Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Thursday, April 30, 2026

04/30 Links Pt1: US finds evidence tying four more UN staffers to Oct. 7; The Party With the Nazi Tattoo; MSF Abandoned Neutrality, Employed Staff with Hamas Ties

From Ian:

What Thomas Jefferson Would Do about Iran's Barbary Pirates

The Western approach to diplomacy is to attempt to reconcile legitimate but conflicting interests. Iran's rulers, by contrast, regard compromise as capitulation. And they have no interests that we should recognize as legitimate. For 47 years, they have vowed "Death to Israel!" and "Death to America" - unambiguous declarations of war.

American presidents in the past have responded: Maybe the theocrats don't really mean it! Maybe they'll liberalize over time! Maybe we can identify moderates among them! One president sympathized with their "grievances," accommodated their ambitions, and sent them palettes of cash. They were not appeased.

The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) still has hundreds of small, fast-attack boats in the Strait of Hormuz. Those who use boats to harass or attempt to seize commercial vessels should be designated as pirates. And Americans long ago learned how to deal with pirates.

In 1786, while serving as U.S. Minister to France, Thomas Jefferson questioned an envoy from Tripoli - one of the North African Barbary states - about his government's habit of seizing American and European ships and cargo, and enslaving sailors. The envoy said he was doing his religious duty, enforcing Islamic law as he understood it. From then on, Jefferson opposed paying ransom or tribute to the Barbary Pirates and deemed negotiations futile. As president in 1801, he took a kinetic approach: the First Barbary War (1801-1805).

Iran's rulers, whatever their internal disagreements, all call themselves "Islamic revolutionaries." Their revolution, we should understand, is against America. If Iran's rulers are praying for martyrdom, that may be a matter on which we can find agreement.

Explaining the Iran-U.S. Value Asymmetry

The Western approach to diplomacy is to attempt to reconcile legitimate but conflicting interests. Iran's rulers, by contrast, regard compromise as capitulation. And they have no interests that we should recognize as legitimate. For 47 years, they have vowed "Death to Israel!" and "Death to America" - unambiguous declarations of war.

American presidents in the past have responded: Maybe the theocrats don't really mean it! Maybe they'll liberalize over time! Maybe we can identify moderates among them! One president sympathized with their "grievances," accommodated their ambitions, and sent them palettes of cash. They were not appeased.

The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) still has hundreds of small, fast-attack boats in the Strait of Hormuz. Those who use boats to harass or attempt to seize commercial vessels should be designated as pirates. And Americans long ago learned how to deal with pirates.

In 1786, while serving as U.S. Minister to France, Thomas Jefferson questioned an envoy from Tripoli - one of the North African Barbary states - about his government's habit of seizing American and European ships and cargo, and enslaving sailors. The envoy said he was doing his religious duty, enforcing Islamic law as he understood it. From then on, Jefferson opposed paying ransom or tribute to the Barbary Pirates and deemed negotiations futile. As president in 1801, he took a kinetic approach: the First Barbary War (1801-1805).

Iran's rulers, whatever their internal disagreements, all call themselves "Islamic revolutionaries." Their revolution, we should understand, is against America. If Iran's rulers are praying for martyrdom, that may be a matter on which we can find agreement.

Monitored phone calls and fear of arrest: What life looks like for Iran’s Jews now

Amid the war in Iran, one Iranian Jewish woman who lives in the United States, but whose family remains in Iran, has been wracked with fear. Before the ceasefire, she spoke with her parents once a week for exactly one minute — both because of the exorbitant cost, about $50 per minute, and because of the fear of surveillance.

During one call a few days into the war, she said, something felt off.

“I could see that something is so wrong. It’s as if someone was there,” the woman, who moved to the U.S. in 2008, said in an interview with the Forward. “It seemed like my mom was actually reading from a note.”

She later learned that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had come to her parents’ home, questioning why they frequently called an American number. They instructed her parents to download Bale, an Iranian messaging app widely believed to be monitored by authorities, before making any further calls.

“It’s a spy app, and everyone knows that,” the woman said with a wry laugh. Her parents refused. Instead, they were told to call their daughter and read from a script while IRGC members watched.

“Basically, they said to prove that you are with us and not with Israel, read this when you call her,” the woman said. “After that day, they didn’t call for a long time.”

Eventually, she learned that her parents had fled to a safer part of the country to escape bombardment.

Her family are among the estimated 10,000 Jews who still live in Iran, in the largest Jewish community in the Middle East outside of Israel. Once numbering around 120,000, the community has dwindled significantly since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, when life for religious minorities fundamentally changed. Today, Jews who remain in Iran must carefully navigate life under the regime, publicly expressing loyalty to avoid being falsely accused of Zionist espionage.

Amid Iran’s war with the U.S. and Israel, that pressure has intensified.

With an ongoing internet blackout, communication is limited and closely monitored. To understand what life is like for Iranian Jews today, I spoke with several people in the U.S. who remain in sporadic contact with family members inside Iran. Everyone interviewed requested that they not be identified, fearing repercussions for either themselves or their families.

Superman Nixes Further Collaboration With IDF: 'Paperwork Worse Than Kryptonite' (PreOccupied Territory)

Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.

