Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Thursday, February 27, 2025

When Gazans say "jihad" they mean genocide

The Telegraph revealed this week:

The BBC has been accused of “whitewashing” the views of participants in its controversial Gaza documentary after repeatedly mistranslating references to “the Jews” and omitting praise of “jihad”.

The Telegraph can reveal that on at least five occasions the words Yahud or Yahudy – Arabic for “Jew” or “Jews” – were changed to “Israel” or “Israeli forces”, or were removed from the subtitles altogether.

An interviewee praising Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader, for “jihad against the Jews” was also mistranslated as saying he was fighting “Israeli forces”.

Immediately, Palestinian apologists insisted that the original translation was accurate:

So what does Jihad really mean, and what do Gazans mean when they use the word - do they normally mean "struggle" or "war"?

I searched for the Arabic word in Palestinian (.ps) websites.

The first result was jehad.ps, which is the website of the Islamic Jihad terrorist organization, which obviously considers jihad to be primarily military.

But one of the first results pointed to an academic paper, "Jihad between the aims and means," from Al-Aqsa University Journal (Humanities Series) Volume Twenty-One, Issue Two, pp. 109-141 June 2017. Al Aqsa University is in Gaza.

Here is the translation of its section on defining jihad:

Definition of Jihad (المطلب الأول: تعريف الجهاد)
Linguistic Definition (تعريف الجهاد في اللغة):
Jihad is derived from the root word "جاهد" (jaahada), which means to exert effort or struggle.
It is used to describe fighting an enemy or exerting effort and energy to repel an opponent.
Technical Definition (تعريف الجهاد اصطلاحًا):
According to Hanafi School (تعريف الحنفية):
Jihad is calling people to the true religion and fighting those who refuse to accept it.
According to Maliki School (تعريف المالكية):
Jihad is fighting a non-Muslim who does not have a treaty with Muslims to exalt the word of Allah.
According to Shafi'i School (تعريف الشافعية):
Jihad is exerting effort in fighting disbelievers to support Islam.
According to Hanbali School (تعريف الحنابلة):
Jihad is specifically fighting disbelievers.
Chosen Definition (التعريف المختار):
After reviewing the definitions from the various schools of thought, the paper adopts the following definition:
"Jihad is exerting one's utmost ability, effort, and energy in fighting disbelievers—after inviting them to Islam and their refusal—in order to elevate the word of Allah and honor His religion.

The paper specifically addresses the obligation of jihad against Israel and its goals:

Resisting Occupation and Expelling the Invader (مقاومة الاحتلال ودحر المحتل):
Purpose and Justification:
An enemy may occupy Muslim lands for various purposes, such as:
Eradicating Islam and its followers.
Exploiting natural resources of Islamic countries.
Occupying lands that were historically under Muslim rule.
Facilitating immigration and creating favorable living conditions for settlers from the occupying state, leading to the displacement of the indigenous Muslim population, as happened in Palestine.
Objective of Jihad Against Occupation:
If the occupier's objective is to achieve any of the aforementioned goals, then expelling the occupier becomes a legitimate objective of jihad in Islam.
In this case, jihad becomes a compulsory duty (fard ‘ayn) on all Muslims by the consensus of the following schools of thought:
Hanafi
Maliki
Shafi'i
Hanbali
Zahiri
Obligation of Defense:
It is obligatory for the inhabitants of the occupied land to use all their means to repel the aggressor.
If they cannot achieve sufficient defense, then the obligation of jihad extends to neighboring Muslims, then to those beyond them, until the enemy is expelled from Muslim lands.
This is based on the principle of collective duty (fard kifaya) becoming an individual duty (fard ‘ayn) when the threat is imminent.

The word "jihad" in this context explicitly means a religious obligation to attack every Jew (disbelievers include civilians) and to expel every Jew from the land.

It means genocide.

Translating that as "struggle" is not at all accurate.

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What about the "greater jihad" that so many use to say that jihad is primarily an internal struggle?

That interpretation comes from a hadith which is considered weak or non-authoritative in mainstream Islam. The idea comes from Sufi Islam but has been more widely adopted colloquially among Sunnis. Some traditionalists and Salafists critique this interpretation of jihad altogether, saying it is purely military.

In this context, however, it is clear that "jihad" means nothing less than a holy, total war on Jews in Israel.

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AP uses heavy deception to imply - but not directly say - that the IDF uses AI unethically

Last week, AP published a long article about how the IDF uses artificial intelligence.

Like other articles, it fundamentally misunderstands how it is being used.

The bias is clear in the first paragraphs:

U.S. tech giants have quietly empowered Israel to track and kill many more alleged militants more quickly in Gaza and Lebanon through a sharp spike in artificial intelligence and computing services. But the number of civilians killed has also soared, fueling fears that these tools are contributing to the deaths of innocent people.

No, the number of innocent people killed are a direct result of Hamas embedding itself among the civlian population. If AI was responsible for more civilian deaths, then wouldn't we have seen far more civilians die in Lebanon, where Israel is using the same AI systems to assist targeting as they use in Gaza? Yet the ratio of civilians to terrorists killed in Lebanon was quite low, hundreds compared to thousands.

Militaries have for years hired private companies to build custom autonomous weapons. However, Israel’s recent wars mark a leading instance in which commercial AI models made in the United States have been used in active warfare, despite concerns that they were not originally developed to help decide who lives and who dies.

The first sentence plus the "However," implies that Israel's AI systems are autonomous weapons. They aren't. They are software tools to go through enormous amounts of data to find valuable information.

IDF policy for years has been that life and death decisions must be made by humans, not autonomously by machines. AP's use of "autonomous" here is highly deceptive.

The main new point of the article is that Israel us using commercial AI products from Microsoft and OpenAI in some of its data analysis.

“This is the first confirmation we have gotten that commercial AI models are directly being used in warfare,” said Heidy Khlaaf, chief AI scientist at the AI Now Institute and former senior safety engineer at OpenAI. “The implications are enormous for the role of tech in enabling this type of unethical and unlawful warfare going forward.”

What does she mean by "directly"? Israel would not use commercial software for actual warfare, for the simple reason that commercial software is not designed for that - the requirements in warfare are far stricter.

As the article says later, Israel's use of Microsoft Azure is mostly for translation, transcription and searching huge amounts of data. That is not "direct" use in war. The quote is either a lie on her part of AP's not telling her what it knew itself.

