“This day you have become a people to the Lord your God.” (Deuteronomy 27:9)
It is a strange declaration in this week’s parsha, Ki Tavo.
Why now?
God had already called the Israelites “My people” while they were slaves in Egypt. They left Egypt together and crossed the sea together.
At Sinai, they received the Torah and entered a covenant with God. There, they were called “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.” (Exodus 19:6)
Yet forty years later, as they prepare to enter Israel, Moses declares: “This day you have become a people.”
What changed?
Ki Tavo opens with the answer:
“When you enter the land that the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, and you possess it and settle in it…” (Deuteronomy 26:1)
Only then begins the commandment of Bikkurim, bringing the first fruits. Standing on the Land with its produce in his hands, the farmer must recount Jewish history: the descent into Egypt, suffering, liberation and finally:
Palm trees in the Jordan Valley (photo: FirstOneThrough)
“He brought us to this place and gave us this land.” (Deuteronomy 26:9)
The Exodus was not simply about leaving Egypt. It was part of a journey toward somewhere.
Egypt gave us freedom. Sinai gave us the covenant. The Land gave us responsibility.
Israel was already a people in Egypt and a covenantal community at Sinai. But entering the Land changed the nature of that covenant.
Now Jews would have land, property, businesses, courts, borders, wealth and poverty. They would no longer simply receive God’s laws. They would be responsible for effectuating them through a society of their own.
That is why Bikkurim matters. Sovereignty does not permit the successful farmer to begin his story with himself. Holding what he grew on his own land, he must recite the history that put him there.
History creates the claim. Covenant creates the obligation. Sovereignty makes both real.
That gives “this day you have become a people” particular resonance after nearly two thousand years without Jewish sovereignty.
A people is not fully defined by what happened to it, what it believes or even the laws it accepts. It is also defined by what it takes responsibility for building.
Israel’s decision to move forward with construction in E1 produced the familiar headlines: settlers, seized Palestinian land, displacement and the death of a Palestinian state.
WAFA reported that Israel issued a tender for 1,234 “settlement units” in E1, presenting it as “one of the most controversial settlement schemes” in a colonial project designed to fragment Palestinian territory.
Before debating E1, start with what is actually being built, where, on whose property and for whom.
An Extension of Ma’ale Adumim
E1 is an approximately 12,000-dunam, or 12-square-kilometer, planning area between Jerusalem and the existing community of Ma’ale Adumim.
It lies in Area C, where the Palestinian Authority and Israel agreed under the Oslo framework would be under Israeli security control and civil administration. Israel is building within the municipal planning jurisdiction of Ma’ale Adumim, not a new area. E1 has not been annexed to Israel.
The current project is E1 South, one part of that larger area. The 1,234 units are in apartment blocks adjacent to the existing city, not isolated houses spread across 12 square kilometers of West Bank hills. The plans contemplate the infrastructure of a normal urban community: elementary schools, kindergartens and daycare, synagogues and a mikveh, community buildings, parks and gardens, commercial facilities, roads and infrastructure.
E1 is not a new project of the current Israeli government. Its planning dates back roughly three decades to the Rabin era. Roads and the Judea and Samaria District police headquarters were built there years ago, even as residential construction remained frozen under international pressure.
Building Does Not Draw the Border
Area C was created under Oslo as an interim administrative arrangement, not a permanent international border. Borders, settlements and Jerusalem were reserved for permanent-status negotiations, and Israel subsequently transferred authority over the major Palestinian population centers to the Palestinian Authority as part of Area A.
E1 South could therefore ultimately remain with Israel, become part of a Palestinian state, or be addressed through a negotiated territorial exchange. Construction changes the facts future negotiators confront; it does not establish sovereignty.
E1 does not make a Palestinian state geographically impossible simply because it creates a narrow connection between northern and southern Palestinian population centers. Israel itself has long existed with a narrow neck across its principal population center, historically only about nine miles wide at its narrowest point. If a narrow neck makes statehood impossible, Israel itself should have been geographically impossible for decades.
Palestinian north-south travel east of the 1949 Armistice Lines (E49)/ Judea and Samaria already happens and is being made easier. A route already exists east of Ma’ale Adumim, and Israel is constructing additional roads intended to connect current Palestinian Arab communities around E1.
