee to Egypt proves that.)

In this sense, the UN and Hamas share the same goal: to cynically use the suffering of Gaza civilians for their own anti-Israel purposes.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

12 hours of antisemitic incidents in the news

All of these were reported during the day on Tuesday.

In Brooklyn:

A visibly Jewish man was slashed in the face in a random attack as he was walking on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn on Tuesday morning by an attacker who yelled hateful rhetoric before slashing him.

The Jewish community of Chicago urged the mayor to act as if he cared in the wake of the shooting of a Jewish man on Saturday. The mayor released a statement that didn't even mention that the victim was Jewish.

Speaking of the Chicago mayor, he just appointed a president of the Chicago Board of Education who has posted antisemitic and pro-Hamas posts on social media.

The Communist Student League a the University of Buffalo had written a letter last week with a list of demands, including that all "Zionists" be expelled from the school. Buffalo SUNY BDS, another unofficial group, agreed.

A West Palm Beach man is being charged with voter intimidation after he was caught on camera by a news crew allegedly yelling antisemitic slurs at a campaign worker at a polling site.

A Jewish family has sued a San Jose charter school, two Santa Clara County education organizations and the California Department of Education for what they say was a pattern of antisemitic bullying, harassment and public humiliation that their 13-year-old daughter experienced while at school in the wake of October 7. The girl is now going to a private Jewish school.

In the Cleveland area, Orange Village police arrested Ryan Kellogg, 37, on Sunday, for painting swastikas on a home near his home.

In Delhi, NY:

An Oneonta man has been sentenced to probation after being involved in a hate crime against a child of the Jewish faith.

Zachary Hoffman Kowatch, 23, was sentenced to five years of probation for Attempted Reckless Endangerment in the First Degree, a Class E Felony.

Kowatch previously admitted that on May 9, he swerved his vehicle at the teenager while he was riding his bike. He also yelled several antisemitic slurs as he passed the victim. Kowatch then turned his vehicle around, revved his engine, and drove back towards the victim. He made further antisemitic remarks as he drove off.

Online:

Hasan Piker, among the most-watched streamers on the platform Twitch, is coming under fire for anti-Israel and antisemitic rhetoric that has escalated in recent weeks.

In one recent stream, Piker declared that “it doesn’t matter if rapes f***ing happened on Oct. 7, like that doesn’t change the dynamic for me even this much,” holding his fingers up in a pinching gesture. He had previously denied those atrocities.

Representatives of 10 Muslim groups in Denmark canceled a meeting about antisemitism in the Muslim community at the last minute. They wanted to include Islamophobia.

In Paris:

A Jewish woman living in Paris filed a complaint with the police after antisemitic graffiti was sprayed on the building where she lives.

This is the same building where Mireille Knoll was stabbed to death in a 2018 antisemitic attack.

Among others, the building was sprayed with red swastikas and red Magen Davids. Nancy, a resident of the 11th arrondissement (district), said that she has been a victim of antisemitic attacks in the last two months.

"Dirty Jewess on the 10th floor," reads one of the inscriptions. In addition, several inscriptions included death threats: "You will suffer.”

In London, a group cheerfully chanted for ethnically cleansing all Jews from Israel.

The Executive Council of Australian Jewry has launched legal action in the Federal Court against an Islamic preacher and religious centre over alleged anti-semitic statements.

If you include a couple of other stories I didn't include, that means that there is a news story about antisemitism pretty much every hour of every day.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

10/29 Links Pt2: The World Doesn’t Care About Your Partisan Politics; Trump or Kamala? Ben Shapiro and Sam Harris Debate; Don't Call It a Hate Crime Against a Jew

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: The World Doesn’t Care About Your Partisan Politics

American foreign policy is always something of a hostage to the domestic politics of the moment. While this might be the unavoidable byproduct of democracy, it can greatly distort our understanding of the world and the coherence of strategic planning.

The Israel-Iran-Ukraine-Russia linedance provides a steady stream of examples, but never has it brought as much clarity to the mismatch between U.S. partisan politics and American grand strategy as it has in recent days. Republicans tend to favor Israel but not Ukraine, and Democrats, the reverse. Our enemies, of course, see it very differently.

Just before the weekend, the Wall Street Journal broke the news that Russia has supplied the Houthis—the Iranian proxy in Yemen that has been shooting missiles at commercial shipping vessels in the Red Sea—with “targeting data” to help sink ships, kill civilians, and sabotage the supply chain. “The data,” the Journal explains, “was passed through members of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, who were embedded with the Houthis in Yemen.”

