Friday, April 24, 2026

04/24 Links Pt1: Don’t mistake Beirut for a partner; Netanyahu reveals prostate cancer treated successfully; 11-year-old girl dies of wounds from Iranian strike on Passover eve

From Ian:

Ruthie Blum: Don’t mistake Beirut for a partner

Judging by the behavior of Lebanese President Joseph Aoun, the answer is no. In the first place, he totally rejected reports by officials, including Trump himself, of an imminent phone call between him and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Yes, the poor guy was incensed at the very notion of a conversation with Netanyahu, as it would hand Israel what he deemed a “moral victory.” So much for shared interests.

Nevertheless, the rebuffing of Netanyahu was excused by peace fantasists and other apologists as Aoun’s fear of assassination at the hands of Hezbollah. And though he’s certainly right to worry about that, it hasn’t really softened his stance toward the Jewish state along his border.

He made this obvious while delivering a speech to the nation on April 17. Calling the ceasefire that had gone into effect the previous day the “fruit of those who stood firm in their homes and villages, on the front lines, affirming to the world that we are here to stay, whatever happens,” he lauded everyone except for Israel.

“I express my gratitude to all those who contributed to stopping the hostilities,” he stated, “from the American president, our friend Donald Trump, to all our Arab brothers, foremost among them the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.”

The rest of his rant about the suffering and steadfastness of the Lebanese people made it sound as though Hezbollah had nothing to do with their plight. In fact, he didn’t mention the terrorist group at all, yet asserted for its consumption that “these negotiations are neither a weakness, nor a retreat, nor a concession.” As though Hezbollah would buy it for a second.

Never mind. What he subsequently declared was directly out of Hezbollah’s playbook.

“There will never be any agreement that infringes on our national rights, diminishes the dignity of our resisting people or abandons a single piece of the land of our nation,” he said. “Our objective is clear and declared: to stop Israeli aggression against our land and our people, to obtain Israeli withdrawal, to extend state authority over all its land by its own forces, to ensure the return of prisoners and to enable our families to return to their homes and villages, in safety, freedom and dignity.”

There you have it in a nutshell. Aoun isn’t a potential partner as long as Hezbollah is setting his agenda, which means the officials convening in D.C. are wasting their breath and a lot of frequent-flyer miles.

House Republicans again aim to leverage U.S. funding to seek accountability for Oct. 7 attacks

Republicans on the House Appropriations Committee, in their draft 2027 funding bill for the State Department, are again aiming to leverage U.S. funding to the United Nations and other foreign programs to seek accountability for involvement by U.N. employees and others in the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks on Israel.

They made similar efforts during the 2026 government funding process, but the provisions were ultimately excluded from the final 2026 funding bill.

The bill introduces a new version of the provision put forward by House Republicans last year that would withhold funding for the United Nations secretariat — the U.N. management headed by the secretary-general — until the U.N. agrees to waive privileges and immunities for United Nations Relief and Works Agency employees or employees of other U.N. entities in cases involving gross violations of human rights, acts of terrorism, support for terrorism or other serious criminal conduct.

The move is an effort to respond to findings that UNRWA employees took part in the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel and subsequently were involved in holding hostages and engaging in other terrorist activity in Gaza.

The provision also withholds any funding for any entities that fail to comply within 90 days with U.S. inspector general requests related to projects and programs in Gaza, the Oct. 7 attacks or support for terrorism.

“The bill also includes a provision to help provide justice for victims murdered in the October 7 terrorist attacks, including 50 American citizens, by requiring full accountability for the UNRWA staff involved in this vicious attack,” Rep. Mario Díaz-Balart (R-FL), who chairs the subcommittee with jurisdiction over the bill, said at a Thursday meeting. “In addition, the bill includes a new provision cutting off funds to any international organization that refuses to cooperate with inspector general investigations into whether October 7 terrorists are on its staff.”

Under the 2026 funding bill, 10% of U.S. funding to the U.N. and its agencies is conditioned on the State Department’s certification that the recipients of that funding are taking credible steps to counter anti-Israel bias, informing donors when aid has been diverted or destroyed and implementing policies to vet staff for terrorist affiliations, among a range of unrelated reforms.

