Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Friday, February 28, 2025

02/28 Links Pt2: The West is colonizing the Palestinian cause; Dara Horn returns to history — and literature — after Oct. 7; BBC is in crisis and only systemic change can fix it

From Ian:

The West is colonizing the Palestinian cause

This term “Palestine” was first introduced by the Romans. Expelling the Jews from their land, they renamed Judea as Palestine. Over the centuries, this term was accepted by Jews themselves. The Land of Israel and Palestine became synonymous.

But in the 1920s, the West migrated the term. Arabs in Palestine at the time expressed their collective sentiment through the nascent Hashemite Arab Kingdom of Syria. They identified as Syrians. When France took over Syria and ended the Arab Kingdom, Western colonialist offices imposed a new identity on Arabs in Palestine: “Palestinians.” British diplomat Mark Sykes (of the Sykes-Pictot agreement) even came up with a flag.

While this colonialist identity-engineering exercise was initially rejected by Arabs living in Palestine, European powers cultivated the notion of Palestinian nationalism in order to promote their own Western interests: The British as counterforce to the Jews, Germans as counterforce to the British, and since the 1993 Oslo Accords, the EU and European governments as a counterforce to the State of Israel and by extension to America.

This worked and, by the turn of the 21st century, it was clear that the term Palestine, as well as the Sykes flag represented the national movement of Palestinian Arabs.

But in recent years, and especially since October 7, the term has been migrating, yet again, from describing a group of individuals in the Middle East, toward describing an abstract concept in the West.

This, for example, was reflected in the September 2023 University of Pennsylvania Palestine Writes festival. American students were not expected to write of the longing for a land they never been to – nor knew much of – but about such concepts as: occupation, suppression, injustice. Similarly, President Donald Trump referring to Senator Chuck Schumer as a “Palestinian” is not a reference to his ethnic background, but to his ideology.

Some can argue, cynically, that the re-appropriation of the term is legitimate. After all, it was Europe who “owns the copyright” on the term Palestine: The Romans created it, and the British, French, and Germans promoted it.

But what about the human rights of Palestinians themselves?

Voluntary de-Palestinization
Repeatedly, Palestinians are denied their basic rights to personal self-determination by their European oppressors. When Palestinians chose to be employed and mentored by Jewish-owned businesses, European governments launched aggressive campaigns to have those businesses shut down, such as SodaStream. Similarly, when Palestinians in Gaza chose to flee a war zone, the West failed to provide escape routes, and now that President Trump has introduced such a plan, Westerns are opposing it, effectively denying Palestinians the basic human right to leave.

There is an inevitable clash: Europe and Europhilic circles in the United States care exclusively about Palestinian national rights, even at the price of Palestinian human rights. This, while Palestinians naturally care about their personal safety, prosperity, and indeed rights as human beings.

To put it bluntly, Europeans and Western pro-Palestinians dehumanize Palestinians.

We are in an era of seismic changes. The Middle East of September 2023 is not coming back, and therefore, Western foreign offices and seasoned peacemakers should get rid of legacy frameworks and assumptions that, perhaps, were relevant back then, but are only standing in the way of peace today.

In this realm, there is a golden opportunity to shift away from frameworks based on a zero-sum game, such as “land for peace” and the two-state solution, toward frameworks that are based on a win-win, such as the Abraham Accords and President Trump’s Gaza relocation plan.

Dara Horn returns to history — and literature — after Oct. 7

The last few years have been strange ones for writer Dara Horn. Used to creating imaginative Jewish worlds as a fiction writer, she published her first nonfiction book in 2021, expecting it to be a “detour.” Instead, the publication of People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present, about the very real and often very depressing world that Jews inhabit, changed the course of her career.

“I became this receptacle for all of these horror stories from Jewish readers,” Horn said. “I was immersed in this dumpster fire that now all of us are living in.”

The book was a series of essays examining the ways in which different societies engage with Jewish history and culture — usually, she found, by venerating Jewish suffering in traumatic historical events such as the Holocaust or the Spanish Inquisition, without teaching people to reckon with Jews as they currently are. The argument was explosive even before the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attacks. Since then, the book’s title has become a ghoulishly ironic tagline for many Jews.

“The premise of the book is really that Jews are only acceptable in a non-Jewish society when they have no power, whether that means politically impotent or dead,” Horn told Jewish Insider in an interview this week. “That is just roaring back at us now. That is the only way that it’s acceptable to be Jewish, if you have no agency.”

Now, Horn has published her first new book in more than three years, a departure from both the award-winning literary fiction she is known for and the nonfiction essays about antisemitism she has written for major publications including The Atlantic and The New York Times since Oct. 7.

One Little Goat: A Passover Catastrophe is a graphic novel, geared toward middle school readers, about a family that gets stuck at their Seder for six months because their house is so messy that the children are unable to find the afikomen. In order to retrieve it, the protagonist must go on a time-travel journey through thousands of years of Jewish history, visiting Seders throughout time — guided by a talking goat from the song “Chad Gadya” — until he retrieves the afikomen, finally saving his family from the longest Seder ever.

“If you’ve ever been to a Passover Seder, you know that they feel like they last forever,” the book begins. In the pane below, the text reads: “It’s a holiday celebrating freedom, but you are stuck at that table for a very long time.” Horn read this passage with a laugh, and a word of praise for the illustration skills of her collaborator Theo Ellsworth, a cartoonist in Montana who she cold-emailed after she found her kids reading one of his books.

“The way he illustrated this is he has this kid sitting in the chair in the top frame, and then the bottom frame is a bearded skeleton covered in cobwebs, seated in the same chair, which is how I feel like a lot of kids feel, and even some adults,” Horn said.

BBC is in crisis and only systemic change can fix it

In a quite remarkable first, after 16 months of anti-Israel bias and gaslighting of the Jewish community, the BBC has admitted fault in relation to its documentary, Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone.