That sentence is a handy organizational chart. The Houthis aren’t merely supported by Iran, the Houthis are Iran. And the Russia-Iran alliance has become so tight that Vladimir Putin is helping the Iranians retaliate against the U.S. and Israel for having the temerity to counter Hamas’s invasion of Israel, and, more specifically, for America’s modest support for Ukraine’s existence against Russia’s eliminationist war machine.

Russia wants to bleed Western resources in the Middle East because Moscow is bleeding resources in trying to destroy part of Europe. Russia is angry that it is bad at war, so it is making more war.

And birds without feathers flock together, so Moscow and Iran have expanded their partnership wherever possible. That includes Russia’s provision of air-defense systems to Iran and Iran’s provision of ballistic missiles to Russia.

Both of which took a literal hit over the weekend.

As the Times of London reports, one of Israel’s targets in its recent strikes included fuel mixers for missile production: “Early analysis of the impact of the strikes suggests that Iranian missile production has been badly affected, reducing Tehran’s ability to export weapons. Without the ability to mix fuel, Iran may be forced to appeal to China or other suppliers to help it restock, a process that could take many months.”

The Times saw the records for one Iranian missile delivery to Russia, in late August, about three weeks after Reuters reported that the two countries had signed a contract for Iran to provide several hundred to Putin’s forces. That could be delayed by as long as two years now.

And what of the air-defense systems provided by Russia to protect Iranian airspace? Gone. Israel destroyed one in April, and “on Saturday Israel systematically destroyed the remaining three S-300 batteries at Tehran’s Imam Khomeini International Airport and the Malad missile base.”

The fact that Iran might become dependent on China to rebuild its ballistic missile stock is another piece of the puzzle. China already buys most of Iran’s oil exports. Beijing has also been boosting Iran in the propaganda war, especially on social media where China has the largest user audience and a repressive censorship regime.

Author coming to St. Louis urges Jews to rethink alliances amid rising left-wing antisemitism

In Benjamin Ginsberg’s latest book, “The New American Anti-Semitism: The Left, The Right, and The Jews”, he urges Jews to “wake up” to the threat posed by left-wing antisemitism in the United States.

Ginsberg is the David Bernstein Professor of Political Science and Chair of the Center for Advanced Governmental Studies at Johns Hopkins University and the author, coauthor, or editor of 36 books.

The Jewish Light spoke to him in advance of his appearance at the St. Louis Jewish Book Festival at 1 p.m. Nov. 7. Some of the conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

What is the new American antisemitism you explore in your book?
“Most Jews are accustomed to right-wing antisemites, going back to the Nazis and the antisemitism of the right in Europe. What’s new for Americans – and I don’t think American Jews have quite wrapped their heads around this – is that the main antisemitic threat today comes from the left. We see thousands of students and some non-students screaming about Zionism in the streets of New York and Philadelphia and other cities. And I was horrified when I watched the testimony of the presidents of Harvard, Penn and MIT – let’s call them ‘The Three Stooges.’ They were not willing to say whether students running around screaming ‘death to the Jews’ are in violation of their campus speech code, and the reason for that is that they’re afraid of liberal forces on their campuses. I thought, ‘This is sort of the end of things as we know them.’ We are at a point in American history where people can be openly antisemitic, certainly on college campuses and some elements of the news media. It’s become possible once again – it hadn’t been for decades – to publicly criticize the Jews. So we need to rethink our position in the United States, and think about who our friends are and who our enemies are, before it’s too late.”

You argue that Jews in the U.S. should forge alliances with evangelical Christians and other Christian Zionists who vocally support Israel. Why are those alliances important?
“When I say to Jewish friends, ‘You should take seriously the Christian Zionists,’ they say, ‘Oh, no, they just want to convert us.’ I talked one couple into going to a little convention where you had Jewish leaders and Christian Zionist leaders. They came away amazed and said, ‘You know, these people do have some strange ideas, but basically they are incredibly supportive of Israel.’ And that’s right. We need people who support Israel; doctrinal differences we can argue about later. Liberal, well-educated Americans sneer at this, but it’s not to be sneered at: There are millions of Bible-believing Christians who view the creation of Israel – and the astonishing victory by Israel over its foes in the 1967 Israel-Arab war – as things that were predicted in the Bible. And they’ve put pressure on the U.S. government (to support Israel). I think Jews are always reluctant to shift their alliances, to realize that their friends of yesterday aren’t their friends today.”

Prof. Phyllis Chesler: Please answer my burning questions

Did you see Michelle Obama stump for Kamala Harris? She is really one angry woman. Her fiery appeal was to "y'all," and perhaps she mainly had black folk in mind. What do y'all think? What has Michelle got to be so angry about?

Obama? He's the former President who barely acknowledged his white mother and white grandparents who brought him up. In his first book, he focuses mainly on the black African father who abandoned him and never looked back. What kind of man does this? Did you ever notice this, ponder upon it? And why did he unleash Iran's evil power? Choose the mullahs to stabilize the Middle East?

