Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Tuesday, September 02, 2025

Today's hate for Israel is fueled by the "Jews as cheaters" trope from the 17th century

One of the major differences between antisemitism and other bigotries is the conspiracy thinking behind them. Jewish mendacity is a given, and any counter-examples are not viewed as disproof but as further proof of Jewish cunning.

We saw this with "pinkwashing" where Israel's LGBTQ-friendly policies were recast as a scam to distract the world from war crimes. we saw it with Israel's response to disasters like earthquakes and hurricanes where the rescue workers were accused of organ harvesting. And we see it today where Israel's extensive attempts to bring food into Gaza is scoffed away as a means to hide the real genocidal intent.

What is the source for this bizarre thinking where every counter-example is turned into a further proof of the antisemitic theory?

Perhaps this began as Jews became more prominent in trade and banking in Europe.

I found a fascinating passage in a 1911 German book "Die Juden und das Wirtschaftsleben" (The Jews and Modern Capitalism) by Werner Sombart. While Sombart ended up embracing Nazism, this book does not seem have blatant antisemitism; instead it is a theory about how Jews helped build modern capitalism because of their exclusion from normal trade guilds.

Let us refer to contemporary opinion, to the men who were sufficiently in touch with everyday life to know the reason. Here again the answer is pretty well unanimous. And what is it? The Jews were more successful because of their dishonest dealing. “Jews . . . have one law and custom whenever it pays them; it is called lying and cheating,” you may read in the pages of Philander von Sittewald. Equally complimentary is the Comic Lexicon of Cheating, compiled by George Paul Hönn, where under “Jews,” the only interpolation in the whole book is made as follows: “Jews are cheats, collectively and individually. . . .” The article “Jews,” in the General Treasury for Merchants, is of the same calibre, while an anonymous writer on manners and morals declares that the Jews of Berlin “make their living by robbing and cheating, which, in their opinion, are no crimes.”

Similar views were current in France. “The Jews,” says Savary, “have the reputation of being good at business, but they are supposed not to be able to carry it on with strict honesty and trustworthiness.”

His sources are all from the 17th and 18th centuries.

Sombart goes on to note that these criticisms were largely without foundation, but came from jealous Christian business competitors who disliked that Jews didn't follow their commercial customs and cared more about pleasing the customer. He notes that the idea of competition, of advertising, even of making one's shop-window attractive to passers-by was considered uncouth and un-Christian. Jews did not subscribe to these views and were therefore regarded as somehow "cheating."

This may be the origin of the idea that Jews, as a group, cheat - which includes lying, misrepresenting themselves, and , inevitably, colluding for greater profit. This led to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and other antisemitic memes, and the assumptions that Jews are liars by default, now. Today, the mainstream media and NGOs trust the words of a genocidal Islamist terror group more than those of a professional army made up primarily of Jews.

The parallel doesn't end there.

The Jews of medieval times were forced into banking and trade by the anti-Jewish laws of the day - they couldn't own land and they could charge interest to Christians. Their adaptions to externally imposed restraints led the Jews to be innovative, creative and ultimately successful.

We see the same in Gaza. The Arab and larger world imposes rules on Israel that no other nation at war has ever had to deal with. Israel makes progress and the goalposts are moved again - just for Israel.

And when Israel succeeds, that is used as proof that it must be cheating.

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

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The "genocide scholars" who cannot define genocide

The International Association of Genocide Scholars - of all groups - has now declared Israel guilty of genocide. But instead of expertise, what they bring is recycled propaganda.

One would think that the IAGS would have their own analysis - this is their supposed field of expertise, so they must have good reason to declare Israel guilty.

But if you read their letter, they do not do any independent analysis. They do no fact checking. They show no seriousness in their declaration.

Here's the first paragraph:

IAGS Resolution on the Situation in Gaza

Recognising that, since the horrific Hamas-led attack of 7 October 2023, which itself constitutes international crimes, the government of Israel has engaged in systematic and widespread crimes against humanity, war crimes and genocide, including indiscriminate and deliberate attacks against the civilians and civilian infrastructure (hospitals, homes, commercial buildings, etc.) of Gaza, which, according to official UN estimates, at the date of this resolution, has killed more than 59,000 adults and children in Gaza;

The determination of genocide is not a conclusion. It is their premise.

And their proof is - everyone else says it is, so it must be!

Acknowledging that leading global international law organizations and UN bodies, including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Forensic Architecture, DAWN, B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights, and the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, have conducted extensive investigations and issued reports concluding that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza;

These scholars have outsourced their scholarship on the very subject that they claim to own!

The entire resolution includes links to sources like Al Jazeera, or links to wire services quoting Hamas institutions, to back up their statements. They cannot even give lip service to the idea that there are plenty of serious scholars who dismiss the allegations, based on a normal reading of the law.