In the new bill, House Republicans proposed increasing that to 15% of the funding in question.

More broadly, the bill would leverage U.S. foreign aid by tying aid levels to cooperation with various U.S. priorities, including recipients’ U.N. votes and their efforts to oppose U.S. adversaries, maintaining a provision first implemented in 2026.

It cuts funding for the U.N. by $1.8 billion, including slashing all funding for the U.N.’s regular budget, as well as cutting nearly $1 billion from humanitarian assistance programs generally.

11-year-old girl from Bnei Brak dies of wounds from Iranian strike on Passover eve

An 11-year-old girl critically wounded in a Passover eve Iranian cluster bomb attack on Bnei Brak succumbed to her wounds on Friday.

She was named as Nesya Karadi. She died at Sheba Medical Center near Tel Aviv, some three weeks after the April 1 attack.

Bnei Brak Mayor Hanoch Zeibert said the city was “bemoaning the passing of a pure girl whose entire future was ahead of her.”

“We pray that God sends comfort and healing to the parents and family,” Zeibert said in a statement. “The municipality will support the family and accompany it in any way that is needed in this time of pain and grief.”

The young girl was critically wounded when her family’s home in the Tel Aviv-area city was hit by a submunition from an Iranian missile carrying a cluster bomb warhead.

The April 1 strike took place hours before the Passover holiday and wounded 13 other people, including the girl’s father, who sustained moderate injuries.

A first responder told Hebrew media at the time that the father, a volunteer with the Magen David Adom ambulance service, applied first aid to his daughter before losing consciousness when medics arrived.

Nesya Karadi is the 21st person killed by Iran’s missile strikes in Israel since February 28. All were civilians of Israeli or foreign nationality. Four Palestinians were also killed in the West Bank during the war with Iran.

Morocco still in an uproar over Haredi Jews praying in public

I wrote yesterday about the Moroccan reaction to a group of religious Jewish tourists in Morocco who made an ad-hoc minyan to pray before it got dark. I noted that the print media was overwhelmingly supportive of the Jews and against those who criticized them.

Morocco's media is aligned with the government and the kingdom has been more tolerant and celebratory of its Jews than any other Arab nation, by far.

But the people is another story. And they are literally going crazy over this incident.

People on social media asked "Jews performing religious rituals in Bab Doukkala, Marrakech. Do they want to rule us?"

Several insisted that the Jews wanted to turn this wall into a new Western Wall.

Someone wrote graffiti on the wall, "Bab Doukkala is for Moroccans and not for the Jews."

A former actor who turned Islamist wrote on his Facebook page that because the Jews defiled it, the entire wall must be demolished and rebuilt to cleanse it from being a place that Jews prayed.

A large group of Moroccan youth didn't go quite that far but they did symbolically cleanse the wall of the filth of the Jewish presence there.

A huge protest was held in front of the wall. Really.

One sign said, "No to provoking the feelings of Muslims."

One crazed man screamed in front of workers sandblasting the graffiti about how terrible this incident was, and they even made a large banner declaring "We don't fear zionism." This video was widely shared.

Naturally, people burned Israeli flags in the second day of protests over Jews praying.

These are not "pro-Palestinian" actions. This is pure Jew-hatred in the most tolerant Arab nation towards Jews.

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The Robot Army Hamas and Hezbollah Cannot Counter

Hamas and Hezbollah have spent years and billions of dollars perfecting the same playbook: tunnels that swallow soldiers whole, booby-trapped buildings that turn entry into a death sentence, ambushes staged from positions indistinguishable from empty rubble. The entire strategic architecture of both groups rests on a single foundational bet — that Israel's political tolerance for casualties is lower than their own tolerance for punishment. Kill enough soldiers, and the pressure to stop mounts. It has worked before.

The IDF is systematically dismantling that bet with robots.

In Bint Jbail, IDF Yahalom Combat Engineers have deployed robots into Hezbollah tunnels and hard-to-reach areas, photographing and mapping the infrastructure, then using those images to accelerate the destruction of Hezbollah's long-term military investments in the region before any diplomatic window closes. The goal is explicit: compress the timeline without sending soldiers into spaces designed to kill them.

