An Open Letter to Commencement Speakers: Use Your Podium for Moral Clarity

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To the commencement speakers stepping onto stages this spring:

You are about to speak at one of life’s defining moments. Graduates and their families will remember your words long after the ceremony ends. That podium carries weight. It should be used carefully.

And it should be used with moral clarity.

Do not praise the fashionable activism of the moment simply because it is loud, visible, and rewarded by the culture around it.

Do not mistake popular protest for courage. If you want to speak about courage, speak about the students who stood for Israel.

Speak about the students who defended Israel’s right to wage a just war against Hamas after October 7—the deadliest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.

Speak about the students who understood that when a terrorist army invades a country, murders civilians in their homes, kidnaps children, rapes women, and openly promises to repeat it, the moral obligation of that country is defense. It is victory. It is the destruction of the machinery of terror.

That is what Israel is doing. And on campuses across America, students who have said so have paid a price.

Speak about that.

Speak about the Jewish students who have walked through hostile encampments and angry demonstrations to get to class.

Speak about the students who removed their kippot, hid their Stars of David, or stopped speaking openly because the atmosphere around them had become threatening.

Speak about the students who stood their ground anyway.

The students who wore hostage pins.

The students who defended the truth of October 7 when others rushed to justify it.

That is moral courage.

Real courage is not standing with a crowd chanting slogans. Real courage is standing when the crowd turns on you.

And that has been the experience of many Jewish students this year.

They have faced harassment, exclusion, intimidation, and hostility—often from classmates and sometimes with the silence or complicity of faculty and administrators.

That reality deserves acknowledgment. It deserves honor.

So if you are going to use your commencement speech to speak about justice, begin there.

To organizations like the American Federation of Teachers and the American Association of University Professors, who speak often about academic freedom and the right of educators to speak their conscience: prove those principles mean something.

Stand behind the educators who speak in defense of Israel.

Stand behind those who praise students fighting antisemitism.

Stand behind those who say openly that Jewish self-defense is moral.

Because if you defend speech only when it flatters your politics, you are not defending freedom. You are defending ideology.

Commencement should be better than ideology. It should tell the truth.

The truth of this year on campus is that some of the bravest students were the ones who stood visibly, unapologetically, and often alone with the Jewish people.

If you want to honor courage from the podium, honor them. That would be a commencement speech worth remembering.

Derek Peterson, chair of the University of Michigan Faculty Senate, speaks during the University of Michigan’s 2026 Spring Commencement at Michigan Stadium in Ann Arbor celebrating pro-Palestinian “activists.”

Palestinians Have Always Been Anti-American

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For over twenty-five years, the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research has tracked Palestinian political opinion. Through wars, peace talks, intifadas, and four American presidents, one pattern remains strikingly consistent:

Palestinians have never been broadly pro-American.

That may sound counterintuitive. The United States has spent decades mediating the conflict, funding Palestinian institutions, and pouring diplomatic capital into the region. If goodwill were built by investment alone, the polling should show it.

It does not.

PCPSR rarely asks, Do you like America? Instead, it asks the more revealing questions: Do you trust the United States as a mediator? Do you want American involvement? Do you believe Washington is fair?

Across twenty-five years, the answers tell the story.

Palestinians burn American and Israeli flags

After the collapse of the 2000 Camp David Summit and the violence of the Second Intifada, positive views of America’s political role sat around 20 to 35 percent. Negative views often exceeded 60 percent. America was seen less as a broker than as Israel’s protector.

That became the baseline.

The mid-2000s brought modest movement. After Mahmoud Abbas replaced Yasser Arafat, some Palestinians supported stronger American engagement. Yet the support was tactical hoping that Washington might pressure Israel. That did not translate into trust.

Then came the only real exception.

Barack Obama produced the highest pro-American opening in the polling record. In 2009, roughly 60 percent supported a stronger American role in negotiations.

Washington read that as goodwill. The polling suggests something narrower: hope that Obama would pressure Israel.

Even at that high point, majorities still believed America fundamentally favored Israel. The atmosphere improved. The structure did not.

By Obama’s second term, positive sentiment had fallen back into the 20 to 30 percent range.

Then Donald Trump recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and trust collapsed into single digits.

In some surveys, roughly 90 percent rejected American mediation. The illusion of neutrality disappeared. America was no longer seen as merely tilted toward Israel, but openly aligned with Israeli claims to Jerusalem.

Palestinian Arabs burn American flag in 1998

Joe Biden lowered the temperature but did not restore trust. The numbers recovered slightly, climbing back into the teens and twenties.