I could not find a single research paper on their website that looked at Gaza and gave evidence of genocide. The lack of any substantive discussion, legal review, definitions, or analysis done by their own scholars is most strange when they issue a resolution of this kind.

However, the site does have one paper that discusses genocidal actions in the Gaza region. A scholar named Sara E. Brown wrote a short monograph on the IAGS site that says Hamas was guilty of genocide on October 7, 2023:

The terror attacks on October 7, 2023, will continue to reverberate across the Jewish community and broader society for years to come. This is the largest antisemitic massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. But as one scholar of genocide aptly pointed out to me, if the terrorists who crossed the fence between Gaza and Israel and perpetrated this slaughter could have killed more, they would have. Their intent was destruction, and their murderous aims were constrained only due to the limitations of their firepower and planning. They would not have paused in the midst of slaughtering, raping, and maiming to say, “we have done enough, let’s go back.” Rather, as their leadership asserts, they are committed to perpetrate the same crimes again and again. As a result, the threat of further Hamas perpetrated violence, terror, and genocide persists.

That paper recommends that "The International Association of Genocide Scholars must denounce Hamas’ genocidal violence, including the terror attack perpetrated against Israel on October 7, 2023, and Hamas’ threats of further genocidal violence."

The IAGS never did that. At the bottom of this paper, the only scholarly paper about Gaza on their site, they say, "The views expressed herein are the authors' alone and do not represent the views of IAGS as an organization."

To sum up: the IAGS website has published evidence of Hamas' genocidal aims and violence, and didn't say a word about it. It has not published any analysis whatsoever on Israel's alleged genocidal actions, and it condemned it.

It is difficult to ignore a broader trend which is apparent on the IAGS website and in academia altogether: the concept of genocide, once tightly defined around the Holocaust and similarly grave and exceptional events, is increasingly applied to modern armed conflicts, sometimes before hostilities have even ceased. Whether this is an effort to maintain academic relevance or a genuine shift in interpretive norms, the result is the same: genocide as a term risks becoming a rhetorical reflex rather than a juridical conclusion.

This is not a scholarly organization. This is a political organization whose only claim to gravitas is the phrase "genocide scholars" in their name.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

09/01 Links Pt2: The Blackout: When Journalism Marches for Hamas; The Palestinian Confederacy’s Lost Cause; The magnificent magnum opus of Rabbi Jonathan Sacks

From Ian:

The Blackout: When Journalism Marches for Hamas

There is an agenda here, and it is not subtle. It is to invert the moral order. Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East, becomes the great oppressor. Hamas, the death cult that slaughters civilians and hides behind children, becomes the custodian of “press freedom.” The words are twisted until they no longer mean what they mean. Orwell himself could not have conceived it better.

But let us be clear: Israel is not exempt from scrutiny. Nor should it be. Democracies must account for their actions, even in war. Yet what RSF and its chorus offer is not scrutiny but slander. To claim Israel blocks journalists “without precedent in modern warfare” is an insult to memory. The U.S. barred press from Fallujah and Mosul. Sri Lanka barred them from its final assault on the Tamil Tigers. Russia barred them from Chechnya. Why? Because in war zones, journalists are not merely vulnerable; they are exploitable. They can be kidnapped, used as shields, or, in Gaza’s case, be Hamas fighters with press cards. Israel’s policy is not unprecedented. It is rational.

The Western public is being played. A blackout will not enlighten but darken; not liberate but mislead. It will turn the press from watchdog into attack dog, not against the guilty but against the besieged.

And there is a wider danger. When the press ceases to be sceptical, it ceases to be free. The journalist who parrots the script of NGOs is no journalist at all, but a propagandist. When the media becomes indistinguishable from a political campaign, it forfeits its claim to independence. And when it does so in service of an armed theocracy that murders children, it becomes complicit in barbarism.

This is the naked truth: information is the new battlefield. Hamas knows it cannot win against Israel’s military. Its missiles are intercepted, its tunnels destroyed, its leaders hunted. But it can win on the airwaves, in the headlines, in the imaginations of the West. It can make slaughter look like resistance, and defence look like genocide. And it can do so because too many in our newsrooms are willing accomplices.

The pen, it is often said, is mightier than the sword. How bitter, then, to watch the pen conscripted into the service of the sword that massacred Jews on October 7. How obscene to see the vocabulary of liberty bent into the service of theocratic fascists. How grotesque to watch those who claim to defend “press freedom” black out their own pages at the command of NGOs.

The truth is simple, if we dare to say it: this is not about press freedom. It is about narrative control. It is about delegitimising Israel so that terror may be rewarded with statehood. It is about turning democracies into pariahs and pariahs into martyrs. And it is about power: the power of words to wound, to deceive, to kill.