This is the continuation of something larger. Col. (ret.) Yaron Sarig, head of the AI and Autonomy Program Executive Office at Israel's Defense Ministry, declared in December 2025 that the 2023–2025 Israel-Hamas War was the first-ever robotics war — one in which Israel mobilized its entire defense ecosystem and deployed tens of thousands of autonomous systems across the battlefield, from drone swarms to ground robotics distributed across vast areas. Thousands of kilometers of the Gaza invasion were carried out by robotic systems.

The application was surgical. Robotic systems explored Hamas tunnels to spare soldiers the risk, while remote vehicles drove above ground to crash into Hamas positions or spring ambushes — so that Israeli soldiers following behind already knew where concealed fighters were. AI was layered on top to improve detection and tracking on a broader and more sophisticated operational picture than human scouts could produce. What had been the most lethal phase of urban warfare — the entry, the first contact, the booby-trapped stairwell — was handed to machines.

The border itself has been robot territory for years. The Jaguar, developed jointly by Israel Aerospace Industries and the IDF's Ground Forces Command and now fully integrated into the Gaza Division, patrols the border fence around the clock — equipped with dozens of sensors, high-resolution cameras, a remotely operated machine gun, and a PA system for warnings. It operates semi-autonomously, navigating rough terrain without human intervention, and has already saved hundreds of hours of manpower per week, eliminating routine patrols that previously required soldiers to stand exposed to snipers, IEDs, and anti-tank missiles. Hamas used to be able to target those soldiers. The Jaguar is harder to demoralize.

Now the AI revolution has reached artillery. The Ro'em system, developed over six years by the IDF in partnership with Elbit Systems and deployed this month by the 282nd Artillery Regiment in southern Lebanon, compresses what used to be a minutes-long targeting cycle to seconds. Once a target is designated, the system can independently load ammunition, calculate firing solutions, aim, and fire — receiving targets directly from intelligence systems or operational headquarters, then relocating within roughly a minute to evade counter-battery fire. It fires up to eight shells per minute at ranges of up to 40 kilometers, operated by a crew of three rather than the six required by its predecessor, the American-made Doher. The result is an artillery unit that functions less like a traditional battery and more like a networked, semi-autonomous node within a larger architecture of sensors and shooters.

The IDF's AI protocol does not permit fully autonomous attack decisions. A human remains in the loop before a weapon fires. What AI and robotics provide is reconnaissance, mapping, targeting calculation, and remote presence — a soldier viewing a live feed from inside a tunnel and choosing when to act, or a commander designating a target that the Ro'em then handles mechanically. The machine extends the soldier's reach into spaces that previously required his body, and compresses the timeline between intelligence and effect. It does not replace human judgment on whether to fire.

The trajectory is toward more of this, not less. Sarig was explicit: "We are only at the beginning of this revolution. In the coming years, driven by operational necessity, we will significantly expand our robotic capabilities. Robotics serves as a critical bridge to the world of AI, which, looking forward, will be integrated into every weapon system and into the operational capability of every soldier." The same logic has already reached Israel's factories: robots and automated services are now integrated into the production of Arrow 2 and 3 interceptors, with officials projecting that cost reductions will allow Israel to purchase substantially more interceptors than before. The Ro'em, meanwhile, has attracted a US Army tender bid, an Asia-Pacific export deal valued at roughly $106 million, and collaboration with Germany's Rheinmetall on a European variant.

Hamas and Hezbollah built their military doctrine around the human cost of fighting them. They dug deeper tunnels, laid more sophisticated traps, and structured their entire force around the assumption that where humans go, humans bleed. That assumption is eroding. Every tunnel a robot maps and a soldier never enters is a tactical investment that paid nothing. Every ambush sprung on a machine rather than a man is a kill that changes no political equation. The IDF is attacking the foundational logic of its enemies' strategy — replacing the target they were designed to hit with something they were never designed to stop.

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

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04/23 Links Pt2: Why Doesn't Everyone Love the Jews?; If the fire-bombed synagogues had been mosques, the Government would respond very differently

From Ian:

Stephen Daisley: Why Doesn't Everyone Love the Jews?

