The Distant Hum at Mobile World Congress

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At Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, the dominant sound is usually ambition. Deals over espresso. AI demos on loop. Spectrum, towers, IoT, eSIM. The future negotiated in glass rooms.

This year there was noise at the gates.

Protesters in keffiyehs waved Palestinian flags and tried to slow the river of attendees entering Fira Gran Via. They demanded the conference bar “genocide supporters.” They blocked traffic briefly. They filmed themselves and shouted.

The doors stayed open. The show went on.

Inside, the tone was very different.

Because of the escalating confrontation between the United States and Israel, and the Islamic State of Iran, many executives from the Middle East never made it to Barcelona due to flight cancelations. The Israeli Pavilion, usually one of the most kinetic and crowded zones on the floor, felt restrained. A few local Jews stood behind booths helping scan QR codes and explain products for companies whose teams were grounded thousands of miles away.

There was no dramatic security ring. No spectacle. Just visible absence.

Attendees still came by. Investors still asked questions and carriers still wanted meetings. The international community, in practice, wants to do business with Israel. It wants the cybersecurity, the silicon, the network optimization, the AI driven infrastructure. The appetite for innovation did not vanish because activists shouted outside.

As in past years, there was no Iranian Pavilion, because there was no demand for that country’s technology despite the billions of dollars poured into nuclear weapons programs and ballistic missiles. There were also no street protests outside the hall condemning Tehran, even as reports attribute tens of thousands of civilian murders at the hands of Iranian police.

Barcelona offered no blockades over ballistic missile programs nor chants about enrichment levels.

The inversion was hard to miss. Accusations of genocide delivered by activists wrapped in the imagery of the very movements whose leaders openly call for the destruction of a state. Silence about a regime long designated by the United States as the leading state sponsor of terrorism.

Anti-Israel graffiti on Barcelona streets, March 2026 (photo: First One Through)

The true backdrop to this year’s MWC was not the shouting. It was the distant hum of war shaping travel and corporate decision making. It thinned a pavilion and changed calendars.

The protesters created friction. The war created gravity.

And Barcelona, for all its global brand and history of hosting the world’s premier telecom gathering, showed something troubling. Instead of projecting confidence as a neutral convening ground for global commerce, it allowed a small group of activists to frame the city’s welcome with hostility toward one delegation in particular, as more of the city streets became unsafe for visitors.

Neighborhoods in Barcelona have become havens for dozens of Muslim men, looking for pickpocketing opportunities

The international industry kept meeting. Deals kept forming. Business cards were still exchanged as the angry chants didn’t cross the convention hall doors.

But the hum of geopolitics settled inside, and the world, watching closely, saw which noise mattered and which one merely embarrassed the host.

The New Model of a Modern Major General

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Gilbert and Sullivan once mocked a Major General who knew everything except how to wage war. He dazzled with recitations while sidestepping reality. The humor lived in the gap between words and consequences.

That song has inverted.

With the coordinated U.S. and Israeli strikes that killed Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the model shifted. Fleets were moved. Air defenses aligned. Hardened targets were hit. Decades of negotiation, sanction cycles, enrichment disputes, and proxy escalation culminated in direct consequence.

For forty years, the Islamic Republic built power through Hezbollah, Hamas, Iraqi militias, and the Houthis while advancing missile capability and nuclear enrichment. Diplomacy stretched. Deadlines slipped. Centrifuges continued spinning.

At some point deterrence must be visible.

The modern major general is no longer measured by speeches about red lines but by whether adversaries recalculate. Does sponsorship of terror slow. Does enrichment reverse.

Does escalation pause.

Khamenei’s death marks a rupture. It introduces instability, succession uncertainty, and the risk of retaliation. It also forces Tehran to confront survival in ways it has avoided for decades.

The nineteenth century satire mocked leaders who substituted knowledge for action. The twenty first century test asks whether action, applied decisively, can alter the behavior of a regime that fused revolutionary ideology with missile technology.

This is not opera. There is no chorus to soften it.

The new model of a modern major general does not sing about military matters.
He imposes them.

Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) tried to cast America and Israel as racist, and invert the reality of the fight against genocidal jihadists

From Defanging to Beheading Islamic Extremism

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The primary goal of a defensive war is to end the fighting for good. The goal is not to conquer land or take spoils but to stop the bloodshed. This objective can be realized with not just defeating the foe but having them relinquish their weapons for good.

