Resilience Versus the Politics of Grievance

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Resilience is a word we use so casually that we sometimes forget what it actually means. It comes from the idea of springing back: absorbing a blow without allowing the blow to determine what comes next.

Israel received an extraordinary demonstration of it Wednesday morning.

Flydubai Flight FZ1073 was flying from Dubai to Tel Aviv carrying roughly 150 Israelis when something went terribly wrong in the cockpit. The plane plunged rapidly, eventually transmitted the international code for unlawful interference and diverted to Saudi Arabia. Israeli officials now say they are investigating the incident as an attempted terrorist attack. According to Israeli officials cited in press reports, a pilot was stabbed during the cockpit struggle, and passengers and crew helped overpower the attacker. Everyone aboard survived.

The investigation is continuing, and some details remain unsettled. But the response aboard the aircraft is striking. A plane full of people suddenly drops thousands of feet. There is violence in the cockpit. Passengers realize their lives may depend upon what happens in the next few minutes. People act and the attacker is subdued. The aircraft lands.

That is resilience in its most compressed form.

Inside the cockpit chaos: Passengers describe blood, screams on Flydubai flight

For a slower version, look at Kibbutz Be’eri.

On October 7, 2023 Be’eri suffered a horrific massacre at the hands of jihadists from Gaza. Nearly three years later, its residents are rebuilding houses, schools and community facilities and preparing for a broader return. Most of the community says it wants to return. The rebuilding effort describes its purpose in the simplest possible terms: returning home rather than allowing jihadi terror to decide whether the community continues to exist.

That is resilience too. Not forgetting or forgiving. Not pretending nothing happened nor escaping grief. Rebuilding anyway.

There is another way some societies and movements can process grievance, and it has almost the opposite dynamic.

A grievance can become something to preserve rather than overcome. Suffering becomes justification for retaliation. Retaliation produces a counterattack. The counterattack becomes a new grievance. That grievance then justifies another attack. Instead of absorbing catastrophe and trying to restore ordinary life, the political ideology continually replenishes itself from catastrophe.

There is a name for this process: grievance-fueled radicalization. Over the course of a century, it has become the mantra of Palestinian Arabs.

Palestinian Arabs mutilate Israelis in Ramallah and hold bloody hands aloft to cheering crowd at start of Second Intifada in October 2000

And it is impossible to understand Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad without understanding how powerfully this mechanism operates within their ideology.

Hamas’ foundational charter did not merely object to particular Israeli borders or governments. It presented Palestine as an Islamic waqf that could not be surrendered and described the struggle over the land in explicitly religious terms. It was a call to “cleanse” the land of Jews and “Crusaders.”

Palestinian Islamic Jihad is even less ambiguous. The U.S. State Department has described PIJ as committed to Israel’s destruction and the creation of an Islamic state throughout historic Palestine, including present-day Israel.

Hamas and PIJ bring back body of dead woman to cheering crowds in Gaza on October 7, 2023

The Palestinian jihadi movement built around grievance can interpret the consequences of its own violence as additional evidence for the grievance that justified the violence in the first place.

Hamas political bureau member Ghazi Hamad supplied an unusually stark example after October 7. He argued that Israel itself was responsible for the bloodshed, said Hamas would repeat October 7 again and again, and rejected the idea that Israel had a legitimate place on the land.

Consider the circularity. Israel’s existence is a grievance > Hamas attacks Israel is resistance > Israel response is a new grievance.

The cycle reproduces itself indefinitely because almost every possible outcome feeds it.

That is fundamentally the opposite of resilience.

Resilience does not require forgetting a grievance. Israelis certainly have not forgotten October 7, just as the people of Be’eri have not forgotten what happened in their homes. Resilience is the decision that suffering will not become the organizing principle of everything that follows.

The passengers on FZ1073 did not have the luxury of theorizing about any of this. Their aircraft was falling. They fought for control of it.

Be’eri has been doing essentially the same thing for three years, only much more slowly: taking back control of what comes next.

Israel has built resilience around what comes after catastrophe: survive, rebuild and move forward. Palestinian jihadist movements have built their cause around grievance that must be preserved, intensified and avenged. Coexistence becomes possible only when their stated mission to eliminate the Jewish state no longer governs the conflict.

The Palestinian Authority Calls Your Jews Terrorists

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The Palestinian Authority has a problem with Jews praying at Judaism’s holiest site.

Its Western supporters have a different problem. They keep telling us the Palestinian Authority is moderate, peaceful and reformed.

This week provides a useful test of both claims.