But Khlaaf is not exactly an impartial scientist.. She called the war in Gaza a genocide - on October 13, 2023.

As U.S. tech titans ascend to prominent roles under President Donald Trump, the AP’s findings raise questions about Silicon Valley’s role in the future of automated warfare.

Again, Israel is not engaging in automated warfare. AP knows this, so it only implies it - over and over again.

Finally, AP quotes the truth after 10 paragraphs of sly innuendo of Israel building war robots:

The Israeli military says its analysts use AI-enabled systems to help identify targets but independently examine them together with high-ranking officers to meet international law, weighing the military advantage against the collateral damage. A senior Israeli intelligence official authorized to speak to the AP said lawful military targets may include combatants fighting against Israel, wherever they are, and buildings used by militants. Officials insist that even when AI plays a role, there are always several layers of humans in the loop.

“These AI tools make the intelligence process more accurate and more effective,” said an Israeli military statement to the AP. “⁠They make more targets faster, but not at the expense of accuracy, and many times in this war they’ve been able to minimize civilian casualties.”

Another nugget of truth:

It’s extremely hard to identify when AI systems enable errors because they are used with so many other forms of intelligence, including human intelligence, sources said. But together they can lead to wrongful deaths.

Which means that the errors are nearly always human - mistakes in data being input, mistakes in interpreting it, and even mistakes in how to integrate AI in the decision making process.

The real question, that AP doesn't answer, is what percentage of human decisions are mistakes and what percentage of AI plus human oversight are mistakes? Looking at AI in a vacuum and not comparing it with the alternative is simply bad reporting.

The article notes that some AI models can make mistakes or even add false data in translations, and quotes an expert:

“Should we be basing these decisions on things that the model could be making up?” said Joshua Kroll, an assistant professor of computer science.

But after that incendiary accusation, AP adds almost skeptically:

The Israeli military said any phone conversation translated from Arabic or intelligence used in identifying a target has to be reviewed by an Arabic-speaking officer.

(I often use automated translation tools for my writing, but if anything seems off, I will verify with either other tools or with a human expert. My writings are not life or death. Anyone assuming that an army would kill someone based on a single tenuous piece of information is not an honest person.)

The article lists potential mistakes that anonymous IDF officers admit to have seen in AI, like mistranslations or mislabeling a spreadsheet. But these are errors that humans can do too - and worse - and in these cases, the human oversight found the errors. If IDF workers don't follow procedure and ensure that data is verified, that is a problem that must be solved, but it is no different from any other army grunt not following proper procedures.

AP also seems shocked that Israeli employees at Microsoft might be - shudder - patriotic:

Microsoft also operates a 46,000-square-meter corporate campus in Herzliya, north of Tel Aviv, and another office in Gav-Yam in southern Israel, which has displayed a large Israeli flag.

Horrors! Israeli employees are Zionist!

Finally, the article quotes anti-Israel tech people to inject more fear in the reader:

Former Google software engineer Emaan Haseem was among those fired. Haseem said she worked on a team that helped test the reliability of a “sovereign cloud” — a secure system of servers kept so separate from the rest of Google’s global cloud infrastructure that even the company itself couldn’t access or track the data it stores. She later learned through media reports that Google was building a sovereign cloud for Israel.
“It seemed to be more and more obvious that we are literally just trying to design something where we won’t have to care about how our clients are using it, and if they’re using it unfairly or unethically,” Haseem said.

The entire point of sovereign clouds is for regulatory and security reasons. Some data is not allowed to cross national lines for various reasons, including higher security. It is not something Google created for Israel: all major cloud companies offer this option and it is meant to safeguard the data. Haseem is saying that cloud companies should be responsible for how their services are used and act as Big Brother to ensure that it fits their own standards.

If that was true, they would have no customers.

Altogether, this is a hugely biased article of the sort we've seen often in major media. There are no direct lies, but it was written deliberately to imply that something really evil is happening when there is none.

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02/26 Links Pt2: This Is Our Moment for Fearless Zionism; If Hamas Won’t End the War, Israel Will; The Myth of the ‘War That Created Israel’; Trump shares Gaza AI-video

From Ian:

Gil Troy: This Is Our Moment for Fearless Zionism

Fearless Zionists are not swivel-headed, forever looking over our shoulders, wondering, “What will they say?” We are level-headed, forever looking straight ahead, asking ourselves, “Who are we? What do we need to do? And how do we do it right?” We learn from Americanism, not just Zionism, that liberal-democratic nationalism is a force for good in this world, and that while no nation is perfect, some dictatorial regimes and terrorist organizations are perfectly evil. We are proud, passionate, thoughtful patriots, not afraid of words like “pride,” “love,” “power,” or “anger.” We define true patriots as those who love their country because of its politics always, despite its politics always.

Fearless Zionists understand that war is hell. We know that this war’s moral calculus starts with holding Hamas responsible for everything that has happened since October 7: They started the war, committed despicable crimes, keep holding and abusing hostages, refuse to surrender, and hide behind their own civilians as human shields. We can regret the deaths of Palestinian civilians caught in the crossfire, we try to minimize the death of innocents, but we know the moral onus is on Hamas, not us.

Fearless Zionists aren’t “April 1 Zionists”: supporters of Israel who nevertheless blamed Israel and not the fog of war, along with the instigators of the war Hamas, when seven aid workers were killed mistakenly, tragically – and then started saying “enough, stop fighting,” as the media turned increasingly on Israel. Fearless Zionists don’t call fending off 320 Iranian missiles “taking the win.” They know the difference between defense and offense, between avoiding catastrophe and restoring deterrence. And fearless Zionists have a moral code too, but theirs doesn’t come from anguishing and blaming our soldiers for the holy work of doing the Western world’s dirty work. Our moral code comes from fighting evil, not just condemning it, while understanding how restrained and disciplined and, yes, ethical Israel has been despite facing an enemy that turns mosques into HaMosques, hospitals into Hamaspitals and kindergartens into killergartens.

We reject Jean-Paul Sartre’s formulation, and The New York Times’ assumption: The antisemite doesn’t make the Jew. The anti-Zionists, including that small, loud minority of anti-Zionist Jews, don’t define the Jew. The Jew makes the Jew. I am not a Zionist because of their hatred, but I do occasionally have to shape my Zionist agenda to fight it.

Fearless Zionists learn from our courageous soldiers. We can come from the right and the left, be religious and nonreligious, be pro-Bibi or hate him, pro-Trump or hate him, but we focus on our enemies and fight them with clarity when they come to get us. And we never, ever, stop singing and dancing and continuing our celebration of life.