Sometimes this happens with the enemy losing much of its army while occasionally it is with the elimination of the leadership. This is mostly true with secular nations who concede the battlefield when any chance to victory has been squashed.

Yet religious wars seem to seep into the future. It is difficult for the faithful to abandon the battle if such effort forces a challenge to faith.

We see that today with radical Islam. Hamas, the popular leaders of Gaza, waged their version of a holy war to annihilate the Jews in what they consider a “waqf”, Islamic land. Even when the fighters were vanquished and the leaders killed, the remaining zealots continue to hold onto weapons and refuse to allow calm to take root. The jihadists’ deeply radical and religious orientation obliterate the chance for coexistence with non-believers.

So the defensive war carries on much longer than required in a secular war. The destruction is more widespread because the jihadists refuse to relent.

The same front is now in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Its leadership is not as popular locally as Hamas is in Gaza. Months ago, the United States and Israel were able to take out the country’s nuclear weapons program in a 12 day war. The Iranian people did not rally to its leaders and press for war as they did in Gaza and the “West Bank”/ east of the 1949 Armistice lines “E49AL” against Israel, but took to the streets to challenge their own leadership.

But the jihadi leaders took aim at their people. Iranian soldiers mowed their own citizens down by the tens of thousands. The radical clerics would not abandon their plans for intercontinental ballistic missiles nor weapons of mass destruction, to be used to threaten and wage war against the “Big Satan” and “Little Satan” of the United States and Israel, respectively.

So the U.S. and Israel have reluctantly returned to Iran. The defanging of the regime escalated to beheading the rulers. On the first day of this next iteration of battle, Khamenei was killed as were other leaders.

Unlike the Stateless Arabs from Palestine (SAPs), the Iranian people are more secular. They want to live a quality life and are not obsessed with killing Jews hundreds of miles away. One therefore hopes that this war will end quickly.

The past two years has pushed back radical Islam significantly in the Middle East, which may pave a path for peace. It is incumbent on the world to encourage a form of humble faith which channels devotion towards personal humility rather than asserting supremacy, as the course towards coexistence.

Islamic supremacy is being both defanged and beheaded in the Middle East. There will likely be victories in the secular states, while the West will need to develop a different gameplan for the religious zealots, like those in Gaza.

Absence And Endurance

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“Remember what Amalek did to you on the way…”


In Book of Deuteronomy the Torah recalls the ambush first described in Exodus. A newly freed slave nation, weary and disoriented, is attacked from behind. The text lingers on a painful detail: Amalek struck the weak who lagged at the rear. Then comes the deeper indictment. Amalek did not fear God.


The assault carried a message about reality itself. Amalek targeted the stragglers and declared that the Jewish God could not protect his flock. The nation attacked Jewish flesh in order to wound their faith.


The Torah directs our attention to the rear of the camp because doubt begins there. The people who fall behind often feel exposed and unseen. In that space it becomes tempting to read hardship as proof of abandonment.


Across centuries the pattern returns. The Inquisition tried to sever Jews from memory and covenant. Pogroms turned humiliation into public ritual. The Holocaust mechanized death while desecrating Torah scrolls. Modern jihadi massacres are staged as proclamations that Jewish destiny can be mocked without consequence. Each generation repeats the same challenge. Where is your God now?


Zachor commands two acts that stand together. Remember what Amalek did. Blot out the memory of Amalek.


Jewish memory preserves the record of cruelty with precision. What must be erased is Amalek’s thesis that hiddenness equals absence and that suffering proves divine withdrawal. The mitzvah confronts the instinct to conclude that what cannot be seen has vanished.


That theme deepens in the story of Book of Esther, read days after Zachor. God’s name never appears in the Megillah. A genocidal decree is signed by Haman, identified as an Agagite and heir to Amalek’s legacy. The Jews of Persia stand vulnerable in exile.
Yet events turn solely with the human characters. A sleepless king. A courageous queen. The story bends without spectacle.


The absence of explicit mention of God becomes the teaching. Presence can operate beneath the surface. Providence can move without announcement.


Amalek’s worldview rests on a simple claim. If God cannot be seen, He is gone.
Zachor and Esther answer together. The covenant does not dissolve in silence. Hiddenness forms part of the design. The rear of the camp remains within divine promise and protection.


To blot out Amalek is to erase the interpretation that vulnerability equals rejection. It is to refuse despair when protection cannot be measured. It is to affirm that concealed presence still sustains.

