04/20 Links Pt1: Ruthie Blum: Trump cards; PA Has Paid Convicted Terrorists Released in Gaza Deal; England’s Jews are being terrorised, and the left is silent

From Ian:

Ruthie Blum: Trump cards

This clash of narratives would be less troubling if it were merely rhetorical. But it goes to the heart of how the Islamic Republic wages war and, crucially, how it and the rest of the jihadist world try to avoid losing one.

Militarily, the imbalance is obvious. The United States possesses overwhelming superiority in every realm other than that of double-speak and propaganda-spreading.

Tehran’s advantage, like that of its proxies, has always existed in the ability to manipulate perception, to blur lines between perpetrator and victim and to exploit the West’s chronic susceptibility to wishful thinking. It understands that battles are not fought solely with planes and tanks, but by way of story lines that seep into public consciousness. It’s an arena in which jihadists are champions. One need look no further than the halls of Harvard.

While aware of this phenomenon, Trump doesn’t grasp the depths of Islamist religious ideology, which is far harder to confront than armies and navies. That’s the bad news.

The good news is that nobody, least of all Trump, likes being played for a fool. So, Iran is pushing its luck and not merely through bluster. Indeed, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) fired on two Indian ships in the Strait of Hormuz on April 18.

This is despite the fast-approaching end to the two-week ceasefire. The deadline for Tehran to agree to U.S. conditions for a deal is April 22.

Though Trump’s been vague about whether he means to extend the truce, he’s not likely to be flexible at this point.

During a joint press conference on April 16 with Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Caine, Secretary of Defense/War Pete Hegseth issued a warning to Tehran, referring to the U.S. blockade as the “polite way this can go.”

Addressing the Islamic Republic, he said, “You like to say publicly ... that you control the Strait of Hormuz. But you don’t have a navy or real domain awareness. You can’t control anything. To be clear: Threatening to shoot missiles and drones at commercial ships that are lawfully transiting international waters—that is not control. That’s piracy. That’s terrorism.”

He continued, “The United States Navy controls the traffic going in and out of the strait, because we have real assets and real capabilities. ... The math is clear. We’re using 10% of the world’s most powerful navy, and you have 0% of your navy. That’s real control, and we have a long track record of dealing with pirates and terrorists. But there is an alternative. As our negotiators have said, you, Iran, can choose a prosperous future, a golden bridge. And we hope that you do for the people of Iran. ... But if Iran chooses poorly, then they will have a blockade and bombs dropping on infrastructure, power and energy.”

Well, the IRGC certainly hasn’t been opting for the outcome desired by Washington, Jerusalem or the Iranian people. Trump, therefore, must stick to his literal and figurative guns.

After all, the last thing he would want is for the United States to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

Palestinian Authority Has Paid Convicted Terrorists Released as Part of Gaza Ceasefire Deal, State Department Tells Congress

The Palestinian Authority (PA) has paid salaries to convicted terrorists Israel released from its prisons as part of its October 2025 ceasefire agreement with Hamas, the State Department formally determined in a non-public report to Congress obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.

The State Department's mandatory report—compiled between August 2025 and January 2026—marks the first U.S. government determination that the PA has "provided payments to convicted terrorists released from Israeli prisons in October 2025 under President Trump's 20-point peace plan."

The notice to Congress confirms a similar conclusion the State Department made in January, when it noted that, even though PA president Mahmoud Abbas claimed in 2025 that he had scrapped the so-called pay-to-slay program, his government had still doled out hundreds of millions of dollars to terrorists and their families. As the Free Beacon reported in February, the PA transitioned last year to concealing those payments from Western governments by funneling them through a newly established welfare authority. The most recent State Department report confirms that a portion of those funds has gone to the terrorists released in October.

The State Department report comes about six months after the beginning of President Donald Trump's Gaza ceasefire, which included a commitment from Abbas that the PA would undertake a series of reforms, including ending pay-to-slay. The notice to Congress demonstrates that he and his government have not followed through in any meaningful way.

The PA appears to have gone further since the end of the period covered in the State Department report. Abbas's Fatah party "announced that terrorists who have been imprisoned for more than 20 years will be granted leadership positions," according to the Palestinian Media Watch research group. Fatah Revolutionary Council member Tayseer Nasrallah said in a televised interview in March that these terrorists will serve as members in the upcoming Eighth Fatah Conference, the forum at which the PA sets government policy.

The State Department report includes other examples of the PA violating the terms of its agreements with the United States. The PA "incited and glorified violence, including on social media and media outlets," and "supported terrorism via educational materials and summer camps" that teach children jihadist ideologies, the notice states.

Khaled Abu Toameh: For the Leadership in Iran, Gaza and Beirut, What Is the Only Important Outcome?

[The US president's negotiations and ceasefires] are viewed by Tehran, Gaza and Beirut as infidels trying to tell Muslims what to do. For them, such a situation is unimaginable, unacceptable, and cannot be allowed to stand.

To Iran's current leaders, whoever they are, if Trump carries out his threat to bomb the country's bridges and power plants on Wednesday, so be it. In the view of Iran's theocratic regime, none of that is of any importance so long as it survives, in any form, to be able to continue waging jihad (holy war) against its people, its neighbors and the West.

A piece of paper signed with infidels at the point of a gun is, in their eyes, nothing more than a Western fantasy.

They see anything short of the total destruction of their entire power base as a total victory.

That is why all three regimes – the Islamic Republic of Iran, Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon – need to be totally dismantled if there is to be any real, permanent change of conduct in the Middle East.

The message should by now be clear: Iran's regime, Hamas and Hezbollah have no intention of laying down their arms, no interest in compromise, and no respect for Trump and his policies. In fact, they are telling Trump: Your initiatives and efforts are irrelevant.

The intractability of their leaders also aligns with their long-term ideological objective of sustaining a permanent conflict with Israel and the West.

Even if the Iranian regime is no longer able to continue funding, arming, and guiding its proxies, all will remain committed to armed struggle until "victory."

"Victory," in their terms, means first the destruction of Israel ("the Little Satan"), then taking over their oil-rich neighbors, and eventually the destruction of Europe and the United States ("the Great Satan").

So long as the Iranian regime – or Hamas or Hezbollah -- is able to survive, there will be no disarmament, no moderation, and no peace.

The repeated refusals by Iran's regime, Hamas and Hezbollah expose the failure of any policy built on engagement, incentives, or accommodation.

These terror entities do not interpret diplomatic overtures, off-ramps and ceasefires as goodwill. They view them instead as weakness.

They are right. It is, indeed, the West's fault that it allows itself to be exploited. The West not only gives these leaders time to rearm and rebuild, but worse, it grants them legitimacy and power bases throughout Europe and the United States. No one in the West even asks them to concede anything of substance.

Until there is a better understanding by the West of what jihad actually is -- and the uncompromising determination behind it -- every negotiation, threat and ceasefire will only lead to more terrorism and the next war.

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Part 2 of my book Reclaiming the Covenant: The Blueprint and the Builders (excerpt)

Here is the beginning of Part 2 of my upcoming book ion America at 250, Reclaiming the Covenant.