A Land System Older Than Israel
Much of E1 is classified by Israel as state or government land, but Israel did not invent that category in 1967.
The underlying system begins with the Ottoman Land Code of 1858, which established categories of land and rules involving government ownership, registration, possession and cultivation. The Ottomans created the system, the British Mandate retained and amended it, and Jordan continued administering and registering West Bank land under it. Israel inherited that legal structure after 1967 and subsequently administered and modified it through military orders.
Private Palestinian Property Was Excluded
Approximately 775 dunams — about 6.5% of E1 — consist of recognized private Palestinian parcels interspersed through the area.
Israel did not classify those parcels as state land, and they were excluded from the official E1 plans. Bimkom, an Israeli planning organization opposed to E1, notes the importance of continued agricultural cultivation to the status of some private parcels.
Critics argue that surrounding development could make access to some excluded private parcels more difficult. That is a legitimate issue, but does not suddenly turn building these apartments into theft of privately owned Palestinian land.
1.55% of E1
The scale of the current project is considerably smaller than the overall E1 map suggests.
On August 18, 2026, Israel issued Tender 186/2026 for E1 South, Plan 420/4/7: 1,234 apartments divided among seven construction complexes. Bids are due October 19, 2026.
The current development parcels therefore occupy about 22.7% of E1 South and only 1.55% of the entire E1 planning area.
A companion residential plan, 420/4/10, contemplates another 2,173 apartments. The current tender, however, is specifically for the 1,234 units in E1 South.
The Bedouin Question
There is a separate Bedouin issue. Jahalin Bedouin communities live and graze animals throughout the broader Ma’ale Adumim/E1 area, and B’Tselem and OCHA argue that development, roads, demolition orders and restrictions threaten their residence, grazing and movement. Israel has previously considered relocating Jahalin families, including a 2005 plan involving approximately 200 families that was never implemented.
Bedouins in E1 (photo: FirstOneThrough)
Who Owns It — and Who Can Live There?
The seven parcels are being marketed in the tender as government/state land. Developers receive development rights over government property. The precise ultimate leasehold or ownership structure for apartment purchasers depends on the final land agreements.
Tender 186/2026 is a regular public tender, not a direct allocation to a religious or ideological organization. Foreign-controlled developers may face additional governmental approval requirements, but there is no requirement that bidders be Jewish-owned.
Nor do the E1 planning and tender provisions identify a religious or ethnic restriction reserving the apartments for Jews. Israeli Arabs could purchase or develop these apartments.
A Palestinian Arab resident presents a more complicated property-law question because the West Bank retains layers of Jordanian law, including a 1953 Jordanian law restricting certain sales and long-term leases to foreigners. The ability of a Palestinian from Abu Dis or a Jahalin Bedouin to acquire and register the same long-term property interest as an Israeli citizen therefore depends on the applicable land and registration rules. That complication is because of old Jordanian law, not Israeli.
Three Questions, Not One
The E1 controversy really involves three different legal questions: whether privately owned Palestinian property is being taken; whether Israel properly classified government land under the inherited Ottoman-British-Jordanian system; and whether international law permits Israel to use even legitimately public land in Area C for Israeli civilian development.
The first concerns ownership. The second concerns land law. The third concerns the law of occupation and sovereignty.
They are not the same question.
What Does “Palestinian Land” Mean?
That brings the argument back to WAFA’s description of E1 as Israeli construction on “Palestinian land” via “land seizure.”
The phrase can mean property privately owned by a Palestinian, public land geographically located in the West Bank, or territory Palestinians want incorporated into a future Palestinian state.
Those are three very different things.
E1 can be challenged because of its impact on future negotiations, Israel’s interpretation of inherited land law, international law or nearby Bedouin communities. But none of those arguments turns government property into privately owned Palestinian land, an urban extension of Ma’ale Adumim into the destruction of a Palestinian village, or housing without a religious purchaser restriction into “Jewish-only” apartments.
And construction today does not determine where tomorrow’s negotiated border must run.
E1 is controversial enough on the facts. There is no reason to blur them.
Stephen Stills wrote those words sixty years ago for Buffalo Springfield’s For What It’s Worth. He did not tell listeners exactly what was happening. He told them to notice.
“Stop, hey, what’s that sound?”