As the tide of antisemitism rises once more, a familiar question is posed: why do they hate the Jews? The answers are the same as before: ethnic and religious prejudice, political fanaticism, the conspiratorial mindset, each feeding and being fed by jealousy, ignorance and resentment.

Antisemitism is not a philosophy arrived at by reason. In fact, it's a volcanic madness that is always there, waiting to erupt at the first rumblings of societal instability, economic precarity, or spiritual disorder. There might be more to gain from flipping the question on its head: why doesn't everyone love the Jews?

It's a thought that has occurred to this gentile more than once because, truth be told, Jews are kind of awesome. The original scribes and scholars of the Bible, defiers of pharaohs, and humblers of empires. Source of modern law and ethics; composers of some of civilization's finest music, art and literature; bearers of an ancient covenant across two millennia of exile. Survivors of extermination; revivers of a nation and a language; and innovators in agriculture, medicine and technology. All this, plus Gal Gadot.

There is surely sufficient truth to foster a culture of philosemitism, by which I mean a respect and admiration for Jewish civilization and its fruits; for institutions, practices and teachings whose benefits stretch far beyond Jews and Jewish communities.

In practical terms, philosemitism means countering the ignorance of others, counseling your children in respect for Jewish people and revulsion for those who despise them, refusing to remain silent when Jews are targeted for harm or hatred.

Former Chief Rabbi of Britain Jonathan Sacks said: "The way a culture treats its Jews is the best indicator of its humanity or lack of it." That culture must move beyond thinking of Jews as a minority to be accommodated and understand them as rightful co-authors of the culture.

Moral Collapse Goes Mainstream By Abe Greenwald

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The liberal establishment has decided it can’t get enough of Hamas enthusiast and 9/11 fan, Hasan Piker. Democratic midterm candidates campaign with him by their side, and the New York Times seems determined to give him a daily platform. Yesterday, for example, on the Times’ homepage you could find a podcast featuring Piker in conversation with the writers Nadja Spiegelman and Jia Tolentino. The nominal topic was what Spiegelman dubbed “microlooting”—stealing items from corporate-owned stores as an act of political resistance. But the discussion quickly turned into a celebration of crime and terrorism committed in the name of justice.

Piker noted that he’s “pro-piracy all the way” and said “we gotta get back to cool crimes” such as “bank robbery, stealing priceless artifacts, things of that nature.” Tolentino believes that when it comes to “stealing with a purpose,” “we love that in America.” She also thinks that blowing up pipelines should be legal and private schools should be outlawed.

It's three cheers for piracy, robbery, and terrorism on the homepage of the New York Times! The podcast seems to have shocked many people. They can’t understand how we’ve gotten here.

I can. It’s precisely the kind of thing I would expect to see from a culture that’s turned against its Jews. Piker, like New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and a bunch of woke-right podcasters, has been celebrated by the liberals for his brazen anti-Semitic incitement in the years since Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023. That’s what made him, and so many others, a beloved star of the left and, eventually, the liberal establishment.

When a culture decides to protect and even reward people for promoting anti-Jewish terrorism—you know, intifada—that culture breaks the civic bonds that hold society together. If you think you can get away with encouraging Jew-hatred while preserving taboos and proscriptions on other destructive impulses, you’re in for a wild ride.

In permitting and elevating anti-Semitism, leftists and liberals have not only sanctioned violent bigotry, which is ruinous enough. They’ve unleashed a tsunami of evil. Because anti-Semitism is fundamentally a form of scapegoating, they’ve sanctioned the idea that victims are responsible for the transgressions committed against them. This legitimizes all manner of thuggery.

Pondering what makes Greta Thunberg and her ilk tick?

Why is the left so bitterly opposed to Israel? There are plenty of reasons why this should not be the case.

Yes, many Jews may look “white” to most people (of course, a great many do not). But most Israelis come from North Africa and other countries in the Mideast—Morocco, Yemen, Iraq. Of course, insofar as the right-wing fever swamp fringes are concerned, they are not even counted as belonging in the white category; “they will not replace us” is their motto. So, they are in effect non-white, and for all intents and purposes should be beloved of the left.