Check out their Facebook and Substack pages.

Fortress of Solitude, Canadian arctic, April 30 - The Man of Steel has declined to renew his cooperative operations with Israel's military and intelligence apparatus, he disclosed today, citing a planning, reporting, and logistical bureaucracy that cripples him more than any piece of his native planet ever could.

Kal-El, known to the world as Superman, decided today against continuing his collaborations with the Mossad and the IDF, following the long-overdue completion of a report from a mission he undertook last May - and for which he only no managed to finish the "nightmarish amount" of after-action paperwork.

“I punched through a reinforced Iranian bunker in 0.8 seconds,” Superman said via encrypted video link, looking visibly drained as he levitated above his Arctic ice fortress. “But getting the IDF’s Form 38-C approved for ‘documenting use of super-strength near sensitive archaeological sites’? That took me eleven months. Kryptonite just hurts. This paperwork makes me want to retire to a quiet farm in Kansas and never leave.”

According to details leaked from the after-action review, Superman’s single-handed elimination of a missile convoy triggered a cascade of administrative demands. He was required to submit separate justifications for each of the 47 vehicles destroyed, including fuel cost estimates (none used), environmental impact statements, and a mandatory “Proportionality Self-Evaluation Questionnaire” signed by a registered social worker. A Mossad case officer also insisted he explain in writing whether he offered the enemy combatants “a reasonable opportunity to surrender” before applying heat vision, and if not, a justification with supporting documentation.

“It’s not that we don’t appreciate the help,” said a senior IDF liaison officer speaking on condition of anonymity because he was still waiting for his own expense report to clear. “But rules are rules. Even Wonder Woman had to fill out the ‘Amazonian Weapon Import Permit’ in triplicate last year. Superman kept asking why we couldn’t just ‘do the right thing.’ Nu, this isn’t Metropolis. We have protocols.”

The Last Son of Krypton added that while the paperwork proved cumbersome and off-putting, it paled in comparison to the challenge of finding the right person in the sprawling Israeli bureaucracy when he had questions about a document, or when some crucial paper was unavailable.

"X-ray vision is useless when you scan the building at the wrong time," he lamented. "That turns out to be any window other than 9:30-10:15 A.M. on Mondays and Wednesdays, as opposed to 1:30-2:30 P.M. on Sundays and Thursdays, while every other day, that desk is closed, or occupied by some clerk who knows nothing about your specific issue."

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

Patriotism Reconsidered

This is an excerpt from part 5 of the serialization of my upcoming book, Reclaiming the Covenant: America’s Remarkable 250 Years and Assuring It Continues.

If you want to read the entire series so far, become a paid subscriber to my Substack.

People disagree about what is right. They always have and they always will — about what is just, what is legal, what is fair, what the facts are, and what the facts mean. We all have different viewpoints, different upbringings, different experiences, different DNA, and this means we will disagree. The variables that determine the right outcome in any complex dispute — an election, a court case, a policy question — are too numerous, too contested, and too dependent on values that reasonable people weigh differently to ever produce a result that everyone can verify as definitively correct.

For the world to keep going anyway, we need methods of determining whatever we can that is close to right and moving on from there. That is process.

The referee makes a call. It may be wrong. The fan in the stands can see it was wrong; the replay confirms it was wrong; the coach knows it was wrong. The call still stands. You don’t replace the referee mid-game because one call was bad. You don’t replay the game because the bad call affected the outcome. You accept the result, grumble about it, and if the officiating is systematically bad you work through the sport’s governance mechanisms to improve it — better training, instant replay, additional officials. What you don’t do is allow the losing team to override the outcome on the grounds that they believe they really won. The moment that is permitted, the game is over. Not that game — all games. The process is what makes the game a game rather than a brawl over who gets to declare victory.

The American covenant’s processes work the same way, and the citizen who understands this instinctively on Sunday afternoon and loses it on election night has not discovered a principled exception. They have discovered that they care more about winning than about the game itself.

But process does not earn its claim to acceptance merely by existing. A process earns the right to have its outcomes respected by meeting the moral structure’s own demands: transparency, corrigibility, and humility. Transparency means the process shows its reasoning — the votes are counted in the open, the court publishes its opinion, the legislative record is available. Corrigibility means the process can acknowledge error and correct it — appeals exist, recounts are available, certifications can be challenged through designated channels. Humility means the process does not claim more certainty than it has — it preserves dissent, maintains records, allows future review. A process that meets these demands has earned its claim on the loser’s acceptance. A process conducted in secret, that suppresses legitimate challenge, that refuses to acknowledge falsifying evidence, has already forfeited it.

This generates the precise distinction between legitimate grievance and defection. When you believe an outcome was unjust, you have two options. The first is to identify the specific part of the process that failed the moral structure’s demands: the specific transparency failure, the specific suppression of legitimate challenge, the specific refusal to correct a demonstrable error. If you can name it specifically, you have a legitimate grievance and a legitimate target. Fix that part. Use the covenant’s mechanisms — litigation, legislative action, constitutional challenge, the ballot box — to repair the specific failure. That is patriotism: holding the process to its own stated standards.