For Jews today, it is becoming increasingly difficult not to hear it.
In Britain, years of anti-Israel demonstrations were followed by attacks on synagogues and Jewish institutions, the murder of two Jews at a Manchester synagogue on Yom Kippur and the stabbing of two visibly Jewish men in Golders Green.
Finally, Prime Minister Keir Starmer told Britain to “open their eyes to Jewish pain, Jewish suffering and Jewish fear.”
He was even more explicit about a slogan common at anti-Israel demonstrations: “If you stand alongside people who say globalise the intifada, you are calling for terrorism against Jews.”
“Everybody look what’s going down.”
Australia had its warnings too. Antisemitism surged after October 7. Jewish institutions were targeted. Then came Bondi Beach.
On December 14, 2025, gunmen opened fire on Jews celebrating Chanukah by the Sea. Fifteen victims were murdered. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese called it an “act of evil antisemitism.”
The warnings had become bodies.
The question is no longer whether every protester is an antisemite or every criticism of Israel antisemitic.
The question is whether something is happening here.
Britain’s leaders now say so. Australia’s leaders now say so.
American Jews should not need another massacre before believing their own eyes and ears.
America has already had Pittsburgh, where 11 Jews were murdered in synagogue; Poway, where a woman was murdered at Passover services; and Jersey City, where Jews were hunted inside a kosher market.
In 2025, two Israeli Embassy employees were murdered outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C. Days later, Jews demonstrating in Boulder, Colorado, for Israeli hostages were attacked with Molotov cocktails. Hostages were taken in a synagogue in Texas. An armed man rammed his truck into a Jewish school in Michigan.
The ADL recorded 6,274 antisemitic incidents in America in 2025—17 every day. Antisemitic assaults reached a record high.
Yet some institutions still debate the meaning of the sound.
In 2023, the presidents of Harvard, Penn and MIT were asked before Congress whether calling for the genocide of Jews violated their universities’ rules. Instead of an immediate yes came answers about context.
The Second Intifada meant suicide bombers on buses and in cafés and restaurants. It meant the deliberate murder of Jewish civilians. Now the slogan is shouted in America while American Jews are assaulted and Jewish institutions require armed guards.
Stephen Stills’s sixty-year-old warning suddenly sounds less like history. “There’s something happening here.”Now.
The university presidents wanted context. The mayor of the American city with the largest Jewish population wanted to explain intifada.
Jews have context. Pittsburgh is context. Poway is context. Jersey City is context. Boulder is context. Washington is context. Britain is context. Australia is context.
Stop. Hey. What’s that sound?Everybody look what’s going down.
Western governments have developed a familiar vocabulary.
“Hate is rising.”
“Religious intolerance is increasing.”
“Antisemitism and Islamophobia must be confronted.”
Every minority deserves protection. But treating victims equally does not require pretending they are being targeted equally.
Country
Anti-Jewish
Anti-Muslim
Jewish / Muslim Ratio
UK (England & Wales)
1,060 per 100,000
120 per 100,000
8.8×
Canada
~274 per 100,000
~13 per 100,000
~21×
United States
~250–300 per 100,000
~5–6 per 100,000
~45–50×
Australia*
~2,185 per 100,000
~38 per 100,000
~57×
*Australia uses community incident reporting rather than a directly comparable national police hate-crime database.
Britain clearly has a religious-hatred problem. Muslims and Jews suffer substantial levels of hate crime, well above that of other English-speaking countries, while Jews are targeted at almost nine times the rate of Muslims. Canada and USA show fewer hate crimes per population, and a wider disparity between Jews and Muslims being attacked.
Then there is Australia.
For the decade before October 7, 2023, Australia averaged 342 reported anti-Jewish incidents annually. That exploded to 2,062 in 2023/24 and remained at 1,654 in 2024/25. In New South Wales, police-recorded hate incidents against Jews rose from 40 in 2020 to 841 in 2025.
Then statistics became bodies.
On December 14, 2025, gunmen attacked Chanukah by the Sea at Bondi Beach. Fifteen people were murdered while celebrating the Jewish holiday.
Australia subsequently established a Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion, which is examining the circumstances surrounding the attack and whether authorities adequately recognized the threat to Jewish events.
Australia had been warned.
