In October 2025, after two years of war and the devastation of Gaza, the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research published findings that should have dominated headlines around the world:
Hamas remained the most popular Palestinian political movement.
More than half of Palestinians continued to view October 7 as the correct decision.
Nearly seven in ten opposed Hamas disarmament even if disarmament would prevent another war.
After two years of destruction, support for Hamas remained strong. Support for October 7 remained widespread. Opposition to disarmament remained overwhelming.
These findings did not come from Israeli politicians or government spokesmen. They came from Palestinians speaking to Palestinian pollsters.
Yet still, the New York Times publishes lengthy articles that the Gaza war continues because of Israel.
Readers were taken inside Benjamin Netanyahu’s political calculations. They learned about coalition pressures, right-wing ministers, territorial ambitions, and supporters who view the war as unfinished business.
By the end, a clear narrative emerged: the war continues because Israelis want it to continue. Because of greed for land, for power.
There was no mention that Gazans want Hamas to remain armed and for the war to continue. That is the political reality that keeps a ceasefire from taking hold.
The omission matters because it changes the reader’s understanding of the conflict. It places blame solely on Israel when a majority of Palestinians continue to seek the destruction of Israel despite the devastation in Gaza.
Until journalists devote the same attention to Palestinian motivations that they devote to Israeli motivations, Americans will continue receiving a false explanation for why this war endures.
For years, the world was told the “Great March of Return” was peaceful theater. Demonstration. Symbolism. Political performance staged at Israel’s border fence. The real outrage, activists insisted, was not thousands of Gazans converging on a sovereign frontier controlled by a terrorist regime openly committed to Israel’s destruction. The outrage was that Israel refused to let them through.
Every breach attempt became a morality play. The fence itself was cast as villainous. Hamas was downgraded from genocidal jihadist organization to stage manager for a humanitarian spectacle. Foreign correspondents photographed smoke, flags, and crowds surging toward the barrier while carefully avoiding the central question: what exactly did “return” mean in practice?
A picture taken on March 30, 2018 from the southern Israeli kibbutz of Nahal Oz across the border from the Gaza strip shows tear gas grenades falling during a Palestinian tent city protest commemorating Land Day, with Israeli soldiers seen below in the foreground. (Photo credit JACK GUEZ/AFP/Getty Images)
October 7 answered it.
The world spent years romanticizing the idea of border penetration into Israel. Then Hamas finally achieved it. The infiltrators entered and what followed was not symbolic “resistance,” not coexistence, not liberation theology with subtitles for Western consumption. It was slaughter. Torture. Kidnapping. Burning families alive. Mass rape. Entire communities transformed into killing fields within hours.
The “Great March of Return” was not a protest but a rehearsal for an invasion.
The flotilla theatrics now replay the same script at sea.
Once again, activists sail toward a Hamas-controlled enclave insisting their mission is humanitarian symbolism. Once again, cameras arrive before facts. Once again, Israel is expected to participate in a choreographed morality play where interception itself becomes the crime. The activists want confrontation because confrontation produces images, and images produce headlines, and headlines produce another cycle in which Israel defending its borders is treated as inherently suspicious.
But after October 7, Israel no longer has the luxury of indulging symbolic breaches.
A blockade around a terrorist enclave is not abstract political philosophy. It is a security perimeter. Every intercepted vessel is being measured against the memory of what happened when infiltrators were not stopped. The Israeli Navy does not have the privilege enjoyed by European activists thousands of miles away who can romanticize “breaking barriers” while knowing they will never personally absorb the consequences if those barriers collapse.
That is why the flotilla activists are ultimately engaged in theater. They know they will be intercepted. Israel knows it must intercept them. The performance depends on the interception itself. Their goal is not to deliver aid more efficiently than established channels. Their goal is to create imagery in which Israeli enforcement appears oppressive by definition.
Sumud flotilla
The irony is impossible to miss. For years, activists treated Israel’s insistence on secure borders as paranoia. Then October 7 became the bloodiest validation imaginable of exactly why those borders existed.
And so the boats are seized and returned to port. The activists call it repression. Israel calls it survival.
Perhaps the flotillas deserve a more honest name: the Great Return to Sender.
Every modern humanitarian organization insists the same thing: suffering is not a business. The starving child is not a marketing asset. The bombed hospital is not a fundraising funnel. The crying mother under rubble is not a revenue generator.
Then the annual reports arrive.
Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) / Doctors Without Borders crossed roughly €2.3 billion in annual revenue in 2022. Then roughly €2.35 billion in 2023 and €2.36 billion in 2024. Three consecutive years above €2 billion. Ninety-eight percent of funding came from private donors. More than seven million donors worldwide.