Yes, they passed the buck and failed to take any immediate action, but after the Asserson Report, the 100-plus corrections in “misreporting” they’ve been forced to make, the appalling anti-Israel social media posts senior BBC journalists have indulged in and of course BBC Arabic continuing to employ staff who openly celebrated the Oct 7th massacre, any admittance of guilt feels significant.

Perhaps worst of all was the acknowledgement by the BBC that money was in fact sent to the wife of a senior member of Hamas. This is now a question for the authorities and certainly for Dame Dinenage Commons select committee to investigate.

The complete and utter failure of journalistic standards, lack of due diligence and breakdown in trust between the public and our national broadcaster with regards to this documentary, is the culmination of the arrogance of BBC leadership since the Hamas massacre.

This depth of failure does not happen in a vacuum though. It happens because the BBC’s values & code of conduct, it’s very mission to tell the truth, be impartial and transparent have been eroded over time.

The license fee payer’s money in this country should not be going to terrorists, the content coming out of our national broadcaster should not be terrorist propaganda and BBC talent and staff shouldn’t be signing politically motivated statements, which place their own twisted world views above the importance of their employer’s impartiality.

The BBC is in crisis and when one faces a systemic problem, the only solution is systemic change. For anyone who cares about the integrity and indeed the future of our national broadcaster, let’s hope that Samir Shah and the board have the courage to do just that.

02/28 Links Pt1: Israel Takes a Hard Look at Its Prewar Assumptions; Why a Palestinian state is a security risk Israel cannot afford; ABC leave out ‘Allahu Akbar’ chants from school protest

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: Israel Takes a Hard Look at Its Prewar Assumptions

Israel did not believe that Hamas wanted, or was capable of carrying out, a full-fledged total war. But it did, and it planned for it, and here we are.

“Israel believed that leveraging improved civil conditions in Gaza would make Hamas less likely to launch a war,” Fabian writes. “Israel worked to have defenses ready for rounds of conflicts lasting several days and the possibility of it deteriorating into a war, during which the IDF could attack and degrade Hamas’s force build-up. At the same time, Israel worked to reach some level of agreements with Hamas to improve the civil conditions in the Strip. In hindsight, Hamas’s efforts to reach understandings with Israel were part of a deception campaign to trick Israel into thinking it was uninterested in war.”

Any and every drop of legitimacy Israel gave Hamas in the name of improving Palestinians’ lives was paid back in Israeli blood. The result of Israel thinking it could coexist with Hamas was devastation for everybody. Hamas’s ultimate defeat is imperative for Israelis and Palestinians alike; neither can afford to leave Hamas intact. And that is an important lesson for the self-proclaimed pro-Palestinian advocates of the world as well.

As for the second major takeaway: The border fence separating Israel from Gaza was intended to represent merely a part of a larger security network that was mostly out of sight. But the reliance on detection technology, which Hamas was able to disarm, meant that there really only was a fence separating the two. Good fences make good neighbors; Israel did not have either.

But the principle goes for the IDF as well: The Israeli establishment misjudged the extent of Hamas’s tunnel construction underneath Gaza. They, too, couldn’t see the entire playing field because part of it was underground, but they were pretty sure they would know if the reality was significantly different from their expectations. It was, and they didn’t know.

The report has important implications for Lebanon, too. Israel expected Hezbollah to represent the greatest threat on its border. But Hamas’s increased threat didn’t make Hezbollah any less of a threat than it already was, regardless of which one posed the more immediate danger to Israeli civilians. Simply put, Hezbollah (and forces similar) cannot be allowed to put Israel in that situation ever again. If you’re wondering why Israel is taking such a serious approach to any perceived threats materializing in the chaos of Syria’s transition, this should answer that question as well.

Israel—and the region more generally—paid dearly for the belief that as long as these terror groups kept their boots off Israeli soil they were a manageable threat basically at all times. The prevention of another devastating regional war depends on Israel not repeating that mistake, no matter how much the rest of the world wants it to.

Seth Mandel: Israel’s Strategic Goals in Lebanon and the New Syria

This should be obvious: Why would Israel allow a second South Lebanon? The goal is to ensure that when the dust settles on this regional post-Oct. 7 war, the new status quo looks very different from the previous one: No Hezbollahland, no Hamastan. It’s why the IDF is taking a proactive approach toward the Iranian-backed terrorist hive in Jenin in the West Bank. And for that very same reason, Israel is watching the new Syria very closely.

Some of Israel’s Syria policy is designed to help the Syrian Druze feel more secure. If that can be done successfully, a pro-Western corridor running from Kurdish territory through Druze areas to Israel’s border could emerge. This would help the new Syrian government too, since it could settle the nerves of areas that might otherwise consider breaking away from Damascus’s control. Ensuring the safety of ethnic and religious minorities in Syria would also help Damascus convince the West to give it a chance.

There is another problem: Turkey. As I wrote in December, the fall of the House of Assad created the biggest Mideast power vacuum since the fall of the Soviet Union. And Turkey, the pro-Hamas power next door, is primed to fill it.

After all, the Kurds are only on alert because Turkey put them there: Ankara periodically sends its armed forces across the border to harass and weaken America’s Kurdish allies in the fight against ISIS. The new Syrian government owes its existence in part to Turkish backing. The intent is clearly for an array of anti-Israel (and anti-U.S.) forces to use Syria much as Iran used Lebanon: as a place to cultivate and command terrorist proxies against the West.

The idea that Israel is just randomly striking Syrian territory to flex its muscles is absurd. As is the idea, increasingly voiced in some quarters, that Israel wants to sabotage Syrian state stability—as if what Israel longs for is more instability in the region.

Israel doesn’t want a power vacuum south of Damascus and it doesn’t want Syria to become a Turkish puppet regime. So it is taking steps to secure its interests, as any responsible state would, by shoring up its allies and its defenses. The fact that this is controversial while the post-Oct. 7 war is extant is childish and, frankly, hypocritical: One does not hear much caterwauling about Turkey securing its interests in Syria.