Israel can survive missiles. What it may not survive, if we are not vigilant, is the great lie that it has become the villain of its own story. That lie is being written not in Tehran or Gaza, but in New York, Paris, and London — on the pages of newspapers that once prided themselves on scepticism. When future generations ask how it was that journalism, of all professions, surrendered itself so eagerly to the propaganda of terror, the answer will be found in the headlines of 1 September. They will see the blackout not as courage, but as collaboration. And the shame, then as now, will be theirs.

Bethany Mandel: Wikipedia bias influences how one’s perception of reality is perceived

One of the clearest recent examples is Israel.

As Aaron Bandler of RealClearInvestigations has documented, Wikipedia’s coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is shot through with ideological bias.

Pages are dominated by editors who advance anti-Israel narratives, stripping out facts and context that complicate their preferred framing.

A casual reader will almost inevitably come away with a version of history that portrays Israel in the worst possible light.

Even attempts at modest correction are often swiftly undone by activist gatekeepers who patrol those pages with zeal.

Inside some of Wikipedia's wicked sneaks
| - At least 30 editors accused by Anti-Defamation League of coordinating to “[downplay] Palestinian antisemitism, violence, and calls to destroy Israel while foregrounding criticism of Israel.”
- These editors made more than a million edits to at least 10,000 related to Israel, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, or similar topics.
- Six “bad-faith editors” eventually banned from posting on Wikipedia pages about Israel and the Israel-Palestinian conflict due to harassment and bullying other editors.
- The number of average edits per day among “bad-faith editors” nearly doubled after Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks.
- One editor removed reference articles documenting terrorist violence and calls for Israel’s destruction, while downplaying the death toll from the Oct. 7, 2023, terror attacks and other atrocities targeting Israeli civilians.
- Study of 1,672 Wikipedia pages in 44 languages by Atlantic Council finds 1,907 links to Russian Pravda-linked propaganda news sites — including 133 citations on English Wikipedia.
- Russian Wikipedia only indirectly referenced Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine following the start of hostilities in February 2022, with just 3.9% of content explicitly invasion related (Ukrainian Wikipedia has 6.9% of content explicitly invasion-related).

This is not an isolated case.

On a range of topics including cultural controversies, political debates, even biographies of relatively obscure figures, the site reflects the worldview of a small but determined class of editors.

Wikipedia has become the reference library of the modern world, but without the oversight, accountability, or intellectual rigor that a library is supposed to guarantee.

The House Oversight Committee’s probe is not an attack on free information; it’s an overdue recognition that information is power, and that when a handful of anonymous ideologues — and possibly foreign actors — exercise such power unchecked, democracy itself is put at risk.

If we would not tolerate a foreign government seeding propaganda in our news outlets, why would we accept it in the encyclopedia that underpins much of the internet’s “knowledge”?

09/01 Links Pt1: What a pathetic bunch of cry-bullies Israel’s enemies are; US imposes blanket ban on PA visas; Greta's Gaza flotilla forced back by storms

From Ian:

Brendan O'Neill: What a pathetic bunch of cry-bullies Israel’s enemies are

Ansar Allah – the official name of the Houthis group – is a profoundly racist and regressive movement. Its very flag dreams of Jew murder. ‘Death to America, Death to Israel, Curse on the Jews, Victory to Islam’, it says. It has made good on its medieval loathing of the Jews by firing its Iranian-sponsored bombs into the heart of the Jewish nation. Maybe the people who are agog that Israel has had the temerity to take out the Houthi leadership didn’t get the memo: You can’t kill Jews with impunity anymore. You can’t just go around plotting the death of Jewish people. It’s not 1492. Or 1942, for that matter. Violent anti-Semitism, fascistic intrusions into the safety and sovereign rights of the Jewish people, has consequences now. Radical, I know!

Boil it down – really boil it down – and what the Houthis and their suicidal sympathisers in the West are saying is that the Jewish State should let itself be attacked. It should never respond to the menaces of its enemies. An avowedly Jew-hating militia is firing ballistic missiles at you? Big deal. Suck it up. They wouldn’t say this about any other nation. If anti-black racists were firing on the people of Botswana, they’d say that was bad. If a Japanophobic militia was launching assaults on Tokyo from inside China, they’d recognise the need for action. Only Israel is expected to put up with military onslaughts from its bigoted foes. Only Jews are implicitly instructed: ‘Don’t fight back – who the fuck do you think you are?’

Has Earth ever had such a gathering of pathetic cry-bullies as we now see in the anti-Israel movement? Hamas carried out the worst mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust and then wailed ‘War crime!’ when those Jews fought back. Hezbollah rained missiles on northern Israel for two years, causing mass destruction, forced displacement and the deaths of Druze kids, and then cried ‘Barbarism!’ when Israel responded with the pagers operation to take out Hezbollah’s top dogs. The Houthis say ‘We hate the Jews and we want to kill them’ and then act all affronted when the Jews say ‘Nah, not today’. And Iran sponsors all this apocalyptic agitation against the Jewish State and then goes blubbing to the UN when the Jewish State takes out its leading military men.