The full chapters are being published on my Substack for paid subscribers, and if you are are a subscriber through this blog, PayPal, Patreon or Ko-Fi, email me and I will give you a gift subscription on Substack so you can read the whole book as it comes out.

The Blueprint and the Builders

In the summer of 1776, the Continental Congress appointed Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams — three of the five who had drafted the Declaration — to a committee to design a seal for the new United States. Adams reached for classical antiquity: Hercules choosing between Virtue and Sloth. Franklin and Jefferson both reached for the Exodus. Franklin's handwritten proposal described Moses standing on the shore, hand extended over the Red Sea, Pharaoh in his chariot overwhelmed by the returning waters, rays from a pillar of fire in the clouds reaching Moses "to express that he acts by Command of the Deity," with the motto "Rebellion to Tyrants is Obedience to God." Jefferson's written submission was essentially Franklin's design with light edits; in committee discussion he also proposed the Israelites in the wilderness, led by a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. The committee adopted Franklin's Moses design for one side of the seal, with Jefferson drafting the August 20 report. Congress tabled it. Only the motto "E Pluribus Unum" — originally Du Simitière's — survived to the final 1782 seal.

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The Exodus story encodes a specific answer to the hardest problem in political founding: how do you bind a diverse collection of people together in a way they cannot simply think their way out of? Blood ties do it, but they exclude by definition. Conquest does it, but it generates permanent resentment. Rational argument does it temporarily, until someone finds a better argument. The covenant at Sinai did something different — it made obligation constitutive of identity. The people who accepted it became something they had not been before. You could not exit the covenant without ceasing to be what the covenant had made you, which is a fundamentally different relationship to obligation than any contract or philosophical argument can create. Israel’s greatest king, David, was descended from Ruth, a Moabite who accepted the covenant — membership defined by acceptance, not ancestry, from the beginning.

But Sinai immediately posed the question the founders would later face in Philadelphia: how much uniformity does a covenant require, and how much difference can it tolerate? The twelve tribes that accepted the covenant at Sinai were culturally different. They had distinct territories, distinct economies, distinct characters — the tribe of Judah was not the tribe of Dan, and the tribe of Levi, scattered among the others as a priestly caste with no territorial holding, was different from both. What they shared was the covenant’s common floor: a body of law that applied to all, common national obligations (defense, the Temple service, the pilgrimage festivals), and the dual membership principle — a member of the tribe of Judah was simultaneously of Judah and of Israel, and neither membership cancelled the other.

Above that floor, the tribes governed themselves. The Torah legislated the common minimum; the silence above it belonged to the constituent parts. The leaders of Manasseh petitioned Moses for an inheritance rule that would protect tribal territory when daughters inherited land — and got it, a tribal policy modification within the national covenant’s framework. Centuries later, the Talmud records that marriage customs in Judah and Galilee differed in legally consequential ways, both fully within halacha, neither overriding it. A seafaring tribe and a ranching tribe developed different commercial norms for the same reason Delaware and Texas have different corporate and oil law: the national covenant sets the floor, and the silence above it belongs to the people whose lives actually posed the problems. The word the founders would later use for this structure derives from the Latin foedus — covenant. When they called their system “federal,” they were using, whether they knew it or not, the vocabulary of the model they were recovering.

This is the balance the covenant must maintain: enough unity to hold together, enough pluralism to stay legitimate. It is harder to maintain than it sounds, because the pressures run in both directions simultaneously. The covenant can fail by imposing too much uniformity — absorbing the constituent parts into a single mandatory identity, which destroys the pluralism that makes membership voluntary and meaningful. It can equally fail by tolerating too much fragmentation — allowing the shared floor to erode, the dual-membership principle to dissolve, the common obligations to go unmet. Both failures are real. The Hebrew political tradition experienced both.

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The Hebrew legal tradition’s influence on the founders was not merely inspirational — it was jurisprudential.

John Selden (1584–1654) was simultaneously the greatest Hebraist of his century and the most important constitutional lawyer of his generation. He argued against the Crown in the Ship Money cases, helped draft the Petition of Right, and first articulated parliamentary sovereignty in terms English constitutional law still uses. He also spent decades producing the most systematic treatment of Hebrew law available in the European scholarly tradition — De Jure Naturali et Gentium Juxta Disciplinam Ebraeorum — arguing that the Noahide laws, the Hebrew legal tradition’s account of what any person owes to any other person prior to any particular covenant, constituted the foundation of universal natural law. What you owe to strangers — the floor of obligation that exists before any specific agreement, any citizenship, any tribal membership — had a Hebrew jurisprudential source, and Selden translated it into the vocabulary of English constitutional argument.

Locke read Selden carefully; the reading notebooks document it. Jefferson and Madison read Locke. The chain from Hebrew jurisprudence to the Declaration’s “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights” runs through Selden’s legal scholarship, not just through the founders’ biblical literacy. The dignity floor that the American covenant will not breach — the claim that every person possesses inherent worth that no majority can revoke — has a genealogy that is simultaneously theological and jurisprudential, and Selden is the point where those two strands fuse into constitutional argument.

The Puritan founders understood the covenantal structure directly, a century and a half before Philadelphia. John Winthrop, aboard the Arbella in 1630, described the Massachusetts Bay Colony in entirely covenantal terms: “We are entered into covenant with Him for this work.” He closed his sermon by quoting Moses’s last speech to Israel before they entered the Promised Land — Deuteronomy 30: “I have set before you life and death, a blessing and a curse; therefore choose life.” The surrounding verses make the passage’s significance explicit: the covenant, Moses says, is not in heaven and not across the sea — it is in your mouth and in your heart, to do it. The covenant does not require superhuman effort or ongoing divine enforcement. It requires acceptance, and then action, and then acceptance again. Winthrop chose this passage deliberately: the structure works through what you become when you accept it, not through what punishes you if you don’t.

The Liberty Bell encodes the same logic in metal. The Pennsylvania Assembly chose its inscription in 1751, twenty-five years before independence: “Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof” — Leviticus 25:10, the Jubilee passage, mandating the periodic restoration of freedom as a structural legal obligation. Exodus tells you how a people is freed; Leviticus tells you how a free people maintains its freedom. The inscription is a constitutional provision, not a sentiment: liberty requires institutional maintenance, it erodes without active renewal, and the law’s job is to restore it when circumstances have undermined it. The founders who chose that verse were reading the legislative books of Hebrew scripture, not just the liberation narrative.

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The Hebrew model that Franklin and Jefferson reached for was not, then, a story of success. It was a story of a structural problem brilliantly solved and then, slowly, disastrously mismanaged.

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Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon! "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

 

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Some Academia Wake Up to the Antisemitism They Were Trained to Avoid

H-Judaic, the main scholarly network for Jewish studies, just announced the inaugural meeting of a new Scholarly Network for the Study of Muslim Antisemitism, convening May 4 on Zoom and led by FIU professor Iqbal Akhtar. The framing is careful — "the intersection of antisemitism and Islamic contexts," an agenda built around "research mapping" and "identifying gaps." Read past the academic register, though, and something remarkable is happening: a mainstream scholarly network is forming around a subject the academy has spent decades pretending did not exist as a distinct category worth studying.

