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.
Data centers have become one of America’s favorite environmental villains. Critics argue that they use too much land, consume too much water and strain the electric grid. Communities increasingly fight proposed facilities on environmental grounds.
The concerns over electricity are real. But put data centers alongside another ubiquitous American land use — golf courses — and the environmental picture looks very different.
Golf uses dramatically more land and direct water and requires harmful pesticides to maintain its turf. Data centers consume dramatically more electricity. And data centers produce roughly four times the overall economic impact already – before the upcoming artificial intelligence boom kicks in.
Metric
U.S. Data Centers
U.S. Golf Courses
Facilities / courses
~3,600 operational
16,034 courses at 13,975 facilities
Land
No authoritative national total; far below golf
~2.3 million acres
Direct water use
~17 billion gallons/year (2023)
~531 billion gallons/year (2024)
Electricity
176 TWh/year (2023)
~2.4 TWh/year*
Pesticides / herbicides
Not material
Regularly used on maintained turf
Total economic contribution / impact
$926.9 billion (2024)
$226.5 billion
Jobs supported
5.5 million
~1.65 million
*The national golf electricity estimate is older and should be treated as an order-of-magnitude comparison rather than a current industry census.
Start with volume. There is no universally accepted definition of a data center, so counts vary depending on whether campuses, buildings and individual facilities are counted separately. An August 2026 tracker identifies about 3,579 operational U.S. data centers and roughly 4,700 when facilities under construction and planned are included. Pew Research Center similarly reported in April that the country had more than 3,000 operational data centers. (DC Map) Golf is considerably more widespread. The latest National Golf Foundation figures count 16,034 courses at 13,975 facilities in the United States. (American Golf Industry Coalition)
Then there is land.
The USGA has estimated that American golf courses occupy nearly 2.3 million acres. (USGA) There is no similarly authoritative national accounting of the acreage occupied by data centers. Rather than manufacture precision from commercial databases, the relevant comparison is scale: America’s golf footprint runs into millions of acres, while several thousand data centers occupy a small fraction of that amount.
Water produces an even more startling comparison.
American golf facilities applied 1.63 million acre-feet of water in 2024, according to the latest Golf Course Environmental Profile survey. That equals approximately 531 billion gallons. To golf’s credit, that represents a 31% decline since 2005 as courses have closed and surviving facilities have become more efficient. (GCSAA)
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory estimated that U.S. data centers directly consumed approximately 66 billion liters of water in 2023, or roughly 17 billion gallons. (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory) So American golf courses use roughly 31 times as much water as data centers directly consume onsite.
Data centers also have an indirect water footprint because generating electricity can consume substantial amounts of water. Golf similarly has indirect resource requirements associated with electricity, fertilizer, chemicals, equipment and maintenance. The 31-to-1 comparison is specifically between water applied at golf facilities and direct water consumed at data centers — not their respective total lifecycle water footprints.
Chemicals produce another imbalance, although one that cannot responsibly be reduced to a current national poundage figure.
Golf courses maintain enormous areas of highly managed turf using fungicides, herbicides, insecticides and other treatments. GCSAA’s national pest-management research confirms continued use of those conventional chemicals while also finding greater use of non-pesticide practices and reductions or little change in reliance on conventional chemistries between its major surveys. (GCSAA)
Data centers, by contrast, do not require herbicides, fungicides and insecticides as a significant part of their core operation. They may have ordinary landscaping needs, but chemicals are not to computing what turf treatment is to golf.
There is one environmental measure where the comparison flips completely: electricity.
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory estimated that U.S. data centers consumed 176 terawatt-hours of electricity in 2023, approximately 4.4% of total U.S. electricity consumption. Its June 2026 update projects that data centers could reach 11.8% of U.S. electricity consumption by 2030, with scenarios ranging from 9.5% to 15.3%. (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory)
Golf isn’t remotely comparable. A U.S. Department of Energy analysis estimated golf-course electricity consumption at approximately 2.4 TWh annually, with a typical course consuming about 250,000 to 500,000 kWh and irrigation pumping accounting for 25% to 50% of course electricity use. The estimate is old, so it should not be mistaken for a current measurement. But even substantial growth would leave golf far below the electricity requirements of data centers. (U.S. Department of Energy)
Data centers are power infrastructure in a way golf courses simply are not. But power is being converted into something: economic output.