For Jews, the invisible is core to faith, while active erasure of those who mock such faith strengthens belief. Absence as endurance componded.

Passport Hyperbole

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The outrage over the U.S. offering passport services in Efrat, in Area C east of the 1949 Armistice Lines (E49AL) as “normalizing annexation” is manufactured.

For many decades, the United States operated a consular office in the western part of Jerusalem on 18 Agron Street, providing passport and visa services to Palestinian Arabs. It was situated in the area that Israel assumed control of in 1949, not 1967 when the “West Bank”/E49AL came under Israeli authority in the country’s defensive war against Transjordan. Still, some countries considered western Jerusalem “disputed” and subject to future negotiations.

Yet when the U.S. ran consular services there, it was treated as routine diplomacy.

Former U.S. office for Palestinian Arabs located in “Western Jerusalem” which has been part of Israel since the end of the 1948-9 War

Now the U.S. offers passport services in Efrat and suddenly it’s a diplomatic crisis.

Why? Because the issue is not passports. It is Jews living beyond the 1967 lines.

The U.S. action is “a dangerous precedent and a blatant alignment with the enemy’s Judaization plans… a practical recognition of the legitimacy of settlements and the enemy’s control over the West Bank.” – HAMAS, a U.S. designated foreign terrorist organization regarding the passport office in Efrat

Disputed means disputed. It cannot mean “routine” when Palestinians receive services in western Jerusalem but “provocation” when Jews receive services in Area C.

Efrat sits in Area C under the Oslo Accords, territory left for final-status negotiations. It was not designated sovereign Palestinian land, and was a Jewish community before the regional Arabs launched a war to destroy Israel at its founding in 1948. In multiple Israeli peace offers, the Gush Etzion bloc – including Efrat – was to be incorporated fully into Israel through land swaps.

Passport services mean nothing about recognizing sovereignty. The hysteria reveals a double standard: Jewish civilian life in contested areas must remain politically radioactive, even when identical administrative acts for Arabs elsewhere pass without comment.

The U.S. decision is “a clear violation of international law” and “participation in the crime of silent annexation.” – Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a U.S. designated foreign terrorist organization

The controversy is not about diplomacy. It is about delegitimizing the presence of Jews.

And demanding that Jews be barred from living somewhere – anywhere, let alone in their holy land – is plainly antisemitic.

The Third Type of Israeli For Diaspora Jewry

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Since October 7, diaspora Jews have met three types of Israelis: traumatized, empowered and lonely.

The traumatized arrive as witnesses.
The empowered arrive as proof of resilience.
The third variety is one of performance – asked to explain a country while still trying to understand their own experience.

In Jewish communities, the first narrative is familiar. Israelis describe rupture.

October 7.
The hostages.
Reserve duty.
Funerals.
The knowledge that Iran sits behind the horizon.

This is testimony. The Israeli leaves seen as wounded.

A second narrative follows.

Israel adapted.
The army responded.
The economy continues.
Restaurants are full.
Startups are built.

This story stabilizes the room. The Israeli leaves seen as resilient.

Between these narratives lives daily life.

Relief and dread coexist.
Normal life returns without feeling normal.
Laughter sits beside background tension.

Public conversation prefers clarity. Experience offers contradiction.

So Israelis adapt to the room.

They speak trauma when trauma is needed.
They speak strength when reassurance is needed.
They translate Israel in real time.

The performance is neither optimism nor trauma.
But it is performance, a derivative removed from feelings.

Psychology defines loneliness as the gap between experience and recognition, not the number of relationships. This is emotional loneliness – social connection without feeling fully known.

A related idea is self-discrepancy, the distance between lived reality and presented identity. When that distance persists, people function well while feeling internally unseen.

Connection forms around the role while the person remains partially hidden.

Diaspora encounters intensify this.

Israelis become representatives of war, resilience, survival. Conversation pulls toward clarity. Ambiguity has little space.

So ambiguity moves inward.

This produces what researchers describe as invisible loneliness: being embedded in strong relationships yet recognized mainly through narrative.

Outwardly, this looks normal.

Travel resumes.
Humor returns.
Good news is shared.
Life is described as continuing.

Much of this is regulation.

Many Israelis instinctively manage diaspora anxiety: softening uncertainty, emphasizing stability, offering reassurance before they fully feel it.