It had also begun responding. The government appointed Jewish communal leader Jillian Segal as Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism. Her national plan followed extensive consultation with Australian Jews, and the government adopted all 13 recommendations.
Yet Australia continues to struggle with whether antisemitism is a distinct threat or another part of generalized “hate.”
Its Combatting Antisemitism, Hate and Extremism Act puts antisemitism in the title – along with more generic terms of “hate” and “extremism.” There is nothing wrong with fighting all forms of hatred. The question is whether symmetry in government policy reflects the reality on the ground.
Australia’s available community data indicate roughly 38 anti-Muslim incidents per 100,000 Muslims and 2,185 anti-Jewish incidents per 100,000 Jews.
That is roughly 57-to-1.
Indeed, Australia’s Islamophobia envoy (in a federal post strictly devoted to “Islamophobia” and no other forms of hate) has urged the Royal Commission on Antisemitism to approach antisemitism through the broader causes of identity-based hatred and the common roots of antisemitism, Islamophobia and other prejudice.
“antisemitism, Islamophobia and other forms of prejudice share common causes, such as polarisation, online environments and declining trust in institutions. Tackling these underlying factors can strengthen outcomes for all communities.” – Australia’s Special Envoy to Combat Islamophobia, Aftab Malik, June 2026
What? If they were all the same, why are Jews attacked at a 57-to-1 ratio?
Australia does not have a generic hate problem that happens to include Jews. It has an extraordinary antisemitism problem that generic language about hate must not be allowed to hide.
On September 11, 2001, jihadi terrorists turned passenger airplanes into missiles and murdered nearly 3,000 Americans.
Only three days later, while bodies were still being recovered, ANSWER—Act Now to Stop War and End Racism—was formed to protest what America might do in response.
The name was important.
ANSWER viewed American military power abroad and racism at home as pieces of the same system: a wealthy, largely Western “Global North” dominating the poorer, disproportionately black and brown “Global South.”
For this anti-Western group, America was not defending itself. It was exercising imperial power. Those fighting it could be engaged in “resistance.”
Seven months after 9/11, Israel was pulled into the same framework.
On April 20, 2002, ANSWER organized more than 100,000 people in Washington under “Free Palestine, No War on Iraq.”
The Iraq War had not even begun.
Later that year, Medea Benjamin, Jodie Evans and others founded CODEPINK to oppose the coming Iraq War. The organizations forming around it had a broader worldview: America and its allies represented imperialism, while their opponents represented oppressed peoples fighting back.
Israel became another perfect target.
It was democratic, prosperous, militarily powerful and allied with America. It therefore became part of the “Global North.”
Never mind that roughly half of Israeli Jews have roots in the Middle East and North Africa. Never mind that Israel’s citizens include Arabs, Druze and other minorities. The supposedly racial framework somehow classified this remarkably diverse Middle Eastern country as the white colonialist.
That classification did something important.
It determined who was allowed to fight back.
Palestinian Arab jihadi violence could be “resistance.” Israeli force became “aggression.” ANSWER could call itself an antiwar organization while defending Palestinian attacks because it wasn’t really applying a rule against war. It was applying different rules to different sides.
Then came October 7, 2023. Thousands of Gazan terrorists invaded Israel, murdered roughly 1,200 people and kidnapped more than 250.
Israelis were still recovering bodies when ANSWER was mobilizing for “Free Palestine.”
The parallel with September 11 was remarkable. America gets attacked. Focus immediately turns to restraining America. Israel gets attacked. Focus immediately turns to restraining Israel.
Twenty-two years separated the attacks, but the ideological framework had barely moved.
The liberal societies being condemned have been spectacularly successful. People from every race, religion and continent continue trying to move to the United States, Canada, Europe and other liberal democracies. Israel itself absorbed Jews fleeing Europe, the Soviet Union, Ethiopia and the Arab and Muslim worlds.
People vote with their feet. They generally flee toward societies with elections, property rights, women’s equality, education, religious freedom and economic opportunity—not away from them.
The divide is not really white versus brown or North versus South. It is between those who view successful liberal societies as achievements worth defending and those who view their success and power as evidence of oppression.
September 11 exposed that divide in America. October 7 exposed it again in Israel.
The anti-Global North’s victims of preference changed from Afghanistan to Iraq to Palestine. And the vocabulary remained: imperialism, colonialism, oppression and resistance.