A 2026 PwC study commissioned by the Data Center Coalition calculated that the U.S. data-center industry contributed $926.9 billion to GDP in 2024, supported 5.5 million jobs and generated $204.4 billion in federal, state and local taxes. (Data Center Coalition)
Golf is also a significant American industry. Its national economic-impact study calculated $101.7 billion in direct economic activity and $226.5 billion when direct, indirect and induced effects are included, supporting nearly 1.65 million jobs and $80.1 billion of wage income. (GCSAA)
America has decided that using millions of acres and hundreds of billions of gallons of water for recreation is ordinary, while communities increasingly treat far smaller amounts of land and direct water used for digital infrastructure as an environmental crisis.
That doesn’t make data centers environmentally harmless. It identifies the environmental challenge they actually present: Power.
Data centers consumed 176 TWh in 2023 and could approach 12% of America’s electricity consumption by 2030. That growth demands generation, transmission and grid investment on an extraordinary scale.
The country should scrutinize where that electricity will come from, who pays for the infrastructure required to deliver it and whether utilities can add generation quickly enough without shifting costs onto existing customers.
Golf uses the land. Golf uses the water. Data centers use the power.
The question for data centers isn’t whether America can spare the acreage or the water. It is whether America can build the electricity infrastructure quickly enough to support an industry already contributing nearly $1 trillion to the economy and will drive the innovation and jobs of the future.
Israel is discussed with hyperbole and adjectives: massive settlements, enormous American aid, rampant settler violence, Jewish encroachment, disproportionate war.
Between 700,000 and 750,000 Palestinian Arabs became refugees when they fled the battlefield as they awaited fellow Muslim Arab armies to destroy the nascent Jewish State during the 1948-9 war. In the same era, roughly 850,000 Jews left or were expelled from Arab countries with many more leaving non-Arab Muslim countries like Iran and Afghanistan.
Even though the Jewish refugee population was larger, we never speak of it today.
Today, UNRWA registers 5.9 million Palestinian Arab refugees, predominantly consisting of descendants of the original refugees, and those who married or were adopted by refugees. The comparable number of registered Jewish refugees from Arab and Muslim countries and their descendants is zero.
The Jews were absorbed as citizens of Israel and other countries. Their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren were not perpetuated as refugees, they way Palestinian Arabs have been forced by those same “brotherly” Arab countries which went to war with Israel in 1948-9, in order to perpetuate the war they initiated and lost.
650 Times — Arab League Territory to Israel
Israel covers roughly 22,000 square kilometers and the 22 members of the Arab League collectively cover roughly 13–14 million square kilometers.
The territory of the Arab League is approximately 650 times the size of Israel.
127 Times — Muslims to Jews
There are roughly 2 billion Muslims in the world, twice the size of the entire populations of North, Central and South America.
There are roughly 15.8 million Jews.
That is approximately 127 Muslims for every Jew.
Muslims account for roughly one-quarter of humanity. Jews account for about 0.2%.
Yet people in the West refer to Muslims as a “minority.”
60 to 1 — Muslims to Jews Ascending the Temple Mount
Before COVID, roughly 1.8 million to 2 million Muslims visited the Temple Mount annually, compared with approximately 30,000 Jewish visits in 2019. That is roughly 60 Muslim visits for every Jewish visit.
The more recent figures of 2025 after the October 7 massacre launched by Gazans has roughly halved the visits by Muslims and doubled those by Jews, lowering the figure to about 15 times at Judaism’s holiest site.
57 to 1 — OIC States to the Jewish State
There are 57 countries in the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation that perpetually lambasts Israel. There is one Jewish state.
The Jewish state exists alongside a Muslim world dozens of times larger in countries, population and territory.
25 to 1 — American Defense Spending Outside Israel
Israel receives about $3.8 billion annually under the U.S.-Israel security assistance agreement. For every dollar America spends annually on Israel’s defense, roughly $25 is spent on defense elsewhere—defending the United States, maintaining forces abroad, supporting allies and providing security assistance around the world.
Even more striking, there are over 220,000 military personnel stationed around the world, of which slightly over 100 are in Israel. The baseline ratio is over 1,500-to-1, rising to 2,200-to-1 when reserve personnel are included.