The organization presents this as proof of global compassion. It is also evidence of something else: misery has become one of the most effective fundraising products on earth. Especially if loaded with charges: “Genocide.” “Starvation.” “Ethnic cleansing.”
The humanitarian industry now operates inside the same emotional attention economy that drives political campaigns, cable news, and social media outrage. The more horrifying the imagery, the more morally charged the narrative, the more emotionally shattered the audience becomes, the faster the money moves.
And nobody understands this dynamic better than MSF.
MSF’s public communications increasingly fused emotionally maximalist language with direct fundraising infrastructure. A visitor no longer encountered merely medical updates. They encountered emotional conversion architecture.
The modern humanitarian sector has discovered what every digital platform already knows: emotionally devastating content converts. A dusty child under rubble produces more engagement than a policy paper. A charge of genocide and starvation moves directly into emotional reflex.
The uglier the images and explosive the charges, the healthier the fundraising pipeline becomes.
Doctors Without Borders is very selective in its explosive terminology regarding Israel. For MSF, Israel is the cause of all the ills in Gaza, not Hamas. Israel is directly called out, not the genocidal terrorist group that launched the war and hides in tunnels without letting civilians use them for protection. No excuse proffered by Israel will satisfy.
Doctors Without Borders doesn’t do this in other conflicts. Not in Sudan nor Somalia. Not in Syria nor Haiti. In those wars, either no one is called out or “all sides” are vilified.
And MSF takes its anti-Israel campaign on the road. Wherever Israel is dragged into a defensive war against those determined to annihilate it, like Lebanon and Iran, MSF is standing guard and pointing fingers.
MSF does not limit itself to smear campaigns against Israel. It is a full lobbying shop, taking out full page ads in newspapers to rally the public against Israel. It pushes governments to stop supporting Israel in its defensive war.
So it is no surprise that MSF has officially backed the entire Iranian proxy war against Israel, telling the world that it rushes to protect “Gaza, Lebanon and Iran” from Israel.
Doctors Without Borders: 1) runs to assist jihadists in their active war against Israel; 2) raises money claiming the belligerent parties are the victims; 3) lobbies to have governments stop supporting Israel and 4) calls for the masses to protest the Jewish State. It does all of this, uniquely in Israel’s war.
Doctors Without Borders is not a humanitarian organization but an active instrument in the war to destroy Israel.
The world now knows what Gaza costs to rebuild: $71.4 billion. What it still does not know is what Gaza is supposed to become.
That is the number in the 2026 Rapid Damage and Needs Assessment (RDNA), produced by the United Nations with the World Bank and the European Union in April 2026. It is a vast and meticulous ledger of destruction, broken into sectors, sub-sectors, losses, and needs. It is also a revealing document, because the table tells you what the world thinks Gaza is.
A physical problem.
Housing: $16.21 billion.
Health: $10.03 billion.
Agriculture: $10.49 billion.
Commerce and industry: $8.99 billion.
Social protection: $5.78 billion.
Education: $4.71 billion.
Water and sanitation: $4.24 billion.
Energy: $2.73 billion.
Transport: $1.54 billion.
Total direct damages: $35.2 billion. Total economic losses: $22.7 billion. Total reconstruction needs: $71.4 billion.
RDNA assessment of cost to rebuild Gaza, April 2026
It is a complete inventory of physical devastation. Buildings crushed into powder. Water systems ruptured. Hospitals crippled. Roads fractured. Farms destroyed. Markets emptied.
The UN has priced the debris.
It has even priced the removal of the debris: $1.7 billion just to clear more than 68 million metric tons of wreckage.
But the table reveals something else.
There is no line item for civic reconstruction. That is the missing category. There is something for “social protection” and even calls to improve “gender equality, and social inclusion,” but a refocus on building a healthy culture is absent.
RDNA report on rebuilding Gaza, April 2026
Not because it is unimportant. Because it is the hard. And the public may still be unwilling to accept it.
Civic reconstruction is the rebuilding of the political and social architecture of a society: education, norms, legitimacy, coexistence, rule of law, pluralism, and the delegitimization of political violence as a governing method.
Without it, reconstruction is replacement. There will be new buildings but the same “deformity” of ideology, to quote James Zogby in his testimony to the United Nations in June 2023.
Civic reconstruction requires power. And commitment. The UN has frameworks, funding channels, and institutional tools. It does not have sovereignty. It cannot rewrite a society by decree.
And that only makes the omission more consequential.
The UN report itself hints at the deeper crisis. It states that Gaza’s human development has been pushed back 77 years, with the Human Development Index projected to collapse to 0.339, the lowest level ever recorded.
Human development is not just electricity and sewage. It is the civic conditions that make human flourishing possible.
The report includes gender equality. Social inclusion. Employment. Governance.
All necessary.