Israelis would love it if none of this were necessary. Until that happens, Israel is navigating the world as it is.

Trump's Home Run: Neutralize Hamas, Qatar, Houthis, Iran

"[Iran's] Operation True Promise 3 will be carried out at the right time, with precision, and in a scale sufficient to destroy Israel and raze Tel Aviv and Haifa to the ground." — Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Major General Ebrahim Jabbari, February 2025.

A Trump decision to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a Foreign Terrorist Organization would go a long way toward making it difficult for its many offshoots to continue supporting it.

Even more urgent is for the Trump administration to neutralize Hamas, Qatar, Iran, Hezbollah and the Houthis -- to limit their ability to keep on destabilizing the entire region, as well as to curtail the Houthis' stranglehold on global shipping. The policy is certainly congruent with the long-held American principle of maintaining the international freedom of navigation.

The move would also send a warning to China not to continue its aggressive effort to gain control of the world's critical sea lines near Taiwan, Australia, the Philippines and Japan.

New batch of EoZ cartoons and memes (12 of them!)

It's been month since I last did these...

This one went viral. Hundreds of thousands of views.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

Nearly one in three Democrats and nearly half of young people support Hamas over Israel. Let that sink in.

Yesterday I wrote about a Gallup poll that showed historic highs for Democratic support of Palestinians and record low support for Israel.

In case you think that this is simply sympathy for Gaza - it isn't.

A new Harvard/Harris poll shows a great deal of sympathy for Hamas - not Palestinians, Hamas - among Democrats, with 31% more supportive of Hamas than Israel.

Among those aged 18-24, 46% support Hamas over Israel.

These results aren't an indication that the respondents truly support Islamist terror, or rape as a weapon of war, or burning babies alive. Most of these people would not say that they support ISIS or Al Qaeda.

Much of this is just ignorance - blindly associating Hamas with all Palestinians and therefore showing sympathy that way.

But a significant part of these results point to how antisemitism works today.

No one outside the far-Right wants to admit that they are antisemitic. But Jew-hatred still exists and is growing quickly, as we see in the huge increase of hate crimes against Jews. Its increase is directly tied to how people perceive the Gaza war. Denying that is denying reality.

People who define themselves as liberal cannot handle the cognitive dissonance that they also hate Jews. They are progressive - they consider antisemitism is a right wing thing, a thing of the past. They are convinced that they only hate Israel, not Jews.

But when asked the question more elliptically, for many of them, antisemitism shines through.

The poll question was constructed as an either-or choice - which side do you support more? So the conclusion is that many of the Democratic and young respondents hate Israel more than they hate terrorists murdering Jews.

Yes, there are some on the fringes who deny Hamas atrocities. But a significant number know about them, and would nominally condemn them - except when they are against Jews. In that case, terror becomes justified and the Jews deserve to be stabbed, shot, burned, raped and kidnapped.

They would deny up and down that they are antisemitic. But if the exact same question was asked between terror group and every other country on Earth, no one would support the terrorists. No one supported ISIS over Iraq or Syria no matter how bad those regimes were. No one supports Islamist insurgents in Egypt.

Only when the terrorists attack Jews do they become sympathetic.

One they become sympathetic, then the newly-converted supporters of Hamas have to support them all the way.

Who in their right mind could oppose Hamas unconditionally releasing hostages?

Only those people for whom the hostages are considered worse than their kidnappers.

This is what modern antisemitism looks like.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

It is no secret that Al Jazeera uses its English media to promote a much different narrative than it does in Arabic. In English, Palestinians are victims, in Arabic they are victors; in English, Islam means peace, while in Arabic, Islam means vengeance and violence.

The dichotomy within the same source is never more stark than with how it approaches Ramadan, the Muslim holy month that starts this evening.

Last year, Al Jazeera waxed poetic in its Ramadan article, written by a Chicago Islamic leader, "Ramadan and the power of faith and unity."

What if faith can influence a billion people and inspire them to feed the hungry after fasting the whole day?

What if religious conviction can cause a community to become more altruistic and give to welfare and charity for a month?

What if the practice of faith can inspire a billion people to become forgiving of each other’s mistakes?

What if a noble civilisation of over a billion people can dispel the myth that human beings cannot live without violence, looting, robbing and killing?

In Arabic, Al Jazeera's version of Ramadan gives an entirely different message - one that celebrates violence and killing.

Already this year it calls Ramadan the "month of resistance." It makes clear what "resistance" means - Palestinian terror attacks. "The Palestinian resistance led by the Al-Qassam Brigades did what it had to: resist the occupier even if it led to martyrdom. The heroes of the resistance went to their deaths with their heads held high because it was their duty."

In 2024, 2022 and 2021, Al Jazeera published and celebrated lengthy lists of Palestinian attacks on Jewish civilians in Ramadan. Excerpts:

April 7, 2022: The young man, Raad Hazem (29 years old), left his home in the Jenin camp (northern West Bank) until he reached Dizengoff Street. Hazem opened fire on those in the street, leaving behind 5 dead and 6 wounded.

In 2016, the resistance carried out 10 suicide operations, ranging from shooting to stabbing, killing 6 Israelis and wounding 15 others. The most serious of these operations occurred when Muhammad and Khalil Makhamreh, cousins from the town of Yatta in the West Bank, entered the Sarona shopping mall near the headquarters of the Ministry of Defense in Tel Aviv and opened fire on settlers, killing 4 and wounding 40.

In 2015, a shooting took place near the Dolev settlement, near Ramallah, at point-blank range, targeting a settler’s car. One settler was killed and another was injured.

In 2010, resistance fighters opened fire on a settler’s car in Hebron, killing four of them.

In 2002, resistance fighters Akram al-Hanini, Walaa Surur, and Dhiab al-Muhtaseb carried out an operation against settlers from Kiryat Arba near Hebron, killing 12 soldiers and settlers and wounding 18 others, 4 of them seriously. In the same year, the martyr Sami Abu Halil from Hebron detonated his explosive belt on Mexico Street in Jerusalem, killing 12 Israelis and wounding 47 others.

