Category Archives: 2023 Gaza War

The Leadership Democrats Didn’t Provide

Posted on by
Reply

This week’s House debate over Israel’s $3.3 billion in annual military assistance was more than a vote. It was a test of leadership.

Many Democratic members of Congress allowed the debate to become one of competing sympathies: Israel versus American families, Israel versus veterans, Israel versus schools and health care. Some even embraced that framing themselves.

But leadership is not about amplifying the loudest voices in your coalition. It is about explaining difficult truths.

Over the past months, I wrote two essays that made straightforward strategic arguments.

In “Nobody Protests the Military Bases in Germany,” I argued that Americans have long understood military commitments abroad not as charity, but as investments in American security. We maintain troops, aircraft, and bases around the world because we believe confronting threats abroad is less costly than confronting them at home. It runs around $75 billion annually.

In “America’s Greatest and Quietest Military Victory in Nearly a Century,“ I argued that the wars in Israel and Ukraine should be viewed together, not separately. Two American allies have spent the last several years severely weakening two of America’s principal adversaries—Iran and Russia—while requiring virtually no American combat casualties and only a fraction of the cost of wars like Iraq and Afghanistan.

One can disagree with either argument. What is remarkable is how rarely Democratic leaders even attempted to make it.

  • Instead of explaining that military aid is part of a broader American strategy, they allowed it to be portrayed as a gift to a foreign country. And to only one country – Israel.
  • Instead of explaining that weakening Russia and Iran advances American interests, they permitted the conversation to revolve almost entirely around domestic tradeoffs. Only relative to Israel.
  • Instead of educating their constituents about seventy-five years of American global defense strategy, they surrendered the debate to slogans about “blank checks.” Specifically to the Jewish State.

Leadership requires more than counting votes. It requires helping citizens understand why America stations forces overseas, why it supports allies under attack, why it spends money beyond its borders, and why deterrence is almost always less expensive than war.

That conversation becomes even more important when the facts are uncomfortable.

  • The United States has committed far more aid to Ukraine than to Israel. Over eight times as much.
  • The wars involving Ukraine and Russia have produced far greater casualties than the war in Gaza. As much as eight times as much.
  • It spends vastly more each year defending allies through bases and military deployments across Europe and Asia. About 18 times as much.

Yet Israel alone has become the symbol of America’s supposedly misplaced priorities.

Statesmanship is not measured by how well elected officials echo the passions of the moment. It is measured by whether they are willing to explain complex realities even when doing so is politically difficult.

This week’s vote exposed more than a divide over Israel.

It exposed a failure to teach. A failure to lead. And a willingness to lean into vile antisemitic tropes.

Basic National Rights… For Some

Posted on by
Reply

The Palestinian Authority had no trouble explaining what every nation deserves.

In a statement condemning Iran’s attacks on Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Oman, and Jordan, the PA repeatedly invokes the same principles: sovereignty, security, stability, and protection of civilians.

PA President condemns Iranian attacks on July 12, 2026

Iran is condemned for violating each of them. The Arab governments are praised for taking measures to defend them.

“The Organization is based on the principle of the sovereign equality of all its Members.” United Nations Charter (Article 2(1))

Where were these principles when Israel was attacked?

When Iran launched missiles at Israel, did the Palestinian Authority defend Israel’s sovereignty?

When Hezbollah rained rockets on Israeli cities for months, did it affirm Israel’s right to security and stability?

states “refrain… from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.” UN Charter (Article 2(4))

When the Houthis fired missiles toward Israel, did it support Israel’s right to protect its people?

And most pointedly, when Hamas – fellow local Arabs of the Palestinian parliament – crossed an international border on October 7, murdered civilians, kidnapped hostages, and occupied Israeli communities, did the PA condemn it as an assault on Israel’s sovereignty?

“the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations.” UN Charter (Article 51)

A principle that applies only to friends is not a principle. It is a preference.

The Palestinian Authority’s own statement demonstrates that it understands exactly what every nation deserves. Its silence when those same principles are violated openly and repeatedly against Israel says just as much as its words.

Gaza Was Called “Hell on Earth” Long Before This War

Posted on by
Reply

Long before the current war began, prominent advocates for the Palestinian cause were describing Gaza as “hell on earth.”

