Jenin Terror Theater in New York

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Jenin did not drift into the headlines after 2022. It started producing them.

What emerged in Jenin was a terrorist factory. Fighters from Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades fused into a loose network called the Jenin Brigades that did not need a central command to be effective. Decentralized cells, shared infrastructure, constant regeneration.

The output showed up quickly. Bnei Brak shootings killed five. Tel Aviv shootings killed three. Elad stabbings and hacking with axes killed four. Different attackers, same origin point: Jenin.

Israeli investigations kept circling back to the same networks that planned, armed, and launched the murders. The response followed the pattern. Raids intensified through 2023 and 2024. Weapons labs were targeted and IED networks were dismantled. Yet the factory kept running, because the underlying condition never changed.

Governance had receded.

Palestinian terrorist from Jenin shot and killed three on Dizengoff Street in Tel Aviv, 2022

By 2024, the Palestinian Authority was largely absent inside the camp. Armed groups operated openly. Weapons moved with little friction. Jenin functioned less as a governed space and more as an incubator.

When the Palestinian Authority finally moved in, it revealed the reality it had long avoided. Arrests. Clashes. Fighters targeted in the same streets that had projected violence outward. An internal confrontation that made clear what Jenin had become.

That move came under pressure. As the transition toward Donald Trump in January 2025 approached, the Authority needed to show it could control territory. It signaled to Washington that it could confront militias, that it could govern, that it still mattered. At the same time, it faced a harder truth: those militias had the street. Polling from the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research showed strong support for armed groups, especially in places like Jenin where the Brigades carried both weapons and legitimacy. The Authority moved against forces that many Palestinians saw as their representatives.

68% support the formation of armed groups, such as the “Lions’ Den,” and 87% believe the PA does not have the right to arrest members of these groups – PCPSR poll, March 2023

And then the story is exported for western audiences.

“The Freedom Theatre,” founded in 2006 inside the same camp, showcases a different version of Jenin. Its language is culture, resistance, narrative. On April 12, 2026, that version appears in Kingston, NY with a screening and discussion at the Old Dutch Church.

What arrives there is a story stripped of origin. No Bnei Brak attack. No Dizengoff murders. No Elad hacking. No accounting for the networks that produced them or the infrastructure that sustained them. The factory disappears. The output is reframed.

Groups like Jewish Voice for Peace and Democratic Socialists of America amplify that version—one that travels without the genocidal bloodlust, speaks the language of “grievance” and “resistance”, and leaves out the mechanics of violence that made Jenin central in the first place.

Two things now move out of Jenin. One is violence, forcing constant military response. The other is narrative, reshaping how that violence is understood far from its source. They are not separate tracks. One conditions the other.

Jenin is no longer just a location. It is a generator—of attacks, of responses, of competing realities.

Every TSA Line Is a Response to Jihadist Terror

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Spring break arrives and the terminals fill. Families in flip-flops inch forward. Teenagers clutch boarding passes. Parents juggle passports, snacks, and patience. The line barely moves. Weeks later it repeats on Passover and Easter: travel with checkpoints.

While it feels like inconvenience, it is much more.

It is memory.
It is cost.
It is consequence.

The line begins with the September 11 attacks, when operatives from the genocidal jihadist group al-Qaeda boarded planes as passengers and turned them into weapons. Nearly three thousand civilians were killed in a single morning. The attack followed a clear logic: target civilians in the West, maximize scale, use the openness of modern Democratic systems against themselves.

Out of that morning came the Transportation Security Administration. The bins. The scanners. The choreography of shoes, belts, and laptops. A system built to harden what had already been breached.

It continues today at scale.

The United States still designates a range of these Islamic superiority groups as terrorist organizations:

  • al-Qaeda
  • Islamic State (ISIS)
  • al-Shabaab
  • Boko Haram
  • Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan
  • Hamas
  • Hezbollah

They differ in leadership, geography, and strategy yet converge in one place: the justification of violence against western civilians in the name of radical Islam.