The second choice is to declare the entire outcome illegitimate because you find it unacceptable, without being able to specify what procedural failure produced it. That is sedition in the legal domain and defection in the covenantal one. The inability to identify what specifically broke is the tell. “The result is wrong” is not a process failure. “The ballots were counted in secret without bipartisan observers” is a process failure — specific, addressable, fixable through legitimate means. The first is a claim about the outcome; the second is a claim about the process. Only the second entitles you to challenge the result, and even then through designated channels rather than through force.

A wrong outcome produced by a legitimate process is always preferable to a right outcome achieved by bypassing the process. This is the architecture of any civilization that intends to last. The wrong outcome can be corrected — through appeal, through the next election, through legislative action, through constitutional amendment. The bypassed process cannot be uncorrupted. Once it is established that outcomes can be overridden by whoever claims sufficient certainty about their own rightness, that precedent is available to everyone who follows, including people with less justification and different certainties. The tool does not stay in the hands of the people who first picked it up.

The covenant’s answer to a corrupted process is always: fix the process, not the outcome. The amendment process, judicial review, legislative reform, the ballot box — these exist for exactly this purpose, as alternatives to outcome override that are always available and always less destructive than bypassing them.

There is a test for patriotism that almost no one applies and that the covenant requires. It has nothing to do with flag pins, whether you stand during the national anthem, military service, or the emotional intensity of your stated love for the country. It has everything to do with a single question: do you accept the covenant’s processes even when they produce outcomes you didn’t want?

That question separates covenantal patriotism from its two main competitors — tribal patriotism on the right and performative rejection on the left — both of which feel like authentic engagement with America and both of which are, in the precise sense the framework requires, forms of defection.

Tribal patriotism defines America by who Americans are rather than what Americans have accepted. It reaches for the flag and the founders and the military and the language of greatness — all legitimate covenant symbols — and deploys them in service of a membership definition the covenant explicitly rejects. Its implicit claim is that real Americans are a specific kind of people: ethnically, religiously, or culturally identifiable, with everyone else admitted on sufferance. The “real America” of small towns and traditional values and Christian heritage is a description of a demographic, not a covenant. Washington’s letter to the Newport congregation is the diagnostic: any vision of America that couldn’t have been written by Washington to that congregation has already defected, regardless of how many flags surround it.

The right-wing version of this is currently the more visible threat, but the structure applies wherever it appears. When politicians describe legal immigrants as an infestation, when commentators argue that certain ethnic or religious communities are incompatible with American values, when the implicit definition of “real American” excludes people who have accepted the covenant’s terms — that is tribal patriotism, and it is covenant defection dressed in the flag.

Identity politics of any flavor commits the same error when it organizes political life around group membership rather than covenant acceptance. The demand that people vote, think, or speak according to their gender or color or ethnicity or religion — that departing from the group’s expected positions is betrayal — treats identity as the primary political fact, which is exactly what the covenant was designed to make irrelevant. Left-wing identity politics and right-wing identity politics share the same foundational error: they put the tribe before the covenant.

Performative rejection makes the mirror-image mistake. It takes the covenant’s genuine failures — and they are genuine, serious, and well-documented — and uses them to argue that the covenant itself is fraudulent, that its language was always a cover for oppression, that the appropriate response to American failure is contempt for American institutions rather than enforcement of American principles.

This move is self-defeating in a way its proponents rarely acknowledge. Every legitimate grievance in American history is most powerfully argued as a covenant violation — which requires the covenant to be real and its terms to be binding. The abolitionists didn’t argue that the Declaration was a lie. They argued it was true and the nation was in breach of it. The civil rights movement didn’t argue that the Constitution was irredeemably corrupt. It argued that the equal protection clause meant what it said. Declaring the covenant fraudulent surrenders the most powerful moral lever available to anyone seeking justice within it.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

Arabic media accused Jews of genocide before the word existed

Part 1: They Called It Genocide Before the Word Existed

On June 26, 1936, the Jaffa-based Arabic newspaper Falastin published a cartoon titled "Danse Macabre." It showed Chaim Weizmann and Ze'ev Jabotinsky — the moderate Zionist statesman and the Revisionist firebrand, ideological opposites conscripted together for propaganda purposes — dancing gleefully with Death over a field of Arab skulls, all to establish the Jewish National Home in Palestine.

Looking at the cartoon, one would think that the Jews massacred Arabs at the gleeful behest of their leaders.

The Arab Revolt had begun roughly ten weeks earlier, on April 15, 1936, when Arab gunmen ambushed vehicles on the Tulkarm-Nablus road and killed two Jews. The following day, Jewish assailants linked to the Irgun murdered two Arab laborers near Petah Tikva in reprisal.

Those are the only two documented deaths of Arabs by Jews between the beginning of the revolt and the date of this cartoon. In fact, the number of Arabs killed by Jewish forces between World War I and 1936 is extremely low — less than one a year, far fewer than the numbers of Jews massacred by Arabs in riots to that point. Nearly all the Arabs who died were killed by British troops suppressing the revolt, not by any Jewish militia. The Haganah's formal policy in this period was havlagah, restraint, and the Irgun's broader reprisal campaign came later, in 1937–39.