What a toxic mix of Islamist intolerance and depthless self-pity. What a foul combination of violence and victimology, where even as you’re raping a Jew or bombing Jews from their homes you somehow manage to convince yourself that you’re the real victim. And every step of the way, this nauseating Islamo cry-bullying has been flattered and further inflamed by the Israelophobes of the West, who seem to think it’s ‘war’ when you kill Jews and a ‘war crime’ when Jews fight back. I can’t believe this needs to be said, but if you start a war, you should expect war. As a passionate believer in the sovereign rights of nations, and the right of Jews to live in peace in their homeland, I support Israel’s swift, strong strike against its vile tormentors in Ansar Allah.

Jake Wallis Simons: This is the UN's next move

In June 2024, in a brazen attempt to leverage his organisation against Israel, the head of the World Food Programme wrongly claimed that there was a “full-blown famine” in Gaza. At the time, however, the UN grudgingly concluded that it was “unable to endorse” that conclusion.

Nonetheless, the BBC duly reported that there were “catastrophic levels” of hunger in the Strip, and the Guardian ran an article headlined “The starvation of Gaza is a perverse repudiation of Judaism’s values”.

You could see where all this was heading. Fast-forward to 2025, and Jerusalem realised that something had to be done to break up the UN-Hamas complicity that was using aid to keep the terror group in power.

The result was the American-Israeli Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which has delivered millions of meals. Enraged, the UN downed tools and did all it could to exacerbate hunger in the Strip, which it blamed on Israel. So the world was led to believe that Israel was both enforcing a policy of starvation and expending huge resources to provide the Palestinians with food.

As George Orwell famously observed, “one of the marks of antisemitism is an ability to believe stories that could not possibly be true”.

Which brings me to the notorious famine classification. This relied on some very dodgy data indeed. A detailed analysis of just how dodgy can be found here. But the clearest and most egregious element was the way the UN dealt with the famine mortality threshold.

According to its own rules, 180 excess deaths every day in Gaza City would have been needed to declare a famine in the city. The actual reported figure was six excess deaths every day, across the entire Strip, not just in the capital.

How did the UN deal with this inconvenient truth? By suggesting that many deaths might not have been counted. In other words, the respected organisation allowed itself to assume, without any evidence, that 30 times the recorded excess deaths had taken place.

Like I said, a new low. But Israelophobic lies are like Pringles: once you pop, you can’t stop. So we arrive at the next step in the UN’s rapid descent into depravity, by which it is trading its institutional credibility for pressure on Israel.

On Friday, the Guardian reported that hundreds of employees of the UN’s leading human rights agency, the New York-based Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), backed an internal letter telling its leadership to declare Israel’s offensive in Gaza a “genocide” and to call on UN member states to suspend arms sales to Israel.

The 1,100-word letter, signed by about a quarter of the 2,000 staff, alleged that the Israeli offensive in Gaza met the legal threshold of “genocide” and so “arms sales, transfers and related logistical or financial support to Israeli authorities” constituted a breach of international law.

OHCHR employees told the paper they were frustrated with the failure of agency’s head, Volker Türk, to “move beyond condemning Israel”. Well, unless the war in Gaza comes to an end very soon, there will be no prizes for guessing what’s coming next.

From the title of the article in Rai al-Youm by Abdul Razzaq Bani Hani , we knew where it would go.

Zionist influence on the global level: the great height

Already in the second paragraph:

According to the historical records I have reviewed, some Jewish-Zionist politicians managed to infiltrate European systems under the guise of taqiyya, which in this context is a display of Christian religiosity, while concealing Jewish-Zionist ideology. Examples include the economic thinker David Ricardo, whose ideas prevailed during the Napoleonic era and Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo in 1815, and Benjamin Disraeli, who became British Prime Minister from 1876 to 1880, the same preparatory period that preceded the Basel Zionist Conference in 1897.

Marx was a Zionist. So was Mao:

Karl Marx, who was of pure Jewish origins, hated the Ottoman Empire and strongly advocated its dismantling, considering it a reactionary state based on Islamic foundations, even if they were simple.
In less than seven decades, Marx's followers, such as Lenin, Trotsky, and their comrades, were able to establish the world's largest state, geographically speaking, occupying nearly a quarter of the globe's land area. They were able to subjugate the Islamic countries of Central Asia, the cradle of al-Bukhari and al-Khwarizmi, and destroy the culture of their peoples, transforming them into peoples devoid of a historical identity, as they had been in the decades prior to the founding of the Soviet Union. In this context, we must not forget that Mao Zedong, the inspiration behind the Chinese revolution that established Greater China, was a brilliant student of the school of Marx and Lenin, both of Jewish-Zionist origin.