Hamas makes the convergence unmistakable. Its founding charter is replete with calls to kill Jews and destroy the Jewish State. Its leadership has framed the conflict in absolutist terms. And on October 7, its fighters carried out coordinated attacks that deliberately targeted civilians—families in homes, people at a music festival—turning them into instruments of terror in a way that was both intentional and public.

Different names and different flags. Same methodology and targets.

Those jihadi ideas do not stay contained to a battlefield. They reshape daily life.

It shows up in synagogues and churches where doors are locked and guards stand watch during prayer. In stadiums and concerts where bags are checked and perimeters hardened. In city streets lined with barriers. In subway systems with armed patrols. In office buildings where access is controlled and monitored.

Islamic extremist Salman Abedi and his brother Hashem Abedi bomb Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, UK

Everyday life has been redesigned around the possibility of civilian targeting.

Every traveler standing in a TSA line is paying part of that price. Every secured synagogue, every guarded stadium, every hardened entrance carries the same cost.

TSA lines at American airports

Aviation remains a focus for a reason. It concentrates civilians. It symbolizes openness. It offers reach. So the security system stays because the threat did not disappear.

As in Israel, faced with daily threats.

Spring break travelers do not think about jihadi ideology when they remove their shoes. Families heading to a Passover seder or an Easter gathering do not connect their delay to Islamic extremist networks.

But they are connected.

To a morning in September.
To an idea that still circulates.
To organizations that still recruit, plan, and attack.

Which are now being promoted and protected by elected officials and a socialist-jihadi alliance growing inside the West.

Erasing a Country with a Date

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Some arguments don’t come as arguments. They come as word choices.

In a recent dispatch, the Palestinian Authority’s official news agency, WAFA, made a choice that says everything. Israel appears as an adjective when attached to institutions. Its actions carry familiar condemnations. And the land itself is recast as “the 1948 territories.”

That is not reporting. That is positioning.

1948 is a year of war and statehood. It marks the moment Israel came into being and survived an attempt to erase it at birth. Turning that year into a place rewrites the present. It drags today back into a permanent opening chapter, where the outcome still hangs in the balance.

A country becomes a placeholder. Sovereignty becomes provisional. Everything sits on ground that the language refuses to make firm.

This is how maximal claims stay alive.

If a state only exists as “1948,” then its future remains permanently negotiable.

The contradiction is visible in plain sight. Daily coordination with a functioning state on one hand. A refusal to grant that state permanence on the other. Even more, that the very land of that state is illegal, stolen. The phrase allows engagement without acceptance.

That approach carries consequences.

Conflicts move when both sides deal with what is actually there. Language that recasts reality into a provisional state keeps the dispute locked at its most basic level. Every negotiation floats above a refusal that pulls it back down.

This pattern extends well beyond a single outlet. It echoes across official statements, classrooms, and international stages. Words are chosen with care because they preserve a claim that facts have long since settled.

Israel is a state with institutions, borders, citizens, allies, and critics. It participates in the global system, fights wars, signs agreements, and argues with itself in open courts. None of that fits inside a date.

Calling it “the 1948 territories” keeps the founding war alive in the present tense.
And as long as that language holds, the conflict never leaves its opening scene.

Peacekeeping Without Peace

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The international community keeps reaching for the same tool and calling it a solution.

It wasn’t in southern Lebanon. It won’t be in Gaza.

After the 2006 Lebanon War, the United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 1701 with clarity: no armed groups south of the Litani River except the Lebanese state and United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon. Hezbollah would withdraw. The area would be demilitarized.

It never happened.

Hezbollah didn’t disarm. It adapted. Fighters disappeared into civilian life. Weapons moved into homes and tunnels. Infrastructure embedded deeper. Over time, Hezbollah became stronger in the very zone it was supposed to vacate.

UNIFIL patrolled. It reported. It de-escalated when it could.

It did not enforce.

It could not.

That is not a tactical failure. It is the model.

A peacekeeping force without the authority or backing to impose outcomes becomes a bystander to violations it is tasked to prevent.