And so did the fundamental question: When terrorists attack a successful liberal society, who has the right to resist whom?
In Greek mythology, the Hydra was almost impossible to kill.
It had many heads. Cut one off and more grew in its place. Heracles eventually understood that killing the monster required more than endlessly chopping at whichever head was attacking him. Each severed neck had to be cauterized so it could not regenerate.
Heracles battling the Lernean Hydra
For nearly three years, Israel has been told that Hamas is a Hydra. Kill its leaders. Destroy its tunnels. Eliminate its fighters. It won’t matter. Hamas—or something worse—will simply grow back.
Queen Rania of Jordan articulated the underlying argument shortly after the October 7 massacre, that Israel’s actions against Hamas:
“create a new generation of resistance that is fiercer and more violent” – Queen Rania of Jordan
Retired U.S. Army Colonel Peter Mansoor was more explicit, predicting that “Hamas 2.0 will rise” from the destruction.
They identified a real danger. But regeneration is not immortality.
Hamas is more than leaders, tunnels, rockets and gunmen. It is a political and military organization built around an ideology. Destroy the organization while preserving everything capable of regenerating it and another head may indeed grow.
The question is whether everything capable of regenerating it must also be allowed to survive.
Nearly three years of Palestinian polling shows the problem.
As detailed recently in Palestinian Arabs Turn Inward, But Not Away From Hamas, Palestinian Arabs have dramatically lowered their expectations after three years of war. Support for Hamas and armed struggle has fallen sharply from the extraordinary levels recorded after October 7. But losing faith in Hamas’s ability to win is not the same thing as rejecting Hamas.
In the August 2026 PCPSR poll, 72% opposed Hamas disarming before a complete Israeli withdrawal from Gaza. Asked what Hamas would become if it gave up its weapons, 53% envisioned it remaining both armed and political and another 36% solely political. In all, 89% envisioned Hamas surviving in some form.
That is the Hydra problem.
And Hamas is only one head.
Hezbollah sits to Israel’s north. The Houthis attack from Yemen. Palestinian Islamic Jihad fights alongside Hamas. Above them, the Islamic Republic of Iran spent decades financing, arming and connecting organizations surrounding Israel.
October 7 exposed not simply a Hamas problem, but an ecosystem.
That is why eliminating Hamas militarily cannot be the entire definition of victory. As FirstOneThrough argued in From a Hamas Double Standard to the Hamas Dangerous Standard, an organization cannot maintain an independent army committed to destroying another state while simultaneously being normalized as an ordinary participant in democratic politics.
And military defeat addresses only part of what allows another head to grow.
FirstOneThrough addressed another part in The Only Way The Conflict Can End: the Palestinian claim to a so-called “right of return” into Israel itself.
A Palestinian state alongside Israel cannot simultaneously mean millions of Palestinians receive a state of their own while millions more retain a claim to move into Israel. That is 1.5 states for Arabs and 0.5 of a state for Jews.
American policy once said this plainly.
The 2004 Democratic Party platform called for Palestinian refugees to settle in a Palestinian state “rather than in Israel.” The 2008 platform repeated the position before the language was omitted in 2012.
President George W. Bush made the same commitment directly to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in April 2004 as Sharon prepared the Gaza disengagement. A realistic solution, Bush wrote, would involve establishing a Palestinian state and “the settling of Palestinian refugees there, rather than in Israel.”
The principle was straightforward: Palestinian statehood was supposed to resolve Palestinian statelessness, not provide another mechanism for eliminating the Jewish State.
Defeating the Hydra therefore requires ending not only Hamas’s ability to wage war, but the expectation that Israel is temporary.
History offers another model.
Nazi Germany did not fight alone, and victory did not consist of killing Hitler while leaving the Axis intact. Germany and its allies were defeated or surrendered.
Then came political defeat. The Nazi military and political apparatus was dismantled. The Nazi Party was outlawed. Its leaders were prosecuted. Germany was not invited to preserve a rebranded Nazi Party so its supporters could recover through elections what they had lost through war.
The Axis was defeated as a system.
The same principle should define the defeat of Hamas.
Hamas cannot be permitted to lose its army, change clothes and emerge as an internationally accepted political party. Global institutions and governments should treat Hamas as one organization, dismantle its financing and international infrastructure, and isolate organizations that materially finance or facilitate its terrorism.