This is part of a larger shift. Andrew Pessin's Institute for the Critical Study of Antizionism launched in late 2025 with a seven-webinar lecture series, a roster that has grown past 180 scholars, and a multi-volume foundational book project now soliciting contributions. Pessin's diagnosis is blunt — antizionism is "the dominant ideology in the academy," and serious scholarship on it has been corrupted to the point that the standards themselves need to be rebuilt. ICSA's explicit model is that antizionism has its own history, internal logic, tactics, and archive, and that these need to be mapped with the same rigor that historians of antisemitism have applied to other variants. The Movement Against Antizionism, Stop Antizionism, and a growing number of faculty resilience groups are pulling in the same direction.

What makes the Scholarly Network for the Study of Muslim Antisemitism interesting is the piece of the puzzle it addresses. Surveys by the ADL and others have consistently shown that antisemitic attitudes in Muslim-majority countries run at extraordinary levels — often two to four times higher than in Western populations — and the diaspora communities carry measurable portions of that freight with them. Everyone in the field knows this. Almost nobody in the field will say it on the record, because the topic sits directly on top of the third rail of Western academic life: anything that could be framed as Islamophobia ends careers, and the taxonomy of acceptable bigotries has long placed Muslims in the protected column and Jews in the privileged one. The result has been a strange silence in which French authorities have scrubbed the Muslim identity of attackers from public descriptions of antisemitic assaults, and Arab antisemitism has been a hate that scholars cannot bring themselves to name even as they catalogue every other variant.

The silence is not only political cowardice; it is methodologically disastrous. Antisemitism is a shape-shifter, and its different hosts produce different pathologies. Christian supersessionism, Enlightenment racial theory, Soviet anti-cosmopolitanism, Black Hebrew Israelite replacement theology, Nation of Islam conspiracism, and the theologically grounded Jew-hatred embedded in significant strands of Islamic tradition each have their own origin, internal grammar, and relationship to Zionism as both provocation and response. Treating them as a single undifferentiated "rising antisemitism" produces analysis that cannot predict anything and interventions that cannot work. You cannot counter a theological claim with a civil rights framework, and you cannot counter a conspiracy theory with sensitivity training. The field has been systematically blurring these categories for so long that treating Muslim antisemitism as its own object of study is, in 2026, a minor scholarly revolution.

The detail that makes this particular initiative unusual is that Akhtar is Muslim. He founded Miami Interfaith after October 7 to build Jewish-Muslim dialogue in South Florida, hosts the Interfaiths podcast with frequent Jewish guests, and studied Jewish, Islamic, and Near Eastern topics as an undergraduate. A Jewish scholar announcing a network for the study of Muslim antisemitism would be dismissed in much of the academy as a polemicist before the Zoom link went out. A Muslim scholar announcing the same network, from inside a Muslim Studies center, creates space that did not exist the week before.

Whether the network produces serious scholarship or whether it gets captured and defanged by the surrounding disciplinary pressures is an open question.  But the fact that these institutions are being founded at all — and that they are being founded simultaneously, across the Jewish/non-Jewish divide and across the antisemitism/antizionism distinction — suggests that a tipping point has been reached, even if it is only among a minority of scholars who have integrity.

As someone who has been writing about Muslim antisemitism for years, this is gratifying. 

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Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon! "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

 

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04/19 Links: The West is losing its moral compass; Arson attempt hits London synagogue; Iran-linked group claims attack; Israel marks 83 years since Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

From Ian:

Jake Wallis Simons: The West is losing its moral compass

Then there was October 7. If anything, the morality should have been even clearer, given that the jihadis of Hamas were of a piece with those who had attacked concert halls, Tube trains and cafés in Britain and across the West. Yet rather than seeing Israeli flags flying from every lamppost, we endured the disgraceful spectacle of people celebrating the pogrom in London less than 24 hours afterwards.

There followed a vicious propaganda campaign, driven by our enemies and embraced by international organisations and the media, which sexed up the war until it was inaccurately labelled a “genocide”. Millions of gullible people were swept up. Supporters of Israel – a democracy fighting for its life – became a dying breed. Once Trump entered the White House, however, there was little doubt which side he was on.

The moral certainty that deserted the president over Ukraine was suddenly there in spades. While European powers concluded it was best to reward Hamas by recognising a Palestinian state, Trump remained stalwart: jihadism was the enemy. Through the sheer force of his conviction, the hostages were freed and the war ended.

Which brings us to Iran. Although this is a regime that is believed to have butchered more than 30,000 people in two days, sows terror around the globe, lusts after nuclear weapons and is driven by apocalyptic theological fantasies, its fans have marched in our cities. Commentators, meanwhile, pay lip service to condemning Tehran while their true passions only gush forth when it comes to willing the downfall of Trump.

What is going on? Well, it’s all about the culture war. No crisis, it seems, is too grave to be bastardised by moral weaklings for petty politics. While Putin becomes some anti-woke folk hero, at the other end of the spectrum, the Ayatollah is given a glow-up as an icon of progressivism.

The problem is, one day we’ll need that ethical instinct we’re frittering away. Look to those with their lives on the line. Ask Ukrainians what they think of Israel. Ask Israelis what they think of Ukraine. Ask the Iranian people what they think of both countries, and ask them all what they think of the regime. Any questions?

Alan Dershowitz: Imminence Is No Longer the Criterion for Military Preventive Action

Extremists have accused President Trump of "war crimes" for his attack on Iran. Trump reasonably and understandably believed Iran was close to developing a nuclear arsenal, which the mullahs might have deployed against Israel in the near term, and perhaps eventually against the U.S.

Regardless of whether the potential timing of this threat fits the traditional definition of "imminent" - right on the verge of happening - it was real and would have been catastrophic if carried out. Accordingly, both the U.S. and Israel had the right - indeed, the obligation - to regard the threat that Iran would soon develop and deploy a nuclear arsenal as sufficiently dangerous to warrant preventive military action. Had either country waited until this nuclear threat was truly imminent, it might have been too late to stop it.

We can say this from experience. We waited too long with regard to North Korea, and that rogue nation managed to develop a nuclear arsenal under our noses. As a consequence, the Hermit Kingdom has been constantly threatening the world, and we can do nothing about it. Iran, the world's top state exporter of terrorism, would pose a far more serious near-term threat than North Korea.

Former Foreign Minister of Australia Gareth Evans wrote in a 2004 UN report that, "The classic non-threat imminent situation is early-stage acquisition of weapons of mass destruction by a state presumed to be hostile." Israel used such a justification to preemptively destroy both Iraq's and Syria's nuclear weapons programs before their threats became imminent.

An even stronger case can be made regarding Iran's nuclear arsenal program, since Iran has threatened to use it against Israel - which its leaders have called "a one-bomb state." Once Iran obtains a nuclear arsenal, it will already be too late for prevention or preemption.

IDF reservist killed, 9 wounded by Hezbollah IED in Southern Lebanon

Israel Defense Forces Sergeant First Class (res.) Lidor Porat, 31, from Ashdod, fell in Lebanon on Saturday, according to the Israeli military.