UNIFIL soldiers

Now the same model is being proposed for Gaza.

Disarm Hamas. Install a new authority. Deploy a multinational force to secure the peace.

It sounds familiar because it is.

Hamas, like Hezbollah, is not just a militia. It is a political and social organism backed by the Islamic Republic of Iran that is embedded in the population, sustained by ideology, and built to survive pressure. It will not voluntarily disarm into irrelevance.

And no external force—operating with limited mandate, constrained rules, and no appetite for sustained combat—will disarm it for them.

This is where the illusion breaks.

Peacekeeping works when peace already exists. It locks in outcomes. It does not create them. When deployed in the absence of resolution, it manages conflict. It does not end it.

That is what happened under 1701.

The “demilitarized zone” became a monitored one. Violations became routine. The temporary became permanent.

Hezbollah didn’t defy the system. It learned how to live inside it.

There is every reason to expect Hamas would do the same.

The problem is not execution. It is the belief that presence equals control. Blue helmets, patrols, liaison offices—they project order. They do not establish it.

Without a force willing and able to dismantle armed infrastructure and impose monopoly on violence, disarmament is not policy. It is aspiration.

Lebanon already ran this experiment. It didn’t produce peace.

It produced a battlefield with spectators.

Three Drivers, One Road

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Civilization reveals itself most clearly on a highway. Not in speeches, not in policy, but in how people move when no one is in charge.

Watch long enough and you will see the whole of society pass by.

There is the nervous driver. Hands clenched. Eyes darting. Checking mirrors, shoulders, blind spots, and then checking them again. Twenty miles an hour in a lane built for sixty. Every decision delayed, every movement tentative. They do not mean harm, but they cause it anyway. Traffic bunches. Others brake. The rhythm breaks. Their insecurity becomes everyone else’s problem.

Then there is the other kind. The overconfident driver. No signal. No glance. No pause. They cut across lanes as if physics were optional and other people were props. High beams on, blinding anyone in their path. They do not doubt themselves, which is exactly the problem. They move fast, loud, and wrong, leaving everyone else to react.

And then there is the third type. The one you barely notice. The competent driver. They check their mirrors, but not compulsively. They signal, they merge, they move with purpose. They understand the road is shared space. They are neither timid nor reckless. They are simply capable.

And this is not a story about driving. It is a map of how people move through the world.

Every organization, every community, every institution, every family is filled with these same three types. The insecure. The reckless. And the competent. We like to pretend the difference is about intention or ideology or background. It is not. It is about capacity. The ability to function in a shared system without forcing everyone else to compensate for you.

The insecure person does not trust their own judgment, so they slow everything down. Meetings drag. Decisions stall. Progress waits for reassurance that never fully arrives. They believe they are being careful. Others experience them as paralyzing.

The overconfident person has the opposite problem. They trust themselves too much without the discipline to match. They move before understanding. They decide before listening. They assume outcomes will bend to their will. Others experience them as chaos.

Here is the part people do not like to say out loud: both types resent the third. They do not just resent competence; they reinterpret it as wrongdoing and personal slight.

The insecure look at the competent and see a threat. Proof that the world can move without constant hesitation. So they question them. Undermine them. Suggest they are reckless or insensitive. “You do not know your place,” and “you are too big for your britches” and other insults fly. Anything to explain away the gap.

The overconfident look at the competent and see a constraint. Someone who refuses to play along with their improvisation. Someone who insists on reality. So they attack them. Call them rigid. Accuse them of stealing. Anything to avoid confronting their own lack of discipline.

In both cases, the reaction is the same. Lash out at the person who works within the system, rather than confront the behavior that breaks it.

Over time, this creates a quiet moral inversion. The people causing friction claim victimhood. The people maintaining order are cast as the problem.

The people who cannot act blame those who can. The people who act without thinking blame those who impose structure. And the people in the middle, the ones who actually keep things functioning, absorb the cost.