Why do I keep doing it, reading the NYT? Am I a masochist? Do you read it too? Well, some of us have to keep up with the daily anti-Israel libels, the kind of lies that always, always, lead to violence and then to pogroms--and worse.

Yesterday, the NYT's described Israel's "foray" into Iran as "retaliatory" and as an example of "Israel's Shadow War." That's their lead front page story. Add to that an article that is sympathetic to Gazan cancer victims in Jordan who are facing psychological battles of displacement (five photos of them); two articles that are actually sympathetic to Iran (!!!), which praise the mullahs for their "muted response" and "restraint.

The largest state sponsor of global terrorism is described as a country that is "aware of its 'responsibilities for regional peace and security.'" Oh yes, there's another article about how outraged media groups are about the Israeli strikes that (inadvertently) killed journalists in Lebanon--Israel's actions are described as a "war crime," and as "deliberate aggression."

As usual, but Oh My God! Not a word about Iran's aggression and that of its' many terrorist proxies; no sympathetic photos of displaced Israelis, wounded Israelis, murdered Israelis. There are now 769 mostly very young soldiers and reservist fathers who were killed in battle; 891 civilians who've been murdered; 76 police officers and ISA agents who've also been murdered. There are 101 Israeli captives still being held hostage in Gaza. An offer of 100K for the release of each one, no questions asked, has led nowhere.

10/29 Links Pt1: Cry Me a River, UNRWA; VDH: The Ordeal and Triumph of Mr. Netanyahu; The JW3 protest is a new low for the ‘anti-Israel’ set

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: Cry Me a River, UNRWA

The proper response from UNRWA would be: Thank you. For an agency funded by hundreds of millions of dollars of U.S. taxpayer money alone, and which does nothing but perpetuate the conflict so it can continue collecting other people’s hard-earned money and spending it on terrorists, any punishment shy of closure and the prosecution of its directors is a gift.

The UN, of course, is furious. But honestly, who cares? For posterity, here’s the crux of the world body’s complaint: “The vote by the Israeli Parliament (Knesset) against UNRWA this evening is unprecedented and sets a dangerous precedent. It opposes the UN Charter and violates the State of Israel’s obligations under international law.”

An unprecedented precedent-setter! The legislation, we’re told, “will deprive over 650,000 girls and boys there from education.” An education from literal Hamas political leaders? Or accused hostage-takers? Anyway, the “education” provided by UNRWA schools teaches children to venerate terrorists and to hate Jews, which is really no education at all.

Finally, UNRWA says, “Putting an end to UNRWA and its services will not strip the Palestinians from their refugee status. That status is protected by another UN General Assembly resolution until a fair and lasting solution is found to the plight of the Palestinians.”

About that “refugee status.” Palestinian refugees, according to the agency’s own definition, are “persons whose normal place of residence was Palestine during the period 1 June 1946 to 15 May 1948, and who lost both home and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 conflict.”

UNRWA then sneaks in that the descendants of refugees are “eligible” for refugee benefits as well. The common claim that there are millions of Palestinian refugees from 1948 is very obviously false. There were perhaps as many as 750,000 refugees. Palestinians are the only refugee class with their own UN agency. It is no coincidence at all that that agency has inflated the number of refugees even though its own definition of a refugee makes that number impossible.

According to Jonathan Schanzer, COMMENTARY contributing editor and vice president at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, members of Congress have been trying for years to pass legislation that would apply the actual definition of a “refugee” to Palestinians. A 2012 amendment would have required “the secretary of state to report to Congress on how many Palestinians serviced by UNRWA are true refugees from wars past — those who could prove that they were personally displaced. That number is believed to be closer to 30,000 people. This new tally would then become the focus of America’s assistance to UNRWA for refugee issues.”

UNRWA could, that is, service Palestinian refugees. But it isn’t designed to do that. It is designed be a Palestinian agency. Which is why it has been subsumed by Hamas in Gaza (and Lebanon). UNRWA counts nearly 6 million Palestinians among its refugee population—which is higher than the Palestinian population in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Actual refugees deserve every bit of help they can get from refugee agencies. But that work isn’t being done by UNRWA, which is why UNRWA should not be doing any work at all.

Alan Dershowitz: The Media Is Implementing Sinwar's Genocidal Strategy Although they could easily distinguish between combatant and non-combatant deaths, Hamas refuses to do so.

They [Hamas] fail to acknowledge that many of these so-called children were also combatants.

They do the same with women, conveying the impression that only men are terrorists.

Without the support of the media, this strategy would not succeed.

And useful ignoramuses on university campuses, along with bigots in international organizations, falsely accuse Israel of genocide, despite the successful efforts of the IDF to reduce civilian casualties to the minimum possible....