People compress their own ambiguity to protect others. Emotional labor strengthens connection while quietly increasing distance.

The loneliness that follows is subtle.

These Israelis are seen as strong and seen as wounded, but rarely seen as both at once. Explanation is recognized faster than contradiction.

Fluency becomes the demanded role.

But that fluency creates distance.

The most adaptive Israelis can tell every story correctly. They sense what the room needs and provide it. They move between testimony and reassurance without hesitation.

This is competence. And compression.

At home, without an audience, the unperformed experience lives: pride and exhaustion, relief and uncertainty, normal life alongside persistent tension.

Psychology frames this as the cost of sustained self-discrepancy: the larger the gap between experienced reality and presented reality, the greater the risk of loneliness inside connection.

Diaspora Jews are not doing something wrong and Israelis are not being inauthentic. This is what prolonged uncertainty does when communities need clarity.

Narratives travel easily. Complexity moves slowly.

The role of the Israeli has become easier to understand than the experience of being Israeli. Can diaspora Jewry enable them to feel truly connected simply by listening, or does the off-ramp from loneliness require sharing the barrage of antisemitism in their own daily lives.

Outrage at History, Silence at Doctrine

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The U.S Ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, referenced ancient Jewish kingdoms. History. Memory. Geography.

And the world went nuts.

US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee interviewed by Tucker Carlson

He cannot redraw borders. He has no authority to even set U.S. policy, let alone Israel’s.

Yet the reaction was immediate: he was condemned and vilified through the Muslim world.

At the same time, doctrines that openly reject Israel’s existence are treated as mere rhetoric.

Israel’s record makes the contrast unavoidable. After military victory, it returned the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt. It withdrew from Gaza, dismantling settlements and military presence. Few states concede territory after defeating enemies committed to their destruction.

The popular political-terrorist group Hamas begins from the opposite premise. Its doctrine frames the land as “waqf,” a permanent religious trust, and within the logic of Dar al-Islam, territory that can never be relinquished because it was once ruled by Muslims. This is not metaphor but structure. The conflict is defined as unfinished until sovereignty changes.

And this doctrine is not isolated to a particular politician.

Qatar and Turkey – on a sanctioned national level as a matter of policy – host and politically enable Hamas leadership. They provide access, legitimacy, and endurance for a movement whose framework rejects Israel’s permanence as a foundational principle.

The asymmetry is stark.

A Western figure referencing ancient Jewish kingdoms triggers global outrage. A movement invoking waqf and Dar al-Islam to destroy the Jewish State draws no scrutiny.

This is dangerous narrative selection.

Speculative Jewish expansion is treated as imminent risk, while explicit ideological rejection of Jewish sovereignty is normalized.

In this world view, Jewish history is reframed as provocation and therefore the basic fabric of Jewish peoplehood is positioned as dangerous to be erased. At the same time, maximalist jihadi philosophy is normalized into diplomatic background.

And the press keeps feeding you this antisemitic bile, and no one pauses to call it out.

The core issue in the Middle East is the attempted obliteration of Jewish history and the presence of Jews in the name of Islamic supremacy. We are seeing it daily but failing to identify it plainly.

America’s Birthday Suit

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Nations don’t usually come into the world naked. They inherit laws, customs, monarchs, churches, debts, grudges, and centuries of someone else’s decisions.

The thirteen colonies wore all of Britain’s garments in 1775: the crown’s authority wrapped around their necks, a state church stitched onto their backs, mercantilist restrictions cinched tight around their waists. It was a wardrobe designed to keep them subjects, not citizens.

And then, in 1776, America stripped.

The Declaration of Independence wasn’t merely a break. It was an undressing – the deliberate peeling away of everything the colonists decided was corrosive, constricting, or corrupt. They shed monarchy because no free people should bow to a single man by accident of birth. They cast off the established church because faith coerced by government is faith without meaning. They tore away the idea that rights were permissions, handed down by Parliament or king, and claimed instead that rights are natural, woven into the human condition by something greater than government.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” – Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence (1776)

This was America’s birthday suit: liberty, natural rights, self-government, and pluralism.

Britain offered representation, but only inside the structure it controlled. America answered with a more radical proposition: the people themselves are sovereign, and governments exist only with their consent. Britain offered subjects. America offered citizens.