But governance itself is budgeted at just $530 million, and that is administrative. Municipal function, institutional capacity and service delivery. Not civic transformation.
That distinction matters.
There is no budget line for:
coexistence education
curriculum reform
dismantling political incitement
independent civil society
women’s civic and legal empowerment beyond emergency protection
minority rights
ideological deradicalization
That is not a technical omission. It is the central question.
Postwar Germany was rebuilt through more than roads and housing. It went through total defeat, disarmament, a state monopoly on force, educational overhaul, and the systematic delegitimization of the ideology that had led it into catastrophe.
Postwar Japan followed the same path: constitutional redesign, political restructuring, educational transformation, and a new civic contract.
The physical debris mattered. But so did the ideological debris.
And ideological debris is harder to clear.
It does not sit in the streets. It lives in textbooks, political institutions, media ecosystems, religious messaging, and the stories a society tells itself about violence and legitimacy.
That debris remains.
The UN has measured Gaza’s physical debris. It has priced the roads, the hospitals, the pipes, the farms, the power grid. What it has not priced is the ideological wreckage underneath them.
That is the danger.
Physical reconstruction without civic reconstruction does not produce peace. It produces restoration.
And restoration means returning to the conditions that made destruction inevitable.
Schools can teach coexistence or sanctify martyrdom. Hospitals can preserve life or sustain armed rule. Roads can carry commerce or carry war.
A rebuilt Gaza can become the foundation of peace or the staging ground for the next war.
You can clear 68 million tons of rubble and still leave the most dangerous ruins standing.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The images out of Gaza arrive stripped of their foundation. Open the The New York Times opinion pages this week and the story feels preassembled: civilians suffer, Israel strikes, outrage follows. It reads cleanly because something essential has been left out. This war does not begin and end on the surface.
Cover page of Sunday TimesTwo-page spread which never mentions Hamas or tunnels
It runs underground.
Beneath Gaza sits one of the most extensive underground military networks in the modern world, built by Hamas over years with money, materials, and time that could have gone elsewhere. The elaborate system of reinforced corridors, command centers, weapons depots, communications lines was designed to survive bombardment and keep a war going no matter what happens above.
Call it what it is: a vast network of bomb shelters.
Now say the part that rarely gets said clearly: Those shelters were never meant for civilians. They were never opened to families. They were never opened to children. They were never opened to the elderly. They were reserved—by design—for fighters, for leadership, for the preservation of the war machine itself.
In any other place, that would be unthinkable. Governments build shelters to protect their populations. When sirens sound, people go underground. Here, the system was inverted. Protection went below ground for those prosecuting the war. Exposure remained above ground for those living in it.
So when the bombs fall, the images follow. Families in rubble. Crowded rooms. Children pulled from collapsed buildings. The world reacts to an outcome shaped long before the first strike in this round of fighting. The protection existed. It was built. And Gazans were never allowed to use it.
That is the story that flips the frame.
This is not only a story of what Israel is doing. It is a story of what Hamas chose to build, and who it chose to protect with it. The tunnels are not just military infrastructure. They are a hierarchy set in concrete. Survival below ground for the regime. Exposure above ground for everyone else.
Once you see that, it becomes impossible to unsee. The destruction remains devastating but it has critical context. It sits alongside a governing strategy that hardened one layer of Gaza while leaving the other to absorb the war.
And that strategy is not finished. It points directly to what comes next. If Hamas remains, Gaza does not rebuild in the way people hope. It continues in the direction it has already taken. More tunnels. More infrastructure embedded beneath dense civilian areas. More resources pulled downward into war instead of upward into life.
The future of Gaza is not being debated. It has already been built.
It just was never built for the people living above it.
And the socialist-jihadi media like The New York Times, will paint a picture of pure fiction, one in which Gazans are the victims of rubble, not tunnels; victims of the Jewish State, not Hamas; victims of “genocide,” not perpetrators of genocide.
And for good measure, it will add a cartoon of a Jewish Holocaust survivor protesting about Israel committing a genocide in Gaza, to completely embalm its inversion of genocide.
Hamas built bomb shelters for the exclusive use of its terrorist army while it let women and children get attacked overhead. We are similarly witnessing the socialist-jihadi media build narrative shelters for those same jihadi terrorists, leaving Jews to take the brunt of the antisemitic tidal wave.
Nerdeen Kiswani is not quiet about her views. She wants the Jewish State obliterated and Zionists killed. She says it openly and proudly in front of loud cheering crowds.
So why did The New York Times soften her stance? Why did it say that she was simply assembling “protests to draw attention to the suffering of Palestinians,” when her entire movement is about the destruction of Israel?
Why did the Times make it sound like pro-Israel groups were uniquely offended that “she supports the liberation of the Palestinian people “by any means necessary,” including armed resistance.”?