In the absence of an honest accounting, the media will continue to do Sinwar's nefarious work in increasing Palestinian casualties in order to increase the pressure on Israel.

Sadly, the media's dangerous cooperation with terrorists tells us more about them than about the war about which they purport to be "reporting." David Singer: UNRWA inflamed Jew-hatred by keeping Gazans penned in Gaza

The continuing failure of the United Nations and UNRWA, its refugee agency that serves only Palestinia Arabs, to remove Gaza’s children, women, the sick and the elderly from 8 refugee camps inside Gaza to the relative safety offered by 10 refugee camps located in Jordan and 12 refugee camps located in Syria - or anywhere else in the world - has been a monumental failure, dereliction of duty and lack of concern for the welfare of the 650356 refugees living in Gaza and already registered with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA).

Keeping these registered refugees penned inside Gaza for the last year has seen the Israel-Gaza war prolonged and civilian casualties and damage to property substantially increased - as Israel was:
- Slowed down in eliminating those Gazan terrorists responsible for invading Israel and murdering 1200 people, raping and beheading, hospitalizing 14970 whilst internally displacing 150000 Israelis on 7 October 2023
- Hampered in its efforts to release 252 hostages forcefully abducted in Israel and taken to Gaza
- Required to confront Gaza’s civilians being used as human shields by the perpetrators of the 7 October 2023 atrocities seeking to escape being killed or captured
- Prevented from speedily destroying the extensive underground network of attack tunnels containing weapons, manufacturing and storage facilities located under hospitals, mosques, schools, commercial and residential buildings

Unsuccessful attempts by the UN to procure a ceasefire – rather than demanding the unconditional surrender of Gaza’s Hamas Government – underscored the UN’s concern more with allowing Gaza to survive to fight another day rather than see these Gazan terrrorist monsters and their infrastructure wiped out and destroyed.

In 1950, the Chicago Tribune accused 3 Jews of running the "secret government of the United States." On Page 1.

The front page of the Chicago Tribune, May 29, 1950, had the story by veteran reporter Walter Trohan of how three prominent Jews were secretly running the US government.

The article had a source for this antisemitic conspiracy theory. It was a "person with highest State Department connections."

And while the word "Jew" was not mentioned once in the article, it does emphasize the three's Zionist connections.

Sound familiar?

Trohan admits, no, these Jews have not - yet - been accused of being Communists. But they sure smell that way:

Trohan would have of course insisted that he was not antisemitic.

No, he was just...anti-Zionist.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

Stina Wollter is a Swedish artist and TV show host who attracted some controversy when she made wildly antisemitic accusations in the early weeks of the Gaza war.

She wrote on social media, where she has over 300,000 followers, that there is a Zionist plot to exterminate all Palestinians. That Zionists have a foothold in every major American company and political position. That the reason Israel is fighting Gaza may be to steal natural gas deposits. And that Swedish media is conspiring to block the real news from Gaza.

Worse, she claimed that "Israel systematically took organs and skin from dead Palestinians" and that "they lied about rape" in connection with October 7.

This caused a bit of a controversy. But not too much of one, because Swedish TV network STV has been working with her in recent months to create a new kind of talk show where - possibly - the guests would have been naked, or maybe she was just going to draw them naked.

The Jewish community that remains in Sweden, and others, got quite upset that this crazed antisemitic conspiracy theorist was getting rewarded with her own TV show.

As a result, the network decided to remove the planned show from the schedule.

At least until antisemites complain and prompt it to change its mind again.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

There are two kinds of social crimes committed by anti-Israel fanatics.

One is that they lie about Israel - incessant, constant, wall-to-wall lies that gain currency by their sheer volume and repetition.

The other, which is far less noticed, is the crime of omission - their refusal to say anything bad about Palestinians, about Hamas terror (except to support it), about Hamas' cynical use of civilians as human shields, about comparing Israeli actions and policies with those of any other Western state at war.

The crimes of omission are in many ways just as insidious as the crimes of commission, because the world simply has no context as to what is going on. When the only news sources only talk about imaginary Israeli crimes without context, the result is the massive wave of antisemitism that we are seeing.

Here is a small but telling example of how a group leading the cultural war against Israel covers up Hamas crimes - even against that group itself.

PalFest, the annual Palestinian Festival for Literature, has organized a boycott of Israeli cultural institutions that is being eagerly embraced by a flock of anti-Israel writers and artists.

The letter that they and others have written insist that they will not work with any Israeli organizations that do not pass their purity test of having forcefully denounced the very existence of Israel (as they put it, "Have never publicly recognized the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people as enshrined in international law" and Palestinians consider all of Israel to be "illegally occupied territory.")