In January 2009, Palestinian Queen Rania of Jordan released a video for UNRWA titled “Hell on Earth.” Eight months later, speaking at UNRWA’s 60th anniversary, she recalled that video and lamented that Gaza was still “Hell on Earth.”

Palestinian Queen of Jordan Rania called Gaza “Hell on Earth” in 2009

In May 2021, UN Secretary-General António Guterres declared, “If there is a hell on earth, it is the lives of children in Gaza today.”

When Israel began to respond to the war waged by Gazans in 2023, UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini said Gaza had become “a living hell.” In January 2024, UN humanitarian coordinator Sigrid Kaag told the Security Council, “Gaza is hell on earth.”

The description has been remarkably consistent. What has often been missing is the question: Why?

Hell is not merely a place of suffering. It is a place where evil reigns.

Hamas violently seized Gaza in 2007 after defeating Fatah in a brief but brutal civil war. Fighters executed political rivals, threw some from rooftops, publicly brutalized opponents, and dragged the bodies of alleged collaborators through the streets. Those who challenged Hamas risked imprisonment, torture, or death. Independent political life disappeared, and an entire generation grew up under the rule of an armed Islamist movement that prioritized rockets, tunnels, and perpetual conflict over building a prosperous society.

Hamas drags a disloyal Gazan through the streets to his death

And Hamas was a known entity, a political party which won 56% of Palestinian parliament in elections with the most antisemitic political charter ever written. It remains the most popular political group to this day, expected to win Palestinian elections in every poll.

Calling Gaza “hell on earth” without acknowledging who built that system leaves the story unfinished. Should people want to transform the region, they must work to end the evil rule and worldview that turned part of the holy land into such a place in the first place.

Why Doesn’t Anyone Call for a State of Boko Haram?

Posted on by
1

For more than fifteen years, Boko Haram has waged one of the world’s deadliest terrorist insurgencies. Since 2009, the group has been responsible for the deaths of more than 35,000 people, with some estimates placing the toll significantly higher when indirect deaths from the conflict are included. It has massacred civilians in villages, churches, mosques, schools, and marketplaces. It has bombed public places, murdered those who refused to submit to its rule, and driven millions from their homes across Nigeria and neighboring countries.

Kidnapping has been one of its defining tactics. The 2014 abduction of 276 schoolgirls from Chibok drew worldwide attention, but it was only one of thousands of kidnappings. Women and girls have been forced into marriage and been raped. Boys have been recruited as child soldiers. Entire communities have lived for years under the constant threat of murder, abduction, and terror.

Boko Haram rejects the legitimacy of Nigeria, a United Nations-member state. It seeks to replace it with its own extremist Islamist regime.

Yet almost no one argues that Boko Haram deserves its own country. No demonstrations demand that its leaders be rewarded with sovereignty. No governments argue that decades of massacres, hostage-taking, and terrorism should culminate in international legitimacy.

And then there is Hamas. The Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Dozens of other Palestinian terrorist groups. And the Palestinian Authority that pays for terrorist acts they commit.

The Bibas family taken hostages and murdered by Hamas on October 7, 2023

As Israelis buried over 1,000 people brutally killed by Hamas, anti-Israel activists took to Times Square and college campuses to express their glee. As Hamas supporters in Iran, Lebanon and Yemen joined the fight against Israel, the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia recognized the State of Palestine.

There are now 157 countries that recognize Palestine. That look at the war between Israel and Palestine as one between two sovereign states, one which invaded another, raped and burned people alive, and took 251 hostages. These nations didn’t pause to question whether Palestine has a right to exist, but got three more countries to join in their sadistic effort.

Perhaps it is time for the 36 countries which do not recognize Palestine to put a resolution before the UN to recognize Boko Haram as the legitimate government of Nigeria, or at least a breakaway state in the northeastern corner which they control.

Boko Haram in Nigeria

Israel Is Surrounded by Failed States – and Failed States in Waiting

Posted on by
1

Much of the discussion about Israel’s security focuses on borders, settlements, or ceasefires. Less attention is paid to a more fundamental reality: Israel is surrounded by governments that have failed – or have yet to demonstrate they can function as sovereign states.