Sukkot is one of Judaism’s three ancient pilgrimage holidays. Jews have traveled to Jerusalem for Sukkot for thousands of years. They still do, including from around the world.

The United States is by far the largest source of foreign tourists to Israel. In August, Americans accounted for roughly 35 percent of foreign tourists, followed by France at 13 percent and Britain at 8 percent. Together, those three countries supplied about 56 percent of Israel’s foreign tourists.

Sukkot brings Jews to Jerusalem to do what Jewish pilgrims have done for generations: celebrate the holiday, carry the Four Species and pray.

This week, 1,731 Jews visited the Temple Mount in a single day. They carried lulavim and etrogim. They gathered together. They prayed. They sang.

The Palestinian Authority’s official news agency called Jews doing this “terrorist colonists.”

WAFA’s own account described the supposed terrorism: they “performed Talmudic rituals and prayers, sang in groups, and engaged in clapping.”

Praying. Singing. Clapping.

Now consider what the political leaders back home have been saying about the Palestinian Authority.

French President Emmanuel Macron has pointed to Mahmoud Abbas’s commitment to fighting hate speech and placed a renewed Palestinian Authority at the center of his vision for a Palestinian state.

Britain says a Palestinian state should be led by a “reformed Palestinian Authority.”

The European Union has praised the PA’s reform agenda and backed it with substantial financial support.

American politicians have joined in.

Senator Chris Van Hollen has said the Palestinian Authority “seeks to accomplish its goals through non-violent means.”

Nineteen Democratic senators—including some of the Senate’s most progressive members—called for a Palestinian state governed by a “revitalized and reformed Palestinian Authority.” Their proposed framework specifically demanded that the PA combat “incitement to violence” and that its senior officials commit to nonviolence.

Perhaps they should read its official news service.

Senator Chris Van Hollen

Western governments have constructed the Palestinian Authority as the moderate alternative to Hamas: secular rather than Islamist, peaceful rather than violent, reforming rather than inciting.

Meanwhile, its official news agency looks at Jews celebrating Sukkot at Judaism’s holiest site and calls them “terrorist colonists.”

Jews travel to Jerusalem for Sukkot from America, France, Britain and elsewhere. They pray together. They sing. They carry their lulavim and etrogim. Then they return home.

They are your Jews. Your citizens.

Yet their own governments are actively aligning themselves with an authority whose official media labels Jews terrorists for peacefully practicing their religion at Judaism’s holiest site.

Macron should be asked whether this is the hate speech Abbas promised to fight. Britain and the European Union should explain how it fits their description of a reformed PA. And the American senators who specifically demanded that a revitalized PA combat incitement should decide whether calling Jewish worshippers terrorists qualifies.

These leaders now have a choice.

They can condemn the Palestinian Authority for calling Jews peacefully practicing their religion “terrorist colonists.” Or they can continue embracing it as moderate and reformed.

Governments cannot proclaim their opposition to antisemitism at home while ignoring it in the Palestinian Authority they champion abroad.

If Western leaders still call the Palestinian Authority moderate after it calls Jews “terrorists” for praying, they are no longer describing moderation. They are excusing jihadi antisemitism.

When Jewish Prayer Became “Terrorism”

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For the Palestinian Authority, Jews who visit Jerusalem during Sukkot, one of Judaism’s three pilgrimage holidays, are “terrorist colonists.”

What did these Jewish “terrorists” do? According to WAFA, the Palestinian Authority’s official news agency, they prayed, sang and clapped together. They gathered among themselves for peaceful Jewish worship at Judaism’s holiest site during a Jewish pilgrimage holiday.

This is terrorism?

This is the language of jihad. It begins by transforming ordinary religious practice into aggression. A Jew praying becomes a provocateur. A group singing together becomes a threat. A religious pilgrimage becomes an invasion. Once worshippers have been labeled “terrorists,” hostility toward them has already been given a vocabulary of supposed self-defense.

That is radical Islam applied to one of the most contested religious sites in the world: not simply insisting upon Muslim rights, but denying equivalent Jewish religious rights and portraying their exercise as an attack.

Every global leader taking the podium at the United Nations should condemn this screed. So should political leaders around the world asking voters to believe they oppose antisemitism and religious extremism.

The question is simple: Do you condemn the Palestinian Authority calling Jews engaged in prayer at their holiest site “terrorist colonists”?

Ignoring this rhetoric while rallying to the defense of the Palestinian Authority encourages the targeting of Jews around the world. The people WAFA describes are not firing weapons or fighting soldiers. They are Jews praying, singing and observing Sukkot.