Ramadan 2001 was crowded with resistance operations. The martyr Maher Habesha from Nablus carried out a bombing operation on a Haifa bus, killing 16 Israelis and wounding 55 others. When his comrades brought him breakfast, he refused, saying, “I will break my fast tonight in heaven.”

Also in Ramadan 2001, the two martyrs Osama Bahar and Nabil Halabiya carried out their double operation against an Israeli army site in Jerusalem, killing 11 Israelis and wounding 190 others. [It was the Ben Yehuda Street pedestrian mall - EoZ].

The two resistance fighters Jihad al-Masri and Muslima al-Araj also stormed the “Eli Sinai” settlement north of Gaza, killing an Israeli nuclear scientist and wounding 5 others.

In this sense, Al Jazeera is perfectly aligned with Hamas, which has published its own celebratory lists of Ramadan attacks.

Last year, Islamic Jihad spokesperson Abu Hamza said "Let Ramadan be a month of terror for the occupation." It was reported in Israeli and Arab media, but virtually ignored in Europe and America.

Because quoting Muslims saying Ramadan is about murdering Jews would be Islamophobic.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

The Harvard Crimson reports:

Paul O’Brien, executive director of Amnesty International USA, said military action is not a legally sufficient answer to accusations of genocide at a Harvard Law School talk Wednesday afternoon.

An HLS alum, O’Brien said he came to the Law School to preview a forthcoming article in the Harvard Human Rights Journal about laws surrounding genocide and their application to Israel’s war in Gaza.

“There can be multiple intents. A military actor who has legitimate military goals can intend the genocide in order to accomplish those goals,” O’Brien said at the talk, hosted by the HHRJ. “It can be a means to a military end.”

Based on this reading of human rights law, O’Brien and Amnesty International published a report in December that argued Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza.

...According to O’Brien, Amnesty eventually established that Israel had “a disregard, and credibly, an intention to destroy the civilian population” in Gaza — a conclusion that allowed the organization to publish its findings.

I don't know if students were allowed to ask questions at the lecture. but here are the questions that should have been asked - that would have demolished O'Brien's entire talk.

1. Isn't it true that Amnesty's report used a definition of genocide that was not accepted by the majority of judges of the International Court of Justice? Your report called the ICJ opinion of what constitutes intent to be "overly cramped." In fact, Ireland asked the ICJ to broaden its own definition of intent of genocide when it joined South Africa's case. If you are using a non-standard definition, how can you declare Israel's actions to be genocide as lex lata, the law as it exists?

2. Isn't it true that Amnesty staffers internally and informally called the report the "genocide report" before it was even written, meaning that Amnesty intended to twist the facts - and ignore others - to reach a preconceived conclusion? This was stated in a letter by Jewish Amnesty staffers, including some senior employees. Are they lying?

In fact, according to your Harvard speech as reported, you said that the determination of Israel's intent to perform genocide was "a conclusion that allowed the organization to publish its findings" - does that mean that you wouldn't have published the report if it hadn't concluded that Israel was guilty of genocide? Wasn't this a predetermined conclusion?

3. The report in the Crimson says you hoped your talk would confirm the value of 'free expression' and 'reasonable debate' on difficult issues. Amnesty Israel - who, curiously, were not involved in researching or writing the report despite their obvious expertise in the region - wrote a very serious, reasoned and detailed response refuting the accusation of genocide. Instead of answering Amnesty Israel's points, Amnesty suspended the Israeli branch of the organization, saying that dissenting opinions threaten the "operational coherence" of the organization. How does that fit with your stated ideals of "free expression" and "reasonable debate"? Amnesty shut down the debate!

Moreover, Amnesty justified this suspension by invoking Article 34 of the Statute of Amnesty International. Yet Article 34 does not say it must protect the "operational coherence" of Amnesty, it says it must protect the "operation" of Amnesty - a completely different thing. Did Amnesty make up a new rule just to expel the meddlesome Israeli Jews?

As far as I can tell, the speech at Harvard does not even attempt to answer the many serious criticisms of the Amnesty report. O'Brien simply restates what the report says.

That is not the debate that O'Brien claims to value. On the contrary, Amnesty has done everything it can to shut down any dissenting opinions within its power. It acts exactly like the dictators that it is supposed to be exposing.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

02/27 Links Pt2: Melanie Phillips: A vile equivalence; Trauma Envy and the Campus Intifada; BBC admits Hamas family was paid for Gaza documentary; Barnard Admin Surrenders To Student Radicals

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: A vile equivalence

Noa Argamani, the Israeli hostage who was rescued from Gaza by the Israel Defense Forces last June, addressed the U.N. Security Council this week. She spoke about being abducted into a “world of torture and humiliation,” where she tried to comfort two small girls who had been dragged with her into the darkness of the Hamas tunnels and where she saw her fellow hostage, Itai Svirsky, brutally murdered.

Her boyfriend, Avinatan Or, who was dragged into the Gaza Strip with her, remains in captivity. Of the 63 remaining hostages, 36 are believed to be dead.

Argamani’s raw testimony was a necessary corrective to the unconscionable indifference in the halls of the United Nations to Israeli suffering and its shocking embrace of Israel’s genocidal attackers.

Shortly afterward, however, someone else addressed the Security Council. This was Daniel Levy, the British former Israeli peace negotiator and now president of the U.S./Middle East Project think tank.

Referring to Kfir and Ariel Bibas, the murdered Israeli infant hostages who were buried in Israel in heartbreaking scenes the following day, he said: “A minute of silence for each of the Bibas children would be appropriate, as would a minute of silence for each of the more than 18,000 Palestinian children murdered in Israel’s devastation of Gaza. That silence would extend to over 300 hours.”