Competence rarely gets credit because its success looks like nothing happening at all. Meanwhile, those who cannot function easily do not just flail on their own but pull down as many as they can.

Campus Jewish Life Needs a Mainstream Voice

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On elite campuses, something more consequential than protest is unfolding. Jewish life is being redefined by extremists.

Groups like Jewish Voice for Peace and “Jews for Liberation” present themselves as the authentic moral voice of Jewish students. They speak in the language of justice, liberation, and equality that resonates with their peers. But strip away the branding and the position is blunt: the Jewish state is illegitimate and cast as a project of racial supremacy, apartheid, even genocide.

That is not critique. That is an argument for erasure.

The danger is not only that these claims are false. It is that they are being laundered into the mainstream through the fig leaf of Jewish identity. When anti-Israel activism is voiced by non-Jews, it is political. When it is voiced by Jews, it is marketed as moral truth. Then the fringe becomes credible and slogans become scholarship. Eliminationist ideas acquire the authority of internal dissent.

That shift matters.

Once Israel is no longer seen as a flawed state – much like others – but as an illegitimate one, every boundary collapses. If the state itself is the crime, dismantling it becomes justice, and whatever follows can be rationalized as liberation.

This is how language is turned into a weapon.

Mainstream Jewish campus institutions have not met this moment with equal clarity. Groups like Hillel are focused, rightly, on building Jewish life: community, ritual, continuity. They create space. They avoid litmus tests. They keep doors open. But when the central attack is not on Jewish practice but on Jewish legitimacy, generality reads as hesitation.

When others define Zionism as racism, it is not enough to respond with programming and belonging. The argument has moved to first principles. It demands an answer at that level.

And so a vacuum has opened.

Into that vacuum have stepped the loudest voices, not the most representative ones. The result is a distorted picture of Jewish opinion, one in which the extremes are visible and the center is absent.

That center needs a voice of its own.

Not a mirror image of the anti-Zionist fringe. Not a reaction that turns legitimate security concerns into collective hostility toward all Arabs. But a clear, unapologetic articulation of what most Jews actually believe, and what a sustainable future requires.

That position is not complicated.

The Jewish people have a right to sovereignty in their historic homeland. Israel must remain secure and capable of defending itself against those who seek its destruction. Terrorism and the glorification of violence are disqualifying, not contextual. No serious political future can be built on a culture that celebrates October 7 or teaches that murder is resistance.

The “two-state solution” is treated as moral doctrine, as if repeating it resolves the conflict. It does not. Self-determination is not a slogan tied to a single map. It can take different forms across different political arrangements. Millions of Palestinian Arabs have held Jordanian citizenship. Others live under varying structures of autonomy. The real question is not whether self-determination exists in theory, but whether any proposed structure can produce stability rather than violence.

A future Palestinian state, if it is ever to emerge, must come after a profound transformation: demilitarization, institutional reform, and an educational shift away from incitement and toward coexistence. Statehood is not an entitlement. It is a responsibility.

This is baseline reality, yet it is rarely stated plainly on campus.

A new kind of Jewish student group is needed, one that is explicit where others are cautious and disciplined where others are reckless. A group that centers Israel not as an abstraction but as a living, embattled state. One that can say, without hedging, that Jewish self-determination is legitimate, that its delegitimization is dangerous, and that moral seriousness requires both strength and restraint.

Such a group would do three things differently.

  • It would reject the language trap. Words like apartheid and genocide would be treated not as serious analysis but as distortions that inflame rather than illuminate.
  • It would refuse the false binary. Supporting Israel does not require abandoning moral judgment. Rejecting terror does not require rejecting an entire people.
  • It would re-anchor the conversation in reality. Israel exists. Threats are real. Peace requires conditions, not just intentions.

The goal is not to win an argument in a seminar room. It is to prevent a generation from being taught that the existence of the world’s only Jewish state is a moral error to be undone.

Campus Jewish life needs a mainstream voice that is willing to speak clearly – and be heard.