The anti-Israel discussion focuses solely on Israel while ignoring the enormous American monies and personnel in Japan, Qatar, Germany and elsewhere.
14 Times — The Growth of Israel’s Arab Population
Approximately 156,000 Arabs lived in Israel in 1948 when the modern Jewish State was reestablished. Today, approximately 2.16 million Arabs live in Israel.
Israel’s Arab population has grown almost 14-fold since the establishment of the Jewish state. Meanwhile, the number of Jews inside Israel hasn’t even grown 12-times in that same time.
And people accuse Israel of “ethnic-cleansing.”
12 Times — Israeli Arabs Killed by Israeli Arabs Versus West Bank Arabs Killed by West Bank Jews
Thus far in 2026, Arab Israelis are murdered by other Arab Israelis at roughly 12 times the number of Palestinian Arabs killed by West Bank Jewish civilians in Judea and Samaria.
Hundreds of Arab Israelis have been murdered amid the organized-crime epidemic inside Israel over the last few years. Yet the international narrative solely focuses on settler violence.
10 to 1 — Muslim Gates to the Jewish Entrance
Muslims have access to the Jewish Temple Mount in the Old City of Jerusalem through ten gates. Jews and other non-Muslims enter through one: the Mughrabi Gate. There, Jews must pass through metal detectors and security clearance at only specified times of the day, even as Muslims ascend and descend at will through every other portal.
Muslim women descending from the Temple Mount through one of the many gates exclusively available for Muslims (photo: First One Through)
9 — Number of Times Hamas Charter Refers to Jews and Judaism
Hamas’s 1988 foundational charter is replete with antisemitic rhetoric. The opening lines begin with “Our struggle against the Jews…” and continues throughout its genocidal jihadist call to wipe out the Jewish people and Jewish State.
While the anti-Israel crowd pretends that the conflict is merely over land which can easily be compromised and carved up, they ignore the deep antisemitic ideology embedded in the Palestinian Arab culture.
8 Times — U.S.’s Ukraine War Spending Versus Gaza War Spending
The United States has spent roughly eight times more in connection with the Ukraine war with Russia than the Gaza war against Israel.
America has made roughly $195 billion available for Ukraine since Russia’s 2022 invasion. American expenditures associated with Israel and the Gaza war are a fraction of that amount.
Yet it is spending associated with Israel that is routinely presented as uniquely extraordinary.
6 to 0 — UN Bodies for Palestinians Versus Israelis
The United Nations maintains six standing bodies, offices or mechanisms focused specifically on Palestinian Arabs and Israel’s treatment of said Arabs: UNRWA; the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People; the Division for Palestinian Rights; the Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices; the Special Rapporteur on the Palestinian territories; and the Human Rights Council’s permanent Agenda Item 7.
There is no comparable UN agency, committee or permanent agenda item devoted to protecting Israelis from the conflict, nor is there any group in the entire world (think the Kurds) so over-represented at the global organization.
5 — Gaza Wars Since Hamas Took Control
Israel withdrew every Jewish civilian and military asset from Gaza in 2005. Hamas subsequently took control of Gaza in 2007. Since then, it has launched five major rounds of war with Israel: in2008–09, 2012, 2014, 2021, 2023-.
Five wars in sixteen years.
2.5 to 1 — Israel Versus the Rest of the World at the UN
In 2024, the UN General Assembly adopted 18 resolutions focused on Israel. It adopted seven country-specific resolutions concerning the rest of the world combined.
That is roughly 2.5 to 1. One country received more than twice as many resolutions as every other country combined.
1 to 1 — An Equivalency of 15 Kilometers Which Matters for One But Not the Other
At its narrowest along the pre-1967 lines, Israel is roughly 15 kilometers wide. It is a stretch that continues along its major population centers.
After Ma’ale Adumim to Jerusalem’s east, the remaining West Bank corridor is also roughly 15 kilometers wide at a single narrow point where virtually no West Bank Arabs live.
15 kilometers versus 15 kilometers. Over a million Jews in the narrow stretch versus a few thousand Arabs.
Israel’s narrow waist is never described as dangerously vulnerable, while the West Bank neck is cast as making a two-state solution “impossible.”
1 — The Jewish State Whose Capital the World Challenges
There is only one country in the world whose national anthem is all about its capital.