What a breathtakingly vile comment. Hamas terrorists murdered 9-month-old Kfir and 4-year-old Ariel with their bare hands and mutilated their bodies to conceal the crime. How could anyone equate this monstrous depravity with the fate of children in Gaza killed unintentionally in a war to defend Israel against genocide—killed, moreover, because Hamas uses Gaza’s children as human shields and cannon fodder?

Moreover, the 18,000 figure is merely a claim by Hamas that notoriously makes no distinction between dead civilians and combatants, has reclassified numerous adult fatalities as children and includes as “children” teenagers who serve as Hamas gunmen.

Worse, Levy said all this in front of Argamani herself. As she stared at him, Levy claimed sanctimoniously that it was “important to hear your testimony of an awful experience to which no human should ever be subjected”—and then went on to diminish that experience by equating it with a stream of distortions and unverified Hamas propaganda claims.

He hailed as an equivalent victim Dr. Hassan abu Safiyeh, director of Gaza’s Kamal Adwan Hospital, who he said was still being held in detention by the Israelis and mistreated.

The IDF, however, raided that hospital because it was a Hamas hub under the terrorist group’s control. One terrorist arrested there admitted to the IDF that abu Safiyeh had been “orchestrating the terror and Hamas activities within the compound.”

Seth Mandel: Trauma Envy and the Campus Intifada

In other words—and this is the key point in understanding the escalation—these students at Columbia University and other expensive universities have been the most pampered young adults in the history of the universe. Though of course there will be individual exceptions, as a group these folks have been handed more and asked to do less than anyone who walked the earth before them.

The students themselves unintentionally acknowledged this generality last night. After they left their occupation, many of them made a circle outside and cultishly chanted a bunch of slogans, including: “We have nothing to lose but our chains.”

I don’t know how people who have actually been kept in chains would feel about this kind of appropriation by the ultra-privileged, but it tells us something important about the mindset of the comfortable elite: They find themselves and their lives utterly boring.

These activists’ anger at previous generations isn’t for withholding opportunity, it’s for the opportunity itself. There are two kinds of Columbia students who talk unironically about losing their chains: those who know they are privileged and pretend otherwise as a form of escapism, and those who actually think being told to go to class at their expensive private institution is what everybody in history has meant by “chains.”

In the past, this kind of progressive trauma envy took the form of poverty tourism. A trip to Cuba to gawk in admiration at the victims of your own ideology, before getting on a plane and going back to your Manhattan apartment, has long been practically a rite of passage, the closest thing the American left has to a bar mitzvah.

But the mixing in of Palestinian nationalism adds a new and escalatory element to this worldview.

Palestinian advocacy too often teeters into trauma envy. The most obvious example is the obsession with claiming that Jews are perpetrating a Holocaust against Arabs in the Middle East, a lie whose overuse is entirely intentional on the part of anti-Zionists. Holocaust envy has only become more explicit: We see Palestinian journalists and activists calling themselves a “Holocaust survivor” or saying “everyone in Gaza is a Holocaust survivor” and declaring they “will proudly wear the Palestinian Keffiyeh to work, especially during the Palestinian Holocaust, just as I would have worn the Star of David during the Jewish Holocaust.”

To underline the point, “pro-Palestinian” activists in the West routinely vandalize Holocaust memorials, protest Holocaust museums, and fetishize the appropriation of Anne Frank to an uncomfortable degree. Last month, the UK’s Islamic Human Rights Commission went so far as to explicitly say Holocaust commemorations that do not include ceremonies for Gaza should be boycotted.

But it isn’t just the Holocaust. In the early part of the 20th century, Arab leaders openly acknowledged the Jewish connection to the land. When that morphed into Palestinian nationalism, suddenly it became obligatory to deny that history and to perform a sort of Replacement Theology whose writers embarked on an ambitious appropriation project: The Wandering Jew became “The Wandering Palestinian,” Palestinian rewrites of iconic novels like The City Without Jews appeared, Golda Meir’s quotes were repurposed against the Jews.

Trauma envy, a direct outgrowth of progressive grievance culture, is warping minds at a rapid clip, spreading far and wide. But like most other forms of anti-Semitism, it’s just easier to see at Columbia.

The truth about ‘No Other Land’

The Oscar-nominated documentary “No Other Land” portrays the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through the microcosm of a collection of Palestinian Arab settlements called Masafer Yatta. In that cluster of makeshift villages, the film gives the impression that impoverished Palestinians confront the oppression of Israeli military demolition crews in an existential struggle to prevent the destruction of Palestinian homes, the displacement of their people and the theft of their land. But ultimately, we are told, the righteous Palestinian resistance survives.

The reality of Masafer Yatta is altogether different. The history of that area exemplifies how Palestinians illegally seize plots of land in Judea and Samaria, and how Israel lawfully defends against these incursions.

The 1920 San Remo Treaty and 1922 Palestine Mandate, under the supervision of the League of Nations, created the state that became Israel. The West Bank, known historically as Judea and Samaria, was part of that allocated territory. These instruments of international law were justified by widespread recognition that the designated land was the ancestral homeland of the Jews.

The State of Israel emerged in 1948 and acceded to membership in the United Nations a year later. By that point, Jordan had illegally invaded and occupied the eastern portion of Jerusalem and land on the west bank of the Jordan River. However, in the 1967 Six-Day War, Israel liberated those territories from Jordanian occupation. Israel then validly applied its sovereign governance to eastern Jerusalem but decided to forego implementing its sovereign right to the so-called West Bank area pending negotiation of peace deals with its Arab rivals.

The Palestinians never had a state that could be occupied. They never even had a treaty or comparable agreement granting them legal ties to eastern Jerusalem, the West Bank or the Gaza Strip. On the contrary, the original 1964 Palestine National Charter of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) expressly disclaimed Palestinian rights to those three domains because they were occupied by PLO ally countries: Jordan and Egypt.