And by the end, it is almost parody:

Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo, the current president of Mexico, comes from a Zionist-Jewish family. Although she governs as a secular left-wing politician, her background is rooted in the Zionist-Jewish heritage.

Sheinbaum is descended from Zionist-Jewish parents. Her father is of Ashkenazi descent, whose family immigrated from Lithuania, and her mother is of Sephardic descent, whose family originated in Bulgaria. Sheinbaum has not publicly emphasized her Zionist-Jewish identity during her political career, as it conflicts with the Catholic faith of the majority of the Mexican people.

Brigitte Macron (wife of the French President), Akshata Murthy (wife of the former British Prime Minister), and Victoria Starma (wife of the current British Prime Minister): All of them are of Zionist-Jewish origin. Brigitte Macron is the granddaughter of Rothschild, who gave millions to the British government, during the Balfour era, to support the establishment of the Zionist state in occupied Palestine. Akshata Murthy is a Zionist-Jew of Indian origin, who hates Muslims. The Akshata Murthy family company invests in the Zionist entity in occupied Palestine. This is a recorded and announced fact

Like Queen Esther, these Jewish women marry Western leaders and turn them Zionist.

This is mainstream thinking in the Arab world. And it is spreading.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

Journalistic ethics officially died today, September 1, 2025, thanks to @IFJGlobal

From the International Federation of Journalists:

In an unprecedented global action, almost 200 media outlets from 50 countries will simultaneously disrupt their front pages, homepages, and broadcasts to demand an end to the killing of journalists in Gaza and to call for international press access to the enclave.

For the first time in modern history, newsrooms across every continent will coordinate a large-scale editorial protest. The action - coordinated by Reporters Without Borders (RSF), the global campaigning movement Avaaz and the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) - will take place on Monday, September 1. Print newspapers will run blacked-out front pages carrying a stark message. Broadcasters and radio stations will pause programming with a joint statement. Online outlets will black out their homepages or banners in solidarity. Editors, reporters and other journalists are also taking part too.

We are seeing newspapers putting this protest advertisement as a front page story with the identical graphic.

This is profoundly unethical.

The front page of a newspaper is assumed to be where the top news stories are. In rare circumstances, a newspaper can put an op-ed as its top story. But this is not an op-ed - it is coordinated activism, using the newspapers as a medium.

Any other activists would have to purchase advertising space in newspapers to get such a message across. Here, journalists are taking advantage of their own medium to be used for something that goes against all journalistic ethics - taking up room normally used for legitimate news or editorial opinion with a coordinated activist campaign.

If they were ethical, they would purchase full page ads like any other group. Using precious news space for an activist campaign is perverting the very medium they work for.

By its nature, editorials are the opinion of the news source itself. People want to read which candidates their local papers endorse, for example. But in this case, the opinions are coming from a central activist framework. A newspaper that signs on has no independence in this matter.

This is problematic, because the message says that Israel is targeting journalists as journalists, which is a lie.

But the worst part is that this activist push it being promoted by the IFJ, which supposedly enforces journalistic ethics. This coordinated campaign goes against the ethics of the organization that created the standard on ethics.

The campaign violates a number of sections in the IFJ Global Charter of Ethics for Journalists, like avoiding distortion of facts and unfounded accusations. But the most egregious part being violated on is Article 13:

[The journalist] will avoid any confusion between his activity and that of advertising or propaganda.

This campaign meant to deliberately do exactly what their ethics prohibits. No matter how sympathetic one may be towards journalists concerned over the safety of their colleagues, it does not justify changing a news site into a megaphone for propaganda. Journalism must not favor journalists.

We know that in recent decades the journalism profession has been blurring the lines between news, opinion and activism. But journalists always at least maintained the pretense of holding up ethical standards. When the IFJ itself promotes activism on the news pages, and hundreds of media outlets sign up for it, that means that even the pretext of journalistic ethics has been shredded.

I once created a reference architecture for what journalistic ethics rules should look like. It goes way beyond any existing standards, and this campaign would violate it in a number of ways. Importantly, no self respecting journalist can argue that my code is wrong - it respects journalism even more than the IFJ ethics charter does by demanding excellence and clear boundaries.

This is not about Israel or bias or journalists blurring lines. This is about the collapse of the entire journalism industry, promoted by the very people who should be defending it the most. And that should frighten you.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

NYT very disappointed in Israel's attack on Yemen

Yesterday I highlighted how incredible the Israeli raid on Yemen last week was.

The New York times was not impressed. It sniffed:

The Houthi militia of Yemen has vowed to strike back after an Israeli attack killed senior members of the group’s government but appeared to leave its military leadership largely untouched.

See? It was no big deal!