“Regardless of how great the power of Israel, America, and the world may be, in the end they will disappear, while we are remaining.” – Fatah Central Committee member Abbas Zaki, April 2021

Then came the October 7 attacks and the war that followed. With Washington backing Israel militarily and diplomatically, Palestinian hostility surged again toward its floor: single-digit trust, overwhelming distrust.

The pattern is unmistakable.

When America pressures Israel, Palestinian approval rises. When America stands with Israel, it collapses.

For twenty-five years, Palestinians have periodically wanted America involved. They have never wanted America embraced.

Not under George W. Bush. Not under Obama. Not under Trump. Not under Biden.

The names changed. The percentages moved. The structure held.

America, in Palestinian political opinion, has never been a friend. Only a force—useful when applying pressure, hostile when withholding it.

After a quarter century of polling, that may be the clearest finding of all.

An American Jewish Blueprint

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When Reality Changes

The first great strategic correction in Jewish history came in the hills of Judea.

In the early days of the Hasmonean revolt 2,100 years ago, Jews hiding from Seleucid persecution were attacked on Shabbat but they refused to fight on the holy day. Their piety became their vulnerability. The enemy understood the pattern and exploited it. Jews died because they would not defend themselves on the Sabbath.

Then came one of the most consequential rulings in Jewish history: if attacked on Shabbat, Jews would fight.

That was more than a legal adjustment. It was a civilizational doctrine. Reality had changed and Jewish survival required adaptation.

Hanukkah is remembered through oil and light, but before the miracle of the oil came the correction in strategy. The Jews who survived understood something fundamental: the law existed to preserve Jewish life, and Jewish life could not be preserved through passive fidelity to assumptions that enemies had learned to weaponize.

That is the enduring Hanukkah doctrine. When reality changes, Jewish strategy must change with it.

The Three Jewish Illusions

Jewish history has often been shaped by three recurring illusions.

The first is the illusion of piety without defense.

That was the lesson of Hanukkah itself. Holiness without strategic realism became a mechanism for slaughter. What began as faith became fatal passivity until Jewish leadership corrected course.

The second is the illusion of integration without power.

This was the great mistake of medieval Jewry and later German Jewry.

In medieval Europe, Jews often flourished under royal protection, economic necessity, and communal tolerance. These arrangements created stability until rulers changed, social pressures mounted, or religious hostility sharpened. Then the protections vanished.

The lesson was brutal: usefulness is not security.

German Jews carried that illusion to its highest expression. They were among the most integrated Jews in history. Patriotic, educated, prosperous, woven deeply into German civic life. They believed they had secured permanence through contribution.

Then came The Holocaust.

No Jewish community had climbed higher inside a host society. None fell faster.

Integration is real. It matters. It enriches Jewish life. It is insufficient.

The third illusion is hope without strategy.

The Bar Kokhba Revolt embodied this danger. Jewish sovereignty briefly returned, messianic expectations surged, and military ambition outran political reality. Rome crushed the revolt and shattered Judea.

Hope is essential to Jewish life. Hope detached from sustainable power becomes catastrophe.

The Jewish Paradox of Power

Jewish history presents a permanent paradox. Jews are vulnerable when powerless and Jews are vulnerable when powerful.

The accusation of Jewish power is one of antisemitism’s oldest reflexes. Jews have been accused of controlling kingdoms when dependent on kings, accused of controlling economies while confined to ghettos, accused of controlling politics while excluded from political life.

Powerlessness never prevented the accusation. Weakness has never protected Jews.

So the answer cannot be withdrawal from power. The answer is understanding what kind of power matters.

German Jews had social prominence but lacked defensive power. They had visibility, achievement, influence, prestige but did not control the institutions that would determine whether rights remained rights when political conditions changed.

That distinction matters now.

American Jews have extraordinary social prominence. In business, law, medicine, media, academia, and politics, Jewish achievement is immense.

But social prominence is not defensive power.

Success creates comfort. Comfort creates assumptions. Assumptions create blindness.

That is where Jewish history becomes dangerous.

The task is not to seek dominance. It is to build durability.

The American Jewish Doctrine

What does that mean in practical terms? How should American Jews position themselves in the current environment?

First, political power.

Diaspora Jews have often treated politics as secondary, entering political life through universal causes and only later recognizing Jewish interests. History argues for the reverse.

Jewish interests are legitimate political interests. Communal safety is political before it is physical. Before mobs move, laws shift. Before violence erupts, institutions bend. Before exclusion becomes visible, narratives are rewritten.

Political power means relationships with governors, mayors, district attorneys, legislators, police commissioners, school boards, university administrations.