It cannot be denied that, considering this perspective, the underdog deserves special appreciation.

Well, Israel has a population of nearly 10 million people and is surrounded by 23 Arab countries hosting roughly 1 billion people. The governments of all of them—at least until the 2020 Abraham Accords—hated Zionism and Zionists with a purple passion. This country occupies far less than 1% of the entire land mass of the Middle East; yet, as some of its regional neighbors purport, it should be kicked out. Or rather, eliminated.

It is the “Little Satan,” according to Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and other terror groups that target civilians. And it works with its ally, the “Big Satan,” aka the United States.

They point their fingers at the joint war against Iran as an example. Yes, the same Iran that happens to be launching missiles right now at fellow Arab states. Where is all the protesting against that?

And still, the left sees Israelis as colonizers. (That’s very bad, in case you haven’t been paying attention.) And so it goes, they deserve to be targeted by terror regimes and related outfits. (Aren’t they bad?)

The Jews have been in the Holy Land for some 3,500 years. The Arabs only arrived a few scant centuries ago. The Al-Aqsa mosque lies above the Jewish Second Temple, which is perched on top of the Jewish First Temple. So the natives, beloved of the left, are the Jews; the interlopers are the Arabs.

It could have gone the other way, but it didn’t. The order is the order. History is history.

But maybe not according to Greta Thunberg.

04/23 Links Pt1: The dawn of a new world order; Introduction to Gazology; No, the Iron Dome Doesn’t Make Israel More Aggressive; Why Trump’s Iran Deal Is Not Like Obama’s Iran Deal

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: The dawn of a new world order

Most people in America are against the war with Iran, as they are in Britain, too.

Very few, however, actually understand why this war is as necessary as it is unavoidably complex.

Few seem aware that Iran has been actively at war against America for the past 47 years. Few seem to grasp that Iran’s fanatical Islamic regime has killed hundreds of U.S. servicemen, perpetrated numerous attacks on U.S. bases, committed countless terrorist atrocities and taken Americans hostage.

Few grasp that U.S. and Israeli intelligence had discovered that Iran was poised to create both a nuclear bomb and a missile arsenal so enormous and so buried underground that no one would ever be able to tackle the mortal threat posed by the regime.

Instead, the American and British public have been fed a remorseless mainstream media narrative framed entirely by obsessive hatred of U.S. President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. This presents the war as a reckless choice into which Trump was bounced by Netanyahu, that it was always going to be a disaster, and that it’s already been lost.

Israel, however, which is desperate for the Iranian regime to be prevented from ever harming it again, fears that Washington is once again leaving it hanging out to dry. The Israeli public thinks that Trump’s ceasefire—and then its extension—shows that he hasn’t got the commitment to see this thing through. They fear that he seeks to make a deal he can call victory, but that will leave the Tehran regime in a position where it can rearm and come back even more deadly than before.

Others, though, think that Trump is displaying strategic brilliance. They point out that he’s flipped the script over the Strait of Hormuz by turning Iran’s supposed chokepoint for the world into a deadly weapon against the regime itself.

America’s blockade of the Strait is causing Tehran to lose hundreds of millions of dollars a day in vital revenue, while the buildup of oil will potentially cripple the oil wells themselves and put them out of further use.

The fact is that this war is neither won nor lost. Both sides say they have the upper hand. Everything depends on Trump. His repeated outbursts on Truth Social, which often seem to contradict each other, are giving many people severe emotional whiplash.

No one knows how this is going to end. But it’s very alarming that opposition to the war in America is feeding into a growing general public animus against Israel.

Matti Friedman: Introduction to Gazology

The origins of this essay lie in a recent visit to the Middle East shelf in a Washington, D.C., bookstore during a visit from my home in the actual Middle East. I was on a short break from the story I’ve been living and covering in Israel for three decades, and from the tragedies that have become routine for Israelis and for our neighbors since the war that began on October 7, 2023.

