Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Friday, May 01, 2026

05/01 Links Pt1: Trump ‘not satisfied’ with latest Iranian proposal to end war; The Gaza Numbers Debate: Who Was Right?; The World's Shameful Silence on Hamas

From Ian:

Trump ‘not satisfied’ with latest Iranian proposal to end war

U.S. President Donald Trump told reporters at the White House on Friday that he is “not satisfied” with Iran’s latest proposal to end the ongoing conflict.

“They want to make a deal, but I don’t. I’m not satisfied with it, so we’ll see what happens,” Trump said. “Iran wants to make a deal, because they have no military left.”

“They’re asking for things that I can’t agree to,” he added.

Iran sent the proposal through mediators on Thursday, though details remain unclear. “They want to make a deal so badly, but they’re not there yet,” Trump told reporters. “In my opinion, they’re not there.”

“Do you want to go blast the hell out of ’em and finish them forever, or do we want to try and make a deal?” he said.

The president added that he’d prefer not to continue military strikes. “On a human basis, I’d prefer not, but that’s the option,” he told reporters.

Asked if he was considering new strikes on Iran, Trump said, “Why would I tell you that?

“Right now, we have negotiations going on,” the president said. “They’re not getting there. They are very disjointed. They’re extremely disjointed. They’re not able to get along with each other as leaders. They don’t know who the leader is.”

Trump noted that this puts the United States “in a bad position,” because separate groups in Iranian leadership want different deals.

The president dismissed the need for congressional authorization for further U.S. military action against Iran, arguing that other presidents have considered the War Powers Resolution “unconstitutional” and “exceeded” the law’s 60-day limit. Trump added that the current ceasefire reset the timeline.

US pulling 5,000 troops from Germany amid spat with Trump over Iran war

The United States is withdrawing 5,000 troops from NATO ally Germany, the Pentagon announced on Friday, as a rift over the Iran war widens between US President Donald Trump and Europe.

Trump had threatened a drawdown in forces earlier this week after sparring with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, who said on Monday the Iranians were humiliating the US in talks to end the two-month-old war and that he did not see what exit strategy Washington was pursuing.

A senior Pentagon official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said recent German rhetoric had been “inappropriate and unhelpful.”

“The president is rightly reacting to these counterproductive remarks,” the official said.

The Pentagon said the withdrawal was expected to be completed over the next six to 12 months. Germany is home to some 35,000 active-duty US military personnel, more than anywhere else in Europe.

The official said the drawdown would bring US troop levels in Europe back to roughly pre-2022 levels, before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine triggered a buildup by then-president Joe Biden.

The official also cast the decision in terms of the Trump administration’s push for Europe to become the main security provider on the continent. But it is nonetheless another potent reminder of Trump’s willingness to respond to perceived disloyalty by allies.

IDF official says Iran war will be ‘one big failure’ if enriched uranium not removed

A senior Israeli military official said on Friday that if Iran’s stockpile of more than 400 kilograms of highly enriched uranium is not removed from the country in the wake of the recent war, the campaign could be considered “one big failure.”

Israeli officials have said that this stockpile is sufficient for 11 nuclear bombs if enriched further. Iran has long maintained that its program is peaceful, despite enriching uranium at near-weapons-grade levels.

Israel launched its campaign against Iran on February 28, alongside the United States, to degrade the Iranian regime’s military capabilities, distance threats posed by Iran — including its nuclear and ballistic missile programs — and “create the conditions” for the Iranian people to topple the regime, the military and other Israeli leaders have said.

The senior officer said that if, under the ongoing negotiations between the US and Iran, no agreement is reached to remove the uranium stockpile and halt enrichment in the country, the achievements of the 40 days of fighting will have been for nothing.

“If the nuclear objective is not achieved, then everything we did in Iran will be one big failure. The evil Iranian regime can pounce on the nuclear program,” the official said during a briefing for reporters, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The officer added that “if the uranium is removed from Iran through diplomatic means, we have done our part.” However, if that does not happen, Israel would need to launch another operation in Iran to achieve the objective.

Periodic reminder the JCPOA was designed to protect Iran from pressure for a decade and flood it with cash so it could build up its economy and military, and then at the end it legalized an unlimited Iranian enrichment program so the regime could build a nuclear arsenal at will. https://t.co/MQQwjviD4v
— Omri Ceren (@omriceren) May 1, 2026

No, Israel Doesn't "Cause" Antisemitism. (Yehuda Teitelbaum)

The same argument keeps coming up every time diaspora Jews are attacked. It usually sounds something like this: no one supports antisemitism, no one wants Jews to be harmed, but given what Israel is doing, a rise in anger and even violence is an inevitable reaction. So let me ask a few questions.

