Bring Israel Into NATO’s Orbit

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Wars do not simply end; they force institutions to confront whether they still address the world they are meant to secure.

As the regional war against Israel recedes from its most intense phase, one conclusion is increasingly difficult to ignore: Israel has been operating inside the West’s security perimeter while remaining formally outside the principal institution designed to defend it.

That institution is the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, NATO.

This gap is structural—and increasingly consequential.

When Iran shut down the Strait of Hormuz, crippling access to one-fifth of the global oil supply, the countries inside of NATO barely budged. Spain went so far as to send the United States a big middle finger.

Only Israel worked together with the U.S. in managing this global threat.

Israel already maintains deep bilateral ties with key NATO members, particularly the United States. Intelligence sharing, joint exercises, and technological collaboration are well established. The problem is that this cooperation remains fragmented, dependent on individual relationships rather than embedded within NATO’s institutional framework. In an era defined by interconnected threats, fragmentation is a liability.

Those threats no longer arrive neatly organized by geography. For more than two decades, Europe has experienced the effects of Islamist extremism within its own borders. Attacks tied to networks such as ISIS in Paris, Brussels, and Berlin were not isolated events. They reflected a broader system—ideological, financial, and operational—that crosses borders with ease. That same ecosystem includes actors such as Hamas, whose attacks triggered the current war.

These are not separate challenges. They are different manifestations of two networks confronting the western world: the jihadi axis of Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas and Houthis, as well as the national threats from Russia, China and Iran.

Israel has been confronting the jihadi network as a whole—mapping it, disrupting it, and adapting to it in real time. Europe, by contrast, has often encountered it in fragments.

Memorial for people killed from jihadi bombing at Ariana Grande concert

The two confrontational axis are linked by Iran. A NATO established to be a defense against Russia and communism must adapt to the new reality that the Russia-China-Iran alliance is buttressing jihadi regimes and terrorist groups to destabilize the west.

NATO, as currently structured, is positioned to respond to effects—naval patrols, sanctions, diplomatic signaling—but lacks a formal mechanism to integrate with the actor most deeply engaged in countering the source.

Israel is not a peripheral partner. It is a central node of capability.

Its missile defense systems operate under continuous pressure. Its counter-drone technologies are refined in live environments. Its intelligence capabilities integrate multiple theaters into a single operational picture. Its cyber operations are embedded directly into conflict environments that NATO is still working to fully integrate.

This is a partner NATO needs.

Geography reinforces the argument. NATO’s traditional focus on its eastern flank remains essential, particularly in relation to Russia. But the critical infrastructure of modern security—energy routes, maritime corridors, and digital networks—runs through the Eastern Mediterranean, the Red Sea, and the Gulf. Stability in these regions is now directly tied to European and transatlantic security.

Israel sits at that intersection with capability, proximity, and alignment.

At the same time, pressures within the alliance itself are becoming more visible. U.S. political leaders—most notably Donald Trump—have underscored a structural imbalance: the United States continues to underwrite a disproportionate share of European defense while facing expanding global demands. That pressure reflects a broader need for NATO to adapt—both in burden sharing and in how it structures partnerships to address evolving threats.

Parallel to this, U.S. policy has begun to shift in the Middle East. Efforts to draw regional actors, including emerging leadership in Syria, away from Russian influence and toward Western engagement signal a changing geopolitical landscape. The region is no longer peripheral to transatlantic security. It is central to it.

Against that backdrop, integrating Israel into NATO’s partnership structure is not an isolated step. It is part of a broader realignment responding to the growing influence of Russia and Iran across multiple theaters.

This does not mean that Israel should join NATO as a full member with Article 5 protections. This proposal refers to formal integration within NATO’s Enhanced Opportunities Partner framework. It does not create automatic military obligations, nor does it commit NATO forces to regional conflicts.

It creates structure where there is currently fragmentation.

NATO should take three immediate steps.

  • First, designate Israel as an Enhanced Opportunities Partner, formalizing its integration into NATO planning, intelligence, and interoperability frameworks.
  • Second, establish a standing NATO–Israel coordination mechanism focused on counter-drone warfare, missile defense, cyber operations, and maritime security.
  • Third, integrate Israel into NATO’s southern and maritime operational planning, particularly in relation to the Eastern Mediterranean, Red Sea, and Gulf energy corridors.