Nine other soldiers were wounded in the same incident, one severely, four moderately and four lightly, according to an IDF statement. The wounded were evacuated by helicopter and their families have been notified.

According to the IDF, a D-9 bulldozer operated by a force from the 769th Brigade in Southern Lebanon hit an IED planted by Hezbollah near Kfar Kila.

Kfar Kila was destroyed in the previous round of fighting against Hezbollah at the end of 2024. The army is investigating whether the explosive dated from that period or was recently placed there, Israel’s Channel 14 reported.

“My wife and I, together with all the citizens of Israel, share in the heavy grief and extend our deepest condolences to the family of Sgt. First Class (res.) Lidor Porat, of blessed memory, who fell in battle in Southern Lebanon,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Sunday.

“I wish a swift and full recovery to our soldiers who were wounded in the difficult incident. Together with his comrades, Lidor fought bravely to defend our communities and our citizens—and this is how we will continue to act,” he added.

The development follows the death on Friday of Warrant Officer (res.) Barak Kalfon, from Adi in northern Israel. Kalfon was an employee of Rafael Advanced Defense Systems. Married and the father of two, he would have turned 49 next month.

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A Case Study: "Gender & Society" Violates Its Own Standards to Publish Anti-Israel Content

There is nothing interesting anymore about discovering that a top-ranked sociology journal has published a one-sided polemic against Israel. Entire fields have been ideologically captured by anti-Zionist rhetoric. I've documented this many times, both in individual papers and in academia as a whole.

What is interesting is watching a respected journal abandon every substantive standard in its own rulebook to publish a blatantly anti-Israel piece— and watching it do so eagerly, in the open, with editorial solicitation on the record.

The article is Sarah Ihmoud’s “Hunger and the Palestinian Womb,” published online March 25, 2026 in Gender & Society, a SAGE journal that describes itself as “a top-ranked, peer-reviewed, sociological journal” that “publishes less than 10% of all papers submitted to it.”

Here is the abstract, in full:

This article theorizes the Palestinian womb as both a site of Zionist colonial violence and Palestinian futurity through the story of Shema, a young woman who became pregnant and gave birth during Gaza’s ongoing genocide. Drawing on decolonial Palestinian feminism and Indigenous feminist scholarship, I argue that Israel’s weaponization of starvation constitutes a gendered assault on Palestinian social reproduction, targeting pregnant and breastfeeding women to sever intergenerational continuity. Shema’s narrative — from her interrupted wedding in October 2023 through forced displacement, miscarriage, and ultimately the birth of her son Youssef amid bombardment and acute malnutrition — reveals how genocide operates not only through military violence but also through the systematic destruction of life’s conditions. Her testimony illuminates what Shalhoub-Kevorkian terms genocidal “unchilding” and what I theorize as the colonial targeting of reproductive futures. Yet Shema’s story also embodies revolutionary mothering as insurgent care work, refusing to cede the future despite engineered hunger and psychic siege. Situating her experience within genealogies of anti-colonial resistance, I argue that storytelling itself becomes decolonial praxis — a refusal of erasure and a sacred map toward collective liberation. Grounded in intimate testimony and critical analysis, this work demands feminist engagement with starvation as reproductive violence and Palestinian life-making as radical resistance.

Every sweeping factual claim in this abstract — “Zionist colonial violence,” “Gaza’s ongoing genocide,” “Israel’s weaponization of starvation,” a deliberate campaign “targeting pregnant and breastfeeding women to sever intergenerational continuity” — is stated as established fact rather than as a hypothesis to be tested. All of the evidence in the piece, by the author’s own description, is a series of WhatsApp messages from one 23-year-old woman in Gaza.

The bias is unmistakable from the abstract alone. How this got published is the real question.  Even a cursory review of both Gender & Society’s own stated standards and the standards that the journal claims to adhere to as a COPE member shows that this article doesn't just violate these rules - it tramples them.

The political content is treated as settled fact, which the journal’s standards forbid

The Gender & Society submission guidelines describe what the journal publishes: “empirical articles, which are both theoretically engaged and methodologically rigorous,” or occasionally “theoretical articles that meaningfully advance sociological theories about gender.”

An empirical article argues from evidence to a conclusion. It states its hypothesis, describes its method, presents its findings, and discusses what the findings can and cannot support. Ihmoud’s piece inverts this entirely. The conclusions — genocide, weaponized starvation, deliberate gendered targeting of Palestinian wombs — are the premises from which the analysis begins. The abstract announces them as established descriptive categories. The sections that follow do not argue for these conclusions; they illustrate them through selected excerpts of one woman’s messages.

This is backwards. If the claim is that Israel has a policy of targeting pregnant women, the claim must be defended with evidence of intent, policy, and outcome, with engagement of contrary evidence. Instead the article treats each claim as self-evident and reaches for ever more extreme restatements: “engineered hunger,” “psychic siege,” “colonial unchilding,” “the machinery of death.” No reviewer trained in empirical sociology could have permitted this as a finding rather than as an opinion. The guidelines require “methodologically rigorous” work. There is no methodology here to even test as rigorous. 

The abstract uses “Zionist colonial violence,” “Gaza’s ongoing genocide,” “Israel’s weaponization of starvation,” and “engineered hunger” as neutral analytical vocabulary - assumed fact - not as positions being argued for. 

The article could have stated an argument in a form that scholarly conventions recognize: “I argue that the conditions in Gaza are best characterized as genocide, for the following reasons…” It instead assumes the characterization as a starting premise. This is what distinguishes advocacy from scholarship. A paper published in a top-ranked sociology journal that treats the Israel-Hamas war as “Zionist colonial violence” in the abstract, without argument, has set the vocabulary of one side as the scholarly default. 

The editor invited the piece — and the journal itself could not have applied its own peer review to it

The acknowledgments reveal the mechanism. Ihmoud thanks “Sharmila Rudrappa and Patricia Richards who invited her to contribute this piece to a symposium in Gender & Society.” Sharmila Rudrappa is the current editor of the journal; Patricia Richards is a former editor. The piece was solicited by the journal’s own editorial leadership.

Invited contributions exist at many journals, but COPE Core Practice 9 requires that “all peer review processes must be transparently described and well managed.” Gender & Society does not disclose anywhere on the article page what review this piece actually received, whether it was sent to external reviewers, whether those reviewers were blinded, or whether they were asked to apply the same methodological standards the journal applies to the roughly 97% of submissions it rejects. 

One part of the ordinary process was structurally impossible. The submission guidelines require that review be anonymous, with authors cited in the third person (“As Collins (2014) has found…” and explicitly NOT “As I previously demonstrated…”). Ihmoud’s article contains exactly the forbidden first-person construction: “as Palestinian feminist analysis insists, and as I have argued elsewhere, genocide operates… (Ihmoud 2025).” She self-cites this way three times. The piece had already appeared five months earlier at Decolonial Hacker under her name, so any reviewer with a web browser would have known who wrote it.