Israel’s national anthem, Hatikvah, expresses the Jewish people’s ancient longing for Zion and Jerusalem.
The Knesset is there. The president is there. The prime minister is there. The Supreme Court is there. The government ministries are there.
Yet most countries still refuse to locate their embassies in Jerusalem or fully accept Israel’s designation of Jerusalem as its capital.
The numbers are there. Before accepting the narrative which is infused with anti-Israel bias, look at them.
A school in Jerusalem’s Shuafat refugee camp is reopening. The building is the same but UNRWA is no longer running it.
The school is now affiliated with Israel’s Ministry of Education and the Jerusalem Municipality. Jerusalem Deputy Mayor Aryeh King posted video of UNRWA signs being removed as the school prepared to open.
Sign of UNRWA run school in Shu’afat, Jerusalem
The change ends an educational arrangement dating back more than sixty years.
UNRWA established the Shuafat refugee camp in 1965, when Jordan controlled “East Jerusalem.” UNRWA’s educational policy, dating to 1952, has been to use the curriculum of the “host countries,” allowing refugee children to take local examinations and continue into local schools and universities.
So UNRWA worked with Jordan at that time.
There was nothing internationally settled about Jordan’s sovereignty over Jerusalem. Jordan seized eastern Jerusalem in 1948 and annexed the West Bank – including East Jerusalem in 1950. Even Britain, one of only two countries (along with Pakistan) which recognized Jordan’s illegal annexation of the West Bank, specifically withheld recognition of Jordanian sovereignty over Jerusalem. It only recognized Jordan’s de facto authority there.
Yet Jordan administered East Jerusalem, so UNRWA worked with Jordan there.
Then came 1967.
Israel captured East Jerusalem and became the government actually administering Shuafat, much like Jordan had previously. But UNRWA did not treat Israel the same way as the de facto administrating authority.
The Jordanian curriculum continued for years. After the Palestinian Authority was established, UNRWA increasingly coordinated its West Bank education program with it and ultimately used the Palestinian Authority curriculum.
That is difficult to square with the simple explanation that UNRWA follows the curriculum of its host country. The Palestinian Authority did not govern Jerusalem; Israel did. Yet UNRWA chose the PA curriculum for schools there.
The contrast is particularly striking today. Israel has nine foreign embassies located in Jerusalem, with Nauru announced as the tenth. Jordan never enjoyed anything approaching that level of international recognition of its rule over Jerusalem. Yet UNRWA had been willing to work with the authority actually administering the city when that authority was Jordan.
UNRWA offices in Jerusalem (photo: First One Through)
But the problem at Shuafat went beyond which government UNRWA chose to recognize educationally. It was what children at this particular school were saying they learned.
UNRWA says its curriculum framework must reflect UN principles of neutrality, human rights, tolerance, equality and non-discrimination.
Footage recorded at an UNRWA school in Shuafat in 2022 and published by Ynet in 2024 showed something very different.
Students said that stabbing and running over Jews brought Palestinians honor. One said he was prepared to carry out a suicide attack. Another said they were taught that Jews were terrorists. Another said they were taught that Jews were deceitful and evil and that he would stab and run them over.
The videos offer a horrifying vision of what is taught at UN schools.
Israel eventually acted.
In May 2025, Israeli authorities closed six UNRWA schools in eastern Jerusalem, including three in Shuafat. UNRWA protested that hundreds of Palestinian children were being deprived of education. Israel said alternative schooling would be provided through the Jerusalem education system.
Now that alternative is becoming tangible.
A former UNRWA school in Shuafat is reopening under the Israeli Ministry of Education and Jerusalem Municipality.
The choice was never between UNRWA and no education. What can change is the system educating them and the content of that education.
The UNRWA sign coming down in the Shuafat school is symbolic. What the children learn when they walk back through those doors will determine whether the real change happened inside.
This week’s Torah portion, Ki Teitzei, contains a commandment that sounds remarkably modern:
“Thou shalt not have in thy bag diverse weights, a great and a small. Thou shalt not have in thy house diverse measures, a great and a small.” –Deuteronomy 25:13–14
The Torah is describing an ancient marketplace. A merchant cannot keep one weight for buying and another for selling, choosing whichever benefits him.