These steps would not expand NATO’s defense obligations. They would enhance its operational effectiveness.

Wars clarify.

This one has clarified that European security is shaped by forces operating far beyond its borders and that the countries are not up to the task of dealing with their own security needs. That terrorism, energy coercion, and hybrid warfare now form a single continuum. That regional boundaries no longer define strategic risk.

And that Israel is already operating at the center of that reality.

NATO was built to defend the system. It now needs to include those already defending it.

No Hashtag for Khartoum or Mogadishu

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Before October 7 reordered the world’s attention, a war in Sudan had already begun killing at scale. April 15 marked the three year anniversary of the latest incarnation of war. It has since produced one of the largest humanitarian crises on earth—millions displaced, famine conditions spreading, entire cities shattered. Over 2,000 healthcare workers killed. And yet it has generated almost none of the global mobilization that defines our era of outrage.

No encampments. No slogans. No sustained moral urgency that travels.

Two forces—the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces—fight for control. Civilians are not incidental to the conflict; they are its terrain. Hospitals are looted, neighborhoods erased, aid convoys blocked. Darfur, a name once synonymous with “never again,” has quietly returned to the same vocabulary of mass killing.

The scale should compel attention. It doesn’t.

For years, much of the global discourse—across media, universities, and international institutions—has sorted conflict through a particular lens: Global North and Global South. The North is cast as inherently evil, colonial and imperial. The South as perpetual victim.

Sudan does not fit neatly inside such lens. There is no clear external oppressor to anchor outrage, no simple narrative that translates easily into the moral shorthand of our time. The violence is internal, complex, resistant to reduction. And so the system hesitates. Attention drifts. Outrage never organizes.

Look at the response architecture. The United Nations convenes, issues appeals, and struggles to convert urgency into action. Funding remains short of need. Access remains constrained. The gap between rhetoric and relief is not marginal—it is structural. Mechanisms that elsewhere become focal points of accountability have not galvanized comparable pressure here. Even institutions like the International Court of Justice sit far from the center of global attention on Sudan, not because the crimes are lesser, but because the political energy that drives action is missing.

Attention follows narrative. Narrative follows familiarity. Sudan offers neither.

The victims do not map cleanly onto categories that travel well. There is no easy compression into a slogan or a symbol. And in a world that increasingly organizes around moral shorthand, what cannot be simplified is often ignored.

This is not only about Sudan. Or Somalia where war has also ravaged the landscape. It is about how the past is taught—and how its lessons travel.

Holocaust education stands as a cornerstone of moral instruction across much of the Global North. Its lessons are intended to be universal. But when it is absorbed as a contained European tragedy, rather than a case study in how societies turn inward, weaponize identity, and destroy their own, its warning loses portability. It becomes history, not instruction. The Global South doesn’t bother to listen to the lesson, and the Global North is focused elsewhere.

In Sudan, mass violence is just statistics without racism and a colonial script. Here is a catastrophe that should activate every alarm built in the twentieth century—and does not. An estimated 400,000 killed in Sudan. Over 500,000 killed in nearby Somalia.

Reducing these to “internal conflicts” explains nothing. It does something worse. It lowers the urgency. It signals, quietly, that this is a tragedy the world can observe rather than confront.

Universities that mobilize rapidly around conflicts that fit prevailing frameworks struggle to sustain engagement here. Media cycles that can fixate for months elsewhere let Sudan and Somalia slip into the margins. International bodies calibrated to respond to pressure find little of it applied.

Sudan is a statistic. Somalia is a statistic. Yet Gaza has a narrative.

Victims should not need a more compelling narrative. They need corridors that function, aid that arrives, and accountability that does not wait for a more convenient story. They need a world capable of responding to human suffering even when it does not fit the frameworks that dominate discourse.

Gazans who launched a genocidal jihadi war never deserved particular sympathy. Especially compared to nearly a million killed in Sudan and Somalia.

