Eight Muslim countries issued a joint statement Sunday condemning Israel’s rejection of the latest roadmap for implementing President Donald Trump’s Gaza peace plan. They are: Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Turkey, Pakistan and Indonesia.
They have no formal collective name. So call them the Muslim Eight — the M8.
Together, the M8 countries have roughly 817 million people and contain forty percent of the world’s Muslims. Indonesia and Pakistan alone are two of the world’s largest Muslim-majority countries.
The M8 was assembled by U.S. President Donald Trump with a specific purpose.
On September 23, 2025, on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly, Trump convened the leaders and senior officials of these eight Arab and Muslim countries. The goal was to end the Gaza War and build a day-after framework. Trump needed Muslim and Arab countries with street-cred in Gaza to make that happen, as well as a history of operating functioning governments.
Egypt controlled the critical border with Gaza and, together with Qatar, was central to negotiations with Hamas. Jordan brought its relationship with Israel, the Palestinian Authority and sensitive holy sites in Jerusalem. Saudi Arabia brought money, Arab leadership and the enormous prize of possible normalization with Israel. The UAE brought capital, administrative expertise and an existing relationship with Israel. Turkey brought regional power and channels to Hamas. Pakistan and Indonesia brought two enormous Muslim populations and legitimacy extending well beyond the Arab world.
Trump assembled M8 to be directed at the problem in Gaza. Help end the war. Get the hostages released. Stabilize the ceasefire. Keep Hamas from returning to power. Reconstruct Gaza. Support a new Palestinian administration. Reform the Palestinian Authority. Create a workable security structure.
Six days after Trump’s meeting, the M8 jointly welcomed his Gaza peace proposal and committed themselves to working with the United States and the parties to implement it.
When Hamas responded to Trump’s proposal in October, the M8 responded together. When disputes developed over Rafah, the M8 responded together. When Trump established his Board of Peace to oversee Gaza’s transition, all eight announced together that they would join.
Trump had created a Muslim steering committee for Gaza. But soon, the M8 discovered it could steer other things.
By December, it was collectively defending UNRWA, even as Trump’s postwar architecture was establishing new institutions to govern, finance and rebuild Gaza.
In March 2026, the M8 jointly condemned Israeli restrictions at Al-Aqsa Mosque/ the Jewish Temple Mount. Later that month, it issued another statement about Muslim and Christian access to Jerusalem’s holy sites.
In April, it jointly declared that the entire 144-dunam Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif compound was exclusively a Muslim place of worship and backed the Jordanian Waqf’s authority there.
The M8 began issuing collective positions on Israeli settlements, Israeli sovereignty measures, “settler violence” in Judea and Samaria.
None of that was why Trump assembled the M8.
The Board of Peace was created around a specific Gaza program: maintain the ceasefire, demilitarize Gaza, establish transitional Palestinian governance, rebuild the territory, reform Palestinian institutions and create conditions for a different future.
Yet the M8 now speaks on subjects well outside of Gaza with the institutional weight it acquired by becoming Trump’s chosen Arab-Muslim partner. A coalition created to solve Gaza has become a platform to pressure Israel over Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria, UNRWA and Palestinian statehood.
Trump gave the M8 a mandate to help fix Gaza. The M8 is turning it into a mandate to lecture Israel.
Charts regularly circulate showing the countries with the most “unicorns” — private companies that achieve valuations of at least $1 billion. Divide the totals by population and tiny Israel suddenly jumps toward the top of the world.
But the headline number obscures a three more interesting stories.
Israel did not spend 75 years steadily accumulating unicorns. Most of its unicorn phenomenon is remarkably recent. And many of the companies created by Israelis aren’t headquartered in Israel at all.
Then there is what these companies actually do.
Put those three pieces together — when they emerged, where they are headquartered and what they sell — and Israel’s unicorn story looks like a specialized company-production machine for today’s world.
The Unicorn Explosion
In 2011, only 16 new unicorns were created in the entire world. Israel was hardly overflowing with them either. TechAviv data show Israel produced just four new unicorns in 2015 and nine in 2019.
Then the curve turned sharply upward.
Israel produced 19 new unicorns in 2020 and 42 in 2021. By December 2021, TechAviv counted 79 Israeli-founded unicorns. By December 2022, there were 98.