Isn’t that just a justification with a polite disclaimer attached? When you tell the world that violence against Jews is an inevitable consequence of Israeli behavior, are you reporting on reality or are you constructing it? Because when you hand someone a grievance and tell them their anger is understandable, what exactly do you think is going to happen?

And if this is really about Israeli policy producing an inevitable outcome, why aren’t Russians being stabbed on the streets of London? Russia has committed a staggering amount of documented war crimes and is responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths at a minimum. Where’s the inevitable backlash against Russians?

The Chinese Communist Party runs an authoritarian repressive system with documented abuses on a massive scale. Where’s the inevitable violence against Chinese people in London? The inevitability only ever seems to apply to Jews. So is it really about the behavior of governments, or is something else going on?

And if the violence is a rational response to Israeli policy, shouldn’t it at least be directed at people who actually support that policy? Do you think the attackers stop and ask their victims where they stand on Israeli settlement policy before they act? Do they check whether the person wearing a kippah supports Netanyahu or opposes him? Because who tends to get targeted in these attacks? Visibly Orthodox Jews. And which Jewish group tends to be among the most critical and ideologically opposed to the Israeli government? Ultra-Orthodox Jews. There are some Hasidic sects who oppose the political state of Israel entirely on religious grounds. Did the attacker in Golders Green know that? Did he care? So what exactly does Israeli government policy have to do with any of this? If this were really an inevitable political response to Israeli actions, wouldn’t the attackers at least be going after the “right Jews”?

When people say Israel is responsible for antisemitism, which Israel do they mean? The State of Israel, meaning the Jewish people governing themselves in their ancestral homeland? Or are they talking about Netanyahu specifically? Because Netanyahu can barely hold a coalition together in his own Knesset. Do you really think he speaks for world Jewry?

When people get accused of fostering hatred toward Jews, they immediately point to Jews like Zack Polanski and say Jews aren’t a monolith, they don’t all support Israel, stop painting us as antisemitic. So then why, when they want to explain away attacks on Jews, do they turn around and treat every Jew as a unified pro-Israel bloc? Which is it? Either Jewish opinion on Israel is diverse and cannot be used to justify targeting Jews, or it isn’t. You don’t get to use that argument in both directions depending on what’s convenient.

And before we even get to policy, is there any other country on earth where the debate isn’t about government policy but about whether the country has a right to exist at all? Any other country where that question is treated as a serious and legitimate one? Because that conversation only ever comes up about Israel. So when people say they’re just criticizing Israeli policy, are they being honest with themselves?

Consider Donald Trump. Arguably the most hated political figure in Europe, certainly in London. Does anyone accuse Londoners of being anti-American for despising him? Does anyone accuse Americans of being unpatriotic for disagreeing with his policies, just as nobody did with Joe Biden? Why does opposition to a government become a justification for Jews, anywhere, to bear the consequences? Why does that logic exist nowhere else on earth? Why only Israel? Why only us?

Even if you accept, for the sake of argument, the premise being pushed, that Jews broadly support the worst accusations leveled at the Israeli government, since when does holding a political opinion about a conflict thousands of miles away justify being stabbed in the street? Reprehensible views exist among British citizens, as they do in any society. They do not get hunted down for it. Jews in England are openly anxious about their safety right now, and yet nobody expects them to retaliate by attacking random people who disagree with them. No one who spends their time demonizing Jews is looking over their shoulder, worried that the Jewish community will respond in kind.

What’s really happening is a reversal of cause and effect. Does Israel cause antisemitism? Or does antisemitism, ancient and adaptable, always finding a new justification, cause these attacks? And when every Jew stabbed in the diaspora is another rung on the ladder of Aliyah, when Jews watch the government response and the public response and find it abysmal, can you really blame them for drawing the obvious conclusion? That there is one country on earth where the government is constitutionally committed to protect them? Is it really a mystery why that country keeps looking more appealing?

So what does England want to do? Does it want to keep blaming Israel, muddying the waters, treating Jewish safety as a geopolitical debate, while things get worse and worse until it isn’t only Jews bearing the consequences? Or does it want to say clearly that it will not allow its citizens to be stabbed in the streets?

If England can’t say that and mean it, then it should at least be honest with its Jewish community. Why keep them waiting in limbo for a protection that isn’t coming? Why not just tell them the truth?