Centuries of Kashrut, Now in Question

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The laws in Parshat Shemini do something unusual. They take holiness out of the abstract and force it into the body. This is permitted; that is not. Eat this; reject that. The categories are exact, and they carry consequences.

Kashrut is not belief. It is execution.

It depends on classification, preparation, and one decisive act: a method of slaughter. Remove any part of that sequence and the system collapses into theory.

For centuries, it did not collapse. It moved intact into daily life, into kitchens and markets, into habits that required no defense because they were simply practiced. By the 19th century, that system was functioning inside modern Europe. Jews in Frankfurt, Vienna, and Budapest were citizens, participants, integrated—and still able to keep kosher.

The paintings of Moritz Daniel Oppenheim and Isidor Kaufmann quietly confirm that reality. They show a world where nothing needs to be argued. The system works. The meal appears. The law reaches the plate.

Oppenheim’s Friday Evening Blessing (1867)

That is the baseline: not tolerance of identity, but permission of practice.

The modern shift begins where the system is most exposed—at the knife.

Kosher meat depends on shechita, a method of slaughter that prohibits pre-stunning. Increasingly, that is where democratic states have drawn a line. Across Europe, bans or effective prohibitions have taken hold:

  • Belgium
  • Denmark
  • Sweden
  • Norway
  • Iceland
  • Switzerland
  • New Zealand

Others—Germany, France, Netherlands—permit it only through narrowing exemptions.

The language used is procedural. They argue that animal welfare requires stunning the animal before slaughter. It sounds neutral but it ends kashrut.

That pressure has forced a new response. Not abandonment, but adaptation. Across Europe and Israel, efforts are underway to reconcile halachic requirements with regulatory demands:

  • Post-cut stunning, applied immediately after the kosher slaughter
  • Reversible stunning technologies, designed to preserve the animal’s halachic status at the moment of the cut
  • Greater integration of veterinary oversight with rabbinic supervision

None of this is settled. Many rabbinic authorities resist any modification that risks invalidating the historic process. Regulators resist exceptions that fragment uniform standards. The space for compromise is narrow and technical.

But the direction is unmistakable. The debate has moved from theology to engineering.

Liberal democracies pride themselves on protecting religious freedom. Yet during ritual slaughter for kosher meat, they are testing a boundary: whether they will protect belief while constraining the mechanisms required to live it.

Storming Words, Not Mosques

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The jihadi war begins in the headline: “Israeli colonists storm Al-Aqsa Mosque under police protection.” Before a single fact appears, the verdict is already written—by the Palestinian Authority’s media outlet—in words designed to inflame.

  • Colonists erases history, recasting Jews as foreign intruders with no connection to the Temple Mount. 
  • Storm supplies violence whether any occurred or not. 
  • Al-Aqsa Mosque collapses the entire compound into the most sensitive Islamic structure to heighten the sense of desecration. 
  • Under police protection reframes standard security by the Israel Police, coordinated with the Jerusalem Islamic Waqf, as state-backed aggression.

Then the language tightens. “Talmudic and provocative rituals.” “Frequent Israeli provocations, including repeated raids.” These aren’t descriptions. They’re verdicts. Quiet presence becomes intent. Routine visits become raids. Silent prayer becomes something suspect.

And then the omission that completes the frame. The site is only described as Islam’s third holiest. It is never described as Judaism’s holiest. The reader is left with a single conclusion: sanctity on one side, violation on the other.

This is narrative design. Islamic Supremacy.

Strip legitimacy. Recast presence as desecration. Elevate exclusive holiness. Repeat it daily through a state-backed outlet overseen by the Palestinian Authority.

That is how a holy war is narrated into existence. By the “moderate” Palestinian Authority.

The Pressure Carrot

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The talks in Gaza are stuck on a single question: when does Hamas disarm? Hamas wants Israeli withdrawal first. Israel wants the dismantling of Hamas’s military capacity. Gazans want Hamas to retain weapons. Every side is waiting and pointing.

So the sequence matters.

In Washington, the argument has hardened around pressure on Israel. Democratic senators like Bernie Sanders, Chris Murphy, Tim Kaine, and Chris Van Hollen have pushed versions of the same idea: use U.S. leverage to change Israeli behavior now. The assumption is clear. The U.S. can influence Israel. It cannot influence Hamas.