At Texas Hillel, before starting Friday night services, so many students said how grateful they were for their community, their camaraderie, their people. And one student — soon enlisting as a lone soldier in Israel — declared his gratitude about belong to a people who refuse to be Jews with trembling knees. That’s Fearless Zionism.

And in building our big, broad, blue-and-white tent, we emphasize our foundational consensus, which doesn’t start in hedging or regretting or fixating on those who betray us. Instead, we affirm. We root ourselves in our amazing tradition and our 3,500-year-old story, reach out to our people and likeminded allies worldwide, and find our strength and joy in shouting from the rooftops: “We are Zionists – and will continue to thrive, not just survive.”

Melanie Phillips: Reconciliation — or surrender?

At a time when the west is beginning to wake up to the nature and extent of the threat from the Islamic world, Jewish faith leaders in Britain appear to be waving the white flag of surrender.

Earlier this month, a group of prominent Jewish and Muslim faith leaders — including Britain’s Chief Rabbi — presented to the King the “Muslim-Jewish Reconciliation Accords” which had been created in secret over the course of a year.

Described as a “framework of reconciliation, understanding, and solidarity”, the document calls for “sustained dialogue, mutual understanding and practical collaboration”.

Acknowledging that “tensions in the Middle East often have ripple effects on Muslim-Jewish relations locally,” it says:
These conflicts can lead to mistrust, heightened emotions, and fractures to relationships that we cherish and value so dearly.

Talk about understatement. “Tensions”? “Ripple effects”? “Mistrust”? Do such bland vagaries really convey the impact of the past 16 months of Muslim-led hate-marches against Jews and Israel following the Hamas-led pogrom in Israel on October 7 2023?

While most Muslims pose no threat whatever, and many of the most vicious antisemites and Israel-bashers are white-skinned, Muslims have played a disproportionate part in this anti-Jewish hysteria. The incitement against Israel and the Jews has been orchestrated by both Sunni and Shia Muslim extremists in alliance with the western left. And as opinion polling repeatedly reveals, antisemitism in the Islamic world is far higher than in the general population.

The inter-faith document says that “both communities must strive to offer reassurance, promoting dialogue and reaffirming our shared commitment to peace and mutual understanding”.

“Shared commitment”? Really? How many Muslim members of this group publicly denounced Hamas after the October 7 atrocities and said “Not in our name”? How many have publicly rejected the Muslim Brotherhood, the jihadi parent body of Hamas that’s entrenched in Britain’s Muslim community? How many have publicly condemned those members of their community who regularly parade through the streets chanting for intifada, the death of Jews and the destruction of Israel?

Seth Mandel: The Myth of the ‘War That Created Israel’

The Israeli War of Independence has no other name. This shouldn’t create much of a problem, even for anti-Zionists: they simply oppose the state that won its independence in that war.

But lately, the trend of discounting Israel’s existence has picked up steam in the media, which has latched onto the “nakba” narrative. Now, “nakba” is not a replacement for “Israeli War of Independence.” Nakba is a descriptive term coined by Arab intellectuals after the war for the combined Arab armies’ military defeat by Israel. (Later on, it was repurposed to refer to the flight of Arabs during the war.)

The fact that nakba isn’t a substitute for the war’s name poses a problem for the Western press: What does one call the war if one doesn’t want to accurately convey what one is talking about?

It would appear the current answer is: Call it “the war that created Israel.”

Now, it should be noted that this, too, is purely descriptive. So it is possible to use this phrase organically and not necessarily to signal one’s disapproval of the fact of Israel’s existence. But the context in which it is usually used makes clear that, most of the time, it is deployed in bad faith.

Sometimes the bad faith is overt and undisguised.

In the New York Times this week, Fatima AbdulKarim and Erika Solomon published a highly editorialized “report” about Israel’s current operation in and around Jenin, where Iran-backed separatists have dug in and threatened the security of both Israel and the Palestinian Authority.

Israel’s attempt to suppress the terrorist hive required evacuation of certain neighborhoods. (There is a dispute as to whether 14,000 or 40,000 were temporarily displaced, and a few thousand have already returned to their homes.) Although Palestinians were already returning home after three weeks, AbdulKarim and Solomon claim the displacement “evoked painful memories of the Nakba, the Arabic word that has been used to refer to the mass flight and expulsion of Palestinians during the 1948 war that created Israel.”

You can see from the text how awkward it would be to call the war by its name: It would make clear that the nakba has always been about the failure to destroy the Jewish nation.

The clunky phrase “war that created Israel” isn’t new, but it has been cropping up all over print media recently. (It is rarely used even in the written stories of broadcast news agencies like CNN and Fox.) In October, the Financial Times ran an absurd piece making the case for UNRWA—the Hamas-adjacent agency whose employees were involved in the Oct. 7, 2023 slaughter—to win the Nobel Peace Prize. In it, UNRWA is described as having a “mandate to care for Palestinian refugees from the 1948 war that created Israel.” The Financial Times had used that exact same phrasing just months earlier in reporting on UNRWA’s Hamas-connected employees.

Seth Mandel: If Hamas Won’t End the War, Israel Will

This is a good reminder that the deal on the table here has always been on the table. Gaza invaded Israel to spark the war, taking hostages; Israel went into Gaza to get those responsible—i.e., the leadership of Gaza’s governing party and armed forces, Hamas—and to bring back its hostages. That Israel was willing to let Hamas leaders leave the enclave alive was generous. There is no reason that all of the pressure from world leaders (and, ahem, protesting publics) should not have focused on lobbying for this particular outcome from Day One.

Wars are not over when both sides get a few good shots in; that’s a hockey fight. Wars do not end when their fundamental underlying conditions are left intact, even if fighting temporarily ceases; that’s an intermission. It is rather maddening to remember that “give back the hostages you took and leave Gaza” was the offer to Hamas leadership—not every member of Hamas, let alone everyone in Gaza; just the top leaders—and yet the war continues because Hamas and its supporters around the world believe “give back the hostages you took” is incompatible with a freshman decolonization course someone tricked their parents into paying thousands of dollars for.

What if Hamas leaders don’t want to live in a penthouse in Qatar? They can keep releasing hostages under the rubric of phase one.