It means voting coherently when Jewish interests are implicated.

Not because politics is everything but because politics determines what protections remain when sentiment changes.

Second, rights.

Modern Jewish communal life often leans heavily on allyship. Allies matter. Coalitions matter.

But allyship is rented. Rights are owned.

Diaspora Jews need to become more comfortable asserting rights directly.

  • The right to visible Jewish life.
  • The right to religious practice.
  • The right to define antisemitism.
  • The right to communal defense.
  • The right to political particularism.

Rights do not depend on approval. That is why they matter.

Third, communal resilience.

Jewish prosperity in America has created a dangerous temptation: assuming that integration reduces the need for internal communal strength. History teaches the opposite.

Strong Jewish life requires thick Jewish institutions.

  • Jewish schools.
  • Jewish civic organizations.
  • Jewish legal defense organizations.
  • Jewish security systems.
  • Jewish philanthropy directed inward.
  • Jewish media institutions.

Strong institutions convert prosperity into durability.

Capital moves. Institutions endure.

The First Signs of Danger

Jewish history teaches that violence rarely begins with violence. It begins with language.

Before pogroms, Jews become symbols.

Before expulsions, Jews become abstractions.

Before extermination, Jews become explanations. Parasites. Foreigners. Exploiters. Poisoners. Colonizers.

The vocabulary evolves. The function remains.

Language creates permission.

That is why Jews must take ideological shifts seriously before they become physical threats.

Universities matter.

Activist ecosystems matter.

Social media matters.

Political rhetoric matters.

Religious radicalization matters.

Institutional capture matters.

By the time violence arrives, the moral groundwork has often already been laid. Jewish history punishes those who dismiss rhetoric as harmless.

The Sovereign Difference

There is one structural difference in modern Jewish history that changes everything.

Israel exists.

For nearly two thousand years, Jewish history was entirely dependent on host societies. That changed in 1948.

For the first time since antiquity, Jews had sovereign power, an army, intelligence services, borders, and a place where Jewish defense was not dependent on the goodwill of others.

That transformed Jewish vulnerability. Yet diaspora Jews remain diaspora Jews. Their fate is still deeply tied to the health of their host societies. Or perhaps more complicated, become local stand-ins to attack policies for which they have no control.

Jewish history now has a sovereign center which points in two directions: an option for refuge for diaspora Jews and also an excuse for pogroms for local antisemites.

The Hanukkah Question

The question facing American Jews is not whether to adopt a wartime mindset. America in 2026 is not Germany in 1932.

Jewish life in America remains among the freest and most prosperous in Jewish history. The challenge is different.

It is to abandon passive history. To stop assuming that flourishing means permanence.

To recognize that strategic conditions can shift. To adapt before threats become kinetic.

That is the Hanukkah doctrine.

The Jews in those caves died believing they were preserving the law. The Jews who survived understood something harder. The law had to preserve the Jews.

That remains the enduring Jewish challenge.

Not panic. Preparedness.

Not militancy. Strategic realism.

Not permanent war. Permanent vigilance.

Jewish history has rarely punished the Jews for being too alert. It has punished them, again and again, for waiting too long.

When the Status Quo Becomes the Threat

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For decades the argument over the Jewish Temple Mount has been framed in one direction only: Jewish prayer must be restricted because Jewish prayer may trigger Muslim violence. The legal scaffolding for that argument is old and sturdy. The British Mandate for Palestine built it directly into Article 13, promising free exercise of worship while “ensuring the requirements of public order and decorum.” Later arrangements, including Oslo, preserved the same operating logic in practical form, with Israel retaining security authority even while leaving day-to-day religious administration to the Jerusalem Islamic Waqf.

That logic has governed the Mount for a century.

Israeli police block a Jew from ascending steps to the Temple Mount at the Cotton Gate in November 2025 (photo: First One Through)

But what happens when the status quo itself becomes the source of disorder?

This is the question no one wants to ask.

Every few weeks, Palestinian media like WAFA warns that “the Al Aqsa Mosque is in danger” from “radical settlers.” The phrase has become ritualized, almost liturgical in Palestinian political culture. A Jew walking quietly on the Mount becomes a provocation. A Jew moving his lips in silent prayer becomes an assault. A Jew bowing his head becomes a threat to Islam itself.

That rhetoric has had a practical effect. It has transformed Jewish prayer into a public order problem.

But there is another side to this equation.

What if the continued suppression of Jewish prayer is itself becoming a generator of instability? What if the status quo, designed to contain conflict, has begun producing it?