Let's look back upon how morally pure PalFest is in defending Palestinian cultural rights.

In 2012, as always, their annual festival was held in various Palestinian cities, including Gaza City. One of their meetings in a Gaza castle was shut down by Hamas:

Following the opening of the colloquium, a security officer wearing civilian clothes arrived at the place and introduced himself as a member of the Palestinian police investigation department. He cut off the electricity and requested the attendees to leave the place. Shortly after this occurred, a number of security officers were deployed to the place when attendees refused to leave. They confiscated cameras that had filmed the colloquium, chaos spread and the colloquium was broken up.

Egyptian participants were too frightened of Hamas to speak to reporters until they left Gaza, but when they returned to Cairo for the closing ceremony, they slammed the terror group:

Most of the writers who visited Gaza had one opinion with respect to cultural activities in Gaza: “deplorable.” They say the aim appears to be to erase the Palestinian character and culture, which gave the world thinkers and poets like Mahmoud Darwish and Edward Said.
Professor of English Literature Sahar El-Mougy said that there’s a deplorable condition of cultural hunger. There aren’t even cinemas, libraries, or shops that sell books on the arts, philosophy or literature. The only available books are those on Islamic Sharia (Islamic jurisprudence) and Fiqh (thinking).
“There’s a conspiracy against the Palestinian character, to destroy its beauty. Hamas is erasing Palestinian culture, replacing it with an extremist version of Islam. They don’t even allow men and women to be in the same place!” El-Mougy objected.

One would think that PalFest would have condemned Hamas for its raid on their colloquium and in general on Hamas' strangehold on Palestinian culture in Gaza.

Yet in their 16 page report on the 2012 festival, PalFest did not say a word about this incident. PalFest never condemned Hamas for attacking their own colloquium. They also did not say a word about the participants' criticism of Hamas, nor about Hamas repression in Gaza altogether. Their description of the Cairo closing ceremony merely says it was "a report from festival participants to the Cairo audience – telling them what they had seen, [and] what they had heard."

Indeed, throughout the PalFest website I cannot find a negative word about Hamas, even though Hamas has repressed all forms of culture - literature, film, and even meetings - in Gaza.

We learned more about Hamas' repression of Gazans from Egyptians who briefly visited Gaza than from the supposed Palestinian culture warriors.

The same PalFest downplayed the murderous October 7 Hamas massacres this way: " On Saturday, after sixteen years of siege, Hamas militants broke out of Gaza."

The same people who deliberately whitewash Hamas crimes against culture and Jews are spearheading a boycott of the Jewish state pretending to defend Palestinian culture.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

While most Lebanese and Iranian media are quick to claim that Hezbollah is beating Israel, the non-partisan and independent site Critical Threats from the American Enterprise Institute published an article that descries what is really going on in Lebanon.

Excerpts:

Hezbollah’s Military Forces Are Failing in Lebanon

Lebanese Hezbollah is attempting to obfuscate the reality that its military forces in southern Lebanon are disorganized and conducting ineffective military operations against the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). Hezbollah’s military forces have been badly damaged and disrupted by Israeli military action. Israeli forces entered Lebanon on October 1 to destroy Hezbollah’s ability to threaten northern Israeli communities. The operation has so far successfully destroyed and disrupted many of the capabilities required for Hezbollah to threaten northern Israel. Hezbollah is attempting to present itself as a competent, confident military organization, but it has so far failed to effectively execute any major military campaign at scale. Hezbollah’s degradation and severe disruption is likely temporary, however, and the group can reconstitute if Israeli operations end soon.

Hezbollah likely planned to execute one of several possible tactical tasks in response to an Israeli ground operation:

Hezbollah could have decided to defend key infrastructure or Shia towns along the border. A defending force aggressively seeks to hold ground or destroy the attacking force. Hezbollah would presumably decisively engage its combat forces and employ more sophisticated tactics in a defense were it executing a defense effectively. Hezbollah has engaged Israeli forces, but it has not conducted any sophisticated multi-stage ambushes. Hezbollah has instead relied upon rocket and mortar shelling to harass Israeli positions. Rockets and mortars cannot defend ground alone, and would need to be combined with infantry to effectively defend against Israeli attacks. These rocket and mortar attacks also are not limiting the IDF’s ability to maneuver on the battlefield or causing the IDF to change its overall scheme of maneuver. Coordinating between infantry forces and artillery is a difficult command-and-control task that may not be possible given the current state of Hezbollah’s communications and command network.

A force conducting an orderly withdrawal evacuates or destroys its supplies to prevent the attacking force from capturing them. Hezbollah did not evacuate even its most prized, high-end supplies, like Kornet anti-tank missile launchers or night-vision goggles, instead allowing these supplies to fall into Israeli hands.