So that’s two overly generous offers from Israel to Hamas. What’s behind door number three? Ah, that would be the gates of hell: “Hamas can choose the end of the ceasefire, which would mean a return to all-out war.” As one Israeli official told the Times of Israel, “It would be different [than before]. A new defense minister, a new chief of staff, all the weapons we need, and full legitimacy, one hundred percent, from the Trump administration.”

The deadline is March 8. If there are no additional hostage releases by one week from Saturday, the cease-fire ends.

This clarity is, as the official suggests, almost entirely a function of the change of administration in Washington. Donald Trump came into office wanting this war over. Both sides have the means to end this war—Hamas by surrendering and accepting exile for its leaders, Israel by forcing Hamas out of power and its leadership out of Gaza. For the next 11 days we will watch as Hamas mulls over whether it or Israel will end the war.

But one of them will. And after the series of demonic festivals-of-death performed by Hamas each week, and after the revelations of what Palestinians did to those hostages and to the Bibas family, and after it became clear that there was no famine and certainly no genocide and that Hamas had made it all up, Israel may very well have the stomach to end the war if Hamas won’t.

02/26 Links Pt1: Israel comes to a standstill to mourn the Bibas family; President Herzog: As president, I ask for your forgiveness; Hamas To Hand Over Four Hostage Bodies

From Ian:

Israel comes to a standstill to mourn the Bibas family

Tens of thousands of Israelis have paused to pay their respects at the funeral procession for Shiri Bibas and her two young sons, Ariel and Kfir, who were taken hostage and murdered during the Hamas-led attack on October 7.

Mourners gathered in central Israel, including at Kfar HaMaccabiah in Ramat Gan, before the procession passed through Yavne, Ashdod and Ashkelon, en route to the Sha’ar HaNegev Regional Council near the Gaza border.

The private burial ceremony took place at Tsoher Cemetery near Kibbutz Nir Oz, the family’s home. Eulogies were being broadcast live from Israel at 9.30am local time, as crowds gathered in solidarity at Hostages Square in Tel Aviv.

Yarden Bibas, husband of Shiri and father of Ariel and Kfir, who was recently released from Hamas captivity as part of the ceasefire deal, shared emotional tributes to his family.

Shiri, Ariel and Kfir Bibas were buried together in a single casket.

The funeral’s MC, Carmit Palty Katzir, whose family members were killed and kidnapped on October 7, said: “They will remain together and close, just as Shiri enveloped the children, always, including on that accursed day.”

Speaking through the Hostage Family Forum, Yarden expressed his deep love and heartache for his loved ones taken from him.

“Shiri, I love you and will always love you! Shiri, this is the closest I've been to you since October 7th, and I can't kiss or hug you, and it's breaking me!,” Yarden said, paying tribute to his late wife.

Reflecting on the loss of his two sons, he added, “Ariel, you made me a father. You transformed us into a family. You taught me what truly matters in life and about responsibility. Ariel, I hope you're not angry with me for failing to protect you properly and for not being there for you. I hope you know I thought about you every day, every minute.”

Yarden also spoke of his youngest son, Kfir, with heartbreaking tenderness: “Kfir, I didn't think our family could be more perfect, and then you came and made it even more perfect… I remember your birth.

"I remember during the delivery when the midwife suddenly stopped everything—we were frightened and thought something was wrong—but it was just to tell us we had another redhead. Mom and I laughed and rejoiced. Kfir, I'm sorry I didn't protect you better, but I need you to know that I love you deeply and miss you terribly!”

Dana Silberman-Sitton, the sister of Shiri Bibas, spoke emotionally about her sister and her two young nephews, Ariel and Kfir, at their funeral.

Using the nicknames she had for her loved ones, “Baz,” “Lulu,” and “Purpur,” Sitton reflected on the special bond they shared. “We waited to be aunts together, just to be called ‘aunt,’ and you, Shiri, were like no other aunt, loving and protective,” she said.

Shiri, Ariel and Kfir Bibas buried in a single casket: ‘They will remain together’

Shiri Bibas and her two young sons, Ariel and baby Kfir, who were abducted by terrorists to the Gaza Strip and then murdered there, were buried together Wednesday in a single casket, mother and children wrapped in an eternal embrace, at their joint funeral.

They were buried at Tsoher Cemetery, near the home in Kibbutz Nir Oz, from which they were seized on October 7, 2023.

“They will remain together and close, just as Shiri enveloped the children, always, including on that accursed day,” said Carmit Palty Katzir, who acted as MC at the funeral.

She was referring to a haunting video clip of traumatized Shiri, clutching her boys to her chest, as a mob of terrorists dragged them from their home. The images became symbolic of the horror of the attack and seared their fate into the national conscience.

Ariel was four years old when the family was kidnapped from their home in Kibbutz Nir Oz on October 7, 2023, and Kfir was just nine months old. The kibbutz was one of the hardest hit on that day — terrorists broke into all but six homes in the community.

Though the funeral was kept as a private event — state officials and the public were asked to stay away — it was broadcast live on a video feed that was simultaneously carried by all major Israeli networks.

The funeral procession began in the central city of Rishon Lezion where the bodies were prepared for burial. Tens of thousands of people gathered along roads and highways of the 60-kilometer route from there to the cemetery to pay their respects. Many held orange balloons or wore orange, a tribute to the bright colored hair of Ariel and Kfir that became an icon of their plight.

In a heartbreaking address, Yarden Bibas eulogized his wife and children at their funeral, speaking with his sister Ofri at his side. Yarden, who was also taken hostage, was released earlier this month as part of a ceasefire deal with Hamas.

Bibas Brothers Join Count Of 55 Israeli Children Killed Since October 7 Attacks

The bodies of Ariel and Kfir Bibas were returned to Israel on Thursday by the terrorists who kidnapped and murdered them. Upon official identification of their bodies, their death increases the total number of children from Israel who have died in the fallout of the October 7 attacks to 55.

Kfir was nine months old when he was kidnapped, and Ariel was 4.

According to a July 2024 report from Israel’s Ministry of Justice, 53 children were known to have been killed during Hamas’s October 7 massacre and during the war that followed. Twelve of those children were killed by a Hezbollah missile while on a soccer field in the Druze Town of Majdal Shams.

“Our hearts were broken today. On October 7, 2023, Israel suffered its deadliest attack in history,” Dr. Cochav Elkayam Levy, the founder and chair of the Civil Commission on Oct 7 Crimes by Hamas against Women and Children, told The Daily Wire. “ Families were massacred, tortured, taken hostage, witnessed the murder of their loved ones, separated from each other and many, including children, were exposed to the atrocities on social media.”