Islamic supremacy does not only call for expelling every Jew. It also means insisting that Jews remain religiously subordinate – that Muslim prayer is a right while Jewish prayer is a provocation.

Calling Jewish worship terrorism is where the demand for Islamic domination becomes even darker. It turns Jews practicing Judaism into the enemy and fuels a global jihad.

The UN Held A Conference on Jerusalem’s Holy Sites. Where Were the Jews?

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In July, 2026 the United Nations and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation convened a conference in Cairo devoted to Jerusalem. The UN described Jerusalem as sacred to the three monotheistic religions and the conference as an “important platform for interreligious dialogue.”

Then it offered a remarkable description of what that dialogue looked like: “Muslim and Christian leaders reflected on Jerusalem’s profound significance to the three monotheistic faiths.”

Three religions. Two of them discussing what Jerusalem means to all three.

This was not a conference where religion was incidental. Its first substantive session was a two-hour panel titled “Saving the Holy City, Safeguarding the historic status quo at the Holy Sites.” The speakers included representatives of the Hashemite Fund for the Restoration of Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock, Al-Azhar, the Latin Patriarchate, the Jerusalem Awqaf and Al-Aqsa, and the Coptic Orthodox Church.

There was no Jewish religious representative.

That absence was consistent with the conference’s design. The UN announcement said the gathering would highlight the “concerns of Christian and Muslim leaders regarding restrictions on worship and threats to Holy Sites.”

Not Jewish leaders.

That left an empty chair at precisely the discussion where a Jewish voice might have asked some uncomfortable questions.

Start with the name of the place being discussed.

The conference repeatedly spoke of Al-Aqsa Mosque and Al-Haram al-Sharif. But this same 144-dunam platform is the Temple Mount, location of the First and Second Temples and the holiest site in Judaism. Yet throughout the conference, the Islamic name and Islamic religious administration were the starting point for discussing the site. Where was the Temple Mount? A conference devoted to Jerusalem’s “multireligious character” could have acknowledged both names.

Then there is the considerably larger question of worship.

The Cairo conference repeatedly invoked freedom of worship and access to sacred places. Yet the historic status quo it sought to protect has restricted Jewish prayer on the Temple Mount. Muslims worship there. Jews have historically been allowed to visit only during restricted periods but denied the same right to pray.

At Cairo, former Jerusalem Awqaf official Atallah Naser warned about “settler incursions and rituals” and what he considered an emerging “temporal and spatial division” of Al-Aqsa. Another speaker complained about increased “religious rituals” by Jews at the site.

At a conference about religious freedom, that should have produced an obvious question: Why is peaceful Jewish prayer at Judaism’s holiest site itself treated as a threat?

Nobody on the panel was there to ask it.

Nor was anyone there to ask why the practical restrictions on Jewish worship received so little attention:

  • Why should Jewish visits be confined to particular hours?
  • Why are Jews only allowed to enter the Temple Mount via single portal while Muslims can use any?
  • Why should Jewish religious practice require close police management?
  • Why does a conference concerned with restrictions imposed upon Muslim and Christian worshippers not apply the same scrutiny to restrictions affecting Jews?

Then there is the question of who administers the site.

Cairo speakers repeatedly defended the Islamic Waqf and Jordan’s Hashemite custodianship. The Waqf retains the central religious administrative role at a site that is the holiest place in Judaism. Why?

Why should Judaism’s holiest site have an Islamic religious authority but no corresponding Jewish religious authority? Why should Jewish representatives have no formal role in decisions involving Jewish worship there? Why not shared administration? Why not a multifaith governing or consultative structure? Why not Muslim administration of the mosques alongside recognized Jewish religious rights elsewhere on the enormous platform?

Those possibilities were apparently not part of Cairo’s “interreligious dialogue.”

Instead, the conference treated preservation of the “historic status quo” and protection of “freedom of worship” as though they necessarily meant the same thing.

They do not.

If the status quo restricts the religious practice of one faith at its holiest location, preserving that restriction is not the same question as protecting religious freedom.

Palestinian protesters wave Palestinian and Islamic flags as they rally at the Dome of the Rock following the last Friday prayers of the Muslim month of Ramadan, on April 29, 2022. (Photo by Ahmad GHARABLI / AFP)

UN Committee Chairman Coly Seck supplied the principle that should have started this discussion. “For Muslims, Christians and Jews,” he said, “Jerusalem carries prayers, history and hope.” He declared that freedom of worship is a right and that “No worshipper should be stopped because of who they are. No community should feel that its faith is being pushed out of its own city. Jerusalem’s religious character must not be used as a tool of control. It must remain a bridge connecting people from the three major faiths. A meeting point. A shared responsibility.”