Israel and the Palestinians began an effort to make peace in 1993 when they signed the first of six agreements known as the Oslo Accords. In the area called the West Bank, the accords awarded Israel interim control over a territory labeled “Area C,” and granted the Palestinians interim control of Area A. Area B was marked as shared.

Masafer Yatta lies in Area C, which places it under Israeli civilian and security control.

About 200,000 Palestinians reside in Area C. Some of them live in Masafer Yatta. But in 1999, when Palestinians erected an additional batch of shacks in Masafer Yatta, they violated the Oslo Accords by failing to obtain building permits from Israel’s Civil Administration.

Palestinian Arabs have orchestrated many such unlicensed land grabs in Area C. Using slapdash combinations of cement blocks, mud bricks, corrugated metal sheets, plastic tarps and portable electric generators, they create chess pawns strategically positioned to block the buildout of Israeli communities and enlarge the pretense of “Palestinian land.” The decision to add Palestinian settlements in Masafer Yatta was especially provocative because that barren expanse had been classified in the 1980s as an Israeli military training zone.

02/27 Links Pt1: Itzik Elgarat, Ohad Yahalomi, Tsachi Idan, Shlomo Mantzur murdered by Hamas terrorists; USAID Official Says Biden Steered Grants to Terror Supporters; Too Stupid To Know They've Lost

From Ian:

‘Killing ourselves,’ Nobel laureate says of releasing terrorists

Yisrael (Robert J.) Aumann was awarded the 2005 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his contribution to Game Theory, a branch of applied mathematics that studies strategic interactions between individuals or groups.

Aumann has said that if he could describe Game Theory in one word, it would be “incentives.”

JNS caught up with Aumann on Feb. 23 at his offices in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he is a member of the Einstein Institute of Mathematics and The Federmann Center for the Study of Rationality, to ask what he thought of the current prisoner exchange deal between Israel and Hamas.

The deal called for the release of 33 Israeli hostages in exchange for about 1,900 imprisoned terrorists, many of them murderers serving multiple life sentences.

In a word, said Aumann, “Crazy.”

“The basis of Game Theory is to give incentives to the other side to do what’s good for you,” Aumann told JNS. “And we keep doing the opposite. We are literally killing ourselves. We are killing our own children. It’s not only that they will kidnap more. We are incentivizing them to attack us again and again, to make war against us, to repeat Oct. 7,” he said, referring to the Hamas-led massacre of Oct. 7, 2023.

Q: Do we know the recidivism rates of these released prisoners who return to terror?

A: We don’t have the exact number. It’s important. Someone should pull together those numbers. It doesn’t even require any analysis. It’s just a matter of gathering the available data. There are a lot of sources.

When it comes to recidivism, not every terrorist attack is successful. In fact, my subjective impression is that most terrorist attacks are not successful. Most of the time, they kill the terrorist, or they stop him before he manages to kill someone.

Let’s say the number of unsuccessful attacks is somewhere between 50% to 75%. But that leaves successful ones between 25% and 50%, and if you talk about 1,000 terrorists released, we get maybe between 250 and 500 successful terrorist attacks where they manage to kill somebody, at least one person. That’s at least 250 dead for 33 live hostages.

Just on that basis alone, it’s obviously a terrible deal.

But that’s not the worst of it. The worst of it is that again and again we’re going to have people kidnapped. We’ve shown the enemy that it’s worth it, that we will completely give up and raise a white flag even if you abduct one, like with Gilad Shalit [an IDF soldier kidnapped by Hamas in June 2006 and exchanged five years later for 1,027 terrorist prisoners.]

We’ve given them incentives to go and kidnap more and more. And they’ve said they’re going to do it. They did it in the past. So we better believe them.

Hamas dropped its victim narrative with sadistic hostage releases

The summer of Gazan love has ended with a thud. The ability to scream about the resistance, about the river and the sea, along with the free-wheeling accusations of genocide, all without accountability, is over.

Hamas has, to no one’s surprise in Israel, made itself completely unpalatable, let alone heroic. It has required its fellow travelers to excuse, contextualize, or defend conduct that, were there no Jews involved, would be universally condemned and despised.

Hamas did it all by itself and to itself. It did it by showing its true colors and straightforward world view, on its own initiative. The morphing realities and narratives in Gaza

In this regard, the ironies are immense and all but overwhelming. That is because, with its discretionary handling of the return of the hostages, Hamas has just made Israel’s case for why it should be expunged from Gaza, and indeed from history.

What happened to the starving, bereft Gazans? We have morphed from pictures of bedraggled Gazans to pressed uniforms, cheering crowds, and an environment worthy of a Hitlerian rally in the 1930s.

All of this was to show the world that Hamas had won. This in and of itself undercuts the case of devastation that must be stopped, privation that must be addressed, and an all-but-eradicated people that must be rescued.

The face that Hamas has chosen to show the world is not one of “We survived Israel’s onslaught,” but in effect one of “Israel never laid a glove on us.” That, of course, beggars the imagination.

However, it is with its treatment of the returned hostages that Hamas has shown its true colors to any who would look objectively at its doings, and listen to what it is, in effect, saying.

Of course, the images of the returned hostages, particularly the men, speak for themselves. Those of us who are allergic to any analogies with the Holocaust nevertheless found ourselves invoking such comparisons when presented with pictures of some of the released men.

The world clearly saw the heinousness of Hamas, and, by extension, its formerly bereft but now screamingly happy acolytes, as Hamas stormtroopers orchestrated scenes that could have easily devolved into lynchings and certainly had all the feel of them.

Itzik Elgarat, Ohad Yahalomi, Tsachi Idan, Shlomo Mantzur murdered by Hamas terrorists

The Prime Minister’s Office announced on Thursday that the deaths of Ohad Yahalomi, Tsachi Idan, Shlomo Mantzur, and Itzik Elgarat have been confirmed following forensic analyses.