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

New York mayor Zohran Mamdani tweeted a video showing two people, one wearing a keffiyeh, knocking on doors in New York City to get people more involved in rent discussions.

Jews immediately recognized the keffiyeh as a symbol of hate. Meanwhile, fans of the scarf claim that it is merely a symbol of solidarity.

We've looked at this question before. There is not even a doubt - Palestinians and Palestinian activists recognize the keffiyeh to symbolize terrorism, which they call "resistance."

About 15 years ago there was a popular Palestinian song called "Ali Al-Kufiya," or "Raise Your Keffiyeh." It is a dance tune that includes lyrics like

Let the gunpowder rejoice and sweeten it
Let the gunpowder rejoice and raise its voice
The first bullet tells the story of the journey,
On the day of battle, we light the paths of victory.

There is no ambiguity in Arabic as to what the keffiyeh symbolizes. It is violence and terrorism.

Everything else is meant to gaslight Westerners.

Mamdani knows what it means. He is trying to normalize terror against Jews in New York - to "globalize the intifada."

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

The Caledonian Mercury, May 24, 1726, relayed a dispatch from Warsaw dated May 4:

A Priest of this City who was going to Cracow to gain the Benefit of the Jubilee, having found a Christian Infant on the Road, which was stabbed through and through, took it up and carried it before a Court of Justice: And the Students of this City thinking that the Jews were the Murderers, got the Mob together to be revenged on that People, of whom they killed severals, and would have proceeded to greater Mischief, had they not been restrained by the Garrison.

An antisemitic claim circulates. It is unverified and almost always fabricated.

Jews as a whole are presumed collectively responsible.

University students are in the forefront of the mob.

Anti-Jewish violence follows, or is attempted — and nobody is surprised.

Poland in 1726 was considered one of the more tolerant environments for Jews in Europe. The laws protected them. The garrison/police showed up but not in time to stop the violence. And really, no amount of police will ever stop a motivated mob that can attack anywhere at any time.

This sounds a lot like England is in 2026.

In Golders Green on Wednesday, it took police four minutes to arrive. They could never have prevented the attacks. Even if they were on every street corner, a murderer can strike.

The attacks were prompted not by facts nor by concern of innocent lives. Then, like now, they are prompted by hate which uses morality as a pretext.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

04/30 Links Pt2: Anti-Zionism is a menace to every Jew on Earth; Being Jewish in Britain means living in a security ghetto; NYTs platforms professor who imagined joining terrorists on Oct. 7

From Ian:

Brendan O'Neill:Anti-Zionism is a menace to every Jew on Earth

It is staggering the extent to which anti-Zionists refuse to be bound by the linguistic rules they enforce on everyone else. These are people who think JK Rowling is responsible for anti-trans violence because she says men aren’t women, and who will accuse you of playing with ‘Islamophobic’ fire if you comment on the rape gangs. And yet apparently their cruel, ceaseless, voluble and entirely disproportionate loathing for the world’s only Jewish nation – and for everyone who supports it, which includes most British Jews – has no impact whatsoever. It magically exists above the grubby fray of cause and effect that the lowly speech of us riff-raff is compelled to inhabit.

Apparently, our measured opinions cause violence, whereas their meticulously constructed and ruthlessly enforced culture of burning animus for the Jewish nation causes nothing. And woe betide the Jew who says it does. He shall be found guilty of ‘weaponising anti-Semitism’ to silence ‘critics of Israel’. See how cynical the Jews are? They will even marshall and monetise their own historic suffering – the Holocaust, 7 October, recent atrocities in Britain – to the end of protecting their precious genocidal homeland from the decent-hearted critique of pacifist Brits. They lie, and they do so for slippery reasons of dual loyalty – that’s what anti-Zionists are saying when they tar Jews as ‘weaponisers’ simply for saying something they themselves say every day: that words have consequences.

Can we cut the crap? Our moral emergency is too pressing. This is the truth: the industry of hatred for the Jewish nation is endangering Jewish people everywhere. It is not merely opinion – it is a vast system of moral instruction enforced through the institutions of education and culture which singles out Zionism as the most repulsive ideology of our time, and Zionists as enablers of apartheid, settler-colonialism and genocide. Golders Green is full of Zionists. I know some of them. They are good people. Yet according to the ideological superstructure of anti-Zionism, they are agents of chaos, facilitators of crime and simps for a regime whose crimes are so uniquely barbarous that even just reflecting on them can feel like ‘opening a door to the darkest recesses of Hell’. It is utterly untenable to say anti-Zionism is not the cause of anti-Jewish violence.