As a longtime denizen of bookstores in Western countries, I knew that almost any shop would carry a few titles about the evils of Zionism and Israel, a venerable genre on the Marxist left. But this time I saw a change: The Gaza war had inspired a proliferation of these titles so intense that they now filled much of a shelf. I noticed the same phenomenon in other bookstores in other cities, where there were suddenly more “Gaza” and “Palestine” books, it seemed, than books about the rest of the entire Arab world combined. Humanity now inhabited a new age, according to one title, The World After Gaza. According to another, The Destruction of Palestine Is the Destruction of the Earth. There was Gaza: The Story of a Genocide, and Palestine and Feminist Liberation, and many more examples in the same vein, with more soon to be published. A new literary genre had been born.

The Gaza war has been fought a two-hour drive from my Jerusalem home by people I know, and has claimed the lives of several of them. For me, reading the back covers of these books left the impression of a genre related to the actual territory of Gaza as the Dune novels are related to the actual NASA space program. At the same time, it wasn’t fringe work. Among the practitioners were authors who have recently won a National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and additional accolades.

After reading more in subsequent months, I came to think of the genre as “Gazology.” By this term I don’t mean the study of the real territory of Gaza, or of the terrible human tragedy caused by the Hamas offensive of October 7 and by the Israeli response in the war that followed—vast tracts of Gaza destroyed, tens of thousands of civilians killed along with tens of thousands of combatants, and aftershocks across the Middle East. Gazology is not reportage, and most of its practitioners are not in or even near Gaza or Israel. This is a Western literary genre with its own rules, tropes, and goals.

It’s likely that much Western culture, journalism, and politics in the coming years will be downstream of these books and the ideology behind them. Students in disciplines from anthropology to medicine will be assigned these works and invited to see the world’s problems through the lens of “Gaza.” For this reason, the genre is important. What follows is a survey of five representative samples of the volumes in question, in an attempt to sketch the contours of this expanding body of writing and to understand what it is trying to say.

Peter Beinart’s ‘Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza’ wins PEN America award

Progressive Jewish author Peter Beinart has won the 2026 PEN America Literary Award for nonfiction for his latest book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning.

Beinart, who has long been an outspoken critic of Israel, is the editor-at-large of the leftist Jewish Currents magazine and a professor at CUNY’s Newmark School of Journalism. His book offers a harsh critique of the American Jewish community’s relationship with Israel and response to the war in Gaza.

“This book is about the stories Jews tell ourselves that blind us to Palestinian suffering,” Beinart wrote in a Substack post announcing the book’s release in September 2024. “It’s about how we came to value a state, Israel, above the lives of all the people who live under its control. And it’s about why I believe that Palestinian liberation means Jewish liberation as well.”

In a statement, the judges of the PEN America award said the book “offers a model for writing a new story when inherited narratives no longer hold.”

The award offered the latest evidence of a shift for PEN America when it comes to Israel, which has polarized the literary and cultural world in recent years.

Founded in 1922, PEN America is a writers’ and free-expression advocacy group that defends the rights of authors and opposes censorship. The group has long opposed cultural boycotts of Israel, including in a December 2023 letter calling on art institutions “not to police speech nor deprive audiences of artists’ work,” earning it increasing ire from progressives.

The group’s CEO left amid tensions in 2024, and last year it published a report accusing Israel of committing a genocide in Gaza.

Seth Mandel: No, the Iron Dome Doesn’t Make Israel More Aggressive

The debate over the Iron Dome is a near-perfect encapsulation of the weakness of the Israel discourse in America. Opponents of the purely defensive program try to work their way back from their partisan conclusion to a coherent rationalization for it. They then demand we dignify their ignorant declarations with a response.

Here’s the latest version of this routine. Democrats looking for an excuse to vote against Iron Dome have reverse engineered the following talking point: Iron Dome, they say, isn’t actually defensive, because the fact that it protects Israelis from rockets makes Israel more likely to attack its enemies.

This seems to be the reasoning that a fair number of Democrats have settled on. As Semafor’s Dave Weigel noted, this argument allows them to claim to support only “purely defensive” weapons while still voting against Iron Dome.

Anyone who has participated in the social media discourse on Iron Dome has had this theory tossed at them. Usually it’s “Nathan Thrall says so!” Thrall’s argument is as follows: “Iron Dome facilitates greater Israeli offensive measures, because it lowers the perceived cost to Israel of escalating or extending or initiating attacks.”