A legal order built to preserve peace cannot become a machine for preserving grievance.

Under the British Mandate, the answer is surprisingly clear. Article 13 protects “existing rights,” but only while ensuring public order. That means the status quo is protected only insofar as it serves order. If preserving inherited arrangements creates recurring confrontation, the law and history allows recalibration.

That was the hidden flexibility in the Mandate and ongoing governing principle. Status quo is presumptive; order is mandatory.

Oslo is even more direct, though in a different way. Oslo does not sanctify the Temple Mount arrangement. It simply leaves it in place while preserving Israeli security. That means if Israeli authorities conclude that the present arrangement itself is a long term security risk, they possess the legal architecture to modify access, prayer rules, and crowd management.

The Old City of Jerusalem including the Jewish Temple Mount/ Al Aqsa Compound. Thousands of Jews can be sound in the Western Wall Plaza, unable to ascend onto the Temple Mount.

The irony is brutal.

For decades the legal doctrine has been used to suppress Jewish prayer because Muslim violence was threatened. But if that suppression itself produces radicalization, frustration, and growing confrontation, the same legal doctrine could justify expanding Jewish prayer in order to restore order.

The law cuts both ways.

“The status quo” sounds ancient and immovable. In truth it is neither. It is a management system. And management systems are judged by outcomes.

If a system preserves peace, it earns its legitimacy. If a system preserves resentment and recurrent crisis, its legal rationale weakens.

The day may soon be arriving that structured, regulated Jewish prayer may become the stabilizing mechanism rather than the destabilizing one.

A designated time. A designated place. A formalized right.

The central legal truth of the Temple Mount has always been misunderstood. The governing principle was never the status quo itself. The governing principle was order.

The Genocidal Chant of “Globalize the Intifada”

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There is a difference between being hated and being hunted. Most people understand that instinctively.

A slur is hatred made verbal. The N-word for Blacks, like “k*ke,” for Jews, carries generations of contempt. It degrades and dehumanizes. When someone says it, there is no confusion about what is being communicated. The message is brutally simple: you are despised.

Ugly as that is, it is at least honest.

But history teaches that some language goes beyond contempt. Some language carries the memory of violence and the method of violence.

For Black Americans, the image of a noose is not abstract. It is inseparable from lynching, terror, and public spectacle. A crowd marching with nooses would never be defended as harmless symbolism or political expression. Black Americans would hear it exactly as history taught them to hear it: as a threat.

That is where Jews place the phrase “globalize the intifada.”

The First Intifada was marked by riots, Molotov cocktails, stabbings, and attacks directed at Israeli Jews. The Second Intifada escalated into systematic suicide bombings: buses blown apart, cafés destroyed, restaurants turned into funeral scenes. Jewish civilians were the battlefield.

Arabs bombing Israeli buses during Second Intifada

Then came what Israelis grimly called the “car intifada” of 2014–2016: vehicles driven into crowds at bus stops and train stations. After that, the “stabbing intifada”: knives pulled in streets, supermarkets, and neighborhoods, ordinary objects turned into weapons for killing Jews.

Palestinian cartoon directing Arabs to run over Israelis in 2015

These were not abstractions. These were methods.

That matters because when someone chants “globalize the intifada,” Jews do not hear a vague political slogan. They hear the globalization of those methods.

Globalize the bus bombing. Globalize the car ramming. Globalize the stabbing. Globalize the killing of Jews.

That is why the phrase lands differently than a slur. A slur says: I hate you. “Globalize the intifada” says: the violence used against your people in Israel should be used against your people everywhere.

And this is no longer merely a Jewish interpretation. Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom said this week that those chanting “globalise the intifada” should face prosecution, explicitly describing it as rhetoric calling for terrorism against Jews. That recognition matters because it affirms what Jews have been saying for years: history gives words their meaning, and violent history gives them their menace.  

“If you stand alongside people who say globalise the intifada, you are calling for terrorism against Jews – and people who use that phrase should be prosecuted. It is racism, extreme racism and it has left a minority community in this country scared, intimidated, wondering if they belong.” – Sir Kier Starmer

Society already understands this principle elsewhere. A noose is not “just rope.” A burning cross is not “just wood.” History made them symbols of violence.

History made “intifada” one too.

And asking Jews to pretend otherwise is no different than asking Black Americans to pretend a noose is just a piece of rope.

Which Arab Murders Count?

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Some murders become international incidents. Others become statistics.

That is what makes the numbers in Israel and the West Bank so revealing.