‘It is morally consistent to oppose both anti-Semitism and Israel’s genocide’, said armies of leftists after Golders Green. Actually, it isn’t. For it is the latter – the ceaseless defamation of ‘the Zionist entity’ as a genocidal machine that lusts after the blood of innocents – that inflames the former. There is a determined effort to draw a moral distinction between ‘real anti-Semitism’, like that in Golders Green, and anti-Zionism. No, no, no. Anti-Zionism is the foul soil in which violent Jew hate has taken root. It is the most menacing hate movement of our time. It has power and clout. It is the ideology of the new ruling class. It is ruthlessly communicated through the digital highways and popular culture. And it is hanging a target sign around the necks of Jews everywhere on Earth. It must be defeated, urgently.

Being Jewish in Britain means living in a security ghetto

Don’t you just hate it when your kids need a security briefing to go to primary school? Isn’t it annoying to have airport-style security at your place of worship so that congregants aren’t murdered?

If you’re Jewish in Britain, this is the reality. We don’t live our lives like normal British citizens any more. We live in a security ghetto – one where tolerant Britain is fading away.

This week – before two Jewish men were stabbed in Golders Green, north London, in an attack police declared a terrorist incident – my better half and I were due to attend a documentary screening by a Jewish-Israeli journalist. We worked out that, given the risk, only one of us should go, so our child would still have a parent if something happened. These are the kind of calculations British Jews now make.

The security services have advised friends’ children to hide their school uniforms when travelling to and from their fortified Jewish schools. Children are asked to conceal what they are in case it upsets racists.

I don’t hide my Star of David on public transport – I don’t mind the glares. The exception is medical appointments. Almost every Jew I know does the same. It is hard not to, when doctors feel free to post Nazi-grade racism under their own names on social media (I’ve been shown a private Facebook group of nearly 17,000 GPs, where anti-Jewish hatred was expressed openly and seldom challenged). And we’re to trust these people to treat us when we are at our most vulnerable?

Soon, it will be my turn again. My turn to put on a stab-proof vest, stand alongside a paid security guard, and guard the gates of my own synagogue. Everyone in the community who can will take a turn. Every synagogue in Britain that I know of runs the same rota. Metal gates. CCTV. Volunteers in body armour. This is what worship looks like now.

Incidents happen when you least expect them. The day before my son’s bar mitzvah, I went to the synagogue to drop off wine. As I left and the gate shut behind me, I turned and saw a man I didn’t know inside the grounds. Scruffy, well-built, tattooed, wearing a vest. He had scaled the perimeter fence as I was leaving and was heading for the door.

I went back in and confronted him. I barely had time to register the backpack.

He was looking around, taking in the layout. I took his picture and shepherded him out. On the pavement, he dropped into the Islamic prayer position. The rest of my day was spent with the police and the Community Security Trust, the Jewish security charity.

DOJ’s Harmeet Dhillon compares contemporary antisemitism of ‘educated elites’ to 1930s Germany

In a speech at a federal government commemoration of the Holocaust on Thursday, Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon argued that the post-Oct. 7 wave of antisemitism in the U.S. resembles 1930s Germany and warned that modern bigotry is often perpetrated by “educated elites” under the cover of intellectual language.

Dhillon, drawing on a speech that the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia gave at a Holocaust remembrance event nearly three decades ago, said that Germany’s reputation as an intellectual and scientific hub in the 1920s and 1930s is closely connected to the development of the Holocaust.

“The road to Auschwitz was incremental and methodical. It began with excluding Jews through the legal, political, economic and social life of everyday society,” Dhillon said. “Many perpetrators of the Holocaust were often the most educated intelligentsia in Germany.”

She was speaking at the 33rd annual Federal Interagency Holocaust Remembrance Program, an event organized by and for federal government employees. It took place in the Justice Department’s Great Hall, and as attendees arrived, they walked up a staircase lined with portraits of historic legal experts, like the Babylonian king Hammurabi. One showed Moses, pictured with the twin tablets of the Ten Commandments.

The fact that the perpetrators of the Holocaust often had advanced degrees and impressive credentials is relevant for our understanding of contemporary antisemitism, Dhillon said.

“Today we are experiencing a rise in antisemitism in the world, including right here at home. As in the past, it often begins with social exclusion. On some university campuses, Jews have been blocked by mobs from entering certain spaces,” said Dhillon. “As in 1930s Germany, these actions are often perpetrated by the educated elites of our nation, framed in intellectual language, giving them a veneer of legitimacy.”

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)