Those words raise obvious questions about Jewish worship on the Temple Mount.

Cairo simply lacked someone at the table to ask them.

The United Nations called Jerusalem sacred to three religions and convened an interreligious dialogue in Cairo about protecting their holy places. But only Muslim and Christian representatives came. They pretended to discuss the religious interests of three faiths, while using it as an opportunity to blame all religious tension on the Jews not in the room.

A Siddur on the Temple Mount Is Now a “Highly Dangerous Development”

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A Jewish prayer book is now a “highly dangerous development” in the Middle East according to the region’s Muslim leaders.

That was the Arab League’s description Sunday of reports that Israeli police are testing allowing Jewish prayer books — siddurim — onto the Temple Mount. The League warned that allowing them could establish new Jewish religious practices and alter the “historical and legal status quo.”

It wasn’t the only alarm sounded during Sukkot.

Over 1,000 Jews visited the Temple Mount on Sunday, with some openly praying and carrying the Four Species.

For perspective, roughly 80,000 Muslims attended the first Friday prayers at Al-Aqsa during Ramadan earlier this year. In normal years, Ramadan Friday attendance can reach 200,000.

For the Muslim world, Muslims were “worshippers” while Jews were “extremist” Israelis conducting “Talmudic rituals.”

Jewish men covered in prayer shawls hold the Four Species as they take part in morning prayers during the holiday of Sukkot at the Cotton Merchant’s Gate entrance to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem’s Old City, September 27, 2026. (Chaim Goldberg/Flash90)

Palestinian Authority spokesman Nabil Abu Rudeineh warned that Israel risked transforming the political conflict into a “religious war.” He declared the entire 144 dunams of the Temple Mount an exclusively Muslim place of worship that cannot be divided or shared.

The reaction extends well beyond the Palestinian Authority.

Jordan condemned Sunday’s Jewish visits and again declared all 144 dunams exclusively Muslim. And Turkey, Egypt, Indonesia, Jordan, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have jointly used the same formulation: the entire compound is exclusively for Muslim worship and the Jordanian Waqf has exclusive jurisdiction to administer it and regulate entry.

Three weeks ago, I wrote about the effort to redefine the Temple Mount “status quo,” transforming restrictions on Jewish prayer into a broader claim that the entire compound is exclusively Muslim.

Sukkot takes the story further.

There is no question that Israel is changing its own practice. For decades, Israeli governments maintained the policy that Muslims prayed on the Temple Mount while non-Muslims visited. Israeli police restricted Jewish prayer and barred siddurim and other Jewish religious objects.

Israel observed those restrictions for decades. But it never enacted a permanent statutory ban on Jewish prayer or agreed that the entire Temple Mount would forever be exclusively Muslim.

Now Israel is allowing some Jews to worship at Judaism’s holiest site.

The response is not simply a demand that Israel return to its previous practice. Multiple Muslim governments are declaring that all 144 dunams are exclusively Muslim. The possibility of a Jew carrying a siddur is described as a “desecration of its sanctity,” and jihadi calls for a “religious war.”

And this is happening during Sukkot, one of Judaism’s three biblical pilgrimage festivals, historically centered on Jews traveling to Jerusalem and the Temple. Jews were making pilgrimage there during Sukkot more than a thousand years before Islam existed.

A small number of Jews praying peacefully at their holiest site during their pilgrimage holiday is used as incitement to jihad. And Muslim governments demanded that the “international community” take actions against the Jews.

Perhaps it is time for the international community to explain to radical Islamists what coexistence means.

Knowing What Time It Is

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We are in the middle of the Jewish holiday season, and Judaism has demanded a lot from us.

Rosh Hashanah asked us to stand in judgment. The Ten Days of Repentance asked us to examine ourselves. Yom Kippur demanded confession, fasting and repentance.

And then Judaism tells us to be happy.

Sukkot is zman simchateinu — the time of our joy.

The pivot can feel jarring. The melodies of Yom Kippur are still in our heads when we leave the synagogue, eat, begin building the sukkah and prepare for a holiday explicitly defined by happiness.

Kohelet, which Jews read on Sukkot, provides an answer: “There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens.”

A time to weep and a time to laugh. A time to mourn and a time to dance. A time to be silent and a time to speak. A time for war and a time for peace.