In fact, the only possible thing Israel accomplished was radicalizing the Houthis further: As their "expert" Farea al-Muslimi, a Yemeni research fellow at Chatham House, said:

The death of the Yemeni officials, among them pragmatists tied to Yemen’s former leadership rather than Houthi ideologues, could result in more hawkishness and extremism going forward, Mr. al-Muslimi said.

Hmmm. The Houthi flag already says "Death to Israel" and "Curse the Jews."

How, exactly, are they going to get more "hawkish"?

Another "expert" told us something completely new:

“Abdul-Malik found his match in Netanyahu,” said Mohammed al-Basha, a U.S.-based analyst focused on Yemen. “They’re both stubborn. They both have religious fervor and ideology that’s very strong.”

Yes, Netanyahu has religious fervor. Who knew?

The New York Times sure knows how to pick their experts.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

08/31 Links: Trumping a ‘conjectural Palestinian state’ at the UNGA; 150 Media Outlets to Stage Anti-Israel Campaign Coordinated by NGOs; Zohran Mamdani’s mom was bankrolled by Qatar

From Ian:

Ruthie Blum: Trumping a ‘conjectural Palestinian state’ at the UNGA

Had Kamala Harris won the U.S. presidential election in November, the United States may have jumped on this bandwagon, as well. Though more symbolic than concrete, it’s significant in terms of how Israel and the P.A. continue to be perceived and treated.

By nixing the entry of the latter into America for the UNGA, President Donald Trump is conveying just as much of a powerful message to the gang of Western terrorism apologists who’d planned on hailing Abbas in the halls of the United Nations as to those denied the visas.

The State Department’s Office of the Spokesperson worded the warning, in part, as follows: “The Trump Administration has been clear: It is in our national security interests to hold the PLO and P.A. accountable for not complying with their commitments, and for undermining the prospects for peace. Before [they] can be considered partners for peace, they must consistently repudiate terrorism—including the Oct. 7 massacre—and end incitement to terrorism in education, as required by U.S. law and as promised by the PLO.”

In addition, the statement went on, “The P.A. must … end its attempts to bypass negotiations through international lawfare campaigns, including appeals to the ICC [International Criminal Court] and ICJ [International Court of Justice], and efforts to secure the unilateral recognition of a conjectural Palestinian state. Both steps materially contributed to Hamas’s refusal to release its hostages, and to the breakdown of the Gaza ceasefire talks.” [Emphasis added.]

However, it concluded, signaling a way forward the likelihood of which is nil, “The United States remains open to re-engagement that is consistent with our laws, should the P.A./PLO meet their obligations and demonstrably take concrete steps to return to a constructive path of compromise and peaceful coexistence with the State of Israel.”

It remains to be seen whether some U.N. maneuver will override the administration’s decree. But the outcry it evoked in anti-Israel circles indicates how brilliant and crucial a move it was.

Trump mulls ‘GREAT’ plan to pay Palestinians to leave Gaza during post-war rebuild: report

The White House is reportedly considering a plan to pay Palestinians $5,000 to relocate for 10 years while the Gaza Strip is transformed into the “Riviera of the Middle East” envisioned by President Trump.

The Gaza Reconstitution, Economic Acceleration and Transformation (GREAT) proposal would establish a trusteeship for control of the 25-mile-long strip of land that would be administered by the US for at least 10 years, while reconstruction – financed by billions of dollars in public and private-sector investments – takes place, according to the Washington Post.

Gaza’s entire 2 million population would need to be temporarily relocated for the project to take shape. The plan relies on “voluntary” departures from Gazans, either to another country or secured zones within the strip.

To encourage relocation, Palestinians opting to leave would receive $5,000 cash, four years of free rent elsewhere, and a year’s supply of food.

The trust would also offer digital tokens to Gazan land owners – good for a 1,800-square-foot apartment in one of six-to-eight new “AI-powered, smart cities” the trust plans to build from the ground up – in exchange for handing over their property rights.

The plan values each new apartment at $75,000, and the trust would save $23,000 for each departure from Gaza, compared with the cost of providing temporary shelter and “life support” services inside the enclave for those who refuse to leave, according to financial estimates included in the plan.

The first steps of reconstruction, as outlined in the document, would involve clearing mountains of debris, removing unexploded ordnance and rebuilding Gaza’s utilities and electrical grid.

Planners tout that 30% of land in Gaza is already “publicly” owned, and would immediately belong to the trust and serve as collateral for initial costs.

“Mega-projects,” including new highways, ports, airports, desalination plants and solar arrays would be funded by investors.

A new perimeter road around Gaza, dubbed “MBS Highway,” is touted in the prospectus, which suggests if the plan moves forward, the trust would seek substantial investments from Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. There is no indication that Saudi Arabia would support such an effort.