Now, making this particular argument requires one to be unfamiliar with basic political-military decisions—why an army would procure certain weapons systems instead of others, what its broader strategic and tactical aims are, its perceived threats, etc. A fair amount of this is usually in public documents.

But in the case of the Iron Dome the debate is even more frustrating because we don’t need to theorize. We already have the answer. The data tell us what common sense would suggest: Iron Dome makes Israel less likely to escalate military conflicts because it can absorb a significant level of rocket attacks from Gaza with minimal casualties.

One Pushy Schnorrer Too Many: Homeowner Installs Trap Door On Porch (PreOccupied Territory

Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.

Check out their Facebook and Substack pages.

Jerusalem, April 23 - A local family has taken drastic measures to preserve its peace and quiet, neighbors reported today, amid a stream of unsolicited dinnertime and bedtime visits from people going door-to-door to collect for charitable causes: if the visitor fails to take the hint and leave after receiving no answer, or shows up a second time despite a previous rebuff, the head of the family enters a code into the security system that opens a panel beneath the solicitor's feet and sends him into a dungeon.

The neighbors, who spoke on condition of anonymity, described the innovation as a last resort after years of polite hints falling on deaf ears. Sources close to the family say the final straw came when a collector for an indigent pair of would-be newlyweds refused to accept "no" for an answer, launching into an extended monologue about starving Torah scholars and orphaned children while the homeowner's dinner grew cold on the table.

A relative noted the family had long been identified as a "prime target" on informal networks shared among door-to-door solicitors. "They swap addresses like baseball cards," explained one cousin who asked not to be named. "Once word gets around that someone actually opens the door and listens for more than thirty seconds, you're marked. The good targets get visits from everyone — from the widows-and-orphans people to the ones collecting for 'emergency' medical equipment in places you've never heard of, to the support-this-promising-young-scholar-who-chooses-not-to-work."

Some in the community expressed concern over the new security feature, warning that it could set a dangerous precedent. "This kind of escalation hurts everyone," said a veteran schnorrer who claimed decades of experience. "We're just trying to engage people's empathy and generosity. A simple 'maybe next time' would suffice. Instead, now we have to worry about falling into dungeons? Where's the tzedakah in that?"

"Hmm," he wondered. "We can probably leverage this to collect for pidyon sh'vuyim," the redemption of captives.

The homeowner remains unapologetic. "They come during bedtime stories, during conference calls, during the one hour a week we actually sit down as a family," he told reporters. "They've got clipboards, sob stories, books they want to 'sell' and that disappointed look when you hesitate — like you're personally responsible for the downfall of Jewish education or whatever cause they're pushing that week. And thanks to their little address-sharing WhatsApp groups or whatever they use, once you're on the list, it's relentless."

Local police have so far declined to intervene, noting that no complaints have been filed by the affected solicitors, nor any Missing Persons reports issued. "Technically it's his property," said one officer with a shrug. "And honestly, after hearing some of these stories, we're not rushing to investigate."

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

The Jewish Witness - Part 3 of Reclaiming the Covenant

Here is an excerpt of Part 3 of my upcoming book, Reclaiming the Covenant.

Paid subscribers to my Substack can read each entire chapter s they get published, twice a week. If you pay EoZ monthly by any other means and want access, let me know.

The Jewish Witness

Part 3 of my series on America at 250, Reclaiming the Covenant

Every argument has a tell.

In Jewish legal tradition, machloket l’shem shamayim — argument for the sake of heaven — describes a dispute conducted in genuine pursuit of truth, where the other side is still recognized as a legitimate participant in a shared enterprise. Its polar opposite is sinat chinam: baseless hatred, the condition in which the opponent is no longer someone you are arguing with but someone whose presence is itself the offense. The Talmud distinguishes these not by the content of the disagreement but by what each side does with the other’s existence. Hillel and Shammai disagreed about nearly everything for decades; their schools preserved each other’s opinions and their children intermarried. That is machloket l’shem shamayim. The factionalism that the rabbis blamed for the Second Temple’s destruction — groups so consumed by contempt for each other that the legal architecture for covenantal repair became unusable — is sinat chinam. The disagreement in both cases was real. What differed was whether the parties retained enough basic regard for each other to remain in the same covenant.