These spool-shaped weights from Tiryns, in Bronze Age Greece, weighed about the same as their counterparts in other parts of Europe and the Middle East.
But the commandment reaches far beyond stones and scales. It is about maintaining two versions of the truth.
Today, the second weight might be a spreadsheet, a rent roll, an appraisal, a tax return or a loan application. It might be one set of books showing how a business is actually performing and another presented to the bank. It might even be one transaction reflecting what was actually paid for a property and another showing the lender a different price.
The technology changes. The commandment does not.
That message has become uncomfortable in light of recent financial fraud cases involving members of Orthodox Jewish communities. The Real Deal has documented mortgage schemes involving inflated financial statements, false rents and properties represented at different transaction prices to lenders.
But those cases are only a contemporary illustration of a problem the Torah identified thousands of years ago.
“A perfect and just weight shalt thou have; a perfect and just measure shalt thou have” – Deuteronomy 25:15
The word “perfect” matters. Judaism demands extraordinary precision. We measure the dimensions of a sukkah. We calculate when Shabbat begins and ends. We examine the letters of a Torah scroll and mezuzah. We measure matzah and wine.
The Torah demands that same precision in business.
An observant Jew cannot be meticulous about measurements in the synagogue and casual about numbers in the office. An accurate set of books is also an expression of religious observance. So is an honest closing statement. So is giving the bank the same numbers that describe the actual business.
Perhaps that is why the Torah says not merely that we should not use two different weights. It says we should not have them. Neither outside the home nor inside.
Do not create the second ledger. Do not prepare the alternate transaction. Do not keep a different measure available for when it becomes convenient.
The Torah then uses unusually strong language:
“For all that do such things, even all that do unrighteously, are an abomination unto the LORD thy God.” – Deuteronomy 25:16
There is no exemption because everyone does it, because the bank can afford it, because the loan will probably be repaid or because manipulating the numbers has become customary.
Ki Teitzei offers a simple accounting principle for a complicated financial world: integrity.
The Torah does not ask whether the numbers balance. It demands that they are true.
Frontier Airlines CEO Barry Biffle once watched 20 passengers board a flight using wheelchairs. When the plane landed, only three needed wheelchairs to get off.
“We are healing so many people,” he joked.
Airline executives and frequent travelers have complained for years about what has become known as “Jetway Jesus”: passengers who seemingly need a wheelchair to board but miraculously walk after landing.
Some of those passengers undoubtedly have legitimate needs. Being able to walk off an airplane does not mean someone can walk a mile through an enormous airport. Disabilities can be invisible, intermittent and complicated.
But the incentives to game the system are also obvious.
Airlines for America estimated that its members were providing about 1.77 million wheelchair assists every month in 2018—more than 21 million annually. American Airlines alone reported more than eight million wheelchair-assistance requests in 2023.
The Government Accountability Office found that some international flights can arrive with 50 to 80 wheelchair requests. More tellingly, airport and airline stakeholders told the GAO that some passengers request wheelchairs because they believe assistance will move them through the airport faster.
Why wouldn’t they?
Wheelchair assistance can come with an attendant through a sprawling terminal, help navigating security, preboarding and early access to increasingly scarce overhead-bin space. The passenger pays nothing.
The airline does. So do the passengers waiting for attendants and chairs that have been diverted elsewhere. And ultimately so does the genuinely disabled traveler whose assistance is delayed because a finite system is overwhelmed.
The instinctive solution is to catch the fakers. It is also perhaps the wrong one.
A gate agent cannot determine whether the person standing up from a wheelchair has arthritis, multiple sclerosis, heart disease—or no disability at all. Requiring medical documentation would create another bureaucracy while inevitably making travel harder for people who actually need help.
There is a much simpler answer:
Make wheelchair assistance easier to get, but less valuable to game.
Europe offers the beginning of a model.
In America, wheelchair assistance through an airport is generally the responsibility of the airline. Airlines commonly hire contractors, meaning multiple carriers operating in the same terminal maintain separate obligations for moving passengers through the same building.
Europe largely puts that responsibility on the airport.
That makes intuitive sense. Airports operate the terminal, elevators, escalators, trains and other common infrastructure. Mobility through the terminal can be another common airport service.
America should consider adopting that model—and then go further.
Imagine the passenger’s journey.