That means the Israeli unicorn story people now take for granted is largely a phenomenon of the last several years.
“Israel ranked first globally in terms of its number of technology unicorns per capita. As of 2025, the country’s startup scene contained 90 active tech unicorns, and raised billions of dollars in investments annually. These are indicators of an exceptionally well performing startup ecosystem, which forms the basis of the country’s robust technology industry.” – Statista.com
The cheap-money technology boom certainly helped. Valuations soared everywhere in 2020 and 2021. But Israel’s performance was exceptional even within that global frenzy.
Israeli Unicorn Doesn’t Necessarily Mean in Israel
Of the 79 Israeli-founded unicorns counted at the end of 2021, only 33 — 42% — were headquartered in Israel.
The rest were spread around the world:
19 in New York.
15 in Silicon Valley.
5 in Boston.
3 in London.
2 in Los Angeles.
1 in Singapore.
1 in Chicago.
A year later, the ratio was almost identical. Of 98 Israeli-founded unicorns in December 2022, 40 were headquartered in Israel and 58 abroad. Silicon Valley had 24 and New York had 19.
So roughly three out of every five Israeli-founded unicorns were headquartered outside Israel.
That matters when looking at those viral country rankings. A ranking based strictly on corporate headquarters can count an Israeli-founded company as American. A ranking based upon where the entrepreneurs came from can count the same company as Israeli.
Israel is creating companies for a market vastly larger than Israel.
What Israel Is Creating
Israeli unicorns aren’t distributed evenly across the economy. The country’s technology ecosystem has become increasingly concentrated around enterprise software, fintech and cybersecurity.
The Israel Innovation Authority found that these three categories represented 29.4% of companies founded in 2013 but 42% by 2021. By 2022 they were attracting 53.4% of all investment in Israeli startups.
Cybersecurity is particularly extraordinary.
Dealroom currently counts 26 cybersecurity unicorns headquartered in Israel. It calculates that Israel is 9.15 times more represented in cybersecurity unicorns than its overall share of the world’s unicorn population would predict. Tel Aviv alone ranks behind only the Bay Area in Dealroom’s global cyber-unicorn count.
And that is based on headquarters. It therefore doesn’t fully capture Israeli-founded cyber companies headquartered in places such as New York and Boston.
Israel also over-indexes in semiconductors, health technology and medtech, although nowhere close to its extraordinary concentration in cyber.
Meanwhile, the composition of Israeli technology has been changing.
Communications — historically one of Israel’s great technology strengths, including hardware infrastructure and chips — represented about 8% of newly established Israeli technology companies in 2013. By 2022 it was just 1.7%.
” In H1 2025, High-Tech accounted for 57% of all Israeli exports, the highest share ever recorded. The export mix points to a clear trend: 72% software services versus 28% High-Tech industry. This means Israel is increasingly reliant on software services exports, while the High-Tech industry, including the defense industry, has been relatively stagnant. Israel increasingly went from building the pipes to building the software running through them.” – Israel Innovation Authority
Israel Invents. America Scales.
That industry mix helps explain the geography.
A cybersecurity company potential customers are banks, governments and Fortune 500 corporations around the planet. An enterprise-software company can develop its technology in Tel Aviv while putting executives and salespeople close to customers in New York. A fintech company can maintain Israeli engineering operations while establishing its corporate headquarters in the world’s largest financial market.
And those American headquarters aren’t simply mailing addresses.
In 2023, the United States–Israel Business Alliance identified 88 Israeli-founded unicorns with global or regional headquarters in the United States. Together, those companies employed nearly 62,000 people worldwide.
The available data do not establish how many of those employees were specifically in America, so the 62,000 should not be described as American jobs. But broader state studies show that Israeli-founded companies have become meaningful American employers. In California alone, Israeli-founded companies directly employed more than 14,000 people, with their broader economic activity supporting more than 22,000 jobs.
That economic relationship runs in both directions.
American venture-capital and private-equity firms finance Israeli entrepreneurs. Israeli founders establish U.S. headquarters and hire American salespeople, executives and other employees. American corporations then acquire some of the most successful companies, bringing Israeli-developed technology inside American businesses.