Even the revolutionaries understood the irony — they were fighting the mother country by returning to the mother truth: all people are created equal, and legitimate power grows only from their permission. Strip away the titles, the aristocratic robes, the bishops’ vestments, and what remains is the basic dignity of the individual. The founders held that up like a newborn being lifted into the world — raw, unadorned, unmistakably human.

“In America the law is king. For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be King; and there ought to be no other.” – Thomas Paine in Common Sense (1776)

And while the young nation failed to live up to those ideals for far too long – enslaved people left unclothed in humanity, women denied their place in public life, Native nations pushed aside – the principles themselves remained America’s original outfit. They were the measure by which future generations would challenge, correct, and expand the promise of 1776.

As the United States approaches its 250th birthday and on the birthday of its first president, it’s worth remembering what it chose to wear on day one. Not imperial gowns. Not inherited privilege. Not a state religion. Not the pomp of monarchs or the chains of decrees.

“Religion… can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence; and therefore all men are equally entitled to the free exercise of religion.” – George Mason in the Virginia Declaration of Rights (1776)

Just the simple fabric of freedom: liberty stitched to equality, rights fastened to responsibility, self-government woven into every seam.

And if we want to honor that inheritance, we should strip off our own modern costumes – the red and blue jerseys, the tribal uniforms of outrage, the ideological armor we sharpen every election season. Beneath all of that, we were born the same way this country was born: in the common belief that people can govern themselves, worship freely, speak openly, and live without bending the knee to any king.

That is America’s true birthday suit — the shared principles that clothed us at the beginning, and the only garments sturdy enough to hold us together now.

The Impossible Conditionals

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The Jewish state is offered acceptance on two terms: 1) become less Jewish, and 2) take in those who want to end the Jewish State permanently.

The first demand asks the Jewish state to thin the very idea that created it. The national home is treated as temporary, acceptable only if its defining character softens and disappears.

People learning and praying at the Western Wall (Photo: First One Through)

The second demand asks the state to normalize existential risk. The perpetual state of war and support for killing Jewish civilians is ignored is rationalized under the rubric of Arab “frustration.”

Each demand strains reality. Together they form a toxic contradiction.

A country cannot weaken the basis of its existence while expanding exposure to those who challenge that existence, and still promise a degree of safety to its citizens. The condition for global approval erodes the basic condition for survival.

This is the impossible conditional embedded in international language, highlighted in UN resolutions. Acceptance in the Middle East and the community of nations is framed as the reward for steps that make recognition unnecessary because the conflict’s central object -the Jewish state – is expected to disappear into a new secular bi-national entity at best, and from the face of the Earth at worst.

Unsurprisingly, Israel cannot accept such terms. So the UN blesses the violence against it.

Remarkably, the world cannot understand why Israelis will not embrace the offer of acceptance coupled with the demand for self-immolation.

From Mishkan to Mikdash

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Parshat Terumah introduces the Mishkan, a sanctuary built in the wilderness, precise in measurements and portable by design. It moved as the people moved. God’s presence rested among a nation without a permanent home.

For nearly two thousand years, Jewish life functioned in Mishkan mode.

Without sovereignty and without a Temple, Jewish law became the architecture that traveled. Halacha, Jewish law, created sacred space wherever Jews settled. The synagogue stood in place of the courtyard and the Shabbat table carried echoes of the altar. Study sustained covenant across continents.

Judaism survived in the diaspora because it was built to move.

But the Mishkan was never meant to be the final form. It pointed toward the Mikdash, the Temple that was ultimately built 3,000 years ago in Jerusalem, enduring and anchored in sovereignty. The Mishkan belongs to wandering. The Mikdash assumes a people settled in its land.

Exile required portability. The State of Israel reintroduces permanence.

The Old City of Jerusalem including the Jewish Temple Mount/ Al Aqsa Compound

That shift changes the demands of Jewish life. Law still shapes the individual and the community, but it now encounters public power. Covenant enters the arena of governance.

The wilderness sanctuary rose from voluntary gifts. The Temple required national structure and responsibility. Now, sovereignty requires the same. While a portable faith sustains survival, a rooted nation must translate that faith into courts, policy, defense, and public ethics.

Jewish history has moved from dispersion to statehood. Yet the deeper challenge is spiritual: whether a tradition perfected in exile can shape a society in power without losing its moral clarity.

Terumah begins with a traveling sanctuary. It gestures toward something fixed and enduring.

The journey from Mishkan to Mikdash continues in our own time.