Criticisms directed at the IDF’s slow pace of operations ignore Israeli operational design and lessons learned in the Gaza Strip. Some Lebanese officials implied that the Israeli operation is failing because IDF forces have not penetrated deep into Lebanon. The IDF’s slow movement is a deliberate choice designed to root out and destroy Hezbollah tunnel infrastructure methodically. This approach was presumably derived from a lesson learned in the Gaza Strip, where after a relatively rapid armored assault, the IDF slowed its pace of operations and began methodically reentering areas and ripping out subterranean and above-ground infrastructure.

Israeli forces will need to undertake additional activities to maintain Hezbollah’s degradation and disruption, but current Israeli tactical and operational efforts appear to have routed Hezbollah units at least in the immediate border area. Hezbollah’s degradation and severe disruption is temporary, however, and the group will recover absent sufficient Israeli pressure. If Israeli air operations targeting Hezbollah forces and commanders behind the lines slacken—due either to an IDF decision to prioritize close air support or to a political decision to slow strikes—Hezbollah will be able to reorganize, refit, and become more effective. Persistent IDF airstrikes combined with the IDF’s advances are likely disrupting reorganization efforts, however.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

10/28 Links Pt2: Palestinian Nationalism Uber Alles; Sally Rooney’s Literary Mob; Chicago Jewish man on way to synagogue shot by attacker shouting 'Allahu Akhbar'

From Ian:

Gadi Taub: The Peace Process Failed, but Its Bad Assumptions Live On

IV. Homo Economicus
But misunderstanding runs deeper. It is not only that we imagined the Palestinian national movement in the image of ours. We also projected our own misconceptions of human nature onto the Palestinians. We misunderstood them, in other words, in the same way that we misunderstand ourselves.

Contemporary Western elites mostly assume as a matter of course that we all want, above all, a decent job, food on the table, and a safe environment to raise our children. But when we conceive of all life in these materialistic terms, we lose the ability to imagine the human capacity for the sublime and the evil alike. And, encouraged by fuzzy-headed liberal and socialist assumptions from America, Europe, and the global NGO industry, Israelis failed to believe in their neighbors’ sinister intentions.

When, one after the other, IDF intelligence chiefs reassured us that the Palestinians are deterred because it was not in their interest to risk the economic gains we helped them achieve, it is because they project our ideas of human motivation onto them. So self-evident do their presuppositions seem that they become invisible to those who hold them.

These presuppositions serve as filters by which any contradictory information is labeled as pessimism, fear-mongering, fantasy, absurdity, or deception—and so never enters intelligence calculations. The same projections and misunderstandings predominate departments of Middle East studies throughout the West.

It was on the basis of these Western conceptions of human nature that we assumed our technology would be intimidating enough; it was this view that informed our belief that, once freed from Israeli occupation, Gazans would naturally devote their efforts to nation-building and economic betterment; it is on the basis of this outlook that we also convinced ourselves that they’ll see that perpetual peace was better than perpetual war.

And this is why we did not take seriously their theology of hate, their deep-seated racism, and the depth of their barbaric sadism.

We did not take ourselves seriously either, and so we did not understand the forces within ourselves that were now awakened.

In his masterful essay “Churchill in 1940,” Isaiah Berlin wrote that Winston Churchill did not create the fortitude that the British people displayed in their determination to fight the evil of Nazism. He only awakened something that was already in them, but that they themselves had forgotten. In a less poetic way, but with no less ferocity, Benjamin Netanyahu tapped a force within the hearts of Israeli Jews that most of us no longer remember we possessed. He did it simply and straightforwardly: he insisted on total victory from day one, and has never wavered since.

Unlike Churchill who commandeered the whole of British society, Netanyahu has had to manage the war despite opposition from much of the state and military bureaucracy, fickle coalition partners, a hostile press, and an elite that loathes him. That elite includes much of the top brass of the IDF and Shin Bet, who have more than once tried to undermine him. Instead of the unwavering support Britain received from the Roosevelt administration even before Pearl Harbor, the current U.S. government has repeatedly tried to bring about the end of Netanyahu’s term as well as an end to the war without Israeli victory. It is also undermining Israel’s long-term security with its strategy of appeasing Tehran. Notwithstanding all this, Netanyahu has persisted on the path to the victory and now Israel seems close to achieving it, perhaps even to removing the Iranian nuclear threat. That’s a breathtaking feat of statesmanship by any standard—one that most of us, myself included, did not believe was possible at all.

All the same, October 7 did happen on Netanyahu’s watch. The question of his responsibility awaits inquiry when this war is over. What he did and did not do before that day will have to be weighed against what he did since.