Google’s acquisition of Israeli-founded Wiz for $32 billion provides an extraordinary recent example. Cisco agreed to buy Israeli-founded CyberArk for approximately $25 billion in 2025. Intel’s earlier $15.3 billion acquisition of Mobileye demonstrated the same model on a massive scale. Three Israeli technology companies. More than $70 billion of announced acquisition value. Three American buyers.
The relationship is particularly important because Israel’s strongest sectors overlap with technologies the United States increasingly considers strategic: cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, semiconductors and advanced computing.
The Israeli and American ecosystems therefore aren’t competing with one another for unicorns. They are often parts of the same machine.
Israel supplies entrepreneurs, engineers, military-trained cyber expertise and dense technical networks. The United States supplies enormous customers, deep pools of capital, experienced executives and the world’s largest technology exit market.
The result is a peculiar multinational organism: Israeli-created, frequently American-headquartered, American-financed and globally sold.
A Very Young Herd
Israel’s unicorn phenomenon is not simply impressive because a country of roughly ten million people has produced so many billion-dollar technology companies. It is impressive because the herd appeared so quickly.
It is unusual because most of the herd established headquarters outside the country that produced its founders.
And it is revealing because the herd increasingly congregated in a few industries where Israel developed extraordinary comparative advantages — particularly cybersecurity, enterprise software and fintech.
For Americans, there is another reason to care.
Israel’s technology success isn’t occurring on the other side of the world in isolation from the American economy. Some of the value Israel creates lands in New York, California, Massachusetts and elsewhere in the United States — as headquarters, jobs, investment opportunities, technology and acquisitions.
The familiar unicorn-per-capita chart therefore captures only the surface. The deeper story isn’t that Israel has a lot of unicorns.
Over the last decade, Israel became very good at manufacturing global technology companies — together with American capital and talent.
For two years, Europe’s movement against Israel looked like a one-way ratchet.
After October 7, governments that had resisted recognizing a Palestinian state for decades suddenly did so. Spain, Ireland, Norway and Slovenia moved in 2024, followed by additional countries in 2025. Each recognition was celebrated as permanent diplomatic progress for the Palestinians and another irreversible loss for Israel.
But then Slovenia held an election and the government that recognized Palestine lost. The new right-of-center government is dramatically more pro-Israel, with discussion of reversing Palestinian recognition and moving Slovenia’s embassy to Jerusalem.
Palestine didn’t lose Slovenia because Israel won an argument. It lost Slovenia because Slovenia changed governments.
Slovenia is small but the precedent isn’t.
France and Spain vote in 2027. Both have been important forces behind Europe’s turn against Israel. Both could move rightward. Spain, in particular, has become one of Israel’s most antagonistic governments in Western Europe under Pedro Sánchez, and parties on the right are predicted to do well.
If Slovenia is a preview, the supposedly permanent European diplomatic shift after October 7 may prove to have been something much less permanent: the policies of a particular collection of governments at a particular moment.
But before France and Spain vote comes Israeli elections in October 2026.
A new Israeli government could deprive European politicians of the convenient ability to present hostility toward Israel as merely opposition to Benjamin Netanyahu. Or a reelected Netanyahu would carry something different: a fresh democratic mandate from Israelis after October 7 and the wars that followed.
Whichever way Israeli elections go, France and Spain would be making their choices in a new political environment.
And Donald Trump will still be in the White House.
That matters particularly for Spain. Trump and Sánchez have already clashed repeatedly, while Washington remains closely aligned with Israel. A future Spanish government could therefore inherit not merely an opportunity to repair relations with Jerusalem, but an incentive to move closer to Washington at the same time.
Israel should be preparing for that possibility now. That means building relationships with plausible future governments before they take office.
Israel and pro-Israel organizations – including global evangelical groups – should be talking now with the parties, parliamentarians, foreign-policy advisers and prospective ministers who could govern France and Spain in 2027. And those conversations should extend beyond defending Israel to demonstrating what closer relations offer: defense, intelligence, technology and trade.
Israel should also have a menu ready for the morning after an election: reconsider Palestinian recognition, change hostile UN voting, reverse restrictions on Israel and deepen bilateral relations—including, where politically possible, moving embassies to Jerusalem. Importantly, in the immediate present, Israel can show the world via Slovenia the benefits of close diplomatice ties.