Kohelet does not suggest that human beings experience only one emotion at a time. We can mourn and feel gratitude. We can love and be angry. We can be frightened and hopeful.

But Kohelet points somewhere else: that emotions and activities do not only exist in time, but time is defined by emotion and activity.

Different moments call for different responses. The emotions we might personally carry do not relieve us of the obligation to recognize what the present moment demands.

Israel offers a powerful example today.

Israel has inflicted extraordinary damage on enemies that sought its destruction. Hamas and Hezbollah have been badly degraded, and Iran has suffered devastating blows. Israelis can feel enormous relief at what Israel has survived and accomplished.

At the same time, Israel faces extraordinary international hostility and diplomatic isolation. The image at the United Nations this week captured that reality starkly: as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took the podium, dozens of delegations walked out, leaving him addressing a largely empty chamber.

So what should Israelis feel today? Relief? Alarm? Both?

Kohelet does not require one feeling to vanquish the other. The challenge is recognizing which response the present moment calls for.

Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks captured something similar in describing the distinctive nature of joy: “Joy lives in the moment. It asks no questions about tomorrow. It celebrates the power of now.”

That may explain why Sukkot follows Yom Kippur so quickly. Judaism does not give us weeks to transition from solemnity to celebration. We finish fasting and begin building a sukkah. We do not need to resolve every worry before experiencing joy. As Rabbi Sacks continued, joy “knows that yesterday has gone and tomorrow is unknown.”

Tomorrow will bring whatever tomorrow brings. Kohelet asks us to recognize today.

Zman simchateinu. This is the time for joy.

The Palestinian Clock Has Many Hands

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The Palestinian clock has many hands.

One points to June 1967 for borders, East Jerusalem and the West Bank.

Another points to 1948 for refugees and their descendants.

Another reaches to 1947, before the United Nations proposed dividing Mandatory Palestine into Jewish and Arab states.

Another reaches to 1917, before the Balfour Declaration endorsed a Jewish national home in Palestine.

And when even that is too late, the clock can be wound back to the Ottoman era, when Palestine was governed by a Muslim empire.

Muslim women prepare to enter the Western Wall Plaza in 2010 (photo: First One Through)

The hands do not need to agree. They serve different purposes.

The President of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas has spent decades demonstrating how it works.

1967: The Border Hand

For the borders of a Palestinian state, Abbas is precise.

In his 2016 address to the United Nations, he said the PLO had accepted a Palestinian state on the “4 June 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as its capital.”

He has repeated the formulation for years. In 2014, he called for Palestinian independence over the “entire Palestinian Territory occupied in the 1967 war,” with East Jerusalem as its capital. In 2022, standing beside President Joe Biden, Abbas again called for a Palestinian state “with East Jerusalem as its capital, on the 1967 borders.”

Why June 4, 1967? Look at the picture the clock produces.

There were no Jews living in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City. Its Jewish residents had been expelled after the Quarter fell to Jordanian forces in 1948. By June 1967, Hebron’s centuries-old Jewish community no longer existed either, evacuated after Palestinian Arabs massacred them in 1929.

Jordanian soldiers destroyed the Hurva Synagogue in the Old City of Jerusalem

So June 4, 1967 creates a remarkably convenient baseline. The Jewish communities that exist today in eastern Jerusalem, Hebron and throughout the West Bank disappear from the photograph.

But the Palestinian clock has another hand.

1948: The Refugee Hand

When Abbas talks about Arab refugees, June 1967 suddenly becomes useless. So the clock jumps backward another nineteen years.

In 2021, Abbas appeared before the United Nations holding up the deed to his family’s property and said Palestinians still possess deeds and keys to their former homes. He argued that Palestinian refugees have the right to “return to their homeland” and recover their properties.

In 2025, he was even more explicit. Abbas said there were now more than seven million Palestine refugees and declared that the “right of return” was an inalienable right that Palestinian Arabs “will not forsake.”

Entrance to UNRWA “refugee camp” in Bethlehem with a key on top representing that UNRWA is the portal for descendants of internally displaced Arabs to move into grandparents’ houses in Israel

Watch the hands.

For the territory of a new Palestinian state, the clock says 1967.

For Palestinians claiming homes and property inside Israel, it says 1948.

Apply 1967 consistently and the mass refugee claim reaching into Israel loses its 1948 baseline. Apply 1948 consistently and Jewish communities and property claims erased by the 1967 baseline return to the picture.

The clock cannot stay on either date.

It has to move with the argument.