In June 1936, this picture portrayed far more skulls than Arabs killed by Jews during the year.

This is an accusation of genocide by Jews before the term was even coined.

The standard contemporary defense of anti-Zionist discourse holds that it targets a political movement rather than a people — that criticizing Zionism is categorically distinct from antisemitism and should not be conflated with it. The Falastin cartoon suite from the summer of 1936 shows that they made no distinction between Jews and Zionists, using Jewish stereotypes in their "anti-Zionist" caricatures.

For example, "Jewish money speaks" with a Jew bribing a British official.

Or John Bull, symbolizing England, having married two wives - a chaste, peaceful Arab and an aggressive cigarette smoking Jewish woman showing her legs.

In one, a Queen Esther uses her sex appeal to convince the (British) King Ahasuerus to add to her long list of attacking Arabs while Mordecai (Weizmann) adds his two cents.

Jews controlling the British was a mainstay theme.

Even though Falastin was an Arabic paper, the cartoons seemed to be aimed at - and perhaps created by - the British diplomats in Palestine. See below.

The editors of Falastin were not distinguishing between antisemitism and anti-Zionism. They were running them as a single editorial project, with the genocide accusation as the headline act and the Protocols-era tropes — world control, financial manipulation, sexual corruption of gentile power — as the supporting evidence.

The Protocols, in fact, is what made the genocide accusation possible. If a shadowy secret group of Jews were controlling the world for their enrichment when they were in Europe, then when they come out in the open in Israel it is expected that their actions will continue to reflect their desire to control the region, but more openly, with utter disregard for human lives,

Part 2: A Note on What the Research Turned Up

The post above focuses on the Falastin "Danse Macabre" cartoon and the casualty record it distorted. But researching it produced a set of observations that seem significant enough to share separately. . Consider this a work in progress.

The cartoons were aimed at British readers, not Arab ones.

Falastin was an Arabic-language newspaper. Its readership was Arab. Yet this series of front-page cartoons — running from late June through mid-August 1936 — carried English captions alongside the Arabic, written in fluent idiomatic English, with Punch-style dialogue and titles like "Danse Macabre," "Another Sharp Weapon," and "A Well Deserved Honour." These are British editorial cartooning conventions, not Arabic ones. "Danse Macabre" as a title carries zero cultural resonance in Islamic tradition; it is a specifically Western European reference, invoking the medieval totentanz and the Allied WWI atrocity cartoon tradition. An Arab editor titling a cartoon for Arab readers would not reach for that phrase. Someone addressing British readers would reach for it instinctively.

British Mandate officials — administrators, political officers, military intelligence personnel — read Arabic as a professional requirement. Falastin knew they were reading it. The English captions weren't a translation service for Arab readers; they were a signal to British readers already consuming the Arabic: we know you're here, and we want to make sure you don't miss the point. The cartoon suite was aimed at the Mandate administration, using their own cultural vocabulary to tell them: your Zionist proteges are mass murderers.

The visual style points to a British contributor.

The cartoon style itself — the John Bull figure in the "Man of Two Wives" cartoon, the dinner-party composition of "Another Sharp Weapon," the slave-driver-with-whip layout of "On the Way to Palestine," the formal caricature of named British officials in "A Well Deserved Honour" — is the visual grammar of British political cartooning, specifically the Punch tradition of the 1880s-1920s. An Arab cartoonist working in the Arabic visual tradition would not compose images this way. The Esther cartoon in particular required someone who knew the book of Esther closely enough to map its specific post-Haman dialogue onto a contemporary political scene — and who expected readers to catch the reference. That is the work of someone with a British classical education.

The cartoons ran for roughly six weeks and then seemingly stopped, apparently abruptly — at least partly because Falastin was suspended by Mandate authorities during the revolt. When publication resumed, the format did not continue. This is the profile of a guest contributor with a specific agenda and a finite engagement, not a house style. Someone came, produced the series, and either left Palestine or ceased contributing.

I have not been able to identify this person. There are no visible signatures on the cartoons, though the print quality of the surviving scans makes it difficult to be certain. If any reader with access to Colonial Office or Mandate administration archives, or with knowledge of British press history in Palestine in 1936, recognizes either the style or the circumstantial profile — a British Arabist with cartooning skills, classical education, Arabic fluency, and access to Falastin's editors — I would very much like to hear from them.

The tropes traveled through British diplomatic culture.

The cartoon suite deploys what are recognizably Protocols-era antisemitic tropes: Jewish financial control of governments, Jewish women manipulating gentile rulers, Jewish world domination through hidden mechanisms. These are Russian in origin — the Protocols were fabricated by the Tsarist Okhrana in the late 19th century — but they reached the Arab world through multiple vectors, of which direct Russian-to-Arab transmission is only one.