It is backed by far-left pro-Palestinian groups like J Street. It is juvenile, dangerous and devoid of critical strategic thinking.

J Street, once again, on the wrong side of history

If all the pressure is on Israel, Hamas learns the simplest lesson in negotiation: wait. Let outside actors squeeze your opponent. Hold your position. Time becomes leverage.

That is where the current approach sits and breaks. And everyone suffers.

A negotiation like this needs a visible incentive on both sides. Hamas has faced pressure only from Israel – military and economic – but almost no credible pathway that links its own actions to a reduction in the conflict.

That is the missing piece.

Set a clear rule: as Hamas verifiably disarms, Israel correspondingly reduces its military posture and need for resupply. Less threat, less armament.

Now the logic runs forward, and resets the debate in Washington. The current fight among Democrats—arm Israel or restrain it—misses the hinge. If Hamas is disarmed, Israel needs fewer arms. That is mechanics, not politics.

Using a pressure stick as the far-left senators are attempting, rewards the antisemitic genocidal terrorist group, ensuring the fighting never ends. Using a pressure carrot entices Hamas to give up its weapons, allowing the US to pull weaponry from Israel.

The world has long only thought of pressure as a stick with the only variable being to whom to apply it. It is time to imagine a pressure carrot, especially when the party with the greatest power believes it has no influence on the entity that blocks every path forward.

Israel May Fix What Iran Broke

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Iran did not remake the Middle East by conquering it. It reshaped sovereignty from within.

Through the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and its expeditionary arm, the Quds Force, Tehran spent decades cultivating armed movements inside other countries. Groups like Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis operate locally while drawing training, funding, and strategic direction from Iran.

The method repeated. Build armed actors inside weak systems. Arm them. Fund them. Legitimize them. Let them grow until they rival the state itself.

The outcome depends on how far that process runs.

Start with Yemen.

The Houthis moved from insurgency to control, seizing the capital and displacing the recognized government. Authority fractured across multiple centers while regional powers deepened the conflict. The country unraveled into competing zones of control, each backed by different patrons.

Yemen reflects the far end of the spectrum. Sovereignty has fractured, authority is dispersed, and the state exists largely in name while power is contested on the ground.

Lebanon presents a more intricate equilibrium.

The government still operates. Ministries function. The army deploys. Daily life continues within the framework of a state.

Power, however, runs on a parallel track.

Hezbollah has evolved from militia to dominant armed and political actor. It maintains a military force outside state control, exerts significant influence within the political system, and operates along the southern frontier with Israel.

In a system where power sits outside the state, accountability thins out.

The Beirut port explosion laid that reality bare. The blast- largely attributable to Hezbollah stockpiling of weapons – devastated the capital and accelerated economic collapse.

Lebanon endures as a state whose authority is constrained and divided. Institutions remain, while decisive power is shared, contested, and at times displaced.

Gaza and the West Bank reflect an earlier phase of the same pattern.

Here, no single authority controls territory, force, and governance at once. Hamas governs Gaza, while the Palestinian Authority administers parts of the West Bank. Armed groups operate alongside political structures, and internal divisions prevent the emergence of a unified system.

Under these conditions, sovereignty never fully coheres.

Iran’s role reinforces these fractures. Support to armed factions strengthens one side of divided systems and complicates any path toward unified governance.

Three arenas. Three outcomes.

Yemen: the state fractures.
Lebanon: the state is captured from within.
Gaza and the West Bank: the state never coheres.

Systems that weaken the state at home rarely stay contained. They travel.

In Yemen, fragmentation has produced a prolonged humanitarian crisis. In Lebanon, economic collapse and institutional weakness have eroded daily life and public trust. In Gaza, civilians live within a structure where governance and armed control are tightly fused, with recurring cycles of conflict.

Members of Hamas bring back body of young Israeli woman into Gaza after killing her on October 7, 2023

These same structures project force outward. Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis have all attacked Israel over the past few years. As has Iran.

And these forces are now all degraded, perhaps on their way to being defeated. The regional implication extends beyond Israel’s immediate security.