Under the proposal, the center of the enclave would serve as Gaza’s residential area for returning residents – complete with new apartment buildings, business districts, schools and hospitals, mixed in with “green areas, including agricultural land, parks and golf courses.”

Hamas terrorist who held Emily Damari hostage said killed in IDF strike

Israel recently killed one of the Hamas terrorists who held British-Israeli hostage Emily Damari captive in Gaza, according to a Sunday report.

Channel 12 named the terrorist as Hazem Naim, but did not provide further details, including when the strike was carried out.

Damari said she shouted “screams of joy” when she heard the news.

“He was responsible for me and [fellow freed captive] Romi [Gonen] for around eight months,” Damari told the Channel 12 news network. “He was the commander of our captors, a very, very evil person.”

Thanking the IDF for its tireless efforts, Damari added: “People will never understand what that monster was to me and to Romi.” She noted that, at the same time, she was “scared to death” for her friends who are still held hostage, including twins Ziv and Gali Berman.

In July, the Israel Defense Forces announced that the previous month, it killed a different Hamas terrorist who held Damari in his home.

Nasr Ali Quneita, who was targeted in Gaza City on June 19, was said by the IDF to be a member of Hamas’s military intelligence unit in the Sheikh Radwan Battalion, known in the IDF as the al-Furqan Battalion, and that he invaded Israel on October 7, 2023, and held Damari hostage in his home at the start of the war.

At the time, Damari responded to her captor’s death, writing on social media: “This is what the face of evil looks like. A face I will never forget. I’m so glad he is no longer [in] our world.”

Damari was kidnapped from Kibbutz Kfar Aza during the Hamas onslaught of October 7, 2023. She was abducted alongside Ziv Berman, her neighbor, who rushed over to her home to make sure she was safe. Invading terrorists shot Damari in her left hand, and another bullet was lodged in her right leg after fatally hitting her dog Choocha in the head.

In July 2023, the journal Frontiers in Public Health published a paper by Bram Wispelwey, Osama Tanous, Yara Asi, Weeam Hammoudeh and David Mills titled "Because its power remains naturalized: introducing the settler colonial determinants of health."

They claim that in Israel and elsewhere, the "colonized" have poorer health because of the supposed "settler colonialism" they suffer under.

This is not the only study that blames poorer Arab health compared to Jews in the region on nebulous factors like racism or colonialism. A series of recent papers (many of whom share some of the same authors) have been pushing this narrative:

Smith J, Kwong EJL, Hanbali L, Hafez S, Neilson A, Khoury R. Violence in Palestine demands immediate resolution of its settler colonial root causes. BMJ Glob Health 2023;8:e014269. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjgh-2023-014269.

Tanous O. On settler colonialism, environment, and health. Jerusalem Quarterly 2023;95:112–15.

Asi YM, Hammoudeh W, Mills D, Tanous O, Wispelwey B. Reassembling the pieces: settler colonialism and the reconception of Palestinian health. Health Hum Rights 2022;24:229–35. PMID: PMC9790940.

Asi YM, Sharif MZ, Wispelwey B, Abuelezam NN, Ahmed AK, Samari G. Racism as a threat to Palestinian health equity. Health Equity 2024;8:371–5. https://doi.org/10.1089/heq.2024.0027.

It does not take long to not only debunk this theory, but to advance an alternative theory that is much stronger to explain why Arab Israelis and Palestinian Arabs have a lower life expectancy than Israeli Jews.

Let's ignore the fact that Israel is not a settler-colonialist state, since Jews are indigenous to the region.

If settler colonial determinants of health (SCDH) were real, then one would expect that Arabs under Israeli rule or "occupation" have worse health than their neighbors in Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt and Syria, who do not live under such circumstances.

Yet the life expectancy of Palestinian and Israeli Arabs is 76, while their neighbors average about 74.5.

That is a negative correlation.

Yet Israeli Arabs do have lower life expectancy than Israeli Jews, which is 83 years. That is certainly a significant difference. If "settler colonialism" is not the major reason, what is?

Modern medicine loves to look at social factors as underlying health determinants - things like poverty or marginalization. Of course, "poverty" does not cause health problems any more than "settler colonialism" does - the use of the word "determinants" in SCDH is knowingly deceptive. There may be correlations, but nothing about poverty causes poor health - it is at best a second-order factor, because perhaps poverty indicates less access to health facilities, or more stress. But social factors, by themselves, are never determinants.

Let's look at poverty. There is no doubt that Arab Israelis have lower incomes and higher poverty rates than Israeli Jews do, so a superficial glance at only those two factors would seem to indicate some correlation.

However, there is another well-defined group in Israeli society that has high poverty rates: religious Haredi Jews. And if you look at their life expectancy you can see that it is higher than that of non-Haredi Jews in Israel! The Haredi population has a life expectancy of 84.5 years, a full year and a half over other Israeli Jews.