For the past two years, Israel has treated every European move toward Palestine as another irreversible diplomatic loss. Slovenia just demonstrated that the ratchet works both ways.
Governments can change. And when they do, Israel should be ready to make the ratchet click backward again.
Protesters demand it. Politicians promise it. Journalists expose its absence. Nations wage wars in its name. Even terrorists describe their violence as justice.
Perhaps that is why this week’s Torah portion, Shoftim, does not simply command “Justice, justice shall you pursue.” First comes a warning:
“You shall not pervert judgment; you shall not recognize faces.” – Deuteronomy 16:19
Lo takir panim. Do not recognize faces. The biblical commentator Rashi explains that “this is an admonition addressed to the judge that he should not be lenient to one and harsh to the other, e.g. letting one stand and the other sit; because as soon as he (the party treated harshly) observes that the judge shows more respect to his fellow his ability to plead is hampered (i.e. he loses self-confidence and cannot present his case with assurance) (cf. Shevuot 30a).”
Justice becomes corrupted when we look first at who stands before us and only afterward decide how to judge what happened.
Was the attacker powerful or weak? Majority or minority? Progressive or conservative? Do we admire the cause or despise it?
Sometimes the distortion comes from empathy. Suffering naturally draws us toward the person in pain. But compassion can obscure how the suffering began, what that person did, or what they intend to do next. Empathy is a human instinct. It is not a verdict.
Once we recognize the face, an attack can become “resistance.” A defeat becomes an injustice. The suffering of an aggressor eclipses the aggression that produced it. Terrorism becomes “liberation,” and “peace” only has relevance for one party.
Shoftim understands that the greatest threat to judgment can come from the judge himself. Human beings have an extraordinary ability to bend principles around the people before them.
Erase the faces. Reverse the identities.
If the nationalities were switched, would you reach the same judgment? If the religion were different, would you excuse the same violence? If people you admire committed the act you condemn, would you still condemn it?
If the verdict changes when the faces change, the principle was never really the principle.
The first justice is judging the act. The second is judging ourselves—whether we would render the same verdict after changing the faces.
WAFA, the Palestinian Authority’s official media, has spent years describing Jews who enter the Temple Mount as “storming Al-Aqsa.” I have written about that linguistic sleight of hand before.
Now WAFA is promoting something more dangerous: that Jews have no right to enter Judaism’s holiest site without Muslim permission, and that Jewish worship there is an assault on Islamic sanctity.
In April 2026, WAFA reported a Palestinian statement declaring the site one that “belongs exclusively to Muslims, to which no one else has any right of entry without their consent.”
On August 13, WAFA carried an Arab League statement condemning Jews entering the site and performing religious rituals as a “blatant violation of the sanctity of the mosque.”
WAFA promoted several lies:
Muslims do not control entry. Israel controls security and access to the Temple Mount. The Jordanian-backed Waqf administers Muslim religious affairs there. Presenting Muslim consent as a prerequisite for Jewish entry is totally false.
The compound does not “belong exclusively to Muslims.” That is a religious and political claim masquerading as settled fact about the Temple Mount—the holiest site in Judaism.
Jewish presence does not inherently violate Islamic sanctity. Islam does not have a general rule that a Jew entering Muslim sacred space desecrates it. Restrictions on Jewish prayer under the status quo are one issue; declaring Jewish worship itself an assault on Islam is another.
Then comes another sleight of hand.
Having defined Jewish presence as an offense against Islam, these organizations pivot to demanding action by the international community on behalf of Palestinians.
But those categories – Muslims and Palestinian Arabs – are not interchangeable.
Some 1.85 million Muslims live in Israel, nearly one-fifth of the country’s population. And the Muslim religious administration of the Temple Mount is handled by the Jordanian-backed Waqf. Palestinian Arabs do not exercise control over entry to the site, nor do they represent all Muslims in the region.
So why transform an asserted Muslim religious grievance into a Palestinian national claim demanding international intervention?
Because the lies are the tell.
The argument is no longer about protecting Muslim worship. It takes an assertion of Muslim religious exclusivity, converts it into a Palestinian territorial right, and then asks the world to enforce that right against Israel and Jews.
The implications become darker when the same logic is applied beyond the Temple Mount. Hamas’s 1988 charter declared all of Palestine an Islamic waqf. Combine that doctrine with the claim being promoted around Al-Aqsa—that Jewish physical presence and worship offend Islamic sanctity—and expelling Jews can be transformed into protecting Muslim holy land.