1947: The Sovereignty Hand

Israel already exists in 1948, a bone in the throat of Palestinian Arabs, or a “painful settlement” to quote Abbas. So the sovereignty hand moves to 1947.

In November of that year, the United Nations proposed partitioning Mandatory Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state. So the clock reaches a moment before Israeli sovereignty.

But international recognition of Jewish national aspirations predates partition by decades.

Move the hand again.

The Holocaust: The Colonial Hand

Abbas wrote his doctoral thesis on Holocaust denial. He dismisses the entire victimization of Jews and argued that Jews brought the Holocaust upon themselves – and Palestinian Arabs have been forced to pay the price for it.

In an April 2018 speech in Ramallah he said “the reason for the hatred of the Jews is not their religion but their function in society…. So the Jewish question, which was prevalent in all European countries, the anti-Jewish (sentiment) was not because of their religion, but because of their function in society, which had to do with usury, banks, and so on…. So their narrative about coming to this country because of their longing for Zion, or whatever – we’re tired of hearing this. The truth is that this is a colonialist enterprise, aimed at planting a foreign body in this region…”

Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, visiting Nazi Germany in 1943

1917: The Zionism Hand

In his 2016 United Nations address, Abbas attacked not the borders created by the 1967 war or the displacement of 1948, but the Balfour Declaration of 1917.

He called it the “notorious Balfour Declaration” and demanded that Britain apologize for the “catastrophes, miseries and injustices” he said it had created.

Look how far the clock has moved. A century.

A time when there was no modern state of Israel. There was no 1948 refugee crisis. There was no occupation resulting from the 1967 war. There wasn’t even a British Mandate for Palestine yet.

The objection has reached the international recognition of Jewish national aspirations themselves.

Still too late.

The Ottoman Hand

Before Balfour, Palestine was part of the Ottoman Empire. Even though there was no sovereign Palestinian Arab state, the land was totally controlled by Muslims. Jews remained a small minority.

Abbas’ longtime adviser on Religious and Islamic Affairs and the PA’s Supreme Shari’ah Judge, Mahmoud al-Habbash said in 2014 that “The entire land of Palestine is [Islamic] waqf and is blessed land… it is prohibited to sell, bestow ownership or facilitate the occupation of even a millimeter of it.” In 2016 he said about Jerusalem “We cannot allow or agree to it being under sovereignty that is not Muslim sovereignty.”

Israeli police block Jewish man from ascending to the Temple Mount because he is a Jew, in Novemnber 2025 (photo: First One Through)

Abbas referenced the Ottoman period in a speech in 2014 when he said “Jews, Christians and Muslims have lived peacefully together in Palestine for centuries. So peace between religions runs through the heart of the most sacred City in the world, Jerusalem. Peace between the world’s religions runs through Jericho the Oldest City on Earth. Peace between the world’s religions runs through Palestine.”

Hamas’s 1988 foundational charter makes the point clear: “raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine, for under the wing of Islam followers of all religions can coexist in security and safety where their lives, possessions and rights are concerned. In the absence of Islam, strife will be rife.”

Watch the Hands

There is one time the Palestinian clock rarely points to: today. Because today leaves too many Jews in the picture.

Jews live in Jerusalem, Hebron and throughout the West Bank. Israel exists as a Jewish state. Jewish sovereignty and self-determination are facts rather than historical proposals.

To say openly that Jews should be removed from those places, that the Jewish state is illegitimate or that Jews should be denied national rights would make the prejudice difficult to disguise.

History offers a more respectable vocabulary. Just choose an earlier date when the particular Jews, Jewish sovereignty or Jewish rights inconvenient to the argument were absent.

That is why the Palestinian clock needs so many hands. No single date erases everything neatly.

History provides the dates. Antisemitism chooses the hand.

Related:

Mahmoud Abbas’s Particular Anti-Zionist Holocaust Denial (July 2017)

Sanctioned for Bidding to Build Homes

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An Israeli construction company sees a government tender to build residential housing. It prepares a bid and submits it.

It does not have to win the tender or break ground. Merely submitting the bid would be enough to expose it to American sanctions.

Senators Chris Coons (Delaware), Elizabeth Warren (Massachusetts), Ron Wyden (Oregon) and Ruben Gallego (Arizona) have introduced legislation targeting construction in E1, the area between Jerusalem and Ma’ale Adumim. The legislation would impose sanctions on foreign persons involved in construction there, expressly including those “submitting a bid for E1 tenders.”