As of early May 2026, roughly 98 Israeli Arabs have been murdered this year, overwhelmingly by fellow Arabs in gang violence, organized crime, and clan feuds. In that same period, about 16 Stateless Arabs from Palestine (SAPs) in the West Bank were killed by West Bank Jews.

The deaths are a tragedy. In each location.

Among the dead in Israel were a young Arab man and his fiancée in Yarka, shot dead together just weeks before their wedding. They were building a home, planning a life, and in a moment both were gone.

Their murders did not trigger an emergency session at the United Nations Human Rights Council. No international campaign formed around their names. No protests filled campuses demanding justice.

But the ratio matters.

For every SAP killed by a West Bank Jew this year, more than six Israeli Arabs have been killed by fellow Arabs.

Yet only one category reliably commands international attention.

When Jews kill Arabs, the broader human rights ecosystem reacts swiftly. The UN warns of “ethnic cleansing.” Condemnations follow. Activists mobilize.

Francesca Albanese, UN special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories, attends a side event during the Human Rights Council at the United Nations in Geneva on March 26, 2024.
Photo: Reuters / Denis Balibouse

When Arabs kill Arabs, the deaths rarely travel beyond the local crime blotter.

If Arab life matters, it should matter regardless of who pulls the trigger.

Israelis protest in Haifa, Israel, against the crime wave impacting their community, on August 31, 2025. An estimated 252 Israeli Arabs were killed by fellow Arabs in 2025. (photo: Kareem Khadder/CNN)

A human rights system that treats one dead Arab as an international crisis and six dead Arabs as a local inconvenience is not organized around human dignity.

It is organized around narrative.

Somewhere in Yarka, two families are mourning a wedding that will never happen.

And the world moved on because no Jew could be blamed.

Orienting the Menorah

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The menorah in the Mishkan was about the height of a person at that time. According to the rabbinic tradition in Babylonian Talmud, the menorah stood eighteen tefachim high, somewhere between four and a half and five and a half feet depending on the measure.

That is a strange choice. The Torah could have commanded a towering monument, a giant golden structure rising upward into sacred space. That is what the ancient world did. Temples were built to dwarf the worshipper. Gods were elevated into inaccessible heights, their homes designed to overwhelm and diminish those who approached. Yet when the Torah returns to the menorah in Leviticus in Parshat Emor, it commands to keep its lamps burning continually – at human scale.

The God of Israel does not seek awe; He seeks encounter. The menorah stood at eye level because holiness in Judaism is not built on distance but relationship.

Its form deepens the message. The menorah is shaped like a tree. Hammered from one piece of gold and adorned with almond blossoms, buds, and flowers, it evokes organic life, growth, and rootedness. Rashi and Nachmanides understood it as a symbol of divine wisdom and life itself. The imagery reaches backward to Eden and the Tree of Life standing at the center of creation. The menorah is that tree brought into history, planted in the center of Israel’s sacred life.

And it is more than a tree. It is time in the shape of a tree. Seven branches, seven flames, seven points of light. Like the seven days of creation, the menorah gathers into one object the architecture of existence itself. In Judaism, seven is the structure of the world. Creation unfolds in seven days. The land rests in the seventh year. Freedom resets in the seventh cycle of the jubilee. Sacred time is built in sevens, and the menorah gathers that pattern into gold.

Yet the number seven is only part of the symbolism. The structure itself carries the deeper lesson. The menorah has one central shaft, with three branches extending from one side and three from the other. Everything depends on the center. That center can be read as Shabbat itself, the seventh day that gives shape to the other six.

This is one of Judaism’s deepest interventions into human experience. Most people think of Shabbat as the end of the week, the point of collapse after six days of work. But the Torah’s vision runs in the opposite direction. Shabbat is not simply the conclusion of labor. It is the center of time. The six days are not meaningful because they arrive at rest; they are meaningful because they emerge from sanctity. The week is not six days of secular striving interrupted by a religious pause. It is six days of labor structured around a holy center.

Modern life has reversed that structure entirely. Modern man builds his life around work and treats rest as recovery. Judaism builds life around sanctity and treats work as extension. One organizes existence around productivity and squeezes meaning into the margins. The other organizes existence around holiness and allows labor to become part of that larger order. One produces burnout. The other produces orientation. The menorah, in that sense, is profoundly anti-modern. Its center is not productivity. Its center is sacred time.

The menorah’s design teaches the structure of the soul. Find the center first. Build outward second. The center is what gives coherence to everything else.

That is why the menorah stands at human height. Divine presence enters human dimensions. It stands face to face, and orients each of us to the life to lead.