“the land of Palestine is an Islamic Waqf consecrated for future Moslem generations until Judgement Day. It, or any part of it, should not be squandered: it, or any part of it, should not be given up.” – Hamas Foundational Charter, Article 11
That is why the Arab League and WAFA’s language matters. By repeatedly publishing these false assertions, it helps turn a Palestinian territorial claim into a purported Islamic prohibition against Jewish presence.
And it begins at the most perverse possible location: Judaism’s holiest site.
The progression is stark:
Declare the Jewish holy site exclusively Muslim.
Deny Jews the right to enter without Muslim permission.
Call Jewish presence and worship a desecration of Islam.
Turn that religious claim into a Palestinian territorial right.
Ask the world to enforce it.
The Arab League and Palestinian Authority are building a religious and political case for removing Jews from their own holy land.
A predator attacks a porcupine expecting an easy meal. Instead, it gets a face full of quills.
Photograph the predator afterward and it may look like the victim. Its wounds are real. Its suffering is real. But the photograph is missing the most important fact: it attacked the porcupine.
That injured predator Nakba’d itself.
Consider Argentina in 1982. It invaded the Falkland Islands expecting Britain to accept the conquest. Britain sailed across the Atlantic, fought back and retook them. Hundreds of Argentine servicemen died, including 323 when a British submarine sank the General Belgrano.
Begin the story with the sinking and Britain looks like the aggressor. Begin it with Argentina’s invasion and you understand why British forces were there. Chronology changes the story.
Which is core of the word Nakba.
In 1947, the United Nations proposed Jewish and Arab states for two people with long ties to the area of Palestine, one for Jews who had ruled for hundreds of years in the land, and one for local Arabs who aspired to their own country. Jewish leaders accepted partition while Arab leaders rejected it. After Israel declared independence in May 1948, armies of five neighboring Arab states entered the war against the reborn Jewish state.
The Arab calculation was breathtaking.
Only three years after the Holocaust, a tiny Jewish state was filled in part with survivors and refugees. Six million Jews had just been murdered. Its enemies looked at a shattered people surrounded by a much larger Arab world and saw weakness.
They mistook vulnerability for helplessness.
They attacked the porcupine. And they lost.
Israel survived. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs fled the battlefield as they waited for their Arab brothers to wipe out the Jews. And they lost the war they launched. In the end, Israel ended the fighting with more territory than the UN partition plan had allocated it.
Palestinian Arabs named their defeat “al-Nakba” — the Catastrophe. But over time, their catastrophe became a romanticized socialist-jihadi word stripped of its rejection of coexistence and fervor for extermination of Jews, even as the sentiments remained deeply embedded in Arab culture.
Still, the photojournalists showed the wounds as evidence of who must have been the victim.
So the Nakba lives on.
Hamas demonstrated that Israel was vulnerable, murdering 1,200 civilians and soldiers and abducting 250 hostages. When Israel fought back Gaza suffered terrible destruction. Once again, the world’s camera focused on the wounded predator rather than the beginning of the encounter.
The Gazans Nakba’d themselves again. They attacked, suffered, and then pointed to their injuries in a plee.
The animal kingdom does it. The quills can be devastating. But the story is clear.
Stop the hatred. Stop the attacks. Stop the complaining after losing the fight you sought and launched.
From his perch at The New York Times, Thomas Friedman wants to be “very clear” about Hamas. Instead, his formulation gets the moral order backwards.
“Hamas is a terrible organization,” he writes, “first and foremost for Palestinians.”
Hamas is not primarily a terrible organization. It is a terrorist organization whose foundational ideology targeted Israel and Jews.
Hamas said so itself. Its 1988 charter declares that “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it.” Article 7 invokes a religious tradition about Muslims fighting and killing Jews. Article 13 rejects negotiated settlements: “There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad.”
October 7 was the depravity of those words turned into action. Hamas terrorists crossed into Israel, attacked civilian communities, murdered families and kidnapped hundreds of people. Terrorism was not an unfortunate byproduct of Hamas rule. It was the method of an organization whose charter had openly described its enemy and objective.