A total of 870 youth lost one parent in the war, and another 23 lost both parents. Three nuclear families were entirely wiped out.

A report by the Dvora Institute, which Levy helped author, found that Hamas killed civilians as their family members bore witness, especially children. Levy’s report deemed Hamas’s tactics on October 7 a “kinocide,” or a systematic and widespread attack directed against families.

“The Bibas family is not alone,” Levy said. “They are among many who faced unimaginable horrors. Families like the Idan family, Arava family and Sharabis suffered devastating losses.”

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

We’ve all heard of people spurning God when tragedy strikes. They say things like, “God didn’t help me when I needed help. Therefore he doesn’t exist,” or, “If there were a God, He wouldn’t have made the Holocaust,” or, “If there is a God, He’s not a loving God but a cruel God and I refuse to worship him.”

But the Israeli Jews taken captive on October 7 experienced no such crisis of faith. They turned to, rather than away from God, embracing Jewish law as best they could. The hostages understood that their persecution was due to the fact that they were Jews. So they doubled down. Because the Jews are a stiff-necked people.

It doesn’t matter where you start out as a Jew. When push comes to shove, we know what to do. Many of the hostages were disconnected from religion prior to being kidnapped. Keith Siegel, for example.

Growing up in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Siegel attended a Conservative synagogue with his family. But after 40 years on a secular kibbutz, Keith had pretty much forgotten any of the prayers he’d learned as a child. This is not to say that Siegel had turned away from God. He probably just hadn’t thought much about religion or God during those years.

But held captive in a Gaza tunnel, Keith Siegel began saying the Shema, an affirmation of faith: “Hear oh Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.”

Siegel knew that what had happened to him, had happened to him because he was a Jew. It shifted something inside of him, something that called out to him in the haze of the endless starvation and torture, and the constant dread of death. Keith Siegel reached out to the one God he’d almost forgotten, and pledged allegiance. “Shema Yisrael, Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai Echad.”

With plenty of time alone with his thoughts, Siegel reviewed his slim knowledge of Judaism. He knew the blessing for bread. It was really the only blessing he remembered. So he began saying the Hamotzi blessing at meals. “We had a pita bread for every meal, that was the first thing I would eat after I said the bracha (blessing),” said Keith.

One day, Keith caught a glimpse of an Israeli TV show after his captors happened to switch the set on. The program was about something like good places to eat in Tel Aviv. Siegel heard one participant make the "borei minei mezonot," blessing said over baked goods and pasta before taking a bite. Keith decided that from then on, he too would make this blessing, whenever he ate anything other than pita bread.

Someone else might have thought that wrong. That you cannot say the mezonot blessing over, for example, a grape or a date. But with his mezonot, Keith Siegel was connecting to God with the only resources God gave him. “I thought it was appropriate,” he said. “But it was the only [blessing] I knew.”

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It was what Keith Siegel had. These were the tools of his survival: the shema, the hamotzi blessing, and now, the mezonot blessing. These things comforted and strengthened him. They were his pathway to God.

When Keith Siegel was finally freed after 484 days in captivity, his family recognized that something remarkable had happened, that cleaving to God was what had kept him alive. His daughter Shir spoke about it.

“Dad searched for his Jewish identity while in captivity, and he found it in small prayers. He started saying blessings over food, like ‘Borei Minei Mezonot,’ which he had never said before, and ‘Shema Yisrael,’ which he had never recited in his life.

"He said that amidst all that hell, he wanted to remember that he was Jewish, that there was meaning to his people and to the place from which he came, and that strengthened him greatly.”

Ah, there it is right there, that backbone Jews get when between a rock and a hard place, life and death, the Inquisition and the Holocaust or a tunnel in Gaza. It only stiffens our resolve and our necks, which is why they never succeed in getting rid of us.

“After he returned,” continued Shir. “I asked him what he wanted us to do for our first Shabbat meal together. I imagined he’d want some dish he loves or a good challah. He replied, ‘You know what I want most of all? A kippah and a Kiddush cup.’”

“Who is like Your people, Israel?” (Samuel 7:23)

Keith Siegel is not the only freed hostage who turned to, instead of away from God. There are many such stories. And we will have plenty of time to tell them.

In fact it will be a delight to take our time in telling the stories, knowing that the enemy will have it rubbed in their faces for years to come. This is what happens when you try to kill the Jews.

It isn’t possible. You can’t do it. Because we’re a stiff-necked people, who, in intolerable situations will always seek to reclaim that spark in the soul that the Arab enemy so desperately wants to extinguish.

But never will.

***

We must thank two readers for bringing my attention to sources that state that it is acceptable to say the mezonot prayer on everything except water or water and salt, b'dieved (a posteriori).

A reader shares the following, "According to the Chayei Adam (58:3) and implied by the Gemara in several places (Brachos 12a, Brachos 35, somewhere in Nedarim that escapes me for the moment), 'Borei Minei Mezonos' on everything but water and salt is acceptable bdi'eved."

Yehudah Posnick comments that Rabbi Aaron Hamaoui of of the Sephardic Community of Greater Boston said that bdi'eved, the mezonot blessing covers all foods, except for water, because the word "mezonot," suggests that the item to be ingested is satiating, and water doesn't sate. (See his comment below for the full thread.)

My take: Keith Siegel did his best and his best was the right thing to do. Disclaimer: I am not a rabbi.

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I am trying out Substack as an adjunct (not a replacement) for this blog. I've been placing some of my longer, original articles on Substack. You can visit the page here.

So far I've been treating Substack as a place for my essays much like I've been treating Instagram as a place for my cartoons and graphics.

It appears to be a nice platform. I have not yet taken advantage of its features like notes and podcasts, but I might as I get more comfortable.

Subscribing to my Substack is free at this time. (I won't object if you want to pay, and some are!) You can then get my essays via email as soon as they are published.

----

Speaking of email, those who were on my email list noticed that the list has been down for several months. I used Madmimi for my mailing lists and it went out of business, and I lost the subscriber list of over 1,500 people. If you want an email digest from the blog, you can use https://blogtrottr.com/ but I have no control or visibility into who does that. I'm not sure if it is worth it to restart the list at this time.

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

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One of the responses on X to my post criticizing Lapid's Gaza plan was, "At least he has a plan. Bibi never had a plan."

There are two problems in this response that are worth calling out.