Normalized Violence

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This was the third assassination attempt against Donald Trump. He survived but the deeper story lies elsewhere. By the third attempt, the country barely pauses. The first attack should have shaken a nation to its core; the second should have deepened the sense of alarm. By the third, something more dangerous has taken hold: familiarity. Political violence begins to feel woven into the atmosphere, another storm system passing through.

That is the shift in American life. Political violence has moved from rupture to expectation. The country has grown accustomed to the possibility that power will be contested through force.

The evidence stretches across the last several years. There was the attempted kidnapping of Gretchen Whitmer, where executive authority itself became the target. There was the hammer attack on Paul Pelosi, where proximity to political authority was enough to invite violence. There was the arson attack on the home of Governor Josh Shapiro. There was the assassination of Charlie Kirk.

Each attack carried its own political coloration. Different grievances, different ideologies, different enemies.

Yet they share the same underlying grammar. The human being is transformed into an idea.

The governor becomes the state. The executive becomes capital. The politician becomes the regime.

That transformation is the hinge upon which violence swings. A person who stands as an abstraction for a hated system becomes easier to strike. Violence acquires moral clothing. The blow feels righteous because the target has already been converted into a symbol.

That is why the public reaction to United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson’s killing mattered so much. The killing itself was one event. The social response revealed the deeper current. The alleged killer, Luigi Mangione, became a hero in corners of the internet. Memes spread. Fundraisers appeared. Admiration followed. A killer became an instrument of vengeance against a hated system.

It felt like the movie Joker come to life. In Joker, an unstable man carries the plot forward, but the real engine is the crowd waiting to celebrate him. The mob grants moral legitimacy to the violence. The killer becomes a vessel for collective resentment.

That is the deeper American drift. Violence increasingly invites sympathy, reinterpretation, and applause. The act becomes secondary to the story society tells itself about why the victim represented something worth destroying.

This can be seen in the Middle East as well.

Palestinian political culture offers a longer and starker example of how this process unfolds. For roughly twenty-five years, polling by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research has repeatedly shown majority support for violence against Jewish civilians inside Israel. This stretches back before the Gaza blockade and before the present war. The permission structure came first.

PCPSR poll from October 2003 asking whether Palestinian Arabs supported armed attacks against civilians in Israel

Then politics followed.

In 2006, Palestinians elected Hamas to a parliamentary majority, fully aware of its openly antisemitic and eliminationist charter. October 7 emerged from that political soil. The massacre fit within a culture that had long accepted the killing of Jewish civilians as part of political struggle.

That is why it was celebrated.

And the celebration reached far beyond Gaza. American campuses, Western cities, and activist spaces erupted with demonstrations that folded the massacre into broader narratives of liberation. The same reduction had already taken place. Jews had been recast as symbols of systems: colonialism, finance, whiteness, Western power, institutional dominance.

Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) goes on antisemitic rant at Democratic Socialists of America conference, invoking Nazi imagery of Jews “operating behind the curtain… to make money off of racism.”

This is the ancient machinery of antisemitism. Jews become the human face of structural resentment.

The FBI hate-crime statistics show the physical consequences of that social logic. Americans often picture hate crime through property damage: a swastika painted on a synagogue, a church defaced, a mosque vandalized. Yet for more than a decade, the majority of hate crimes in America have been crimes against persons.

In 2019, 62.6 percent of hate-crime offenses targeted people. In 2020, the FBI recorded 7,750 crimes against persons, with nearly half involving direct physical assault. The figures jumped to over 11,000 in 2023 and 2024, with Jewish accounting for the vast majority of hate crimes by religion.

The reason sits in plain sight. Jews occupy a permanent place in political imagination as concentrated power: finance, media, institutions, influence. Even when stated softly, the accusation remains the same: too much influence, too much reach, too much control.

Once power itself is treated as morally suspect, violence against those imagined to embody it starts to feel cleansing. Society begins teaching itself that rage against elites is a form of justice. Institutions become enemies. Authority becomes corruption. Violence becomes political purification.

That moral structure echoes the French Revolution. The crowd gathers. The elite are marched into the square. Their status dissolves. Their destruction becomes public theater.

That is the destination of normalized violence.

The warning sign is larger than the incident. The warning lies in the crowd, in the cultural ecosystem that grants permission, supplies applause, and tells itself that the target stood for something hateful enough to justify blood.

Society has normalized violence as the media and school systems falsely rebranded America as a deeply unfair caste system. In the masses attempt for a complete redistribution of power and wealth, those with or with perceived power – politicians and Jews – will be open game for the angry mob.