Why did the Times use so much energy and so many words to say “that her activism opposes Israel, its policies and its structure as a Jewish State,” without saying that she supports targeting Jewish organizations and the annihilation of the only Jewish State?
“We marched today, we took over the streets and we visited multiple Zionist settler foundations. Multiple. We let them know we know where they’re at. We know where they work. We’re gonna find out more about where they’re at too. And we’re gonna go after them.” – Nerdeen Kiswani, YouTube, Jun 11 2021
Why didn’t the Times explicitly state that Kiswani endorses US designated terrorist groups and individuals?
Picture on left is Kiswani with pin of Abu Obaida, a spokesman for Hamas, while protesting in front of a synagogue in Teaneck, NJ on April 1, 2024 (from ADL website)
On June 10, 2024, Kiswani led a protest outside a memorial exhibit in downtown New York City about the Nova Music Festival where she said that young partygoers enjoying music was “like having a rave right next to the gas chambers during the Holocaust,” mocking not only the hundreds of murdered youth but millions of Jews slaughtered in the Holocaust.
Kiswani post of a child kissing an armed Hamas terrorist, like those that burned Jewish families alive
In short, Kiswani is a proud supporter of terrorism against Jews and American allies. Yet The New York Times made it appear that her stances were simply pro-Palestinian, which some members of the pro-Israel community found offensive.
The reality is that a pro-Israel “extremist” allegedly planned an attack on a pro-Palestinian “extremist.” But the Times editorialized by showing the smiling face of an “activist” worried about the “suffering” of her people. Such is the alt-left embrace of the toxic “deformity in Palestinian culture.”
Abraham had two sons. That is not only history; it is the underlying structure of the Middle East.
From Isaac came Jacob (Israel) and the Jews. From Ishmael came peoples that would become much of the Arab world. One father. Two lines. A separation that began in a household and expanded into history.
“And the thing was very grievous in Abraham’s sight… and he sent her [Hagar and Ishamael] away” (Genesis 21:11–14)
A rupture in youth. Ishmael into the wilderness. Isaac remaining with the covenant, inheritance, and land. Two trajectories set before either became a nation.
They meet again only once.
“And his sons Isaac and Ishmael buried him in the cave of Machpelah” (Genesis 25:9)
The text records a moment that refuses to disappear: the separated sons standing together over their father.
History widened the gap.
The descendants of Ishmael became many: spread across vast geographies, largely Muslim, with enduring Christian communities. The region became overwhelmingly Arab.
The descendants of Isaac became few. Driven out, dispersed, conquered repeatedly, yet carrying something that would not yield: memory, covenant, and a fixed orientation toward their promised land.
Eventually, they returned. A small people, back in a narrow strip of that land, surrounded by a region that traced itself, at least in part, to the other son.
That imbalance defines the present.
Then something shifted.
The Abraham Accords – named for their common forefather – introduced a different possibility. Arab states choosing open relationship with Israel, shaped by economics, technology, security, and a recognition that the region was already changing beneath older narratives.
A shared pressure point sharpened that shift: Iran.
A Muslim non-Arab power, Persian in identity and imperial in ambition, projecting influence across Arab capitals and against Israel alike, forcing alignments that would have seemed implausible only years ago.
The Accords opened a door for a new future. Now widen it.
Bring the Abraham Accords to Hebron.
Bring them to the Cave of Machpelah, the burial place of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and the Jewish matriarchs as well. The place where the text records Isaac and Ishmael standing together.
Let the leaders of Israel and the Arab world stand there.
Let it be an invitation – especially to Saudi Arabia – to step fully into this framework, not only as a strategic actor but as a central inheritor of the Abrahamic story.
Let it also be a reminder closer to the ground.
To Jews and Arabs living in the disputed lands east of the 1949 armistice lines (E49AL) that includes Hebron, that their conflict sits inside a much older relationship. They are not strangers placed side by side by accident. They are descendants of a shared origin, living out a divergence that began long before modernity created borders.
Ishmael did not return to neutral ground. He came back to the land understood to be Isaac’s inheritance. He stood with his brother there and buried their father.
That moment carries a clarity that history has often obscured: the land of Israel is the Jewish home.
The Arab world does not disappear in recognizing that. It becomes something stronger—anchored in reality, aligned with its own long-term interests, and reconnected to a shared origin that was never erased.
The Abraham Accords can move from alignment to acceptance.
Hebron is where that truth can be stated without abstraction.
The region has spent centuries replaying the separation.
Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States can choose, now, during their common battle against Iran, to stand again at the place where Isaac and Ishmael met thousands of years ago, and acknowledge what each brought with them when they arrived: a common bond and their own roots in the region.
First One Through 