The British diplomatic and intelligence world of the early 20th century was saturated with conspiratorial antisemitism. The first English-language edition of the Protocols was published in 1920 by Eyre and Spottiswoode, the King's printer, with a preface by a former British intelligence officer — an establishment imprimatur, not a fringe publication. The British Arabist network in Palestine was exactly the milieu where that framework would have been most actively operationalized, because it gave officials a coherent explanation for the policy they already resented: Jewish influence over Balfour, over Lloyd George, over the Colonial Office, wasn't merely inconvenient — it was the Protocols machinery producing its predicted output. High Commissioner Chancellor wrote privately to his son in 1930 that he considered the Balfour Declaration "unjust to the Arabs and detrimental to the interests of the British," and his diary recorded that British civil servants in Palestine were so resentful of Jewish press criticism that they would resign en masse if they could afford to.

Those same officials were in daily contact with the Arab political and press elite — newspaper editors, lawyers, landowners, political leaders — who were educated, cosmopolitan, and looking for frameworks to understand what was happening to Palestine. The Protocols offered a complete explanatory system. British Arabists who already thought in those terms would have transmitted the framework through professional and social contact, long before formal Arabic Protocols translations were widely circulating.

I have written elsewhere about how Christian missionary antisemitism traveled from Western missionaries to Arab Christians and then into broader Arab political culture. The Falastin cartoon suite suggests a parallel and contemporaneous transmission: Russian conspiratorial antisemitism traveling through British diplomatic culture into the Arab press, producing in a single Jaffa newspaper in the summer of 1936 the synthesis that would eventually harden into the ideological infrastructure of modern anti-Zionism.

The genocide accusation in the "Danse Macabre" cartoon was not an indigenous Arab response to Zionist violence. The kill count was two. It was, in all likelihood, a British antisemite's cartoon, drawn in the British atrocity-propaganda tradition, deploying a Russian conspiracy framework, published in an Arab paper for a British audience — and in the process handing the Arab nationalist movement a fully formed ideological weapon it has been using ever since.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

04/29 Links Pt2: Israel's Legitimacy Isn't Debatable under International Law; How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Feed the Jews to the Mob; Spain’s Jewish Question

From Ian:

America’s Real ‘Special Relationship’ When the Pageantry Is Stripped Away

King Charles came to Washington this week to renew an old claim: that Britain remains America’s closest friend, joined by history, language, culture, and long alliance. There is truth in that. The ties are real. Yet the visit also exposed a tension no amount of ceremony could quite conceal. Beneath the pageantry, the handshakes, and the polished invocations of shared destiny, the old “special relationship” seemed less like a settled fact than a British hope. For today, America’s most “special” ally is surely Israel. Who says so? Britain’s own ambassador to the United States, caught in a leaked recording only weeks before the king arrived.

The royal visit was intended to mark 250 years of American independence, an anniversary born from rupture, and was tasked with displaying friendship between two nations whose elected leaders plainly have little warmth for one another.

For decades, the phrase “special relationship” has been used as a kind of Anglo-American incense, waved over every disagreement until the room smelled less of conflict. US President Donald Trump has battered British Prime Minister Keir Starmer for months, leaving the relationship between Washington and London looking bruised, transactional, even contemptuous. The royal visit was supposed to place something older and grander above that. And it nearly worked.

But Britain’s ambassador to Washington, Christian Turner, said the quiet part aloud.

The Financial Times obtained a leaked recording of Turner speaking to British students, in which he called the phrase “special relationship” nostalgic and backward-looking. But there was, he said, one country that could probably claim such a relationship with the United States: Israel. The Foreign Office insisted his remarks were informal and did not represent official policy, but the damage was done.

Turner’s point was awkward because it was true. The United States still values Britain. The historic and cultural ties remain deep. But a special relationship requires more than shared history and flags in matching colors. It requires instinctive trust in moments of danger. Under Starmer, that trust has more than frayed — it is in shreds.

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Feed the Jews to the Mob

The leadership of the Democratic Party has decided to feed Israel to its left. This is no longer a matter of speculation or of reading tea leaves in polling data. Every plausible aspirant to the 2028 presidential nomination, Khanna, Van Hollen, Newsom, Pritzker, Booker, Gallego, Warnock, Emanuel, has moved, is moving, or is preparing to move toward some version of the anti-Israel position, whether by calling for an end to military aid, by denouncing AIPAC, by using the word genocide, or by maintaining the tactical silence that, in the current environment, functions as a form of the same concession.

Rahm Emanuel, a man who spent his career as the embodiment of pro-Israel Democratic centrism, now argues that the Israelis should pay for the Iron Dome themselves. The New York Times is chasing Hasan Piker. Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist and child of the Third Worldism whose views on Israel require no explanation, sits in the mayor’s office in the largest city in the country, and the establishment figures who initially tried to hold him at arm’s length, from Schumer, to Jeffries, Gillibrand, have been drawn, with the aid of Obama, one by one, into the gravitational pull of the Third Worldist hatefest.

The establishment’s reasoning is basic strategic calculation: the left will not relent on Israel; a civil war inside the party over the Jewish state would destroy the coalition; therefore, the rational move is to concede this issue, preserve party unity, and proceed with the moderate agenda on everything else: affordability, climate, migration, AI, etc. Feed this one thing to the beast, and the beast will be satisfied. It is an intelligent calculation, a genius one, really, but it is also a catastrophic one, because it rests on a complete misapprehension of what is being conceded and to whom.