A covenantal society needs a way to know which condition it is in, because the two look similar from the inside — passionate disagreement always feels righteous to those conducting it — and the consequences of misreading them are severe. Part 2 established that the covenant’s renewal mechanism requires, as its operating condition, the willingness to grant your opponent the benefit of the doubt. But how do you know when that condition is being met and when it has already failed? How do you detect sinat chinam before it has progressed far enough to make the repair mechanism unavailable?

There is a diagnostic. It is not a survey or a political index. It is a pattern so consistent across three thousand years of history that it functions less like a coincidence and more like a structural law: the societies that are losing the basic regard between their members — that are converting policy disagreement into existential enmity, that are beginning to treat some of their members as outside the covenant’s protection — often show the same symptom first. They turn on their Jews.

The Jews are almost always the first target because they are the perennial test case for the covenant’s membership principle — a group identifiable as separate, whose full membership was most recently contested, most explicitly established by legal or founding act, and therefore most available to be re-contested when the covenant’s universalism begins to erode. A society willing to strip one group of its inherent dignity has already decided that dignity is conditional — available to be stripped from any group once the right justification is constructed. The Jews come first not because the hatred is primarily about Jews but because the logic that makes them first makes everyone else potentially next. Watching what a society does with its Jews tells you whether the argument inside it is machloket l’shem shamayim — legitimate disagreement within a shared covenant — or something that has tipped into sinat chinam, the contempt that makes covenantal repair impossible.

Consider the sequence. Spain expelled its Jews in 1492, the same year Columbus sailed — the beginning of a golden age that turned out to be followed by centuries of relative decline as the intellectual and commercial energy that Spanish Jews had contributed was permanently exported to the Ottoman Empire, the Netherlands, and eventually America. The Weimar Republic’s Jews were among the most assimilated, educated, and patriotic citizens in Europe — their persecution was the clearest possible signal that something had gone catastrophically wrong in Germany’s civic architecture long before the world understood what that something was. The Soviet Union’s antisemitism tracked its internal decay with uncomfortable precision. Poland’s postwar antisemitic episodes — most notoriously the Kielce pogrom of 1946, when Poles murdered Jewish Holocaust survivors who had returned home — revealed a civic sickness that would take decades to begin healing.

The inverse is equally striking. The Dutch Republic in the seventeenth century offered Jews something genuinely unusual for its era: stable residence, property rights, relative freedom of worship, and meaningful participation in commercial life. The correlation with Dutch commercial and intellectual dynamism is not coincidental. Britain’s nineteenth century trajectory moved further along the same arc: the gradual extension of actual civic membership to Jews — Parliament in 1858, Oxford and Cambridge following — tracked the development of the most robust parliamentary democracy of the era. The closer a society moved toward Washington’s formulation, the more it flourished. The societies that went all the way — that built inherent membership into their founding architecture rather than extending it as a concession — produced something different in kind, not merely in degree.

The mechanism is structural. Once a society decides that dignity is conditional — that membership can be revoked, that the dignity floor is negotiable for one group — the question becomes only which group is next and what justification will be constructed for their exclusion. The attack on Jewish dignity is always, simultaneously, an attack on the covenant architecture that protects everyone’s dignity. The diagnostic works because what it detects is not specifically anti-Jewish sentiment but the deeper condition: the conversion of machloket l’shem shamayim into sinat chinam, the moment when a member of the covenant stops being someone you argue with in good faith and becomes someone whose existence is the problem.

Jews are, in this sense, canaries in the coal mine. Our historical position has given us a sensitivity to specific kinds of danger that people who have never occupied that position are slower to develop. We notice the early signals. We recognize the patterns before they become undeniable. We have seen where certain kinds of rhetoric lead, where certain kinds of institutional erosion lead, where certain kinds of redefinition of membership lead — because we have been the people those processes were turned against, repeatedly, across civilizations that each believed they were different from the ones that had come before.

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