Related:

The Broke-n Generation (December 2024)

Trauma in Present Tense

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There was something fitting about Lior Raz standing in Chappaqua, New York last night raising money for Magen David Adom. Raz built his career dramatizing the hunt for terrorists. Magen David Adom exists for the moments after the hunt fails.

Lior Raz being interviewed at a fundraiser for Magen David Adom in Chappaqua, NY April 29, 2026 (photo: First One Through)

For those unfamiliar with Raz, he is more than an actor. Before becoming one of Israel’s most recognizable cultural figures, he served in an undercover Israeli military unit operating inside Arab communities, gathering intelligence and carrying out operations in hostile environments. He grew up with Iraqi and Algerian parents speaking Arabic, making him deeply bi-cultural in Jewish and Arab worlds. That experience and background became the foundation for Fauda, the global hit he co-created and stars in, a drama centered on Israeli undercover units hunting terrorists in the West Bank and Gaza.

What made Fauda different was never simply its action but its realism. Israelis and Palestinian Arabs were not rendered as symbols, but as human beings moving through an intimate, brutal conflict where ideology, family, fear, and violence occupy the same space. For international audiences it was compelling fiction. For Israelis and Stateless Arabs from Palestine (SAPs) it often felt closer to lived reality.

Then October 7 collapsed whatever distance remained between fiction and reality.

At the fundraiser, Raz put words to what that rupture did to Israel.

Israel, he said, is living in trauma, not PTSD. It was not an echo of horror but the continuation of it.

It was the most important thing said all night because it captured something essential about the country after October 7. PTSD belongs to memory. Trauma belongs to the present. PTSD is what remains after danger has passed. Trauma is what happens when danger tears through your assumptions and reorganizes how you live.

That is Israel now.

Lior Raz being interviewed at a fundraiser for Magen David Adom in Chappaqua, NY April 29, 2026 (photo: First One Through)

The hostages are home or accounted for. The war has shifted phases. But the rupture remains embedded in Israeli life. The confidence that catastrophe could be anticipated and contained has been broken. Every family understands more intimately how quickly ordinary life can split into irreversible loss. The danger may have changed form, but the nervous system of the country remains altered.

That is where Magen David Adom enters the story.

If Fauda is about the front edge of violence—the raid, the chase, the interception—Magen David Adom lives on the back edge: the ambulance, the paramedic, the trauma room, the blood bank, the race to preserve life after violence has already landed. Security exists to stop attacks. Emergency medicine exists for when stopping fails.

Raz spoke with particular pride about what Magen David Adom represents: Jews, Christians, Druze, and Muslims working side by side to save lives. In a region where identity so often organizes conflict, MDA operates at the level beneath identity, at the essence of humanity. No politics, no theology, no tribal sorting. Just the oldest civilizational imperative there is: preserve life.

It is one of Israel’s deepest strengths that even under permanent security pressure, its emergency institutions remain organized around life itself.

Raz also looked forward. The next season of Fauda which will come out in a few months, he said, will directly reflect October 7 and the years after, with half of it set in Marseille, France. That choice is revealing. Marseille is one of Europe’s great pressure-point cities, where migration, communal fragmentation, criminality, radicalization, and fractured civic identity collide. It is a city where many of the tensions Israel has lived with for decades are becoming visible in European form.

The movement of Fauda into Europe suggests something larger. The Israeli condition is no longer entirely Israeli. The fractures Israel has lived with for decades—terror, divided loyalties, imported ideological battles, fear in public life—are increasingly visible across Western democracies. Israel was simply earlier, home to 45% of global Jewry. The anti-Jewish attacks and growing anti-Western attacks are everywhere.

When Raz was pressed on American politics, he declined to engage. He understood the trap of America’s partisan machinery and would have no part of it. He was there to fight violence from wherever it came from, not from a single ideology.

At an event raising money for ambulances, blood banks, and emergency responders, it became clear that this too belongs to the same mission.

Raz is known for Fauda, for portraying the hunt for terrorists, the intelligence work, the raids, the violence used to stop violence. But that is only the outer layer. Beneath it lies something older and deeper.

The mission is to save lives.

To save lives in Israel when violence breaks through. To protect Jewish life abroad when antisemitism rises. To defend the perimeter and preserve the people. These are not separate missions. They are one.

For most of Jewish history, Jews endured violence dependent on the mercy or restraint of others. Now there is a Jewish state with power, intelligence capabilities, and institutions of rescue, carrying with it not only sovereignty but obligation. That obligation no longer ends at Israel’s borders. A Jew threatened in Paris, attacked in New York, harassed in London, or targeted in Melbourne enters the same moral universe.