Weakening these groups can shift the balance inside the countries they inhabit. Space can reopen for state authority—unevenly, imperfectly, and with no guarantee—but space nonetheless.

Israel is acting out of its own security needs. It is very possible that the entire region will benefit once the Iranian proxies are removed.

Make Hamantaschen

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Make hamentaschen.

Yes, Purim is over. Make them anyway.

Because hamentaschen were never just for a holiday. They are a response to something permanent. Every generation produces its own Haman. Today it comes dressed as an Iranian proxy war, spread across governments and militias that still build their purpose around destroying the Jewish people and the Jewish state.

The language changes. The intent does not.

So make hamentaschen.

Out of season. On purpose. As a refusal to let Jewish life run only on the calendar of threats. The lesson of Purim does not expire in Adar. It lives in every moment when enemies of the Jews believe time is on their side.

Knead the dough. Fill it. Fold it. Bake it.

There is something defiant in that simplicity. Jewish survival has never rested only on armies, though they matter. It lives in continuity. In ritual. In memory. In the quiet insistence on remaining who we are while others plan our disappearance.

That is what they never understand.

So make hamentaschen. Feed your family. Share them with friends. Mark the fact that Jewish life continues on its own terms, not theirs.

And pray.

Pray that those who seek Jewish destruction are defeated. Pray that their power breaks. Pray that the story ends the way it did before.

Purim is over. The story is not.

Make hamentaschen.

NY Times Issues Warning About “Resurgence” of “Far-Right” Jews

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The latest The New York Times piece on a JDL-linked murder plot tells a very specific story—and then stretches it into something much larger than it is.

Start with the facts. One individual in a fringe offshoot movement, often described as a ghost of the old Jewish Defense League, allegedly plotted a murder that never happened because law enforcement stopped it. That is the entire event. Not a movement. Not a wave. Not a trend. A single actor orbiting a marginal group.

And the target was not randomly selected. This was not an attack on “Muslims” or a civilian population. The alleged target was a highly visible anti-Israel agitator who celebrates violence against Jews and calls for the destruction of the Jewish state. That context matters. It does not justify anything but explains a motive. Erasing that distinction flattens reality into propaganda.

Yet from this narrow incident, the long article pulls a wide arc—Meir Kahane, Baruch Goldstein, decades-old ideology, insinuations about modern Israel. The reader is led to see not one unstable actor, but a resurfacing Jewish extremism problem.

“apparent resurgence of far-right Zionism” – The New York Times

That framing collapses under the weight of what is actually happening.

2025 saw the highest number of Jews murdered in antisemitic attacks in over thirty years. Not plots—killings, specifically because they are Jews. Across cities and continents. In New York, Jews remain the primary target of hate crimes by a wide margin. Assaults are not hypothetical. They are routine. Visible Jews are attacked on the street, not in theory but in daylight.

So the inversion becomes obvious.

A stopped act by one fringe Jewish extremist becomes a sweeping narrative. A global surge in antisemitic violence becomes less than background noise.

“a disturbing message to New York City: the ideology of the Jewish Defense League has resurfaced.” – The New York Times

This is not balance. It is misdirection.

Every society has extremists at its edges. Jewish communities are no exception. They should be confronted early and without hesitation. But scale matters. Sequence matters. When coverage elevates a single fringe actor into a defining story while minimizing the sustained targeting of Jews, it sends a clear signal about whose fear counts and whose does not.

“voted for President Trump,” – The New York Times non-sequitur about member of the JDL, seemingly painting all Jews who voted for Trump as a potential extremists

And it feeds something deeper: the growing belief among Jews that institutions—from media to politics—are more comfortable scrutinizing Jewish reaction than confronting antisemitic aggression.

The real story is not that somewhere on the margins there are Jews capable of violence. Every people has that margin.

The real story is that Jews, in New York and across the diaspora, are once again living with a level of threat that is measurable, visible, and rising—and that too many prefer to mock the real security fear of Jews and cast Jews as the crux of the problem.

Holocaust – and Hamas – Remembrance Day

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Six Million Jews were slaughtered in Europe by Nazi Germany and its enablers in the 1930s and 1940s. One-third of European Jewry was wiped from the earth for the sick reason that people detested them and wanted them gone “by any means necessary.” The scale and the barbarity of the genocide was revolting and a permanent stain on humankind.