The first error is the assumption that anti-Zionism is a position, a policy preference, a discrete item on a list of demands that can be granted in exchange for quiet on the remaining items. No, no, no. This is a major category error. Anti-Zionism is not a position. It is a worldview, and a worldview does not function the way individual policy preferences do. A policy preference can be traded: you give me this, I give you that, and we both go home. A worldview is the structure within which all positions are generated, the logic that determines which sentences can be spoken and which cannot, and when you concede the worldview, you have not bought peace on the other questions. You have conceded the very logic by which all the other questions will be decided.

Anti-Zionism is the keystone of the decolonial mentalité, the foundation of Third Worldist resentment, the case study around which the entire system of colonizer and colonized, settler and indigene, white and nonwhite, oppressor and oppressed, achieves its most concentrated political force. It is where the theoretical rubber meets the real road, where the theory meets an actual state, an actual conflict, an actual set of policy levers, and becomes, in the world of its grandfather, world. Conceding it does not quiet the theory. It does not quiet anything but validates the movement, and the movement then proceeds to apply itself, with the momentum of a successful campaign of destruction, to the next question and the next, and the next, and the next. Nothing will be spared. NY Times facing backlash for calling Hasan Piker "progressive in a MAGA body" : r/popculturechat The Democrats’ new Charlie Kirk

The second error is that the liberal establishment treats the decolonial left as though it were a moral movement; a coalition of idealists whose passion on this one subject must be accommodated because the passion is about something real and the moral claim has traction. This is the view from the outside, from the surface, and it is wrong. What is at work inside the American left on the Israel question is not, or not primarily, some moral awakening. It is an inter-elite ruthless competition for institutional position, and anti-Zionism is the instrument through which that war of position is being waged.

Spain’s Jewish Question

On March 10, 2026, Spain’s Council of Ministers officially terminated the appointment of its ambassador to Israel, Ana María Salomón Pérez, formalizing a diplomatic standoff that had been building for months. Pérez had first been recalled for consultations on Sep. 9, 2025, hours after Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar accused the Sánchez government of antisemitism, and had never returned. The permanent recall is the culmination of a steady deterioration since Oct. 7, 2023, during which Sánchez recognized Palestinian statehood, imposed a military embargo, and banned weapons-carrying vessels headed to Israel from Spanish ports. The most recent trigger was Spain’s vocal opposition to the U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran, leading Israel to expel Spain from the Civil-Military Coordination Center in Kiryat Gat, which oversees the cease-fire in the Gaza Strip. Sánchez has only doubled down. At a recent rally in Andalucia, where his party is trailing, he said he would push for the European Union to break its commercial ties with Israel: “A government that violates international law or the principles of the EU cannot be its partner.”

Sánchez’s anti-Israel posture is not just foreign policy. Rather, its calculation is mostly domestic. As corruption scandals engulf his party, Sánchez’s approval rating has cratered to 25.7%, with 69.6% disapproval. The anti-Israel turn plays well at home regardless: Since November 2023, Spanish sympathy toward Palestinians has grown by 16.5 points, nearly 57% of Spaniards consider what is happening in Gaza a genocide, and a Pew poll found 75% have unfavorable views of Israel.

One could frame Sánchez’s anti-Israel posture as part of a broader European left turn catering to Muslim voters, as expressed in parties such as France’s La France Insoumise and their equivalents in Belgium and the United Kingdom. I find this explanation reductionist. More importantly, it doesn’t apply to Spain. Unlike France and the United Kingdom, where Muslim voters number in the millions, only an estimated 800,000 Muslims have the right to vote in Spain, about 2% of the electorate. Muslim migration to Spain is a relatively recent phenomenon, accelerating in the late 1990s and early 2000s, compared to France’s and the United Kingdom’s postwar guest-worker programs that brought migrants half a century earlier. Spain itself was an exporter of labor through most of the second half of the 20th century. As a result, over half of Spain’s Muslim population does not yet have citizenship. Sánchez did recently regularize half a million immigrants—but they cannot vote yet, and most come from Latin America, not Muslim-majority countries.

There is simply no need to invoke Muslim electoral pressure to explain anti-Israel sentiment in Spain, because Sánchez’s position is rooted in something older and more specifically Spanish: a particular brand of antisemitism, anti-Americanism, and anti-Israeli sentiment with its own deep history.

After the Civil War and during Francisco Franco’s 40-year rule, Spain’s history was insulated from the rest of Europe. Although Franco was more aligned with the Nazis, Spain did not suffer or participate directly in World War II. Ironically, the country served as a conduit both for Jews escaping Nazism and for Nazis escaping prosecution afterward. This is also a reason Spain, unlike Austria or Germany, never faced the pressure of dealing publicly or institutionally with its inherent antisemitism.

Spain was the last country in Western Europe (aside from Vatican City) to formally recognize Israel, doing so only in 1986 as a condition of joining the European Economic Community—after decades during which Franco promoted a mythical Jewish-Masonic conspiracy as a foundational threat to Spain. As with many of Franco’s legacies, the country was quick to turn the page; there was no historic accountability for four decades of institutionalized instrumentalization of antisemitism. Those unexamined attitudes have proven durable: The ADL’s Global 100 survey places Spain as the Western European country with the highest level of antisemitic attitudes, at 26%—ahead of Belgium (24%), France (17%), Germany (12%), and the United Kingdom (10%).