The procedural question matters less than a deeper one: how anything calling itself peer review could have looked at this article and cleared it. A scholar competent in qualitative sociology, applying the journal’s stated methodological standards, would have returned this manuscript with comments on the n=1 sample, the absence of a methods section, the treatment of the conclusion as a premise, the lack of engagement with contrary evidence, and the circular self-citation. None of those comments made it into the published piece, which means either they were never made or they were ignored. Either way the “peer-reviewed” label at the top of the article page is doing work it cannot support.

The journal’s own rule against prior publication was waived — and the author said so in print

The journal’s submission rules are explicit: “Authors submitting manuscripts to the journal should not simultaneously submit them to another journal, nor should manuscripts have been published elsewhere in substantially similar form or with substantially similar content.”

The author’s note reads: “This piece was first published in Decolonial Hacker in October 2025… and is reprinted with permission here.” She adds that she “made the decision to stop updating data after its original publication.”

A side-by-side comparison confirms the two versions are the same article with trivial edits. Gender & Society apparently insisted that the word "Zionist" be capitalized.  Otherwise, the piece is fundamentally identical to that published in an unapologetically biased source.  

This is textbook redundant publication, which COPE Core Practice 7 requires every member journal to police. Gender & Society has the policy in its own submission guidelines. The editors simply ignored it, took a piece already running at an activist outlet, and reprinted it with a SAGE imprint.

A scholar submitting original, blinded, empirical research through the ordinary queue would be rejected immediately on this ground alone. For this piece the rule was waived. The reason, on the evidence available, was that the editors wanted its conclusions in their journal.

Worse, an article published as activism was republished verbatim as scholarship. 

The author’s political commitments are not disclosed as a competing interest

We see this often, but it is worth highlighting.

COPE Core Practice 4 requires “clear definitions of conflicts of interest and processes for handling conflicts of interest of authors, reviewers, editors, journals and publishers.”

Ihmoud is a founding member of the Palestinian Feminist Collective, an advocacy organization with an explicit political mission. She has published in activist outlets including Decolonial Hacker and Jadaliyya, where the same arguments appear without the scholarly framing. The article’s conclusions are effectively identical to the political positions of the organization she co-founded.

This affiliation appears in her biography but is not flagged as a competing interest. Scholarly norms require that the conflict of interest be disclosed and managed. The journal made no such requirement of her. 

The article’s analytical foundations are circular self-citation

The load-bearing theoretical claim — that “genocide operates not only through bombs and bullets but also through the slow, grinding destruction of life’s conditions” — is cited to Ihmoud 2025, while the claim that “decolonial Palestinian feminism refuses this futurelessness” is cited to Ihmoud 2022. The concept of the “Palestinian womb” as a theoretical object traces back to Ihmoud’s 2021 chapter.

Self-citation is normal in academic writing. Load-bearing self-citation for every core analytical move, with no serious engagement with contrary scholarship on any of these points, is not — it makes the piece a restatement of Ihmoud’s own prior positions rather than an original contribution. The journal’s guidelines are explicit that it publishes work making “original contributions to gender theory.” This article just rehashes. 

The smaller violations

Several further breaches of the journal’s own rules and of COPE Core Practices are worth listing briefly, because each would on its own justify desk-rejecting an ordinary submission:

• No methods section. The article does not describe how the interview material was collected, verified, coded, or analyzed. The sample size is one. The journal’s guidelines require empirical articles to include “discussions of both theory and method.”
• No data availability statement. COPE Core Practice 5 requires journals to have data-availability policies. The raw data — in this case, WhatsApp messages — cannot be examined, verified, or independently interpreted. The research design is unfalsifiable.
• No ethics review statement. COPE Core Practice 6 requires policies on research involving human subjects, particularly vulnerable populations. The article publishes a named, identifiable 23-year-old woman in an active war zone — her full name, her child’s name, her pregnancy history, her displacement history, and private photographs. The College of the Holy Cross, Ihmoud’s employer, has an Institutional Review Board; the article is silent on whether it was consulted.
• Abstract 35% over the word limit. The submission guidelines specify 150-200 words; the published abstract is 265. Small on its own, but telling about how carefully anyone read this.

What this adds up to

The failures here all point in the same direction: the editors wanted this piece, and each rule that stood in the way was waived. The prior-publication rule was waived. The anonymous-review requirement was, by construction, impossible to honor. The methodological-rigor standard was not applied. The requirement that theoretical articles make original contributions was waived. The conflict-of-interest norm was not enforced. The ethics-oversight expectation was not raised.

Journals do bend their rules for invited contributions. What makes this case diagnostic is how thoroughly the rules were bent, how many were bent at once, how openly the violations are documented in the article itself, and how reliably the bending ran in one political direction. Gender & Society did not publish an imperfect essay despite its standards. It published this essay by suspending its standards. 

This is how bias functions inside institutions that still think of themselves as impartial. The infrastructure of impartiality — the submission rules, the peer-review process, the COPE membership, the low acceptance rate — remains fully intact as a set of public claims. It is only when you check whether any of it was applied to a particular piece that you discover that standards can be ignored when the journal wants. 

Which means Gender & Society has no standards at all. 

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Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon! "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

 

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Attacks on @AIPAC and @ADL show the playbook. Now is the time to combat the antisemites before their next targets.

The recent pressure on Democratic members of Congress to distance themselves from AIPAC is not the beginning of something. It is the end phase of something that has been running invisibly for years. By the time an elected official issues a careful statement about not accepting certain kinds of money, the decision has already been made upstream — in staff conversations, in coalition meetings, in the internal risk calculations of people who never appear in the news. The public distancing is the visible part. The actual event happened earlier, and mostly in private.

It is a template, the same mechanism that has already been used against the ADL, and it will be used against other mainstream Jewish organizations. 

Tracing the methods by which this became mainstream is essential in identifying the next time this method will be used. And it will be.  

The tactic works like this. A campaign does not attack its primary target directly, because the primary target is well-defended, well-funded, and capable of responding. It attacks the target's partners — the universities, legislators, nonprofits, and coalition members who have chosen to associate with the target over decades. The partners are told that their association is itself evidence of moral complicity. Since the partners have no independent investment in the target, they face an asymmetric calculation: the cost of defending an ally they did not create is high, and the cost of quietly distancing is low. Most choose to distance.

The accusation does not need to be true. It does not even need to be plausible. It needs only to generate enough reputational risk that defense becomes more expensive than dissociation. In game-theoretic terms, the tactic exploits the fact that truth is a public good — diffuse, hard to produce — while reputational risk is concentrated and immediate. Any rational institution will discard truth when the alternative appears to be caution. 

This is why "but the accusation is false" does not work. Pointing out the lie assumes that the partner institutions are trying to determine whether the accusation is true. They are not. They are trying to determine whether the accusation is worth responding to, and that calculation has almost nothing to do with its factual content.

These cascades follow a reliable sequence. First comes seeding, where a claim circulates at the margins — in activist channels, on social media, in small publications — and is repeated enough to become discussable even where it is not accepted. "They support genocide!" "They facilitate apartheid!" "They have been complicit in police brutality!" - all of these are absurd, and that absurdity is not relevant in combating it. This is hard to swallow but it is the way it works. 