The first one is fairly obvious: a poor plan is worse than no plan. However, I wouldn't say that Lapid's plan is poor - it would be certainly better than how Gaza was pre-October 7.

The second problem is more subtle, and it is one that was shared by much of the world during the war, including from the US: that Israel should not fight a war without a plan for post-war Gaza.

Once again, this betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the region.

Any reasonable plan for post-war Gaza would involve other Arab states to cooperate. (The exception is Israel annexing Gaza completely, and that is not a reasonable plan.)

By definition, if Israel presents a plan that requires something from other Arab nations, they would reject it out of hand, because they would look like they are lackeys of, or collaborating with, Israel.

Once again, the honor/shame dynamic is key to everything in the Middle East. It would be shameful to accept any plan that Israel proposes or to be seen as a partner with Israel against "Palestine."

This doesn't mean Israel cannot present plans privately, or cooperate with Arab partners in coming up with what would be acceptable. But it cannot be done in public, because its very publicity would doom it.

The UAE has shown strong indications that it is shedding the honor/shame mentality and looking for win/win situations, which is a major reason I believe it is has best chance for partnering for the future of Gaza.

Does Bibi have a plan? I have no idea. But I'm sure he has ideas and that he has discussed those ideas with the US and others.

The presentation of a plan is more important than the plan itself when it involves Arab states. It can never, ever appear to be an Israeli plan.

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Yesterday, Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid presented a "day after" plan for Gaza in front of an audience at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies in Washington.

His plan is that after the hostages are all released, Egypt would take control of the Gaza Strip through a UN Security Council resolution, including internal security and civilian management. This control would last for a decade or so, until a reformed Palestinian Authority can take over.

With all due respect for Lapid, anyone who follows the region know that Egypt would never want to control Gaza under any circumstances.

Lapid points to Egyptian control of Gaza from 1948-1967 as if that is something to be emulated today. Yet Egypt's control was not out of a desire to make Gazans' lives better but to keep them out of Egypt.

In 1948, Egypt created the "All Palestine Government" as a puppet government for Gaza, led by the notorious Nazi collaborator Amin Husseini, the former Mufti of Jerusalem. After a mere three months, they relocated this paper organization to Cairo, yet for several years Egypt still pretended that the All Palestine Government was in charge of Gaza. In reality, it was a military occupation where the social services of a normal government were given to UNRWA. Egypt provided only the barest minimum of medical, educational and administrative services to the minority of Gazans who were not considered refugees: people who were born in Gaza were jealous of the refugees who received support from UNRWA.

Those nineteen years prove that Egypt wanted nothing to do with Gaza. It did not take responsibility - it abdicated it as much as it possibly could. It treated Gazans with contempt.

Nothing has changed since then. Egypt's activities during the Gaza war were centered around aid - not because they care about Gazans but because they don't want Gazans to flee to Egypt. Except for the brief time that Egypt was ruled by the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt has treated Gaza as a threat, not as a brotherly Arab region.

Lapid pretends that he has a solution: throw money at Egypt. Egypt is suffering from a foreign external debt of $155 billion, and he says the world will step up to pay this off in exchange for Egyptian control of Gaza.

This is again a mixture of wishful thinking and naivete.

Egypt's governance of its own people is rife with corruption and inefficient bureaucracy. It treats minorities like Copts poorly. The absolute best anyone can hope from an Egyptian controlled Gaza is that it would be as good as - Egypt. That is a low bar indeed, and in reality, Egypt would never prioritize Gaza welfare over Egypt's own citizens.

No one - not the Arab states, not the EU - will throw hundreds of billions of dollars to an Egypt that is only controlling Gaza under protest and with no interest in the welfare of its people.

Even less likely is the idea that a UN Security Council resolution would ever pass to give an unwilling Egypt control over Gaza. Does Lapid even know anything about the UN?

Perhaps the most naive part of the Lapid plan is the assumption that the Palestinians can reform and build a peace-loving state. How many times will the world make this same mistake? Every Palestinian leader has been corrupt and supported terror, and every potential leader who is pragmatic has no support from the people. As Hussein Aboubakr Mansour writes, in his argument to dissolve the Palestinian state project, "No meaningful leadership capable of guiding Palestinians toward a humane, tolerant society appears to exist. Indeed, the only consistent leadership visible keeps cycling back to incitement, illusions of conquest, and pride in acts that defy basic human decency."

My own plan to make Gaza an emirate of the UAE is admittedly a longshot, but it has huge advantages over the Lapid plan, not least being that the UAE could reap huge benefits from having a presence on the Mediterranean and potentially access to natural gas in the region. Israel would be a partner in such a scenario, not a looming military threat. Only the UAE could turn Gaza into an economic and tourist powerhouse that would benefit Gazans as well, because only the UAE could look at Gaza as an investment, not a burden. And most Gazans who are not Hamas members would love to become citizens of the UAE and gain immediate benefits of statehood and access to high paying jobs across the Gulf.

The goal is a lasting, permanent peace. Too many people like Lapid assume that this means an independent Palestinian state. They simply cannot accept that a Palestinian state and true peace are utterly incompatible. We need to define the problem before we find a solution. A Palestinian state isn't a solution - it would be a further problem.

Egypt did not want to dignify the Lapid plan with an official response, but it put former general General Samir Farag on state-run TV to reject the plan and say, "Egypt's decisions are independent and cannot be linked to any financial accounts or debts, and the Egyptian state has full sovereignty and places the national interest and the Palestinian people at the top of its priorities."

Indeed, Egypt would look at this plan through the lens of honor/shame. Egyptian rhetoric against accepting Gaza refugees all emphasize the idea of an independent Egypt and how o(somehow) an influx of Palestinians would imperil that. Whether it is true or not, Egypt's pride is tied up in its self-perception of independence. Accepting cash to change its principles is shameful and out of the question.

Is Lapid really this naive an uninformed about the Egyptian mentality? He claims he understands the Egyptians because of his dealings with them, but he does not seem to grasp that how they speak to him is not necessarily how they think. It is entirely possible that he knows that this plan is dead on arrival, but he wants to make himself look like a leader and the appearance of having a plan is a political move, not a realistic desire.

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

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Arab media still believes Omer Shem Tov spontaneously kissed his terrorists' foreheads

Here is how Egyptian newspaper Al-Melnoujoum described last Saturday's Hamas handover ceremony of Omer Shem Tov.