Prohibition is only half the answer.
Muslim governments, religious leaders and international institutions should strengthen Muslim movements committed to peaceful coexistence, religious equality and acceptance of Jewish sovereignty. Muslim-majority countries that have made peace with Israel already demonstrate that Islam and permanent war against Jewish sovereignty are not synonymous. Isolate the jihadis in the Jihadi-Israel Conflict and empower the moderate Arab and Muslim countries.
Make the institutions of coexistence stronger while making the institutions of violent supremacy militarily, financially and politically untenable.
The Hydra has many heads.
Hamas is a head. Hezbollah is a head. The Houthis are a head. The Islamic Republic supplies the Hydra with blood. The ideology gives it reason to regenerate.
The Hamas 2.0 warning should therefore be taken seriously—but not accepted as prophecy.
The Hydra is difficult to kill. It is not immortal.
The name made sense at Israel’s founding. Israel fought wars against the armies of Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Iraq and other Arab states. The conflict was understood principally as one between the Jewish State and the surrounding Arab world.
Then the map changed.
Egypt made peace with Israel in 1979. Jordan followed in 1994. During the horrific Second Intifada, the suicide bombings, shootings and other attacks were overwhelmingly part of a localized war involving Palestinian Arabs. The terminology narrowed accordingly. The Arab-Israeli Conflict increasingly became the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict.
That description is now inadequate too as the map evolved again over the past several years.
The Abraham Accords fundamentally changed the regional picture. The United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco normalized relations with Israel. Trade, tourism, investment and security cooperation followed. Other Muslim-majority countries have also maintained or developed relations with the Jewish State.
Yet at the same time, Israel has faced repeated war from Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen and, increasingly directly, the Islamic Republic of Iran. These forces are separated by borders, ethnicity and even the Sunni-Shiite divide. What connects them is not Arab identity. It is a radical Islamist rejectionism that refuses to accept a sovereign Jewish state in the Middle East.
It is therefore time for the terminology to catch up. This is increasingly the Jihadi-Israel Conflict.
Ahlam Tamimi, who helped plan and transported the suicide bomber to the 2001 Sbarro restaurant bombing in Jerusalem and now lives in Jordan.
The term captures the venom, vitriol and violence of Hamas and the armed Islamist movements aligned against Israel. It encompasses Hezbollah and the Houthis and, most importantly, the Islamic Republic of Iran that has armed, financed and supported much of the network surrounding Israel.
It also leaves room to describe the roles of Qatar and Turkey, whose close relationships with Hamas and fierce political hostility toward Israel place them in a very different category from Muslim and Arab governments pursuing normalization.
Most importantly, the new terminology does something the old terminology cannot: it separates Muslims and Arabs who seek peace with Israel from radical Islamists committed to its destruction and the slaughter of Jews.
Hamas leader calling for slaughtering Jews as a religious Islamic principle
The dividing line has moved.
And that makes the choices facing Lebanon, Syria and Saudi Arabia especially important. They can move toward a Middle East built around trade and coexistence, or remain trapped in a conflict driven by radical Islamist movements that reject Jewish sovereignty, basic human rights and self-determination.
The conflict has become crystallized for what it likely always was: the Jihadi-Israel Conflict.
Two events separated by three months in 2021 delivered the same message to Islamist movements confronting more powerful enemies:
Keep fighting. Keep waiting. Eventually the infidels leave.
The first came in Israel.
In May 2021, Hamas launched rockets toward Jerusalem and Israeli cities, casting itself as the defender of Al-Aqsa and Palestinian Arab families facing possible eviction in Sheikh Jarrah.
Eleven days later came a ceasefire and the Israelis never moved forward with the evictions.
Immediately after the fight, the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research’s June 2021 poll described a “paradigm shift” toward Hamas and armed struggle. 77% of Palestinian Arabs believed Hamas had won, versus 1% who thought Israel had won. And 65% believed Hamas had achieved its declared objectives regarding Sheikh Jarrah and Al-Aqsa.
The perceived lesson was simple: Violence worked.
Then came Afghanistan a few months later.
On August 15, 2021, the Taliban returned to Kabul, twenty years after the United States had removed it from power. The lesson for jihadist movements was not that they needed to defeat a stronger enemy. They needed to outlast it.