So what accounts for these seemingly contradictory results? If it isn't settler colonialism, and it isn't poverty, then what is it that is the major factor for determining life expectancy?

If you had to choose one dominant health factor, the answer is simple: smoking.

If you compare life expectancy with smoking rates, among Haredi, non-Haredi Jewish Israeli , Israeli Arab and Palestinian men and women, the negative correlation between smoking and life expectancy is a very high -0.934.

This is a much stronger correlation than other first-order health factors like obesity or diabetes.

When academic health papers are biased like these, and ignore easily obtained statistics and methodologies that undermine their theories, that is no longer just bias or antisemitism. It is a threat to the entire health industry. Public health must be guided by evidence, not activism. When empirically measurable factors like smoking rates show a near-perfect inverse correlation with life expectancy, ignoring them in favor of untestable theories is not only unscientific - it's unethical.

This is not the only problem with the SCDH theory. But it is enough to show that within some health circles, activism is trumping science. That should concern everyone, no matter what your position is on Israel.

One shudders to think that these health professionals are spending more effort to slander Israel in the name of Arab health than to promote anti-smoking initiatives among Palestinians and Arab Israelis - an idea that Israeli health officials would gladly embrace.

(h/t Andrew P)

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EU High Representative Kaja Kallas gave a briefing after meeting with foreign ministers yesterday, where she said, "On Gaza, Israel's announcement that Gaza City is now a combat zone threatens to worsen the humanitarian situation. If a military solution was possible, the war would already be over. Gaza needs less war, not more war. "

This is an astonishing statement from a political leader.

Kallas is saying that Hamas cannot be defeated militarily. She is no military expert, of course, but she represents the EU position.

What logically follows is that she is telling Israel that they must live with Hamas. They must withdraw from Gaza with no plan to stop the next October 7 except to wait and hope they can foil the next terror plot.

The EU has not given any substantive proposal on how to rid Gaza of Hamas, except for wishful thinking that a weak, corrupt and also terror-supporting Palestinian Authority takes over Gaza by some magical method. They ignore that all Palestinians - including those in the West Bank - prefer Hamas to Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah party.

So they have no plan. But they do know that Israel destroying Hamas is unacceptable. The official EU position is that Hamas' human shield strategy, which is its entire defense doctrine, is valid and should be rewarded.

This is not a principled position. This is an immoral position. No one disagrees that Israel should do everything it can to minimize civilian casualties, least of all Israel itself - it has strong disincentive to hurt innocents. But it has a stronger moral imperative - to end Hamas' rule in Gaza.

No one - not the EU, not the "social justice warriors," not the Arab states, not the Democratic Party - has come up with a non-military solution.

Which means that the official position of these supposed anti-violence people is that Hamas' continued survival is more important than the Israeli lives Hamas is sworn to snuff out when it gets a chance.

(h/t Irene)

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JPost reports:

Houthi Prime Minister Ghalib al-Rahawi and several other ministers were killed in the IAF strike in Sanaa on Thursday, the news agency run by the terror group said on Saturday, citing a statement by the head of the Houthi Supreme Political Council, Mahdi al-Mashat.

The Houthis further announced that several other ministers who were present were seriously or moderately injured in the strike and are receiving medical treatment.

According to Army Radio, citing Israeli security sources, eight others killed in the attack were the Houthis’ political bureau director, the prime minister’s chief of staff, the group’s cabinet secretary, and its justice minister, economy and trade minister, foreign minister, agriculture minister, and public relations minister.

Al-Hadath reported that the IAF targeted homes where senior Houthi officials were hiding in Yemen’s capital.

This is extraordinarily impressive.

Unlike Lebanon, Gaza or Iran, Israel has not had years to grow a mature human intelligence (HUMINT) network in Yemen, and the Houthis are famously insular which would make such penetration difficult under the best of circumstances. Chances are that Israel leaned heavily on signals intelligence (SIGINT) to track their targets.

But even so, the Israelis knew where multiple officials would be hours ahead of time - it takes time to organize such an attack and fly 1,800 kilometers. And they appeared to have been able to monitor where they were in real time.

From reports, Israel didn't just hit one gathering of Houthi leaders, but several places that they were, hitting them close to simultaneously. That is logistically difficult.

No one has said anything about collateral damage, further indicating precise intel. Otherwise Israel could have justified flattening entire buildings to reach high value targets. But they didn't.

The Sanaa strike is a remarkable achievement for Israel, showcasing its ability to conduct a long-distance, intelligence-driven operation against a secretive adversary in a challenging environment. The real-time intelligence and the coordination of simultaneous strikes highlight Israel’s technological and operational capabilities. It was a strong message not only to the Houthis but to Iran as well and any others who are considering attacking Israel.

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