Pope Leo Leaves Room For Antisemitism

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There are moments when language has to carry more than meaning. It has to carry memory. It has to carry consequence. When the subject is the death of Jesus and the role of Jewish leadership in that story, every word is loaded with two thousand years of fallout.

That is the backdrop to a recent homily reported by Vatican News, where the Pope recounts how members of the Sanhedrin planned to put Jesus to death and frames the decision as a political calculation rooted in fear.

On its face, this is familiar terrain. The Gospel of John tells that story. The Pope emphasizes fear, power, and the instinct of leadership to preserve order when threatened. He broadens the lesson, warning about “hidden schemes of powerful authorities” and concluding that not much has changed when we look at the world today. It is a universal moral frame, the kind clergy have used for centuries to draw a line from ancient texts to modern behavior.

But this is not a normal moment, and that is not neutral language.

We are living through a surge in antisemitism that is not subtle, not isolated, and not theoretical. Jews are being targeted in cities, on campuses, and online. The State of Israel is being recast in mainstream discourse as uniquely illegitimate, even genocidal. The old accusations have not disappeared. They have been updated, rebranded, and redeployed. In that environment, the space between what is said and what is heard narrows dangerously.

The Catholic Church knows this better than anyone. For centuries, Christian teaching around the Passion narrative fed the idea that Jews, as a people, bore responsibility for the death of Jesus. That charge—deicide—did not stay in theology. It moved into law, into mobs, into expulsions and massacres. It became part of the architecture of antisemitism in Europe.

The Church confronted that history in Nostra Aetate, a landmark statement of the Second Vatican Council. The declaration made clear that Jews as a whole, then or now, cannot be blamed for the death of Christ. That was not a minor clarification. It was a doctrinal line drawn after catastrophe, an effort to shut down a pattern of interpretation that had proven lethal.

Successive Popes understood what that required in practice. Pope John Paul II did not rely on implication. He spoke directly, repeatedly, calling Jews “our elder brothers” and making visible gestures that reinforced the message. Pope Benedict XVI went further in precision, arguing explicitly that references to “the Jews” in the Gospel of John describe a specific leadership group, not a people across time. They closed interpretive doors because history showed what happens when those doors are left ajar.

That is why the current language matters. “Religious leaders saw Him as a threat.” “Hidden schemes of powerful authorities.” “Not much has changed.” None of these phrases, standing alone, violates Church teaching. None explicitly assigns blame to Jews today or draws a line to the modern State of Israel. But they operate in a space that has been misused for centuries, and they leave enough room for that misuse to return.

In a different era, that looseness might pass without consequence. Today, it does not. The categories are too easily mapped by those already inclined to do so. “Religious leaders” becomes “rabbis and synagogues.” “Powerful authorities” becomes a stand-in for Jewish power, whether the government of Israel or leaders in the Jewish diaspora. “Not much has changed” becomes an argument for continuity from the first century to the present. And in a climate where Israel is already being portrayed as a moral outlier among nations, the slide from scripture to contemporary politics is not a leap. It is a small step.

This is not about intent. The Pope is speaking in a long Christian tradition of drawing moral lessons from the Passion. The emphasis on fear and political calculation is, in fact, a move away from older, more dangerous framings. But intent does not control reception, especially when the subject has such a charged history.

The standard here cannot be whether the words are technically defensible. It has to be whether they are tight enough to prevent foreseeable distortion.

Because the distortion is not hypothetical. It is already happening in the broader culture. Jews are being pushed out of public spaces, treated by default as representatives of a state and a government they may or may not support, whether they live there or not. Israel is singled out in ways that strip context and complexity, recast as uniquely evil in a world that has no shortage of brutality. In that environment, any rhetoric that can be bent toward those narratives will be bent.

The Church has done the hard work of confronting its past. It has the doctrine. It has the precedent. What it needs, in moments like this, is the discipline to match.

Hey NY Times, Nerdeen Kiswani Wants Zionists Killed and Israel Destroyed

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Nerdeen Kiswani is not quiet about her views. She wants the Jewish State obliterated and Zionists killed. She says it openly and proudly in front of loud cheering crowds.