A video clip, banned by Israeli censorship, of the released Israeli soldier, Omer Shem Tov, kissing the head of the Qassam Brigades fighters during the handover ceremony as part of the seventh batch of the exchange deal, has been circulating on social media platforms. This demonstrates the resistance’s good treatment of Israeli prisoners during their detention in Gaza.

The kiss made Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli Prime Minister, lose his mind, so he started to rage and rage, an idiomatic expression meaning that his anger became more intense and his threats and intimidation increased, and he ended up taking a retaliatory measure by suspending the release of Palestinian prisoners, on the condition that Hamas treats the prisoners with dignity.

Did Hamas instruct the Israeli soldier to kiss their heads in gratitude and appreciation for the good treatment, fear for them, and protection of their lives from the bombing of Netanyahu’s planes and drones?

Can any sane person, if Netanyahu is still sane, imagine that kissing heads is an ambush planned by Hamas to trap Israeli prisoners on their way to Tel Aviv? What kind of mind is this that governs the usurping Zionist entity?

Denial is not just a river in Egypt - it is also built into the minds of Egyptian and other Arab media.

Omer never met the terrorists on stage before that moment. They weren't the ones who held him hostage underground for 15 months. Why would be even consider kissing the foreheads of two strangers wearing masks and holding guns?

While I am finding plenty of Arabic articles crowing over the kiss, I cannot find one that reports what Shem Tov himself said about it: "Those dogs told me to do it, I had no choice."

It doesn't sound like he is very fond of them.

The video, which is obviously not censored in Israel, shows that a cameraman tell Shem Tov something, he looks at the two masked and armed terrorists next to him, twice. The cameraman tells the terrorists something, and then gets back into position. The first terrorist signals with a slight nod to Omer that he is ready and hen Omer goes through his charade.

What is striking about the article is that Egyptians, who hate Hamas with a passion as being related to the Muslim Brotherhood, suddenly are certain that Hamas is wonderful and pure.

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

02/25 Links Pt2: The Anti-Semitic Takeover of the Health and Education Industries; Sydney nurse charged for threatening to kill Israelis; Roger Waters loses libel case

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: The Anti-Semitic Takeover of the Health and Education Industries
In order to believe anti-Semitism isn’t at a crisis point, you’d have to believe in coincidences to a degree that would strain credulity.

Two recent controversies provide cases in point.

First, from George Washington University: “A federal civil rights investigation uncovered evidence that the George Washington University faculty retaliated against Jewish students based on ‘shared ancestry-related advocacy’ by placing them in a remediation program after the students lodged an anti-Semitism complaint against an anti-Israel professor,” reports the Washington Free Beacon.

This incident has always been one of the most important anti-Semitism-on-campus sagas because it demonstrates just how far beyond the classroom the bias extends.

The investigation stemmed from a civil-rights complaint filed by Jewish students at George Washington taking a mandatory graduate course by psychology professor Lara Sheehi. (Sheehi has since left to work for a school based in Qatar.) According to the complaint, Sheehi attacked a student’s Israeli background in front of the class. She then invited an infamous blood libelist to give a guest lecture in which, according to the complaint, the speaker “suggested that good deeds done by Jews and Israelis are done to mask sinister activity.” She repeatedly denigrated Israelis and “lionized” a Palestinian who took part in a terrorist attack against a Jewish child in a candy store.

Jewish students raised their concerns with Sheehi at the beginning of the following class. Sheehi responded by denying that the textbook anti-Semitism the students had been subject to was anti-Semitism and that this was a “non-negotiable truth.” Zionism—the belief in equal Jewish rights to self-determination—was arguably the real anti-Semitism, she suggested, thus accusing the Jewish students themselves of being anti-Semites. Sheehi then encouraged the class to see the students’ complaints as evidence of Islamophobia, even though the Jewish students did not mention Muslims. Sheehi further defended her guest lecturer’s advocacy of violence against Jews.

The students spoke with an official in the psychology program who brushed them off, then a dean who refused to let them even exit the class. Sheehi then retaliated against the students by telling the faculty in the graduate program that the Jewish students were racists. She then initiated disciplinary proceedings against the students for objecting to anti-Semitism in a diversity course.

The Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights has since vindicated the Jewish students’ account.

Mandatory diversity courses such as this have been common in recent years. Orwellian disciplinary processes against students are common. The language used repeatedly in this course—“Islamophobia,” “white Israeli racism,” “white fragility,” etc.—are common. Anti-Zionism is common, to put it mildly.

Which is to say: What happened here is common. And it was essentially a derailing, or an attempted derailing, of Jewish students’ professional education and careers because they were Jewish, full stop. All the evidence above suggests that, too, is common.
Seth Mandel: Antisemitism in America a "virus" which mutates - including as DEI
JFeed: To end off: obviously, none of us are prophets, but based on what you know now and assuming trends continue, how do you see the anti-Semitism wave continuing? Is it going to continue to be in recession or do you see an explosion happening?

Seth Mandel: So I tend to be an optimist by nature, but I'm not on this issue. So...I don't come bearing any sort of sunny optimism on this. I think that the reason we always rely on the comparison of antisemitism to a virus is because it mutates. And I don't think that anything in general stays the way it is. It's sort of like an object in motion stays in motion unless acted upon by an outside force. So it's gonna keep going forward and not just tread water.

I think that antisemitism behaves that way. And so on campus, we had the Tentifada and I wrote a piece warning that it can get worse than this, even if it's not as public, right? That these things have to change to survive. And the Tentifada, especially once the active war stopped, there was not gonna be the same amount of Jews for the tent protests, right? But there were the seeds planted among especially young activists that you could and should wave a Hamas or a Hezbollah flag or wear a hoodie with the picture of Abu Obeida, the spokesman for Hamas on it, like he was Shea Guvara. There was like this normalizing of explicit violence against Jews. And then we saw investigations and some arrests.

You may not have the numbers, but I think that antisemitism itself has been strengthened in a really important way during this time. And you don't need that many people to do terrible things. I'm not saying they're all terrorists on campus or whatever, or even budding terrorists, but the point is that they get, activists tend to get older. Activism itself tends to get older. And it's certainly true in American politics over the years.

Things don't tend to mellow out, pauses don't mellow out because if they do, they disappear, right? You have to always find a reason to push onward. And if your cause relies on the ability to shock, which antisemitism and the... Tentifada and a lot of the pro-Palestinian movement does, then what shocks people changes over time. It's the Overton window problem of moving the Overton window.