Swiss National Council votes against recognizing Palestinian state

Switzerland's National Council voted 116-66 against recognizing Palestine as a state, with 11 abstentions, on Tuesday.

The proposal was put forward by the Geneva Canton, which requested that Switzerland recognize the state of Palestine and “make every possible effort to establish a just and lasting peace between Israel and Palestine, notably inspired by the Geneva Initiative.”

The Foreign Affairs Committee of the National Council, which considered the proposal, said that while it "condemns the massacres taking place in the Middle East," a majority concluded that conditions are not yet in place to recognize a Palestinian state.

It cited international law, which requires three main conditions to be met before recognizing a state: a permanent population, a defined territory, and an independent and functioning government.

The committee found the third condition to be lacking, as there is no functioning organization to govern Palestine.

The Palestinian Authority does not exercise unified and effective state authority over the entire territory
“Recognizing Palestine in the current situation would send a problematic signal,” said Erich Vontobel of the Swiss People’s Party, Zurich. “Gaza remains under Hamas control. Hamas opposes peace, openly seeks Israel’s destruction, and is classified by Switzerland as a terrorist organization.

“Meanwhile, the Palestinian Authority does not exercise unified and effective state authority over the entire territory.”

Furthermore, the majority of the committee also believes recognition now would “run counter to Swiss neutrality and jeopardize Switzerland’s role as mediator in seeking peace.”

It therefore concluded that it is currently too early for Switzerland to recognize Palestine, but that this does not call into question support for a two-state system in the longer term.

04/29 Links Pt1: Two Jews stabbed in Golders Green; These blood libels are endangering Jews; Navy begins intercepting Gaza flotilla; Iran’s Hormuz toll plan falters as Gulf nations side with US

From Ian:

The Golders Green attack was sickeningly predictable

It was only last month that four ambulances, operated by the Jewish Hatzola charity, were set ablaze in Golders Green. One of the more slyly heartbreaking details to emerge from the horror in Golders Green this morning is that Hatzola volunteers treated the stabbing victims at the scene. One of their surviving ambulances spirited one of the bloodied men to hospital. You could not find a grimmer metaphor for the threat to life and limb that is now faced by Britain’s tiny, embattled Jewish community.

It is now impossible to ignore. Back in 2024, were it not for a successful operation by undercover officers from Greater Manchester Police, British Jews would have suffered a massacre on the scale of Bondi Beach. In February this year, two foreign-born ISIS fanatics were locked up for plotting to gun down Jews in Manchester. Porous borders, homegrown Islamic extremism, and leftist useful idiocy have put a target on Jews’ backs.

While the Labour government has offered little more than a tepid bath of thoughts and prayers, the leaders of the ‘anti-racist’ left have basically told Jews to relax. Last week, Green Party leader Zack Polanski, having been asked about the spate of anti-Semitic attacks, said ‘there’s a conversation to be had about whether it’s a perception of unsafety or whether it’s actual unsafety’. Meanwhile, Green local-election candidates continue to be outed as pond-scum Jew haters, calling the recent firebombings ‘false flags’ and openly saying things like, ‘it takes serious effort not to be a tiny bit anti-Semitic’.

How long are Jews supposed to put up with this? Long before October 7, and the carnivals of anti-Semitism posing as ‘pro-Palestine’ demos, they suffered a level of menace no other community would be expected to tolerate. Long before Hamas’s butchers and rapists ploughed into Israel, and Islamists and leftists took to our city centres to celebrate, British Jews made up 0.5 per cent of the population and a quarter of the victims of religious hate crimes. They sent their kids to schools behind high fences, with security guards and routine police patrols. Their elders were suckerpunched in the streets. Their cemeteries were routinely desecrated.

Now the sewers have well and truly burst. This is a national emergency. It requires action, not mere words. If we do not stand with British Jews now, then we can no longer claim to be a civilised nation. Certainly, we cannot claim to be surprised when the next attack rolls around.

Brendan O'Neill: These blood libels are endangering Jews

Truth is not the intention here – demonisation is. You can tell this from the frenzied podcast Jones made to accompany his batshit article. Reading and writing about the ‘indescribably horrific’ crime of Israeli dog-rape was like ‘opening a door to the darkest recesses of Hell’, he says. ‘You will rightly ask yourself’, he says to listeners waiting with lolling tongues for yet further confirmation of Israel’s wickedness, ‘how any human being could possibly imagine these crimes, let alone actually perpetrate them’.

This isn’t journalism. It’s certainly not anti-imperialism. It is nothing I would recognise as ‘progressive’ commentary. It is a medieval morality play, where the mob is invited to marvel and gag over the fathomless depravity of the Jewish State. It is of a piece with Jones’s religious mania over Israel, a nation he says is ‘uniquely murderous’ and in the grip of a ‘genocidal mania’. As for its ‘cheerleaders’, who have succumbed to ‘depravity’, he hopes they will be ‘haunted by the souls of the slaughtered Palestinians… until the end of time’. These are the ramblings of a mind rendered unstable by obsessive, one-eyed loathing for Israel.