So why did The New York Times soften her stance? Why did it say that she was simply assembling “protests to draw attention to the suffering of Palestinians,” when her entire movement is about the destruction of Israel?

“I hope that pop-pop is the last noise that some Zionists hear in their lifetime!” – Nerdeen Kiswani, Youtube, Aug 4 2021

Why did the Times make it sound like pro-Israel groups were uniquely offended that “she supports the liberation of the Palestinian people “by any means necessary,” including armed resistance.”?

“Israel must be annihilated.” – Nerdeen Kiswani, Instagram, Mar 3 2017

Why did the Times use so much energy and so many words to say “that her activism opposes Israel, its policies and its structure as a Jewish State,” without saying that she supports targeting Jewish organizations and the annihilation of the only Jewish State?

“We marched today, we took over the streets and we visited multiple Zionist settler foundations. Multiple. We let them know we know where they’re at. We know where they work. We’re gonna find out more about where they’re at too. And we’re gonna go after them.” – Nerdeen Kiswani, YouTube, Jun 11 2021

Why didn’t the Times explicitly state that Kiswani endorses US designated terrorist groups and individuals?

Picture on left is Kiswani with pin of Abu Obaida, a spokesman for Hamas, while protesting in front of a synagogue in Teaneck, NJ on April 1, 2024 (from ADL website)

On June 10, 2024, Kiswani led a protest outside a memorial exhibit in downtown New York City about the Nova Music Festival where she said that young partygoers enjoying music was “like having a rave right next to the gas chambers during the Holocaust,” mocking not only the hundreds of murdered youth but millions of Jews slaughtered in the Holocaust.

Kiswani doesn’t hide her love of the genocidal antisemitic group Hamas. She posts her fondness to the public.

Kiswani post of a child kissing an armed Hamas terrorist, like those that burned Jewish families alive

In short, Kiswani is a proud supporter of terrorism against Jews and American allies. Yet The New York Times made it appear that her stances were simply pro-Palestinian, which some members of the pro-Israel community found offensive.

The reality is that a pro-Israel “extremist” allegedly planned an attack on a pro-Palestinian “extremist.” But the Times editorialized by showing the smiling face of an “activist” worried about the “suffering” of her people. Such is the alt-left embrace of the toxic “deformity in Palestinian culture.”

Mine Awareness or Narrative Warfare?

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Every year, the United Nations marks the International Day for Mine Awareness and Assistance in Mine Action, a day meant to focus the world on one of war’s most enduring dangers: explosives that linger long after the fighting ends. It is supposed to be about clarity, about identifying risks so civilians can return home safely.

Instead, it has become a case study in how language can blur reality.

The Secretary-General’s message follows a familiar script. Landmines, explosive remnants of war, improvised explosive devices—all grouped into a single, undifferentiated threat facing millions. Then comes the quiet insertion: Gaza. Not explained, not distinguished, simply placed alongside countries like Colombia, Ethiopia, Lebanon, Myanmar, and Syria—places long associated with entrenched landmine contamination. With that single move, a narrative is constructed without ever being explicitly stated.

The problem begins with the collapse of categories. Landmines, IEDs, and explosive remnants are not interchangeable. Landmines are deliberately planted, often victim-activated and designed to persist. IEDs are improvised weapons, most commonly used by non-state actors. Explosive remnants of war are what’s left behind—unexploded bombs, artillery shells, rockets. In Gaza, those distinctions are not academic; they are the entire story.

Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups have relied heavily on IEDs and booby traps as a core tactic. Not Israel. There does remain unexploded ordnance buried in rubble after extensive Israeli strikes. But the UN language compresses all three categories into one phrase and drops Gaza into the middle of it, allowing implication to do what evidence does not.