As described at the time in Gaza, The Terrorist Enclave, Hamas met with the Taliban and congratulated it for expelling Western forces from Afghanistan.
By June 2023, Palestinian confidence had moved beyond believing Hamas could win a confrontation. PCPSR asked Palestinian Arabs whether Israel, then celebrating its 75th anniversary, would survive to celebrate its 100th. 66% said no. Only 27% believed Israel would still exist. Another 51% believed Palestinian Arabs would eventually recover historic Palestine and return refugees to their former villages and cities.
Just four months later came October 7.
Nearly three years of war have weakened that opinion – in the near-term. As FirstOneThrough detailed in Palestinian Arabs Turn Inward, But Not Away From Hamas, support for armed struggle has fallen sharply and only 20% of Palestinian Arabs now believe Hamas won the Gaza war but 89% believe Hamas will continue to exist in some capacity.
Weakened but waiting. “Resistance” with resolve.
Which brings the argument from the Taliban and Hamas to the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Iran is making the same wager on time. That it can outlast the United States and send it packing much as the Taliban did in Afghanistan.
But for the United States, Iran is not Afghanistan.
Iran has called America the “Great Satan” since 1979 and built a regional military network directed against American forces and allies. Iran has developed increasingly long-range ballistic missiles and pursued nuclear weapons capabilities that could threaten far beyond its borders.
Afghanistan did neither.
Iran also sits on the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly one-fifth of the world’s petroleum consumption passes. Disruption there reaches energy markets and economies around the world.
Afghanistan had no comparable leverage over the global economy.
America had no long-term goals of staying in Afghanistan. It was not going to keep thousands of troops and pour billions of dollars in a region thousands of miles from its shores to make sure girls went to school and women had equal rights.
But Iran is a real concern for the entire western world, both militarily and economically.
The current U.S. war has already achieved important aims by severely degrading Iran’s nuclear, missile and proxy capabilities. But degraded is not finished.
Iran does not need to reverse its losses today. It only needs to survive long enough for politics to change.
And two elections are approaching. Israelis vote on October 27 and Americans vote in November 3.
For Iran, Hamas and the broader jihadist world, those are more than elections. They are milestones testing the strategy of patience.
While the strategic logic for Israel and U.S. to continue the fight may be sound, their citizens may vote differently. And that is what the jihadists are waiting to observe.
Israel cannot leave Israel. America cannot simply walk away from an Iran threatening its forces and allies, pursuing nuclear and long-range missile capabilities, and holding a critical artery of the global economy at risk.
But jihadist strategy places a different bet: Can they wait until Israelis and Americans vote to stop fighting?
The summer of 2021 taught Islamists that they don’t have to win the wars against more powerful foes. Iran has ten more weeks to stall negotiations and wait for democracies to decide whether to pursue long-term strategic benefits or move on to more immediate matters.
Democracies have elections. Their enemies know it.
Will Israelis and Americans turn their elections into the jihadists’ exit strategy.
The Economist warned this week that “Israel is flirting with the next intifada,” arguing that violent Jewish settlers may push West Bank Arabs into another uprising.
It has the intifada backwards.
West Bank Arabs do not need West Bank Jews to introduce them to political violence. Palestinian Arab attacks against Jews in Judea and Samaria have been a persistent feature of the conflict for years, even when nobody attached the formal label “intifada” to them.
By 2021 and 2022, new armed groups were emerging in Jenin and Nablus, including the Jenin Brigades, Nablus Brigades and Lions’ Den. Their attacks spread beyond Judea and Samaria into Israeli cities, while the Lions’ Den became popular among Palestinian Arabs and the Palestinian Authority resisted demands to suppress it.
That was the environment in which I wrote “The Settler Intifada” on July 2, 2023, three months before the October 7 massacre.
The argument was that something new was happening among Jews in Judea and Samaria.
For years, Palestinian Arabs had murdered Jews while Jewish residents generally relied upon the Israeli government and military for protection. That slowly began to change. “Price tag” attacks appeared, followed by much larger retaliatory attacks after Jews were murdered.
In February 2023, after two Jewish brothers were shot and killed while driving, hundreds of Jews descended on Huwara and burned cars and buildings. In June, after four Jews were murdered at a restaurant and gas station, hundreds went into Turmus Ayya and again burned property.