Then comes normalization, where the claim migrates into more mainstream venues and institutions begin privately calculating the downside of association. 

Finally comes the cascade itself, where enough actors defect that the cost of not defecting exceeds the cost of joining, at which point the remaining holdouts cave in quickly, and then claim this is a moral position. 

By the time the cascade is visible — congressional statements, institutional announcements, media coverage of "reckonings" — the first two stages have been complete for months. The apparent suddenness is an illusion produced by the coordination mechanism: everyone was waiting for a safe moment to move, and once a few visible actors moved, the rest followed within days.

The uncomfortable implication is that the decisive phase is pre-public. It happens inside institutions, among people whose names you do not know, in conversations that leave no trace. By the time a university's administration is fielding formal complaints about a Jewish organization on campus, the framing that makes those complaints intelligible has already won inside the relevant staff culture. The administration is no longer deciding whether the accusation is true. It is deciding whether to defy its own internal environment, which most administrators will not do.

What makes these cascades so reliable is not that most people believe the accusations. It is that most people assume other people believe them. Inside an institution, the cost of saying "this claim seems unsubstantiated" is much higher than the cost of saying nothing, because silence is cheap and dissent is visible. So people who privately doubt remain silent, and their silence is read by others as agreement, and the illusion of consensus forms before anyone has actually agreed to anything.

This is the specific vulnerability that makes the tactic work. It is not that institutions are captured by activists, though that sometimes happens. It is that institutions cannot distinguish between genuine consensus and collective silence, and activists have learned that manufacturing the appearance of consensus is sufficient to produce most of its effects.

The corollary is important: cascades can be disrupted by a surprisingly small amount of visible dissent, if it happens early. One person in a staff meeting saying "I don't think we should make reputational decisions based on unverified claims" is worth more than a thousand op-eds later. The intervention has to occur before pluralistic ignorance crystallizes into apparent consensus. After that, the cost of dissent is too high for almost anyone to bear.

Early-stage dissent is difficult for a reason that compounds everything above. The moment an accusation is challenged — even with a neutral request for evidence — the tactic pivots. The accusers claim they are being silenced, that powerful forces are refusing to let them speak, that asking for specifics is itself a form of aggression. This converts any attempt to apply ordinary evidentiary standards into further evidence of the original accusation. Engage, and you have validated the narrative; decline to engage, and the claim stands.

This self-sealing structure is the reason factual rebuttal has become nearly useless. It is also the reason that institutions, once the pattern is recognized, refuse to engage at all. They have learned that there is no safe move on the board — which is exactly what the tactic is designed to produce.

It is successful because the framework was built to not allow any dissent.

Which means the only way to counter this is to attack the framework, not the accusations themselves.

Organizations must refuse the frame that conflates scrutiny with silencing. The cleanest formulation is procedural: you are free to make your claims; we are not obligated to act on claims that have not been verified. This separates speech from adjudication. It affirms expression while preserving decision-making standards. It is harder to accuse of "silencing" because no one is actually being prevented from speaking.

Most institutions cannot execute this move under pressure because they have not prepared for it. Under pressure, they conflate the two — either by acting on unverified claims to avoid appearing hostile to the complainants, or by trying to suppress the complaints to avoid the appearance of controversy. Both responses are losing moves. The winning move has to be pre-committed, before any specific campaign begins, and it has to be framed in terms of institutional integrity rather than defense of any particular partner.

In short, the institutions that partner with Jewish organizations need to think now about how their internal processes work. Because when those processes fail to defend their Jewish partners, the same playbook will be used to force them to do other things they aren't comfortable with. 

The question "Would you accept AIPAC money?" is the paradigm case of how mature this tactic has become. Every direct answer is a trap. "Yes" concedes implication. "No" sounds evasive or reads as admission that the association is shameful. Qualification reads as deflection. The question is not a question; it is a test whose only passing grade is to have already distanced yourself before being asked.

The question works because it smuggles in two premises that have not been argued: that the funding source is the morally relevant fact, and that association implies endorsement. Both premises, if applied consistently across the political landscape, would disqualify every elected official in the country, because virtually everyone accepts funding from interest groups. The premises are applied selectively because the goal is not consistent principle. The goal is to make association with specific organizations costly enough that rational politicians distance themselves.

The only response that does not fall into the trap is one that refuses the implied standard while still answering the literal question. Something like: Campaigns receive support from a wide range of groups; what matters is how I vote and what I advocate for, and my record speaks for itself. This answers the question, denies the premise, and redirects evaluation from association to conduct. It is not a winning answer in the sense of ending the attack, but  is a survivable answer, which is the most any legislator can hope for once the question has been asked in public.

Most legislators will not make this move, because it requires a confidence in their own record that most do not have, and a willingness to treat the question as adversarial rather than legitimate that most will not risk. The ones who cave are making optics decisions under conditions that have been engineered to make optics the only decision that matters. and legislators who care about optics more than principle may not be the best representatives anyway. 

The tactic is portable. It is not specific to AIPAC or to Israel. Any organization with broad legitimacy, many institutional partners, and narrative flexibility can be targeted — which describes most mainstream Jewish institutional infrastructure, but also describes many other kinds of organizations that have not yet been selected for campaigns. The selection is driven less by who deserves the treatment than by who currently looks available for it.

In fact, the Track AIPAC organization also opposes legislators who already don't accept AIPAC money — but do accept from J-Street, which they also consider "Israel lobby" even though their positions mirror those of the most anti-Israel lawmakers. 

Success does not sate the attackers; it makes them hungrier. 

The predictable next targets share a profile: they operate inside institutions where internal narrative formation happens quickly; they depend on partnerships rather than direct constituencies; they have limited ability to defend themselves without the defense itself becoming evidence of the original accusation. Hillel International fits this profile almost perfectly. So does the American Jewish Committee, the Jewish Federations of North America, B'nai Brith International, and most major campus-facing Jewish organizations. None of these will be attacked because of anything they have done. They will be attacked because they exist within institutional environments where the cascade mechanism can operate.

There is no rhetorical defense against this tactic. Every argument one can make within the frame is defeated by the frame itself. The only defense is structural, and it has to be installed before any specific crisis, in the form of institutional norms that treat dissociation-under-pressure as itself a reputational liability. The norm is simple: we do not alter partnerships or access based on external pressure alone; serious allegations are evaluated using consistent standards; requests for clarification are not treated as silencing. Create robust processes for challenging partnerships or funding sources and invite the challengers to use the proper procedures, like anyone else.  Partners who have adopted this norm in advance can survive pressure campaigns. Partners who have not will fold on schedule.

That is the real strategic question, and it cannot be answered during a crisis. It has to be answered now, before the next wave begins — which means before anyone knows who the next target will be. The institutions that are doing this work quietly, right now, are the ones that will still be standing in two years. The ones that are waiting to see what happens will discover, too late, that what was going to happen had already happened.

By the time you see the cascade, it is over. We've seen how it works, and this means we need to prepare now for the next ones that will use the same playbook. 