Just as telling is the disappearance of agency. The United Nations Mine Action Service and related reporting have acknowledged encountering IEDs in Gaza. But in public-facing messaging, the actor behind those devices vanishes. There is no mention of Hamas, the governing authority in Gaza that initiated this war with the October 7 attacks. There is no mention of homes rigged with explosives, of tunnels wired for ambush, of civilian infrastructure turned into tactical hazards. The war did not emerge from nowhere; it was launched by Gaza’s rulers, and Israel did not seek it. Yet in the UN’s framing, explosives simply exist, detached from the decisions and strategies that put them there. When agency disappears, accountability follows.

The rhetorical effect is powerful. By placing Gaza alongside countries defined by decades of landmine contamination, the UN shifts perception. Gaza becomes, in the public mind, a classic minefield. But it is not. It is a dense urban battlefield littered with booby traps and complicated by the deliberate use of improvised explosives by militant groups embedded within civilian areas.

The reality is that Gaza is a public hazard of itself. The mines, the terror tunnels under homes and schools, the embedded terrorists throughout neighborhoods is a tragedy the UN helped foster.

Rather than take a modicum of responsibility or lay blame on its adopted wards, the UN’s language pivots the blame on the victims of October 7. It deliberately has tried to change history and public perception that Israel deliberately turned Hamas into a large minefield when Gazans did that to themselves.

The International Day for Mine Awareness was created to expose hidden dangers, to name them clearly so they can be removed. Here, the danger is not only in the ground. It is in the language. When distinctions collapse and responsibility dissolves, understanding becomes another casualty. And in a conflict already defined by competing narratives, what remains unexploded in the words can be just as damaging as what lies beneath the rubble.

The Fire That Doesn’t Go Out

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Parshat Tzav centers on a single, stubborn image: a fire that must keep burning.
Day and night, without interruption, the flame is sustained. Wood is added. Ash is cleared. The rhythm continues.

No drama surrounds it. That is the point.

The Torah uses a precise word: tamid—continuous.
Rashi sharpens it further: continuous means that the fire burns through Shabbat. It burns even when conditions are imperfect. There are no pauses built into the system.

Continuity is not aspirational. It is enforced.

Continuity is fragile. It breaks in small gaps—missed days, skipped responsibilities, moments when no one shows up. Enough of those moments, and what once felt permanent disappears quietly.

Tzav eliminates the gap.

The tradition holds that the original fire descended from heaven—a moment of revelation. And then the responsibility shifts.

Ramban notes that even with that divine beginning, the command remains: keep it burning. What begins from above survives only through what is sustained below.

This is how permanence is built.

The Kohanim return each day to the same tasks. The altar is prepared again. The fire is fed again. Over time, repetition becomes structure. Structure becomes identity.

Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch sees in this a broader model. A people endures through daily acts that reaffirm what it stands for.

The fire becomes a signal:

Something is still here. The commitment continues. Yesterday carries into today.

In much of the worls today we have built a culture of moments. A flash of outrage. A declaration. A cause that surges and disappears as quickly as it arrived.

Tzav points in the opposite direction.

What matters is not who lights the fire. It is who keeps it burning.

Ner Tamid and lights in synagogue in Gibraltar (photo: FirstOneThrough)

The Jewish world speaks often about continuity. It invests heavily in beginnings—early education, bar mitzvah preparation, the moment a child stands before a community and reads from the Torah.

And then, too often, the system loosens its grip.

The years that follow—high school, when identity is tested, challenged, and reshaped—are treated as optional, as if the fire will somehow continue on its own.

It doesn’t.

As Adam Teitelbaum argues in Sapir, the drop-off after bar mitzvah is not a minor leak; it is the structural break. Jewish education often peaks at the moment it should begin to deepen, especially for boys.

The system celebrates ignition and neglects continuity.

The result is predictable: a generation trained for performance at thirteen, and left without reinforcement at seventeen—precisely when identity is challenged, not assumed.

Continuity cannot be front-loaded.

It requires reinforcement when the surrounding culture is strongest, when belonging becomes a choice rather than an inheritance. Those are the years when the fire must be tended most carefully.

Continuity is not sustained by intention. It is sustained by people who refuse to let the fire go out.