The Nazi Party did not rise alone. It was carried by a culture that softened language and normalized hatred. The machinery of murder arrived last. The permission came first.

We have watched that permission be rebuilt.

People often comment that the Palestinian Arab massacre of Israeli Jews on October 7, 2023 was the worst killing of Jews since the Holocaust. It is true, in terms of scale, a statistical fact. But the underlying reason is not discussed enough: a systemic hatred became embedded in a society that elected a government to carry out a genocide.

October 7 was not a rogue event by a gang. It was a popular movement by a sitting ruling authority that had years of preparation to carry out a genocide of local Jews.

Hamas’ 1988 foundational charter is the single most antisemitic political document ever written. The Stateless Arabs from Palestine (SAPs) voted Hamas to 56% of parliament with full knowledge of the group’s position and mission. When Hamas took control of Gaza in 2007, the area became a terrorist enclave, building an infrastructure and culture dedicated to the annihilation of Jews.

And when it acted out its plans in full on October 7, the people celebrated.

A “Holocaust Remembrance Day” that confines memory to ceremonies and candles misses the point. Remembrance without recognition of the present is ritual without responsibility. The lesson was never only about what was done. It was about how quickly societies create the conditions that allow it to be done again.

So what does responsibility look like now?

It begins with clarity. A group that openly declares and executes the mass killing of Jews is genocidal. That word should not be negotiated away, let alone flipped onto the victims.

It continues with institutions. Universities, media and cultural organizations must stop laundering advocacy for such groups through euphemism. Speech has consequences; platforms are choices.

It requires enforcement. Governments must treat material support, incitement, and coordination for designated terrorist organizations as what they are: threats to public safety, not protected abstractions.

It demands civic courage. Communities, leaders, and peers must refuse the social comfort of silence when celebration of violence surfaces in their midst.

And it insists on moral consistency. If the targeting of civilians is intolerable anywhere, it is intolerable everywhere—without qualifiers, without footnotes.

Democratic Socialist of America believe that violence against Jewish civilians is appropriate

It is important to remember the past: the millions of Jewish victims and the culture that touched Europe from Vienna to Vilna. It is also important to remember the environment that allowed it to happen, and actively confront the antisemitic infrastructure that enables the genocide of Jews.

Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) openly traffics in antisemitism – and gets reelected

Mock the Dead, Police the Living

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The uniform matters. The place matters more.

At Buchenwald concentration camp, the ground holds ash. It exists for a single purpose: to remember the industrial murder of Jews. The expectations are clear without being written—restraint, silence, humility.

Buchenwald concentration camp

Bring a keffiyeh into that space and call it “expression” and the word collapses under the weight of context. Symbols do not travel untouched. In that setting, it reads as intrusion—present politics laid over a site of extermination. Memory for mockery.

Yet the pro-Palestinian Arab mob wants to remind Jews that the genocide of Jews is not just in the past but in the present. They want their right of “free expression” precisely where it can hurt Jews the most. The right to bring a cause onto ground that was meant to remind people “never again” was targeted with “again now.”

In their antisemitic zeal, they push the opposite at Temple Mount, the holiest site in Judaism. For centuries, Jewish prayer has pointed toward this place. Yet the pro-Palestinian crowd demands Jews be barred- not only no free expression but no freedom of religion.

“Status quo!” and “Provocation!” used very selectively, when Jews are the target.

The same principle—expression—stretches in one place and shrinks in another.

Expanded to override the norms of a concentration camp. Constrained to block prayer at Judaism’s holiest site.

That is the pattern.

It is not only a double standard. It is a antisemitism squared.

The past is diluted when a site of Jewish death is treated as open terrain for contemporary symbolism. The present is constrained when Jewish prayer is treated as a threat rather than a right.

Buchenwald should demand humility before the dead.
The Temple Mount should allow the living to pray.

When those principles reverse, the fracture is not rhetorical. It is civilizational. And the pro-Palestinian camp continues to reveal the profound “deformity in its culture,” and how it revels in Jew hatred.