“Following the completion of the identification process by the IDF, the Health Ministry National Center of Forensic Medicine and the Israel Police, IDF representatives have, overnight, informed the Yahalomi, Idan, Mantzur and Elgarat families that their loved ones—Ohad Yahalomi, Tsachi Idan, Shlomo Mantzur and Itzik Elgarat, of blessed memory—were murdered and have been returned for burial in Israel,” the PMO statement said.

“Pursuant to the intelligence and all of the information at our disposal, Ohad Yahalomi, Tsachi Idan and Itzik Elgarat were murdered while held hostage in Gaza. Shlomo Mantzur was murdered in the 7 October 2023 massacre and his body had been held in the Gaza Strip,” the statement continued.

“We share in the families’ sorrow at this difficult time.”

Kibbutz Nir Oz announced earlier on Thursday that Israeli hostages Elgarat and Yahalomi, whose bodies were among four returned to Israel overnight Wednesday, were murdered in Hamas captivity in Gaza.

The Hostages and Missing Families Forum and Idan’s family shortly thereafter confirmed the identification of Mantzur’s and Idan’s remains, respectively.

The terrorist organization handed over to the Red Cross what it claimed were the bodies of the four Israelis at around midnight in Gaza.

Hamas Vows To Rebuild Clothing Store Named 'Hitler' (PreOccupied Territory)

Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.

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Hamas Vows To Rebuild Clothing Store Named 'Hitler'

Gaza City, February 27 - The owner of a now-destroyed garment sales enterprise named after the most notorious, genocidal dictator of all time announced today he had secured funding from the Islamist group that governs this territory, to reestablish the shop, which will carry the numeral "3" after the fascist leader's name instead of the "2" in the previous incarnation of the business.

Nidal Radwan, owner of the now-rubble "Hitler 2" clothing store in this city before the current war, sent messages to friends, business contacts, and former customers today, to the effect that Hamas will help pay to rebuild the store. He credited the organization with committing to provide more than $75,000 to make Hitler 3 a reality. A spokesman for Hamas "Liked" one of the posts announcing the project on social media, and another commented that the movement has chosen Hitler 3 as one of its flagship reconstruction tasks.

Hitler 2 met a dusty, violent end last year during the IDF's ground operations in Gaza to locate hostages and smash Hamas's fighting ability in the territory. The cause of the destruction remains uncertain: Israeli airstrike, Israeli artillery, house-to-house fighting, or booby-traps could each serve as plausible explanations. All the areas in which the IDF fought were crisscrossed with Hamas tunnels and bunkers, making all the structures above them likely targets.

Reconstruction of Gaza remains an uncertain and contentious issue, as does its future governance. Israel failed to dislodge Hamas from its position as the ruling entity, but powerful international interests have stated they will not accept that situation for long. Various governments have voiced hesitation to fund building in Gaza again if it will all get demolished in yet another war several years hence - Hamas has repeatedly insisted it will attack Israel again and again, making destructive retaliation an inevitability. Partly to cement its position as the only credible Gaza governance option, the organization has begun to assert itself in the role by announcing several reconstruction initiatives to which it wants to call attention, among them Radwan's Hitler store.

"These projects showcase the priorities of the Resistance in rehabilitating Gaza," explained a movement spokesman. "Of course we will rebuild facilities and positions of military significance. But the morale dimension also requires attention. Rebuilding Hitler - as many times as necessary - is a statement that the enemy cannot defeat us, that our movement is anchored in history, and that we cannot be deterred from continuing Hitler's work."

"But those mannequins were butt-ugly," he added, "and we will insist that Mr. Radwan not use them this time."

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Support for Israel among Democrats plummets, it remains high for Republicans

A new Gallup poll shows that most Democrats now have unfavorable opinion of Israel, and he percentage who have a favorable opinion is down to 33%.

Here is the trend over time of those who have a favorable impression of Israel:

That is a precipitous drop.

Gallup says:

This year marks the first time any party group has had majority-level unfavorable ratings of Israel, with 60% of Democrats expressing that view. Forty-four percent of independents also have an unfavorable opinion of Israel.

Democrats’ and independents’ sagging views of Israel have pushed its favorability to 54% among all Americans, its lowest rating since January 2000, when it was also at 54%. The last time Americans had worse opinions of Israel -- 48% favorable -- was in February 1992. The all-time low was 45% favorable (and 45% unfavorable) in 1989.

In 2014, 74% of Democrats had a favorable opinion of Israel; in 2020 it was 67%.

More Democrats have a favorable view of the Palestinian territories - 45% - than Israel.

Also, Democrats gave higher scores to Egypt - 61%.

Other countries the Democrats prefer to Israel are Cuba and Colombia.

To me, this indicates the effectiveness of anti-Israel propaganda and of anti-Israel media bias over the past year. Democrats - and independents - get most of their news from the mainstream media which has shown lots of photos and videos of Palestinian civilians and nearly none of Hamas terrorists whose decisions made them miserable.

Perhaps this next chart is more important. Here is a chart of all Americans' opinion of Palestinians for the past 25 years:

That jump in favorability this year is primarily from Democrats (26% to 45%). In fact, no other demographic (age, income, race) showed as much of a change in opinion as Democrats altogether.

Even if you accept the slander that Israel is guilty of "genocide," which most of the Democrats seem to think, why would this translate into more favorable opinions of Palestinians? What did they do this year to make them more admirable?

Certainly the PA did nothing. And Hamas spent the past year lying about casualties and bragging about attacks. The corruption and support for violence has not gone down in the least.

Why would Democrats opinions of Palestinians jump so much in a year when the Palestinians did nothing positive, and plenty negative?

This may indicate that the zero-sum mentality so prevalent among Palestinians has now infected Democrats. To them if Israel is bad, Palestinians must be good.

Zero-sum thinking is a consequence of honor/shame culture. It is childish and amoral.