The perimeter has widened.

Fauda may be about counterterrorism and Magen David Adom may be about emergency medicine. Together, they represent the fight against antisemitism which lies in the same ancient Jewish imperative: protect life, preserve the people, continue.

That may define the ever-present trauma among Jewry today: the need to constantly think about personal and communal safety, without the calm to simply sit at a cafe or send one’s kids to school and purely enjoy life’s moments.

The Most Important Debris To Clear in Gaza is Ideological

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The world now knows what Gaza costs to rebuild: $71.4 billion. What it still does not know is what Gaza is supposed to become.

That is the number in the 2026 Rapid Damage and Needs Assessment (RDNA), produced by the United Nations with the World Bank and the European Union in April 2026. It is a vast and meticulous ledger of destruction, broken into sectors, sub-sectors, losses, and needs. It is also a revealing document, because the table tells you what the world thinks Gaza is.

A physical problem.

  • Housing: $16.21 billion.
  • Health: $10.03 billion.
  • Agriculture: $10.49 billion.
  • Commerce and industry: $8.99 billion.
  • Social protection: $5.78 billion.
  • Education: $4.71 billion.
  • Water and sanitation: $4.24 billion.
  • Energy: $2.73 billion.
  • Transport: $1.54 billion.

Total direct damages: $35.2 billion.
Total economic losses: $22.7 billion.
Total reconstruction needs: $71.4 billion.

RDNA assessment of cost to rebuild Gaza, April 2026

It is a complete inventory of physical devastation. Buildings crushed into powder. Water systems ruptured. Hospitals crippled. Roads fractured. Farms destroyed. Markets emptied.

The UN has priced the debris.

It has even priced the removal of the debris: $1.7 billion just to clear more than 68 million metric tons of wreckage.

But the table reveals something else.

There is no line item for civic reconstruction. That is the missing category. There is something for “social protection” and even calls to improve “gender equality, and social inclusion,” but a refocus on building a healthy culture is absent.

RDNA report on rebuilding Gaza, April 2026

Not because it is unimportant. Because it is the hard. And the public may still be unwilling to accept it.

Civic reconstruction is the rebuilding of the political and social architecture of a society: education, norms, legitimacy, coexistence, rule of law, pluralism, and the delegitimization of political violence as a governing method.

Without it, reconstruction is replacement. There will be new buildings but the same “deformity” of ideology, to quote James Zogby in his testimony to the United Nations in June 2023.

Civic reconstruction requires power. And commitment. The UN has frameworks, funding channels, and institutional tools. It does not have sovereignty. It cannot rewrite a society by decree.

And that only makes the omission more consequential.

The UN report itself hints at the deeper crisis. It states that Gaza’s human development has been pushed back 77 years, with the Human Development Index projected to collapse to 0.339, the lowest level ever recorded.

Human development is not just electricity and sewage. It is the civic conditions that make human flourishing possible.

The report includes gender equality. Social inclusion. Employment. Governance.

All necessary.

But governance itself is budgeted at just $530 million, and that is administrative. Municipal function, institutional capacity and service delivery. Not civic transformation.

That distinction matters.

There is no budget line for:

  • coexistence education
  • curriculum reform
  • dismantling political incitement
  • independent civil society
  • women’s civic and legal empowerment beyond emergency protection
  • minority rights
  • ideological deradicalization

That is not a technical omission. It is the central question.

Postwar Germany was rebuilt through more than roads and housing. It went through total defeat, disarmament, a state monopoly on force, educational overhaul, and the systematic delegitimization of the ideology that had led it into catastrophe.

Postwar Japan followed the same path: constitutional redesign, political restructuring, educational transformation, and a new civic contract.

The physical debris mattered. But so did the ideological debris.

And ideological debris is harder to clear.

It does not sit in the streets. It lives in textbooks, political institutions, media ecosystems, religious messaging, and the stories a society tells itself about violence and legitimacy.

That debris remains.

The UN has measured Gaza’s physical debris. It has priced the roads, the hospitals, the pipes, the farms, the power grid. What it has not priced is the ideological wreckage underneath them.

That is the danger.

Physical reconstruction without civic reconstruction does not produce peace. It produces restoration.

And restoration means returning to the conditions that made destruction inevitable.

Schools can teach coexistence or sanctify martyrdom.
Hospitals can preserve life or sustain armed rule.
Roads can carry commerce or carry war.

A rebuilt Gaza can become the foundation of peace or the staging ground for the next war.

You can clear 68 million tons of rubble and still leave the most dangerous ruins standing.