But the truth is that Israelis care very little about that now, which is why the attempts to pin responsibility for the disaster on the prime minister have failed to gain traction. After a string of extraordinary operational successes in the conduct of the war, and after resisting external pressure to buckle in the face of Israel’s enemies, Netanyahu is steadily rising in the polls. That’s because a solid majority in Israel understands the existential danger we are in, and so does not dream of replacing the one man who has never wavered on “total victory.”

Seth Mandel: Palestinian Nationalism Uber Alles

Fatah’s control of the PLO at this time was so consequential because it was created as an umbrella coalition of Palestinian resistance groups. The last major holdout, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, had joined the prior year. Arafat took over at the perfect moment to mold the entire Palestinian national movement according to his methods. Though there would be disagreement and discord, the main point of uniting the disparate factions of the Palestinian “resistance” was to threaten the stability of Arab states that didn’t back total war with Israel.

Fight Club’s first rule was “you don’t talk about Fight Club.” The PLO’s first rule was “you only talk about destroying Israel.” Everything else gets checked at the door.

What Qaddumi’s comments meant was not that supporters of the Palestinian cause should temporarily set aside their devotion to, say, gay rights or feminism. It meant that supporters must permanently set aside their devotion to gay rights and feminism and anything else they believed. Because the true state of a leftist movement, in the Palestinian rendering, is revolution in perpetuity.

This is the danger of the primacy of Palestinian nationalism on campus and among other, mostly but not entirely progressive, activist institutions. Nothing else matters but the destruction of the power structures wherever they are. Permanent revolution means there can be no peace, no compromise. If yet another generation of activists is reared on this one rule, it will apply to everything, not just Israel or Zionism.

Finally, how to reconcile the declared Marxist and socialist bona fides of the Palestinian national movement with its issue ban, which would seem to rule out much that animates the class war? Here Qaddumi shows the cleverness of the movement. The class war exists, but the Palestinians have… invented a new class:

“Because of the evacuation of the Palestinians, Al-Fateh represents the refugees. It is the only revolutionary movement which has transcended the Arab movements, Arab parties and the Palestinian regional movements, and it has done this because it has depended on the refugee class. The bourgeois concept, on the other hand, is one of attributes.”

In other words, in the permanence of the “refugee class” is where the movement finds its greatest strength.

The “pro-Palestinian” activists in the West are not unaware of all this—or at least those who speak for them and lead them aren’t unaware. The point of all this conflict is its permanence and its wide applicability. There are, of course, people who support the establishment of a Palestinian state but who do not support open-ended violent revolution. But of the two groups, the Western activist class tends to elevate and legitimize only the more extreme one, which makes no excuses for its hypocrisies and which cannot be placated by peace and compromise.

We’re All Colonialists Now

Kirsch notes that the massacre of Jews in Israel—instantly transmitted around the world via bodycam footage taken by Hamas fighters—had the effect of reversing “the usual terms” of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. For two decades, the pattern of the conflict saw Hamas casually rocket Israeli towns near the Gaza border with little effect while Israel retaliated with lethal artillery barrages and air strikes. The asymmetry of firepower combined with a similar asymmetry in the protection of civilians left Israel largely unscathed while Palestinians bore the brunt of the Israeli response. These uneven death tolls provoked fierce criticism of Israel around the world. One might have expected, then, that a gruesome and intimate butchery of many hundreds of Israeli civilians would elicit widespread horror and condemnation. In fact, just the opposite happened. The most murderous attack against Jews since the Holocaust inspired “a larger and louder pro-Palestinian response than any previous conflict.”

How to explain this wretched state of affairs? Kirsch admits that some of the indignation toward Israel flows from traditional humanitarian concerns in response to Israel’s retaliatory invasion of Gaza, which resulted in a great many civilian casualties. But in truth, this was an afterthought. The protests against Israel erupted more or less concomitantly with the news of Jewish bloodshed, well before any Israeli military response. Over the years, it had been common to witness excitement and enthusiasm over Hamas’s exploits in Palestinian culture, or even in the political slums of Cairo and Damascus; what made this time different, Kirsch observes, is that now “it was coming from Ivy League campuses, the Democratic Socialists of America, and Black Lives Matter.”

And the forces of jihad returned the compliment to the boutique left, adopting the language of an academic seminar. Three months after its barbaric attack in the Gaza Envelope, Hamas published a memorandum in defense of the war it initiated. “The events of October 7 must be put in their broader context,” it said. That broader context, Hamas explained, is “all cases of struggle against colonialism.” Formerly committed to shedding Jewish blood on explicitly theological grounds, Hamas now fine-tuned its position to opposing Zionism as a “colonial project,” an “illegal entity.”