Nor was Hamas imposed upon Palestinian Arabs. In the 2006 Palestinian legislative elections, voters handed Hamas 56% of the seats in parliament — 74 of 132 — and control of the legislature.
October 7 did not sever that political connection. In December 2023, the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research found that 72% of Palestinians believed Hamas’s decision to launch the October 7 attack was correct, including 57% in Gaza and 82% in the West Bank. Even in October 2025, 53% still called the decision correct.
That context makes Friedman’s criticism of Western Hamas apologists particularly revealing. He calls the “free pass” Hamas receives from some pro-Palestinian progressives “shameful.”
The issue runs much deeper than shame.
There is a straight line from a charter describing the destruction of Israel and the killing of Jews, to terrorists carrying out a massacre in Israel, to people defending the decision to launch that attack. The depravity lies in the ideology, the terrorism committed in its name and the willingness to celebrate or excuse it afterward.
And that depravity has migrated into American politics. The Democratic Socialists of America and radical left-wing university professors describe Israel as a colonial project and Israelis as “colonialists,” a framework to erase the distinction between combatants and civilians and recast violence against Israeli Jews as “resistance.” This movement is no longer confined to demonstrations and campuses; DSA member Zohran Mamdani has ridden the democratic-socialist movement into the New York City mayoralty and is now helping other left-wing candidates like Mohamed El-Zayed in Michigan win office.
Friedman’s formulation reverses the danger. Hamas becomes “terrible” rather than terrorist. Palestinians become its primary victims rather than a population which supports Hamas. And those in the United States and elsewhere who give Hamas political cover are merely “shameful.”
That formulation grants absolution to terrorists and their knowing supporters.
The endorsement and celebration of mass violence against Jews — a tiny minority-minority — is becoming a motivating force in American politics. That should terrify Thomas Friedman. It should terrify every decent American.
Because when a movement can watch the mass murder of Jews and explain why their killers were engaged in “resistance,” the problem is no longer simply Hamas.
Staring at the sun is dangerous. It can permanently damage your eyes.
That is true today, during a solar eclipse. It was true yesterday. And it will be true tomorrow.
Yet almost no one spends an ordinary sunny day warning people not to stare at the sun. There are no news alerts. No public-service campaigns. No rush to buy protective glasses.
Then an eclipse arrives, and suddenly everyone is talking about retinal damage.
The eclipse does not make the sun more dangerous. It makes us more likely to look.
On an ordinary day, the sun is painfully bright. We instinctively turn away. During an eclipse, the moon covers much of that brightness. The sun becomes darker, stranger and irresistible. Curiosity tells us to keep looking precisely when the covering makes the danger easier to underestimate. We look at the danger precisely when the danger hides behind a mask.
The danger was always there. What changed was our behavior.
Violent jihad presents a darker version of the same phenomenon.
An ideology that glorifies murdering civilians, suicide bombings and religious war does not become less dangerous because something is placed in front of it. Yet organizations, activists and politicians can provide a kind of ideological eclipse—describing jihadist violence primarily through the language of “resistance,” “liberation” or Palestinian Arab self-determination.
October 7 should have been impossible to romanticize. Thousands of Hamas terrorists murdered families in their homes, slaughtered young people at a music festival and dragged hostages into Gaza. Yet almost immediately, people began searching for language that could place a covering over the horror.
“Palestinian self-determination” became one such covering. It transformed a discussion about what Hamas actually did and what it openly sought into a more familiar political argument about nationalism, borders and statehood. The words did not change the violence. They changed how people were invited to look at it.
The head of the CAIR posted that October 7 was a Martin Luther King moment for Palestinian Arabs while the massacre in Israel was ongoing
And once the horror is covered, something disturbing happens. What should repel people can become a passing fascination. Violence acquires slogans, symbols and intellectual rationalizations. Terrorists are recast as revolutionaries; psychopaths and cowards as heroes. People who would instinctively recoil from the naked ideology are encouraged to stare at a filtered version of it.
That is the danger of an eclipse. It does not destroy the source of the danger. It obscures enough of it to change human behavior.
The sun was dangerous before the moon passed in front of it. It will remain dangerous when the moon moves away.
Violent jihad was dangerous before October 7. It remained dangerous while people explained its atrocities through socialist-jihadi language. And it will remain dangerous after today’s political fascination moves somewhere else.