At the curb, anyone who needs mobility assistance gets it. No doctor’s note. No interrogation. No charge. The airport’s common mobility service gets that passenger through the terminal and to the gate.
But a wheelchair is transportation, not a Fast Pass.
Needing help traveling three-quarters of a mile through Newark does not necessarily mean someone cannot wait in the ordinary security process. Assistance should help passengers through security without automatically moving them ahead of everyone else.
The same principle should apply at the gate.
A passenger who needs help crossing the terminal does not necessarily need help boarding an airplane. Passengers requiring an aisle chair, additional boarding time, assistance transferring to a seat or other physical accommodation should continue to preboard.
Someone who simply needed a ride to the gate can board with the appropriate regular group.
That distinction matters because early boarding has acquired real economic value. When airlines charge for checked luggage and overhead-bin space becomes scarce, getting onto the aircraft first means getting the bin. Wheelchair assistance should not be the way to acquire it.
Arrival could work similarly.
Passengers who need physical assistance getting off the aircraft receive it. Where operationally appropriate, assistance requiring an attendant could occur after ordinary deplaning rather than creating another potential time advantage. Current federal rules would need modification before airlines could impose a universal last-off requirement, but the principle is worth considering.
The objective is not to punish someone for needing help. It is to make assistance neutral.
And then measure it.
DOT and airports should publish wheelchair-assistance requests per 1,000 passengers, broken down by airport, airline and perhaps domestic and international routes. If comparable flights routinely generate radically different assistance rates, operators and regulators would finally have data to investigate rather than anecdotes about miraculous recoveries on the jetway.
Most importantly, none of these reforms requires deciding who is disabled. That is the elegance of changing the incentive instead of policing the passenger.
The wheelchair should get that passenger exactly what was requested: Mobility. Nothing more—and nothing less.
A sprawling mortgage fraud investigation has been working its way through a corner of American real estate with deep connections to the Ultra-Orthodox Jewish community.
The Real Deal spent months mapping the people and companies caught up in it. Its conclusion was striking: “A commercial mortgage fraud scandal is getting big and ugly.”
The publication estimated that the financial scale of suspected fraud “likely runs well into the billions,” although the exact amount remains unknown. Fannie Mae alone claimed roughly $700 million of exposure to eight sponsors it had blacklisted, according to an internal email obtained by the publication.
Federal investigators have already secured guilty pleas and prison sentences. Others remain under investigation or scrutiny and have not been charged with wrongdoing.
The Real Deal noted another common thread among the sprawling cast of borrowers, brokers, lawyers and title companies it examined: “Many have ties to each other and to heavily Orthodox Jewish communities in Lakewood, New Jersey; Brooklyn; and Monsey, New York.”
The Real Deal graphic of players in wide mortgage fraud, July 2025
The schemes themselves were often surprisingly straightforward.
One method was to inflate a property’s financial performance, particularly its trailing 12-month financial statements, making the building appear more profitable and therefore capable of supporting a larger mortgage.
Another was even more audacious: create a second transaction.
The Real Deal calls it “the flip.” A property would be purchased at one price and then purportedly sold to another party at a substantially higher price. The second transaction could involve an affiliate or straw buyer and no genuine exchange of money. The higher fictional price was then presented to the lender to support a larger mortgage.
In one transaction, the deception became almost literal.
Moshe Silber, Fredrick Schulman and their co-conspirators acquired the Williamsburg of Cincinnati apartment complex for $70 million in March 2019. But that wasn’t the price presented to the lender and Fannie Mae.
Using a stolen identity and fraudulent documents, the conspirators presented a purchase contract for $95.85 million. The lender consequently funded a $74.25 million mortgage—more than the actual purchase price of the property.
And there weren’t merely two numbers on paper. There were two closings on the same day. The Justice Department says one closing reflected the true $70 million purchase price. The other reflected the fraudulent $95.85 million price presented to the lenders.
Silber ultimately pleaded guilty and received 30 months in prison. At sentencing, Judge Robert Kirsch described the conduct as involving layers of “chicanery and deceit.”
A second property followed a similar pattern.
Troy Technology Park in Michigan was actually acquired for $42.7 million. Aron Puretz and his co-conspirators submitted documents supporting an inflated $70 million purchase price, helping obtain a $45 million JPMorgan loan. Puretz ultimately received five years in prison and was ordered to pay more than $22 million in restitution.