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04/18 Links: He dreamed of regime change; Endgame in Sight; Israel is not at war with Lebanon; Fetterman blasts his party for tolerating antisemitism; Melanie Phillips: An unholy silence

From Ian:

Martin Kramer: He dreamed of regime change

The Iran war has entered a new phase, a “double-sided ceasefire.” Eventually, we will learn the backstory, and it won’t look like anything we were led to believe while it was unfolding. Much of what seems true today will turn out to be false, and vice versa. If it weren’t always so, the world wouldn’t need historians like me.

In the meantime, I seek insights in the wisdom of mentors now gone. Bernard Lewis was one; I wrote about Lewis and Iran the other week. This time, I’ll consider Uri Lubrani (1926-2018), an Israeli diplomat and defense official.

Lubrani, who served the state from its founding, had the unusual distinction of being posted, time and again, to the epicenters of crisis. From 1967 to 1971, he served as ambassador to Ethiopia, which positioned him to play a crucial role in the emergency emigration of 14,000 Ethiopian Jews to Israel in 1991 (Operation Solomon). It was his greatest achievement.

But he was also known for serving as head of the Israeli mission to Iran (with ambassadorial rank) from 1973 to 1978. His claim to fame: he anticipated the rise of religious extremism and the Shah’s fall before anyone else did.

As early as 1975, he warned a US senator visiting Tehran that “the most serious problem that the Shah had domestically was from the religious elements who were hostile and very difficult for him to deal with.” The US diplomat who accompanied the senator later recalled: “I never heard anyone say that in the American embassy. I never heard any journalists say it or any Iranians say it. This was the first time that I heard that analysis.”

Lubrani remained ahead of the curve. In a June 1978 dispatch, he reported to Jerusalem that the Shah’s position was undergoing an “accelerated process of destabilization… a process from which there is no return and which will ultimately lead to his downfall and a drastic change in the form of government in Iran.” Again, he was alone. The State Department at the time estimated that the Shah had “an excellent chance to rule for a dozen or more years,” and the CIA held that “Iran is not in a revolutionary or even a pre-revolutionary situation.” Lubrani emerged from the Iranian revolution as an acclaimed oracle.

I got to know him in the mid-1980s, when he ran an office for Lebanese affairs at the defense ministry. Israel was occupying much of South Lebanon and rubbing up against Hezbollah, Iran’s Shi‘ite proxy. I was beginning to work on Hezbollah myself, and we had much to discuss. Lubrani was also an old friend of Lewis, and I often found myself at dinner with both of them. I wish I’d taken notes.

Melanie Phillips: An unholy silence

Britain’s prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer, has adopted a particularly odious attitude. Having said the Iran conflict was “not our war” and “not in our national interest,” he then tried to cast himself as a peacemaker by flying to Saudi Arabia purportedly to negotiate a ceasefire.

While the United States is bringing Iran economically to its knees by interdicting Iranian maritime traffic in the Strait of Hormuz, thus brilliantly turning the regime’s ostensible trump card against it, Starmer is sending out invitations to a risible summit to “break” Iran’s control of the Strait.

Top of their deliberations will doubtless be what gifts to put into the party bags they’ll give the Iranians to take home with them.

Shockingly, Starmer thinks that Israel has no right to defend itself against Hezbollah in Lebanon. He told the House of Commons this week: “Israel’s strikes are wrong. They’re having devastating humanitarian consequences and pushing Lebanon into a crisis. The bombing should stop now.”

He thus presented Israel totally falsely as a wanton aggressor, ignoring the thousands of rockets that Hezbollah has been firing at Israeli civilians—with all the death and destruction they’ve caused--and that show no sign of stopping.

Starmer thinks diplomacy brings peace. But more than four decades of diplomacy with Iran have resulted in thousands of Jews, Americans and others around the world being murdered, killed and wounded; a terrorized and butchered Iranian people; and the world’s most lethal terrorist state coming to the very brink of arming itself with the nuclear bomb.

Like the pope, Starmer and his fellow European fainthearts make pious incantations of peace while leaving the targets of genocidal war to swing in the wind.

This culture of appeasement reflects the dismal fact that Britain and these European nations are now on a trajectory of cultural collapse, as their countries become steadily Islamized while they refuse to defend a historic identity they no longer respect or even recognize.

Accordingly, the pope’s position should cause the utmost dismay to all who understand the need to prevent Western civilization from disintegrating.

Since religion is the moral scaffolding of a culture, it’s essential for the church to assert itself if the West is to be defended. For decades, the Church of England has tragically been instead at the forefront of civilizational decline. Now the Pope is sanctifying Europe’s surrender to Islam.

Trump’s crude and sometimes preposterous pronouncements dismay many. People’s real concern, however, should be for the survival of the civilization that only America’s president and the State of Israel are trying desperately to defend.

Endgame in Sight By Abe Greenwald

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Here's what I think is happening. The U.S. and Israel won the opening military phase of this war. The U.S. is now winning the economic phase. What’s left of the Iranian regime is cracking under the massive economic stress of the blockade. With the U.S. Navy still interdicting Iranian shipping, the regime may yet break altogether.

Iranian leaders are trying simultaneously to get some economic breathing room and save face by linking their actions to the Israel–Lebanon cease-fire. Trump, irked by the anti-Jewish right’s claims that he’s Benjamin Netanyahu’s puppet, is trying to shut them up with a little social media bluster. It would be wise to take the actual words of the cease-fire as the operative framework here. Trump hasn’t traveled this far, with Israel by the U.S.’s side in a successful war against Iran, just to tie the Jewish state’s hands against Iran’s proxy in Lebanon.

Neither the Iranian regime nor Trump wants to resume the fighting. The regime can’t afford to absorb more damage. For another president, that might mean it’s time to start dropping bombs again. But no other president, despite talking about it, has taken this fight nearly so far. He’s the only one that made the bold decision to wage this war, and he’s done so on his terms. Trump always wanted a short war, and, after a month and a half, he can just about taste victory.

I have my doubts about the details and projected timelines, but, hard as it is to imagine, I believe the president when he says the U.S. will get Iran to hand over its enriched uranium (everything that’s transpired since Operation Midnight Hammer in June was once hard to imagine). And that really would be the whole shebang—the clearest, most incontrovertible victory the U.S. has seen in decades.

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04/17 Links Pt2: Jabotinsky Was Right About Everything; What do the Democrats want from Israel?; How the Greens chose Gaza over the environment; Billy Corgan interviews David Draiman

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: Jabotinsky Was Right About Everything (So Cheer Up!)

Jabotinsky believed the future State of Israel—he didn’t live to see it, but he knew it would come—had to produce more than Jaffa oranges; it had to build things the world needed. He was right: He presaged the emergence of “the start-up nation” by many decades.

His influential writings on Ukrainian nationalism and Russian imperialism were eerily predictive of our current moment. His belief in the importance of persuading the general American public, and not just the government, of the justice of the Zionists’ cause has been likewise vindicated.

And these are just a few of the examples. There are more, because Jabotinsky was right about it all.

And that is one reason to feel less pessimistic about the still-very-concerning rise of Jewish anti-Zionism in our current post-October 7 moment. Jewish history leaves no doubt as to who will be vindicated and who will not: In the future, no one is going to say, “if only I’d listened to Peter Beinart.”