Warren makes the consequence explicit: those who facilitate construction in E1 should understand that they “risk losing access to the U.S. financial system.”

That is an extraordinary penalty for bidding to build homes in an allied country.

And the piece of land that has generated this response is remarkably small. E1 covers roughly 12 square kilometers, or 4.6 square miles. The entire West Bank is roughly 5,655 square kilometers. E1 therefore represents about 0.2% of the West Bank—roughly one five-hundredth of its territory.

And that sliver of undeveloped land has generated calls to reach for one of America’s most powerful economic weapons.

The United States has long used its dominance of the international financial system as one of its most powerful foreign-policy tools. Iran has faced sanctions over its nuclear program and other activities. North Korea has been subjected to extensive sanctions over its nuclear and ballistic-missile programs. Russia has faced sweeping sanctions connected to its military aggression.

American sanctions can also reach companies outside those countries. Do business with an American adversary and a foreign company may discover that it has to choose between that relationship and access to the American financial system.

Congress has occasionally been willing to impose that choice on allies.

Turkey is a NATO member. Yet the United States sanctioned Turkey’s Presidency of Defense Industries after Ankara purchased Russia’s S-400 air-defense system from Rosoboronexport, Russia’s state arms exporter. The transaction involved an advanced weapons system, an American adversary and concerns about the security of American military technology.

European companies encountered the same American financial power over Nord Stream 2. Congress enacted sanctions aimed at companies participating in construction of the pipeline, including businesses from American allies, for engaging with a Russian pipeline carrying Russian gas into Europe. Congress viewed it as increasing European dependence on Russian energy and strengthening Moscow’s geopolitical leverage.

E1 presents something completely different.

There is no Russia on the other side of the transaction. No Iran. No North Korea. No weapons purchase or nuclear technology. No American adversary receiving the proceeds.

There is an Israeli government tender to construct residential homes in the immediate suburb of its capital.

Nor is this simply an initiative of four senators.

Fifteen additional Democratic senators have joined them: Michael Bennet (Colorado), Tammy Duckworth (Illinois), Martin Heinrich (New Mexico), Tim Kaine (Virginia), Mark Kelly (Arizona), Andy Kim (New Jersey), Jeff Merkley (Oregon), Chris Murphy (Connecticut), Patty Murray (Washington), Jack Reed (Rhode Island), Brian Schatz (Hawaii), Adam Schiff (California), Elissa Slotkin (Michigan), Chris Van Hollen (Maryland) and Peter Welch (Vermont).

That brings the proposal’s Democratic Senate support to 19 senators.

Senators Elizabeth Warren and Chris Coons

The United States developed financial sanctions to confront hostile states, weapons programs and transactions with American adversaries. It is a powerful tool meant to confront grave risks to America. Yet in this proposal, the triggering transaction is an Israeli housing project occupying roughly one five-hundredth of the West Bank, which poses zero threat to the United States.

The Democratic senators sponsoring the legislation describe E1 construction as a threat to a future Palestinian state, presumably because the Palestinian Authority demands a country devoid of any Jews and it must include Jerusalem. Their proposed response is to make companies and individuals participating in that construction grounds for exclusion from the American financial system.

For these 19 Democratic senators, countering Palestinian Arab aspirations has become a threat to the United States.

That is the question their bill puts before Congress: Should the financial weapon America has used against adversaries and national-security threats now be turned against businesses of a close ally because they bid to build homes on 0.2% of the West Bank?

ACTION ITEM

Contact these senators about their proposed bill on E1 and find out whether the Democratic Party has become so unmoored from its mission of protecting Americans that it is using its greatest financial weapon to serve Palestinian Arabs objecting to Jewish homes.

Sen. Chris Coons Washington office (202) 224-5042, Wilmington (302) 573-6345, Dover (302) 736-5601

Sen. Elizabeth Warren Washington office (202) 224-4543, Boston (617) 565-3170, Springfield (413) 788-2690

Related:

What Is Actually Being Built in E1? (August 2026)

“Genocide” Is Not An Accusation. It Is A Tool Of The Accuser

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“Genocide” is usually treated as a description: a word often intended to characterize what is happening in Gaza. People unpack the actual definition and bring dozens of examples to prove why the accusation is not just false but slander, or accurate.

But it distracts from the environment the word lives in. The word functions as a tool of the accuser.

The same word serves different purposes for different groups.

  • Humanitarian organizations use it as a bullhorn to protect Palestinians.
  • Anti-Israel protestors use it to undermine military support for Israel.
  • Political actors in the Arab and Muslim world use it to keep the Abraham Accords from expanding.
  • Antisemites use it to attack Zionists and Jews.
  • Palestinian Arabs use it as a form of absolution.