Other cases involved different methods.
Jacob and Aron Deutsch pleaded guilty to fraud charges arising from a scheme involving Freddie Mac and HUD. According to prosecutors, false rent rolls and leases were supplied to lenders and appraisers, including leases identifying tenants who didn’t actually live in apartments or overstating rents. Vacant apartments were even staged with furniture to deceive inspectors into believing they were occupied.
The investigation has reached far beyond a handful of borrowers.
The Real Deal’s examination includes sponsors, brokers, brokerages, attorneys and title companies. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have blacklisted or restricted various individuals and businesses while the Federal Housing Finance Agency and other government agencies have investigated suspicious transactions. Some people identified by The Real Deal have not been charged with any crime, an important distinction in a scandal whose perimeter remains unsettled.
The investigation also raises uncomfortable questions about the institutions surrounding the borrowers.
Title companies had visibility into transactions. Brokers arranged financing. Lenders underwrote the loans. Attorneys prepared documents. The Real Deal notes that no lenders or underwriters had been indicted or accused of wrongdoing by federal agencies as of its investigation, while asking how much responsibility lenders have to ensure borrowers and transactions are legitimate.
Federal authorities have already been investigating for years. The prosecutions have involved the Justice Department’s Criminal Division and U.S. Attorney’s Office in New Jersey, with investigations by the Federal Housing Finance Agency’s inspector general, U.S. Postal Inspection Service and HUD inspector general. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have conducted their own reviews and imposed restrictions on industry participants.
There is another institution worth considering: the community itself.
The Real Deal did not identify these communities incidentally. Lakewood, Monsey and Brooklyn contain some of America’s largest and most intensely religious Orthodox Jewish populations. The people implicated in the scandal cannot be generalized to those communities, and many people appearing in the broader investigation have never been charged with wrongdoing.
Yet when a pattern becomes significant enough that a national real estate publication specifically identifies connections among participants and heavily Orthodox communities, it becomes reasonable for the community to ask what is happening in its midst.
One of the convicted participants ultimately asked that question of himself.
Before his sentencing in June 2025, Boruch Drillman apologized to his family, investigators and the financial institutions he had helped defraud. He had pleaded guilty to participating in a $165 million mortgage fraud conspiracy and ultimately received five years of probation after cooperating with investigators.
Then he addressed the contradiction between his conduct and the community and values with which he identified. “I tarnished the Jewish people, and I failed to live by my values that I claim to hold so dear.”
Federal prosecutors can investigate fraudulent closings. Fannie Mae can blacklist borrowers. Freddie Mac can restrict vendors. Judges can impose prison sentences and restitution.
But who is policing the values before the government has to police the people?
It is very strange that Sen. Jon Ossoff would make fun of Donald Trump.
Trump has many more followers and, candidly, is much better at insulting people than just about anyone. So it begs the question as to Ossoff’s motivation.
At an Atlanta rally, Ossoff mocked Trump for supposedly not wanting to do the job of president, saying Trump wanted to “build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace,” referring to Trump aide Natalie Harp. He later doubled down, describing Harp and other aides around Trump as a kind of “security blanket” to make him feel good about himself.
Ossoff had to know that would provoke Trump’s ire and generate targeted insults.
And it did.
Trump mocked Ossoff as a “Pee-wee Herman” look-alike, while White House officials piled on with insults of their own.
But those insults would go out to millions of Trump followers. Ossoff’s supporters and anti-Trump people would simultaneously pile on online. Suddenly, Ossoff becomes the topic of conversation, and people start talking about him running for president in 2028. Indeed, that is already part of the discussion surrounding the episode.
It is all manufactured to improve his visibility.
Ugly. Vapid. And that’s politics.
But what about Rep. Jamie Raskin claiming that Trump manufactured the antisemitism-in-schools narrative?
Raskin seized on a whistleblower complaint from former Justice Department attorney Haley Van Erem, who alleged that the Trump administration’s investigations of antisemitism at Harvard, Brown and Columbia were driven by predetermined political objectives and, in some instances, pursued without sufficient factual or legal grounds. The Justice Department disputes those allegations and stands behind its investigations.
Raskin went considerably further in describing what the report meant. He accused Trump officials of abusing Title VI investigations to attack universities while using “antisemitic discrimination as a pretext and a ‘ruse.’”