The dog-rape tale leaves no doubt – ancient blood libels are being rehashed in the phoney langage of ‘criticism of Israel’. The Jewish people were once accused of lusting after the blood of Christian children – now the Jewish State is accused of intentionally murdering Palestinian children. The Jews were once said to be the secret puppetmasters of politics – now the Jewish nation is said to have the mighty West eating from the palm of its hand. Jews were once branded as agents of Satan, doing his diabolical work on Earth – now they are said to deploy dogs in their genocidal crimes and in the process are ‘opening a door to the darkest recesses of Hell’. Are we seriously expected to believe it is wholly coincidental that all the dangerous shit that was once said about Jews is now said about the Jewish State? Yeah, I’m not buying it. To me, it feels like medieval calumnies are being reanimated on the altar of a deranged loathing for the world’s only Jewish nation.

That Francesca Albanese is spreading the dog-rape story takes the blood-libel crisis to a whole new level. This is a UN official. These are dangerous times. There was a stabbing in Golders Green just today. History tells us that blood libels beget violence. Burnings and pogroms followed the medieval myths about Jews being child-killers and well-poisoners. In the past year, we’ve seen Jews in England be violently attacked and stabbed by people calling them baby-killers. How long before the knife is wielded by monsters calling them rapist dogs, too?

Seth Mandel: Anti-Jewish Anarchy in London

This is merely Iranian opportunism, however. The UK’s longstanding problem with anti-Semitism was waiting to be exploited. The cell seems to be having no trouble finding all these single-use recruits. At their best, the police are simply not up to the task of policing. At their worst—as happened in Birmingham last year—they have essentially colluded with the anti-Semites and fabricated anti-Jewish talking points.

Which is to say that the atmosphere of Jew-hunting in London and Manchester is the fault of those who govern London and Manchester. The ruling Labour Party has demonized the Jewish state and stood with its hands in its pockets as the natural results of that vilification—violence against Jewish Britons—commenced and increased. The Green Party has managed to come back from the electoral fringe by repositioning itself solely as a refuge for the “Gaza left,” a riotously anti-Semitic group of political lowlifes gaining ground in local and municipal elections at an alarming clip thanks to its focus on Jew-baiting.

Iran didn’t make Jew-hatred popular in London and Manchester; it took advantage of it, making it even deadlier. Such anti-Semitism has been on broad display since October 7, and the government of Keir Starmer and David Lammy did nothing but throw occasional fuel on the fire.

Speaking of which: Today’s attacks come while King Charles III is visiting the U.S. The king gave a rousing speech to Congress yesterday and his visit was carefully crafted to buck up the transatlantic alliance. And while the Crown’s diplomatic competence was reassuring to watch, it also highlighted the fact that the United Kingdom has no real head of government. Starmer is prime minister, but he is an unpopular fool with no gravitas and no talent for governing and spectacularly poor judgment. The term “lame duck” does insufficient justice to the contempt Sir Keir’s peers have for him, a contempt Starmer has earned.

The longer Starmer stays in office, the more London and its environs descend into anarchic Jew-purging. His mere presence at 10 Downing is a disgrace, but his exit would be only the beginning of a long process to fix what’s broken.

As for right now: Protect the Jews of Britain, for God’s sake, or enable them to protect themselves.

Seth Mandel: An Apology Would Be Nice, But It Isn’t Enough

When Australian authorities announced they would restrict the routes that pro-Palestinian marches were allowed to follow two months ago, it was because of the impending visit of Israel’s head of state. When UK officials suggested today that they support heavily restricting pro-Palestinian marches, it was because they don’t know how to get “anti-Zionists” to stop constantly trying to murder Jews.

The explanations were slightly different, but the underlying problem was exactly the same: not one of these so-called protests is free of foaming-at-the-mouth pogromniks. Their slogans unambiguously call for violence against Jews anywhere in the world, and violence against Jews almost inevitably follows.

In America, where even anti-Semitic lunatics have free-speech rights, the institutions of democracy—universities, political bodies, etc.—had a responsibility to counter the Hamasniks’ bad speech with good speech. Instead, they ceded the field to Beijing-backed terrorism supporters. Joe Biden said the demonstrators “have a point.” University administrators invited lawlessness, and their faculties went on teaching anti-Jewish conspiracy theories.

The result was that commencement ceremonies had to be canceled or live student speeches had to be removed from the programs, restrictions that will continue at many of this year’s ceremonies. That is, school administrators reached the same conclusion that institutional authorities reached in Britain and in Australia: Every single time so-called anti-Zionist activists are given the floor, they will whip up anti-Jewish bloodlust.

Jonathan Hall, a UK government adviser on anti-Semitism policy, reportedly told Times Radio today after the stabbings in Golders Green: “It pains me to say this, but I think we may have reached a point where we need to have a moratorium on the sorts of marches that have been happening. It’s clearly impossible at the moment for any of these pro-Palestine marches not to incubate within them some sort of anti-Semitic or demonizing language.”