The eclipse does not change the sun nor does political covering change violent jihad. It only changes whether people recognize the danger when they look at it.
Is there a more gay-friendly capital than Reykjavík?
Walk through Iceland’s capital and Pride is everywhere. Rainbow flags fly from storefronts. Streets are painted in LGBTQ colors. Businesses and government buildings proudly proclaim their support for gay rights, queer rights and equality.
Then look a little closer.
On those same Reykjavík streets are Zionists Not Welcome stickers and other expressions of hostility toward the one country in the Middle East where LGBTQ people openly flourish: Israel.
Anti-Israel sticker on parking pay station in Reykjavik, Iceland (photo: First One Through)
The contradiction is hard to miss.
In Israel, gay people serve openly in government and the military. Tel Aviv Pride is one of the world’s best-known LGBTQ celebrations. Gay couples live openly. LGBTQ organizations operate publicly.
Across the Palestinian Arab territories and much of the surrounding Muslim Middle East, the reality is radically different. Hamas governs Gaza according to an Islamist ideology hostile to homosexuality. Iran criminalizes same-sex relations and has imposed the death penalty for homosexual conduct.
Yet in Reykjavík, the political sympathy often seems to run precisely backward.
The rainbow flag is supposed to say that gay rights are human rights. That should apply in Iceland, Israel, Gaza, Iran and everywhere else.
Reykjavík proudly covers itself in rainbows but should follow those colors all the way to the Middle East and ask where gay people can actually live beneath them.
The New York Times published a photo essay under the headline “Still Waiting for Peace in Gaza.” Its Palestinian Arab photojournalist documents the world around him: shattered buildings, displaced families, rubble and danger. The photographs powerfully show what war looks like from inside Gaza.
But what does peace look like?
For Israelis living a few miles away, peace means sleeping without rockets overhead. It means children not watching their parents gunned down before them. It means young adults attending a music festival without being hunted, families living on kibbutzim without gunmen entering their homes, and civilians never again being murdered or dragged across the border as hostages.
Those images are outside the Times’ frame. And their absence raises the central question: Are Gazans waiting for peace with Israel, or peace from Israel?
Palestinian Arab polling makes the distinction important. After October 7, the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research repeatedly asked whether Hamas had been correct to launch its attack. In March 2024, 71 percent of Gazans said yes. Three months later, after enormous destruction inside Gaza, 57 percent still considered the decision correct. Support showed a desire to live with violence inside Gaza if it led to the destruction of Israel.
The pattern predates October 7. Palestinian polling over decades has repeatedly recorded substantial support for attacks against Israelis, including civilians. The question of peace therefore cannot be answered simply by photographing people who desperately want the war around them to end.
Peace is reciprocal. It requires imagining security for the people across the border as well as for oneself.
A revealing photo essay would turn its lens outward. Ask Gazans whether Jewish families should live safely in Sderot and Kfar Aza. Whether Israelis should be able to dance near Gaza without fear of armed Palestinian Arabs crossing the border. Whether rockets should stop permanently. Whether Hamas should disarm. Whether the future they envision includes Jews living securely beside them.
Those answers would tell us whether Gazans are waiting for an end to war or waiting for peace.
And this is where the New York Times itself enters the frame. This is the newspaper’s own photojournalist, presented under the Times’ own headline and editorial framing. By calling the desire for calm inside Gaza “waiting for peace,” the newspaper takes one side’s desire for relief from war and gives it the language of reconciliation between two parties. It portrays the Palestinian Arabs as desirous of coexistence when it is plainly not so.
That framing is particularly consequential when the war began with Hamas crossing into Israel on October 7 to murder and abduct civilians. When thousands of Arab civilians invaded Israel to rape women and abduct children and spit on their corpses as they arrived in Gaza. Removing Israel from a story about “peace” reduces peace to what happens to Gaza after the attack, rather than what Gazans want to happen to Israelis in the future.
The Times reinforces a distorted understanding of the conflict: Palestinian peace becomes the absence of Israeli violence against Palestinians, while the Palestinian attitude toward violence against Israelis disappears beyond the edge of the photograph.
A camera pointed only into Gaza can show us what Gazans want to stop seeing. Peace begins with asking what they want Israelis to stop seeing too.
First One Through 