That is not a silly swipe at Trump. It is an anti-factual smear about Jews under attack.
Why would Raskin do that?
In politics, it is to generate views and, consequently, power. He might get picked up by Hasan Piker or others who trade in Jew hatred online. He chums for antisemites to get their support for his own personal brand while simultaneously scrubbing any scent of Jew from his person.
That is a whole different kettle of fish than silly insults about Trump.
And it says terrible things about the state of the Democratic Party, that Jewish progressive politicians are whitewashing antisemitism in an appeal to votes from antisemites.
Two decades ago, Israel had a Jewish mafia problem.
Crime families including the Abergils, Rosensteins, Abutbuls and Alperons fought over drugs, gambling and territory. Their wars spilled into public spaces. In 2003, an attempt to assassinate mob boss Zeev Rosenstein with a bomb in Tel Aviv killed three innocent bystanders and wounded about 50.
Israel responded aggressively. Police investigations, prosecutions and financial enforcement eventually broke much of the power of the major Jewish crime organizations.
But something unexpected followed.
An analysis by Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) cites a comprehensive government report that “suggests that the collapse of Jewish crime organizations in the early 2000s transferred criminal activity to Arab towns, where police presence is lacking and enforcement is ineffective.”
Arab communities offered criminal organizations opportunities to flourish: illegal weapons, black-market lending, protection rackets, socioeconomic problems and deep distrust of police.
The enforcement gap was enormous. The State Comptroller found approximately 9,200 shooting incidents in 2019 alone, while indictments were filed in only 3% to 5% of investigated shooting cases between 2017 and 2019. Government gun-collection campaigns recovered just 15 weapons in 2017 and 19 in 2019.
Criminal organizations grew from gangs into economic powers.
In 2021, Public Security Minister Omer Barlev told the Knesset that crime families were infiltrating government spending intended for Arab communities by threatening bidders and extracting protection payments.
MANY ILLEGAL weapons in the Arab community are stolen from Israeli army bases, while others are smuggled from the borders with Jordan and Egypt. Here, illegal weapons are displayed after a police operation against illegal gun dealers, in Nazareth in 2021. (photo: MICHAEL GILADI/FLASH90)
Four years later, Tira Mayor Mamoun Abd al-Hay told a Knesset committee: “The city is run today by the organized crime groups, not by the police.” He called organized crime “an economic enterprise for all intents and purposes.”
The Abraham Initiatives found that 71.7% of the Arab homicides it could classify in 2023 involved conflicts between criminal organizations or family and clan disputes. Some victims were innocent relatives murdered in revenge attacks.
Israel briefly showed that the trajectory could be reversed.
The Bennett-Lapid government launched Safe Track and Government Resolution 549, a five-year, roughly NIS 2.4 billion campaign against crime and violence in Arab society. Police worked with tax and financial authorities to attack the organizations rather than simply arrest individual shooters.
Arab crime deaths fell in 2022.
But the campaign did not dismantle the organizations. The death toll reached 244 in 2023 and remained above 200 in each of the next two years.
Now WAFA reports that 151 Arabs have already been killed in crime and violence inside Israel in 2026.
That number provides a striking update to the FirstOneThrough article Which Arab Murders Count? published in May. At the time, roughly six Arab Israelis were being murdered in internal violence for every West Bank Arab killed by a West Bank Jew.
The disparity has grown substantially. Using the UN’s broader count of 18 West Bank Arab deaths linked to settler attacks this year—including deaths attributed to Jewish civilians, Israeli forces or disputed responsibility—the comparison is now more than eight to one. Using only the 12 deaths the UN attributes directly to civilians, it exceeds twelve to one.
The Israeli government knows the dimensions of the problem. The State Comptroller launched another audit this year into organized crime and its penetration of municipal tenders after previously finding that nearly 90% of contractors were required to pay protection money. The Knesset National Security Committee has repeatedly examined organized crime, illegal weapons and the low rate at which Arab murders are solved.
Arab organizations blame inadequate policing, discrimination and underinvestment. Police point to illegal weapons, entrenched criminal organizations and witnesses afraid to cooperate.
All may be true. The question that remains is whether anyone will do anything about the runaway Arab Israeli violence that kills hundreds of people each year.
First One Through 