And so the self-humiliation ritual that Ezra Klein put himself through at the New York Times over the past week—in which he defended anti-American anti-Semite Hasan Piker’s inclusion in Democratic Party politics, only to have Piker reaffirm his Jew-hatred and his fanatical worship of those who murder American civilians—evinces outrage that melts into pity. We’ll send you a postcard from the future, Ezra.

Judaism is indestructible, which is why the destruction of the holy temple, at a time when it was the center and anchor of the religious aspect of Jewish peoplehood, still has millions of Jews around to mourn it. The best future anti-Zionists can hope for is to be a memory, to have been something that we vaguely recall.

Where do the Jews who aren’t anti-Zionist but who are easily cowed by anti-Zionists fall in this equation? They are ripe for an education. The Jews did not keep their status as the eternal people by voting against bulldozers for Israel, as several Jewish Democratic senators did this week. They seem to have forgotten that, just as they themselves will soon be forgotten.

When Jabotinsky was demobilized after the war, he recounted telling his fellow Jewish Legionnaires the following:

“Far away, in your home, you will one day read glorious news, of a free Jewish life in a free Jewish country—of factories and universities, of farms and theaters, perhaps of MPs and ministers. … Then you shall stand up, walk to the mirror, and look yourself proudly in the face … and salute yourself—for ’tis you who have made it.”

That was in 1918, 30 years before the rebirth of the State of Israel. Some people have an easier time seeing the future than others. It’s usually those who have a better grasp on the past.

Jonathan Tobin: What do the Democrats want from Israel?

Indeed, liberal writer Jonathan Chait was not far off the mark when he wrote in The Atlantic of the fear that Democratic officeholders have of a party base that has fallen under the spell of anti-Israel hatemongers like podcaster Hasan Piker.

Republicans may have their own problem with a similar antisemitic set, including Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Alex Jones and enablers like Megyn Kelly. But Democrats who don’t wish to bend the knee to their intersectional left-wing base are in a very different position than the GOP. The leader of the Republicans—Trump—had no problem kicking them out of the party and his MAGA movement for the offense of opposing the war on Iran and alliance with Israel. He did so not only because he isn’t the type to take orders from someone like Carlson, who is more of a Mar-a-Lago court jester than a policy adviser. He could do so with impunity, secure in the knowledge that whatever inroads the Israel-bashers and Jew-haters have made among young voters, the overwhelming majority of his supporters approve of his stances.

Senate Democrats, most of whom came into office pledging their undying support for the Jewish state, don’t have that luxury. Indeed, as Chait writes, they are on the verge of losing their party to the likes of Piker, as well as the academic, pop-culture and media elites who, as we’ve learned from their pushback against calls to isolate someone who hates America as well as Israel and the Jews, largely agree with him.

Chait’s proposed solution to the problem is to follow the path of the 40 Senate Democrats who are now on record backing a proposal that would disarm Israel in the middle of a war. He says they have choices. One is to abandon Israel and hold onto office. The other is to stick to the principles that got most of them elected in the first place—and be defeated in a future primary by an Israel-hating and antisemitic Democratic Socialist who will steer the party toward the hard left. It also means a Democratic Party in which members of the left-wing congressional “Squad” that includes Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), along with fellow Marxist New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, are no longer on the margins but in control.

They know he’s right because, as he put it, they can all read polls. And so, they are shifting their principles to accommodate the new ideological alignment toward people for whom one Jewish state on the planet is one too many. And if that means leaving Israel without the weapons and means to defend itself against its genocidal regional foes, that’s just too bad.

Were the Democrats who changed their votes in the last year to get in sync with the new fashionable antisemitic wing of their party—such as Sens. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), Ruben Gallego (D-N.J.), Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.), Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.) Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.)—to admit to this, it would be disgraceful enough. But what’s truly awful about their stand is the disingenuous defenses of their position. They claim that they still support Israel, but think its democratically elected government led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has engaged in reckless and needlessly brutal behavior by waging war on Iran, in addition to its terrorist allies in Gaza and Lebanon.

Missing from their hypocritical speeches is any mention of what they really expect from an Israeli government. Even Chait, who also claims to be a “liberal Zionist” disenchanted with Netanyahu but not Israel itself, had to acknowledge that the Jewish state has no current peace partner. At some point, even those who are willfully ignorant about events in the Middle East have to take notice of the fact that Palestinian Arabs don’t want a two-state solution, which liberal Americans still seem to think is the only answer to the conflict. Unlike them, the overwhelming majority of Israelis have decided to accept that Palestinians are saying “no” to any outcome other than the destruction of the Jewish state and the genocide of its people.

The atrocities in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, helped cement that viewpoint.

Jewish Democratic disillusionment deepens over party’s direction

The Democratic shift on Israel policy was on full, dramatic display on the Senate floor on Wednesday night as 40 of 47 Senate Democrats voted for at least one of two resolutions to block U.S. shipments of bulldozers and bombs to Israel.

The votes left many pro-Israel Democrats shocked and disillusioned — exemplified in the muted statements, if any, on the vote from key pro-Israel groups — and is being seen by some as the marker of a new era of Democratic policy on Israel, in which critics of Israel are firmly in the party mainstream.

“It’s yet another data point that the bipartisan consensus [in support of Israel] is, at least at the moment, no longer,” a former Biden administration official told Jewish Insider on Thursday. “Democrats think it’s politically advantageous to take these votes that would have been completely out-of-bounds just two-and-a-half years ago. … It’s deeply concerning if you care about the relationship, if you care about the security of [Israel]. But that’s the state of play at the moment, I think until or unless there’s an event that changes the trajectory.”

Abe Foxman, the former head of the Anti-Defamation League, said the vote highlights the “progressive socialist wing” of the Democratic Party’s increasing takeover. “This is a calamity for the Democratic Party, if it will not be contained and stopped,” Foxman told JI. “What’s also disturbing to me is that this litmus test is being first administered to every Jewish candidate.”

He added that the votes send a terrible message to U.S. allies beyond Israel that the U.S. can’t be relied upon.

Pro-Israel Democrats who spoke to JI said the votes came about as a combination of several factors: They served as a proxy for the war in Iran that nearly all Democrats oppose, but also were a signal of opposition to Israel’s operations in Lebanon, settler attacks and settlement expansion in the West Bank, the war in Gaza and — to a substantial degree — the Democratic enmity that has been growing for years toward Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, his government and his alignment with President Donald Trump and Republicans.

And lawmakers are also responding to the growing progressive pressure, fueled by two years of imagery from the war in Gaza, amplified by social media platforms that boosted antisemitic content, that has changed the politics around Israel in a “really dramatic way” in the Democratic Party, the former Biden administration official said.

“Those [resolutions], at this moment in time, were just a proxy for real discomfort with the direction of the Trump-Netanyahu relationship in this war, which is not the right reason to vote for these,” another former Biden administration official told JI. “I understand the [vote to block] bulldozers at this moment in time. [Withholding] the munitions — I think it’s really, really troubling.”

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