I wrote then that Jews in Judea and Samaria had become “exasperated and are starting to engage in massive revenge attacks.” I warned that as Palestinian Arab attacks continued, Jewish violence could “morph from retaliatory in nature to constant.”
That was the idea of a settler intifada.
The word intifada has become so closely associated with Palestinian Arabs that journalists instinctively use it only for Arab violence against Jews. The Arabic word means an uprising. Palestinian Arabs do not own it only when they perpetrate it.
If a population believes its government cannot protect it, loses faith in existing institutions and begins taking matters into its own hands through recurring political violence, that can fairly be described as an intifada whether the people carrying it out are Arabs or Jews.
And the October 7 massacre made the situation even more toxic.
Jews in Judea and Samaria saw their government’s incompetence in allowing the massacre to take place. From 2021 to 2023 they had seen how West Bank Arabs attacked them with impunity, and now they saw Israeli Jews get hunted in their homes by thousands of Gazans.
Close to home, Arabs celebrated the slaughter of Jews. In the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research’s December 2023 poll, 82% of West Bank respondents said Hamas was correct to launch the October 7 offensive. Support for Hamas surged after the attack, even more amongst West Bank Arabs than the Gazans who committed the crimes against humanity.
Jews in Judea and Samaria increasingly concluded that waiting for the Israeli government to stop Palestinian attacks was insufficient. Some began retaliating directly. Those attacks grew larger, more organized and less isolated.
But The Economist begins the movie in the middle. It sees Jewish violence today and warns that it may provoke a future Palestinian intifada. The more interesting story is that the Judea and Samara intifada is already underway.
AIPAC isn’t run by Israel. It is run by Americans who support Israel, just as Planned Parenthood is backed by pro abortion people, not aborted fetuses.
Israel isn’t committing genocide. It is preventing one by trying to eliminate Hamas, the genocidal jihadi group that invaded Israel, massacred civilians and seeks Israel’s destruction.
Israel isn’t an apartheid state. It is a multi-ethnic society in which Arabs are citizens, vote and serve throughout society. Meanwhile, Palestinian Arab leaders continue to demand a future Palestinian state devoid of Jews.
And then there is the claim about Americans losing their lives for Israel. Israel has overwhelmingly fought its own wars with its own soldiers. The American military presence inside Israel has historically been tiny compared with the enormous U.S. deployments around the world – about 110 people versus 175,000 around the world.
The money tells a similar story. The United States has spent roughly eight times as much supporting Ukraine in its war against Russia as Israel itself has spent fighting its eight-front war. Yet somehow Israel—not Ukraine, Europe or the dozens of countries where America stations troops—is presented as the foreign country consuming American lives and resources.
But there is something even more revealing about the Democrats.com post.
The entire thrust of the post was Pearson’s attack on Israel. Nothing about jobs. Nothing about housing, education, crime, taxes or the cost of living. Democrats.com chose his obsession with a foreign country as the reason Americans should see him as the future of their party.
And Democrats.com is not an obscure Facebook account.
Its founder and president, Bob Fertik, has spent more than two decades building a massive progressive Democratic communications network. Democrats.com says its network reaches more than 10 million supporters and boasts that “nearly every Democratic state party has rented our emails for nearly every competitive candidate since 2008.” It sells Democratic candidates access to its activists to raise money, recruit volunteers, mobilize supporters and turn out voters.
Fertik’s network has become part of the Democrats’ election-mobilization apparatus. So it matters what Fertik’s Democrats.com chooses to promote as the party’s future.
Pearson accused an American organization of being “the Israeli government’s lobbyist,” accused Israel of genocide and apartheid, and claimed Americans are losing their lives on behalf of Israel. Democrats.com took that anti-Israel statement, put it beneath his photograph and announced that this is the present and future of the Democratic Party.
So who exactly are the foreign-country fanatics?
Pearson is supposedly warning Americans that they are too consumed with the interests of a foreign country. Yet his showcased political message isn’t about Americans at all. It is about Israel. And Democrats.com apparently found that message so important that it used it to define both Pearson and the future of the party.
If Justin Pearson really is the “present and future” of the Democratic Party, the problem is much bigger than Justin Pearson.
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