And in response to the tool being worked into their sides and hearts, Jews are being forced to consider what the charge means for their relationship with Israel, with one another and with the people making it.

Signs in Paris

The first function is humanitarian.

Pro-Palestinian activists and human rights organizations, use the accusation of “genocide” to create the greatest possible urgency around Palestinian Arab suffering. It makes the world jump the queue of Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, Ukraine or any number of regions suffering massive death.

In common terminology, calling civilian deaths a “tragedy” demands sympathy. Calling them “disproportionate” raises questions about military conduct. Calling them “war crimes” demands investigation. But calling them “genocide” demands that they stop. Immediate intervention becomes the imperative.

Doctors Without Borders

The second function is policy.

For activists seeking to weaken or end Western support for Israel, the genocide accusation transforms the argument over weapons. Countries supplying Israel with arms can be accused of enabling genocide. The target expands from Israeli military conduct to the governments, companies and institutions that make that conduct possible. Arms sales become complicity. Military assistance becomes something that must be stopped rather than merely conditioned.

Protest outside General Dynamics in Maine

It similarly pressures would be allies of Israel to pause. One of the reasons Hamas launched the war when it did was that Saudi Arabia was getting very close to joining the Abraham Accords and normalizing relations with the Jewish State. The masses would rebel if the kingdom normalized such relations when a “genocide” was unfolding against Muslims nearby.

The third function is social — external.

For antisemites, “genocide” provides an extraordinarily powerful accusation to direct against Zionists and Jews.

Once Israel is placed in that category, the accusation travels outward. Zionists become supporters of genocide. Jewish organizations defending Israel become its enablers. Jews associated with Zionism are pressed to answer for it.

The argument has traveled from Gaza to Jews themselves. “Genocide” becomes a means of stigmatizing Zionists, excluding them from institutions and social spaces, and targeting Jews who refuse to disassociate themselves from Israel.

Graffiti in Scarsdale, NY

The fourth function is absolution via inversion.

Palestinian Arabs and their supporters divert attention away from the truly genocidal acts and intentions of Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, dozens of jihadi terrorist groups and thousands of Palestinian Arabs. Attaching a label of genocide on Israel reorients the viewers and grants amnesty to the heinous acts of October 7, and allows room for people to rationalize the action.

Media personality Mehdi Hasan repeatedly invokes “genocide” associated with Israel and its supporters

The fifth function is social — internal.

Here the audience is the Jewish community itself. Jews are being asked to not only look at the war, but at one another and at the people deploying the accusation.

They must decide what they believe Israel is doing. They must decide whether other Jews who reach a different conclusion remain inside a shared communal tent. And they must decide how to regard the organizations, movements, individuals and governments using the word “genocide” – as humanitarian advocates, political adversaries, antisemites, jihadists or some combination of them.

Far-left Israeli group B’Tselem

“Genocide” is much more than a smear in this war. It acts. And to miss that point is to miss the invisible war that has permeated society.

Why Is Israel Still in the Name of the Iran War?

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The Guardian continues to place its Iran coverage under the banner: “US-Israel war on Iran.”

Al Jazeera uses the same formulation.

It was an accurate description when the war began. It isn’t anymore.

The United States and Israel attacked Iran on February 28. Iran retaliated against both countries. For the opening weeks, the United States and Israel were both directly at war with Iran. That fighting ended with the April 8 ceasefire.

There was one brief interruption. In June, after Israel attacked Hezbollah in Beirut, Iran fired missiles at Israel. Israel responded by striking Iran. The exchange lasted roughly two days ans stopped.

The Congressional Research Service says the June 7–8 fighting “appears to be the last direct exchange of fire between the two countries as of September 2026.”

The United States and Iran, meanwhile, have continued fighting.

That makes the media labeling increasingly strange.

The Guardian and Al Jazeera maintain an entire section called “US-Israel war on Iran” even when it is clear even in their own articles that Israel is no longer involved. Even more, it is Iran and its proxies that have waged war ON ISRAEL, not the reverse.

Why?

Does keeping Israel permanently attached to the war serve a purpose — reinforcing the idea that every American bomb dropped on Iran is also somehow an Israeli bomb, and every American decision to continue the war is part of an Israeli-American campaign? That every spike in energy prices is Israel’s fault?

For outlets whose audiences are already intensely hostile toward Israel, the distinction is not trivial. It is propaganda to inflame millions.