So I think that we've accepted, not we, but we as a sort of society, considering the behavior of a lot of elected leaders and institutional leaders, a certain level of Jew hatred as normal. And that wasn't the case before. They would have denied before October 7th and before all these protests, a campus administrator would have flatly denied that such a thing, that level of Jew hatred existed in those places.

And it's gone in those 16 months to now being: not only does it exist, but it's basically been sort of accepted as normal. And then the question turned to what do we do to make our campus safe for everybody? There's almost no thought given to the fact that they sort of read this vile Jew hatred in students and among professors and people on campus. There's just like, all right, well, what do we do about it? So that Jews stop asking, Jewish students stop asking to take their classes via Zoom. and they're not afraid to come on campus. It's been normalized. It's like, all right, this is the status quo.

The status quo is we've got chapters of SJP and all their followers and people who will behave like this and a very large number of people who hate Jews with every fiber of their being and will cheer violence against them with almost no limit. And that's like, all right, that's where we are. Now what do we do just to make our institution run? Not what do we do to turn back that tide and cleanse our institution of the ideas and the hatred and I would say the enabling agents of it, the things that push people to do that or see them as the incentive structure, I guess you could call them.

So, I don't know what form it's going to take. And like I said, it's not a partisan thing, and there's no way to see the future. But I think that there are warning signs that you just have to expect that whatever it is, this is a thing that mutates. And you have to just try to assess the political climate wherever you are. And think about how that virus might gain a foothold, how it might survive, and how it might evolve. in the changing environment. And that's really kind of the best you can do to try to stay ahead of it.
Trouble in Australian Jewish paradise
Australian Jewish community leaders explain the unnerving spate of anti-Semitic incidents in a country so long seen as a safe refuge.

Last month, two men with covered faces, dressed in black, came to a house in Sydney’s Eastern Suburbs. They sprayed the garage with red paint, set the cars parked in the street on fire, and added anti-Semitic graffiti. Their chosen target was the former home of Alex Ryvchin, co-CEO of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, the representative body of the country’s Jewish community. They apparently thought that Ryvchin still lived there.

"My wife and I woke up early that morning, because we received the security camera recordings from our old neighbor who lives opposite," Ryvchin relates. "On the cameras, we saw a car pull up and two men pouring gasoline on the road leading up to the house and setting two cars alight. On one of the cars they wrote ‘Fuck Israel’ on one side and ‘Jews’ on the other side. For us it was a shock, but it’s one more event in a series of very similar attacks."

As Ryvchin says, this was certainly not the first anti-Semitic incident in Australia lately. Just over a month ago, for example, a children’s daycare center next to a synagogue in Sydney was set on fire, and in December a Molotov cocktail was hurled at a synagogue in Melbourne. According to data gathered by the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, the number of anti-Semitic incidents in the country jumped to 2,062 in the twelve months to September 2024, from just 495 in the previous year. Community leaders tell of continual reports of harassment, abuse of authority against Jews, and shocking physical attacks. The other week, the premises of a Jewish-owned business in Melbourne were sprayed with the words "Gas the Jews".

As if that were not enough, a couple of weeks ago the world received a particularly viral demonstration of the anti-Semitism in Australia. Israeli content producer Max Veifer happened upon two nurses from a Sydney hospital on TikTok the other week. The two, Ahmad Rashad Nadir and Sarah Abu Lebdeh, refugees from Afghanistan, made clear at the beginning of the conversation that they were not exactly fans of Israel, but things rapidly deteriorated. Lebdeh said of Israeli patients, "I won't treat them, I will kill them," and added later, "I want you to remember my face, so you can understand that you will die the most disgusting death," while Nadir chimed in with, ""You have no idea how many Israeli dog (sic) came to this hospital and I send them to Jahannam (hell)."

The Australian authorities reacted quickly to the incident. The nurses were suspended from the hospital and an investigation was opened. But the situation has caused great anxiety among Australia’s Jewish population of almost 120,000. "We are chasing every rabbit down every hole, and that takes time," New South Wales deputy police commissioner David Hudson told "The Wall Street Journal." State and federal police have set up a special hate crime investigation unit. Last year, Australia outlawed Nazi salutes and the public display of Nazi insignia, and the other week the federal parliament passed government-sponsored legislation introducing mandatory prison sentences for hate crimes.

Even so, many in the Jewish community still think that the Labor government, headed by Anthony Albanese, is not doing enough. Whether or not that is a fair assessment, police helicopters currently patrol Sydney’s Eastern Suburbs nightly, and synagogues and Jewish businesses are protected.

How has a country perceived by Israelis as a place of refuge where no-one cares about their ethnicity become a place where they are hated? Local sources say that antis-Semitism began to rear its head in Australia straight after October 7. A few days after the war broke out, a grotesque demonstration took place outside the Sydney Opera House, with participants recorded shouting "Death to the Jews" and "Jews to the gas chambers." The world was horrified, the Australian government condemned the incident, but nothing substantial was done.
Sydney nurse charged for threatening to kill Israelis
A Sydney area nurse was charged for threatening to kill Israeli patients in a viral video that created a massive uproar around the world, the New South Wales Police Force announced on Wednesday.

Twenty-six-year-old Bankstown Hospital nurse Sarah Abu Lebdeh was arrested on Tuesday and charged with threatening violence to a group, using a carriage service to threaten to kill, and using a carriage service to menace.

The Condell Park woman was granted conditional bail and is set to appear at the Downing Centre Local Court on March 19.

NSW Police Commissioner Karen Webb said in a statement that the antisemitic task force had exhaustively investigated the incident, in which Abu Lebdeh wished a harsh death on Israeli influencer Max Veifer that she wouldn't treat Israeli patients but instead would "kill them."

“Strike Force Pearl detectives must be commended for acting swiftly under enormous pressure and public expectation,” Webb said of the antisemitism task force established in December to address rising antisemitic incidents in New South Wales. "These charges have been laid following a lot of hard work and legal advice, received yesterday from the Commonwealth DPP [Director of Public Prosecutions]."

Webb noted that the detectives had to overcome obstacles and jurisdictional challenges since their commended their investigation on February 12. The NSW police faced controversy when they had contacted Veifer for a full version of the video, but had allegedly not provided him with an email address to submit the content.

The full video showed Abu Lebdeh and a male nurse engaging in conversation with Veifer over a random video chat platform. When the other nurse discovered that Veifer was Israeli, he said that Veifer would eventually be killed and go to hell.