Category Archives: 2023 Gaza War

The Most Important Debris To Clear in Gaza is Ideological

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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.

No Hashtag for Khartoum or Mogadishu

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

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

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

The scale should compel attention. It doesn’t.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Pressure Carrot

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

So the sequence matters.

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

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

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

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

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

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

That is the missing piece.

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

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

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

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

Israel May Fix What Iran Broke

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

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

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

The outcome depends on how far that process runs.

Start with Yemen.

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

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

Lebanon presents a more intricate equilibrium.

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

Power, however, runs on a parallel track.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Under these conditions, sovereignty never fully coheres.

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

Three arenas. Three outcomes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Bomb Shelters Gazans Were Never Allowed to Use

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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 Times
Two-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.

Hey NY Times, Nerdeen Kiswani Wants Zionists Killed and Israel Destroyed

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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?

“I hope that pop-pop is the last noise that some Zionists hear in their lifetime!” – Nerdeen Kiswani, Youtube, Aug 4 2021

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.”?

“Israel must be annihilated.” – Nerdeen Kiswani, Instagram, Mar 3 2017

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 doesn’t hide her love of the genocidal antisemitic group Hamas. She posts her fondness to the public.

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.”

It Is Time To Bring The Abraham Accords To Hebron

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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.

Savannah Guthrie Times 250

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Savannah Guthrie tried to describe the indescribable.

Her 84 year old mother was taken from her home, with signs of violence left behind, a masked man on camera. And then nothing. A void where a mother used to be. She spoke about sleepless nights, about imagining fear she cannot reach, about a word she kept returning to: unbearable.

That word should end the conversation. It should strip away everything else.

Because everyone understands what it means when someone you love is taken.

Now Multiply That by 250

What Guthrie is living through is devastating.

In Israel, it happened at scale.

Over 250 people were abducted violently—children, parents, grandparents—dragged from homes, shoved into vehicles, disappeared into tunnels by jihadi terrorists. The same questions Guthrie now asks became a national condition: Are they alive? Are they suffering? What are they thinking?

The same agony. Multiplied. Multiplied. Multiplied.

Where the World Breaks

Here is the dividing line.

When Guthrie speaks, there is no debate. No one justifies it. No one says her mother deserved it. No one rallies in defense of the abductor.

The reaction is immediate and human: bring her home.

But when Israeli families faced the same horror, the reaction in too many places—especially on college campuses—was not sympathy.

It was celebration.

Not confusion. Not distance. Celebration of the very act Guthrie calls unbearable.

The Only Question That Matters

Her interview removes every excuse. No politics, no slogans—just a daughter describing what it feels like to have a mother taken.

If you can feel that—and then justify or cheer when it happens to someone else—you are not misinformed. You are choosing evil.

And that is the part that is unbearable to civilized people.

The UN Has Wiped Raped Jewish Women From History

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The United Nations has released yet another report on violence against women. It reads like a catalogue of human depravity – Sudan, Congo, Haiti, Ukraine, Gaza – each documented, each calibrated to shock the conscience.

And it does but not for the reason the authors intend.

Because one of the most documented episodes of mass sexual violence in recent history is missing. Not debated. Not contextualized.

Absent.

On October 7, an estimated 6,000 Gazans invaded Israel and carried out atrocities that included the systematic rape and mutilation of women. This is not a matter of competing narratives. It has been documented by eyewitnesses, first responders, forensic teams, and subsequent investigations.

And yet, in a sweeping global report about violence against women, these victims disappear.

The report finds space for a child raped every half hour in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, for the explosion of abuse in Haiti, for war deaths in Ukraine, and for casualty figures in Gaza. Horrific and worthy of attention.

But the omission is not accidental. It is instructive.

Because what the United Nations is quietly establishing is a hierarchy of victims. Some suffering is elevated. Some is ignored. And some – when it disrupts a preferred political narrative – is erased altogether.

Jewish women fall into that last category.

That is not human rights reporting. It is narrative management.

And that distortion does not stay confined to UN documents. It bleeds outward. When the international system refuses to clearly name and center atrocities committed against Jews, it creates a form of moral cover. The record itself becomes a kind of absolution.

So when figures in the West – like the wife of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Rama Duwaji – publicly express approval for the October 7 massacre, the reaction is muted, rationalized, or ignored. The most grotesque elements of that day, including the sexual violence, have already been softened, blurred, or omitted by institutions that claim to stand for universal rights.

If the crime is not fully acknowledged, then the celebration of it can be more easily excused.

That is the downstream consequence of selective memory and outrage.

The United Nations is not failing to see. It is choosing not to look and remind the world about violent antisemitism. And in doing so, it transforms a report about protecting women into something far more revealing: a document that tells us which victims matter and which ones are inconvenient.

In that calculus, the rape and murder of Jewish women is not denied. It is deemed unworthy of inclusion. Perhaps even harmful, lest it paint its forever wards, the Stateless Arabs from Palestine (SAPs) in an unfavorable light.

Such silence is not neutral. It is the story.

“Screams Before Silence” movie

Spain Breaks With Israel, Not Washington

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In a sharp escalation of transatlantic tension, Donald Trump threatened to cut off trade with Spain, accusing Madrid of refusing to support operations against Iran and failing to meet its defense obligations within NATO.

Spain rejected the criticism, citing sovereignty and international law and refusing to allow U.S. forces to use Spanish bases in operations tied to the Iran conflict.

Yet at the same time Madrid made a different diplomatic move. Spain permanently withdrew its ambassador from Israel, citing the widening regional war.

The contrast is striking.

The military campaign against Iran has been led by the United States, with Israel acting alongside it. If participation in that conflict justified downgrading diplomatic relations, the same logic would apply first to Washington, yet Spain withdrew no ambassador from the United States.

Even after Trump threatened sweeping trade retaliation, Madrid left its diplomatic posture toward Washington unchanged.

Instead, the rupture fell on Israel alone.

The reason is not difficult to see. Confronting the United States carries consequences. The American economy dwarfs Spain’s, and Washington anchors the NATO security system protecting Europe. Spain benefits from that umbrella while contributing among the lowest shares of national income to defense within the alliance.

Angering Washington carries risk. Angering Israel carries almost none.

Spain frames its decision as moral protest. But if war with Iran is the offense, the United States leads it. If regional escalation is the concern, Spain still maintains diplomatic relations with Iran itself, the leading state sponsor of terrorism.

If Spain were to look in the mirror, what would it see? A principled stand against war? That is the language Madrid uses.

But the reflection suggests something else. Spain keeps its ambassador in Washington, maintains relations with Tehran, and breaks with Jerusalem — the smallest actor in the conflict.

Spain is a nation of nearly fifty million compared to Israel, a country of ten million, a small state surrounded by hundreds of millions of Muslims where hostility toward Israel goes back to the Jewish State’s reestablishment.

That asymmetry will not go unnoticed in Washington or among Israel’s allies. Spain already faces pressure to increase its NATO defense spending. If Madrid is willing to rupture relations with Israel over the Iran war while maintaining relations with Iran itself, the contradiction may soon move from rhetoric to diplomacy.

The question could become blunt:
restore normal relations with Israel, end trade with Iran, and meet NATO defense commitments — or risk losing the security umbrella Spain depends on.

A nation looking honestly in the mirror might call that geopolitics. Or antisemitism.