But the insistence that Israel is part of the same historical process that brought European settlers to various lands wrenched from indigenous peoples belies the historical record. Modern Zionist settlement in what is now Israel took off in the 1880s when Palestine was a province of the Ottoman Empire. Jewish emigration continued after World War I when the land was ruled by the British under a mandate from the League of Nations. Eventually, the Jewish state was established in a manner that displaced Arab inhabitants of Palestine but did not erase them.

Notwithstanding the post-1967 settlements on the West Bank, the State of Israel remains a speck on the regional map surrounded by a vast swath of Arab countries stretching from Morocco to Iraq. Some empire. And since 1948, the Arab population of historic Palestine has swelled from about 1.3 million to about 7.5 million. Some genocide.

Anyone with a tinge of sympathy for Zionism ought to recoil from an ideology that is a fount of historical falsehood and monstrous fantasy at the expense of the Jews. But Kirsch wisely instructs readers how the settler-colonial prism also provides low returns for Palestinians. In short, the rise of this framework generates terrible confusion about that insoluble conflict. By fashioning a radical argument against Israel’s entire existence, the settler-colonial paradigm obviates any legitimate discussion of land swaps and proposed national borders. Given the durable imbalance of power, the implications for Palestinians of remaining locked in rejectionism will be grim. Hence the beginning of wisdom for advocates of Palestinian interests is to recognize that Israel, with no “mother country” to speak of, is staying put.

Ultimately, it is not only the concept of colonialism that people fail to grasp in the modern age but the concept of war. In a century of recurrent conflict between Jews and Arabs, it is long past time for Palestinians to adjust to the reality of Jewish sovereignty. Without that, their aspirations for a better life will remain bound up in an impossible, anti-historical scheme. On Settler Colonialism is a lucid and humane warning against precisely that fate.

10/28 Links Pt1: Western Leaders Should Be Thankful to Israel; Israel outlaws UNWRA; What would you do in our place, President Macron?

From Ian:

Western Leaders Should Be Thankful to Israel

At a bleak time in global affairs, a powerful blow has been struck against the most malign regime in the Middle East. On Friday night the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) conducted a measured, precise but devastating aerial assault on Iran. It was a proportionate response to Iran's missile attack on Israel, and civilian casualties were kept to a minimum.

Israel has reminded allies and enemies alike of just how formidable its military capabilities are. The IDF has established air superiority over Iran and can destroy its military infrastructure with virtual impunity. Having already decapitated Hamas and Hizbullah, Israel has demonstrated that it could do the same to their masters in Tehran at a time of its choosing.

While Europe and America have sought to bully Israel into ceasefires, the IDF has methodically set about eliminating the terrorist threat on its border, while checking Iranian power and influence.

Israeli Strike Could Create Deterrence

Israel has apparently inflicted severe damage on Iran's air defense systems. It is reasonable to assume that they were significantly impaired in the initial wave of attacks, given that the Iranians barely intercepted any missiles or Israeli fighter jets. With its air defenses neutralized in several critical areas, Iranian leaders will have to carefully consider whether to launch a strong attack on Israel and risk a counter-response they cannot stop.

The Israeli strike was deliberately designed to offer the Iranian regime the option to avoid retaliation. The IDF spokesperson explicitly stated the strike was "focused," and Israel has no interest in prolonging the exchange of blows.

The Israeli strikes aimed to achieve a tangible impact on Iranian military capabilities, a clear signal to the regime that it is exposed and vulnerable, which strengthens deterrence, and a severe blow to its prestige in the eyes of its citizens, all while carefully giving Tehran a "ladder to climb down from the tree," providing a justification to halt the cycle of retaliation. Neither Israel, the U.S., nor Iran currently desires a regional war.

The strikes on facilities for the development and production of surface-to-surface missiles and rocket engines were carried out around 2:00 a.m., when no civilians were present. Attacks in Ilam and Khuzestan provinces targeted surface-to-surface missile launch facilities and arrays, from which ballistic missiles were launched at Israel in the two previous Iranian attacks.

Israel's Strike on Iran

Israel destroyed Iran's air defense systems, leaving the country vulnerable to repeated Israeli Air Force strikes. These systems, of Russian origin, also demonstrate the superiority of Western weapons over Eastern ones. Given that Russia needs these systems for its war against Ukraine, it's questionable whether Russia will agree to sell additional systems to Iran.

Israel's offensive capabilities surpass Iran's defensive capabilities, revealing Israel's clear operational superiority over Iran. Israel managed to strike all of its intended targets, while Iran did not.

In deciding whether to escalate, Khamenei must consider key factors: Does Iran have enough missiles to sustain a prolonged campaign against Israel, given that production has been disrupted? Could Israel's next strike target energy and nuclear facilities? No response would signify an historic weakness, while a response would allow Israel to strike where it truly hurts. All this is happening as Hizbullah is weakened and no longer serves as a restraining force on Israel.