Perhaps worse is that Democratic leaders have not been outspoken in their support of Israel, out of fear of alienating their noisy pro-terror constituents. Outside of John Fetterman and Richie Torres, the Democratic politician message on Israel has been ambiguous at best and hostile at worst. This is a big contributor to the deepening rift between Israel and the Democratic party.

When Israel is no longer a bipartisan issue, it is bad for everyone.

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Batman weeps: A mother’s fight, two little lions, and a nation forever changed (Forest Rain)

By Forest Rain

Batman weeps: A mother’s fight, two little lions, and a nation forever changed

How much impact can a person have on the world when they are only given four years to live?

Words shape reality. They give form to our emotions and channel their power. That’s why I believe it is so important to articulate what we feel in response to the murder of Shiri, Ariel, and Kfir Bibas.

I’ve seen it written that Ariel loved Batman. I didn’t know him, so I don’t know how deep that love ran. Did he dress up as Batman often, or was the video we’ve seen of him in his Batman costume from one Purim? I don’t know.

I do know that the image of Batman crying for the little boy who is no longer here felt like a stab in my heart.

Painting by Elisabetta Furcht

Ariel—his name itself carries weight. A combination of "Arieh" (lion) and "El" (God), it is one of the many names of Jerusalem. A powerful name for a little boy who might have dreamed of being a foreign superhero—only to become a symbol for an entire nation.

So much horror has unfolded. Why, among all the pain, has our nation focused so intensely on this one family?

If we limit our emotions to pity or even rage at their murderers, we do a disservice to ourselves and to the Bibas family. There is more here. Within this terrible loss, there is also a gift.

Ariel and Kfir were the youngest hostages taken by the Gazans, but they were not the only child hostages.

Other babies were murdered. Rescue teams found families burned alive in an embrace—parents shielding their children with their own bodies, older siblings covering the youngest in a desperate attempt to protect them.

We saw Shiri’s terror, captured on camera. That split second of horror as she found herself alone, surrounded by the invaders, with no one to help her or her babies. Other Jewish mothers had that same moment, but we didn’t see them live on TV.

We saw Shiri again on video, in Gaza, wrapped in a blanket, still clutching her two boys as she was dragged into captivity. Carrying a four-year-old and a nine-month-old is difficult even in normal circumstances. How long did she hold them in her arms? How long before she no longer could?

Now, in death, she carries them still. They were buried together, forever locked in that embrace.

And Yarden? We saw his abuse. The beating as he was ripped from his family. The starvation in the tunnels. His torment when his captors told him that his beloved wife and babies were dead—and then shoved a camera in his face, forcing him to beg for them to be returned to him.

Now, we see his dignity and heroism. In the instructions he gave us—to tell the world what was done to his babies. In the way he articulates his love for them. In his wonder and appreciation that our Nation is trying to wrap him in love. And in his quiet acknowledgment that this enormous love, is not the simple love of his beloved, the only love he really wants.

The Bibas family captured our hearts because they are special. But also because they have become symbols that help us live with our own trauma.

The mind cannot comprehend the enormity of what we have experienced—what we are still experiencing. There are not enough tears for all the children. For all the broken families. For all the survivors struggling not to be swallowed by the abyss.

But we can cry for Ariel and Kfir. Little lions who will never grow up. (Kfir is the Hebrew word for lion cub.)

It is easy to call the murder of babies evil. The very idea of a grown man choking an infant to death fills us with revulsion. It is paralyzing to imagine men mutilating the body of a dead child—to frame the murder in a way that serves their twisted narrative. The dead child feels no pain. But what does it take for someone to look at the lifeless body of a baby and still feel that it is necessary and good to smash it?

We need to think of Ariel and Kfir because we cannot take into our hearts the evil unleashed on so many others. The children tortured in front of their parents before being butchered. The children forced to watch their parents being tortured before they too were killed. The children found tied together and burned.

The soul screams, and the mind shuts down. It’s too much. We don’t want to know. We can’t take it all in.

But these things happened. And the world needs to know.

That is why Shiri, Ariel, and Kfir are so important. And Yarden too.

For their family and friends, they remain their private, individual selves. But for the rest of us, they are symbols—symbols we desperately need.

They allow us to grieve. We cry for them while crying for all the others.

They force the world to see what evil looks like. There is no nuance, no excuses. Babies versus baby killers is an equation no one can ignore.

Shani Louk, in her grace and light, dancing at the Nova, contrasted with the hideous image of her twisted, half-naked body paraded in a pickup truck—men cheering, children spitting on her—made it impossible to ignore the sickness in Gazan society.

The Bibas family clarifies this evil further.

Some have attempted to excuse the horrors Gazans brought to the Nova might as generalized violence of men against women, an outburst of bloodlust, facilitated by terrorists on drugs with the opportunity to do whatever they want to the enemy population. The Bibas family puts the evil in hyperfocus, in a way that is impossible to define other than what it is - the deliberate destruction of Jewish families. A hatred so deep that it erases all empathy, making it impossible to see a baby as a precious form of life. Giving no respect for a mother battling to protect her cubs. The evil that strangles and mutilates babies is not a fluke in the system, it is the system. It is a building block in a society that seeks the destruction of ours.

Batman became a superhero after a terrible event in his childhood. His pain drove him to want to prevent others from suffering. He didn’t have any special magical abilities. He developed tools that enabled him to serve the people of his city, and most of the time he did it alone.

What a terrible, all-too-familiar burden.

Shiri and Yarden just wanted to be parents. Ariel and Kfir just wanted to be themselves—happy, exploring, growing boys, wrapped in the love of their family.

Who wants to become a symbol? Particularly not one born in trauma and horror. No one wants to embody the battle between good and evil, life and death.

But that is what they have become.

I cannot undo what was done to them. I cannot ease their suffering.

But I can be grateful for what they have given us—a way to express the emotions that are too vast for our small nation to contain. A defining truth, for us and for the world, of right and wrong, good and evil. The ultimate line that must never be crossed. Proof that no justification or excuse can ever make it acceptable to allow monsters to live on our doorstep.

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