To Israel’s north lies Lebanon, a country where the government spent years unable to enforce a monopoly on force within its own territory. While the Lebanese Army wore the national uniform, Hezbollah built an independent army, amassed an enormous missile arsenal, dug tunnels, launched drones, and ultimately dragged the country into war. A sovereign state that cannot control its own territory has surrendered one of the defining responsibilities of statehood.

Lebanese pound to Israeli shekel exchange rate, defaulting on debt in March 2020, enormous explosion in Beirut for stored Hezbollah weapons in August 2020. The bank devalued currency by 90% in February 2023 and again in February 2024

Next to Lebanon is Syria. More than a decade of civil war shattered the country’s institutions, fractured its territory among competing armed groups and foreign militaries, and left millions displaced. Syria has long stood as one of the clearest examples of state failure in the modern Middle East.

Syrian civil war killed nearly 600,000 and dispersed 13 million. It is now ruled by Abu Mohammad al-Jolani who headed ISIS in the region

To Israel’s south lies Gaza. Hamas spent years and billions of dollars to build an underground military fortress instead of a functional society. The result was war after war after war. Destruction and death.

Hamas on October 7, 2023 slaughtered 1,200 people in Israel and brought over 250 people as hostages into Gaza to cheering crowds.

In the West Bank, the picture is different but equally troubling. The Palestinian Authority maintains civil institutions in parts of the territory, yet it has never established a monopoly on force or unified governance. Rival armed factions continue to operate, political legitimacy remains deeply contested, and governance has been divided from Gaza for nearly two decades.

“recent poll shows a majority of Palestinians rejecting moderate leadership, despairing of peaceful change and now favouring armed struggle? That tragic deformity in Palestinian political culture is the result of the continued brutality of the occupation.” – James Zogby, President of the Arab American Institute at the United Nations Security Council on June 27, 2023

The collapse of governance in the states surrounding Israel has turned the region into one of the world’s greatest concentrations of terrorist groups. This is the strategic reality Israel faces every day.

Its neighbors are not peaceful democracies with settled borders and accountable institutions. They are governments weakened by civil war, dominated by militias, or unable to establish unified authority. Israel is repeatedly asked to take security risks on the assumption that these entities will prevent terrorism and enforce agreements, even though their recent history demonstrates the opposite.

The tragedy is not only Israel’s. The greatest victims of failed governance are the Lebanese, Syrians, and Stateless Arabs from Palestine (SAPs) themselves. They deserve governments that build economies instead of militias, schools instead of tunnels, courts instead of armed factions, and national institutions instead of perpetual conflict.

Peace agreements are negotiated between states because states can make commitments and enforce them. Militias cannot. Failed governments cannot. A failed state in waiting cannot.

Until the governments surrounding Israel control their territory, uphold the rule of law, and prioritize their people over perpetual conflict, Israel’s security challenges will remain the consequence of failed governance, not simply hostile neighbors.

Does Israel’s War Meet the Catholic Just War Test?

Posted on by
2

For more than sixteen centuries, the Catholic Church has wrestled with one of humanity’s most difficult questions: When, if ever, is war morally justified?

St. Augustine laid the foundation by teaching that, “The purpose of all wars is peace.” War was never to be pursued for conquest, revenge, or hatred, but only to restore a just peace.

St. Thomas Aquinas refined that principle, writing that, “In order for a war to be just, three things are necessary. First, the authority of the sovereign… Secondly, a just cause… Thirdly… the belligerents should have a rightful intention, so that they intend the advancement of good, or the avoidance of evil.”

The Catechism of the Catholic Church later added that “The strict conditions for legitimate defense by military force require rigorous consideration.” It identifies four additional requirements: the aggressor must inflict lasting, grave and certain damage; peaceful alternatives must have been exhausted; there must be a serious prospect of success; and the use of force must not create evils greater than those it seeks to eliminate.

These principles have recently been invoked by Catholics questioning Israel’s wars against Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran.

The first question is legitimate authority.

Israel is a sovereign state with an elected government entrusted with protecting its citizens. Hamas is a terrorist organization that seized control of Gaza by force. Hezbollah is an Iranian-backed militia that operates independently of the Lebanese government while maintaining its own army. Iran finances, arms, trains, and directs proxy organizations across the region while repeatedly calling for Israel’s destruction.

The Catholic tradition recognizes a government’s duty to defend those under its care. That responsibility belongs to Israel’s government. It does not belong to terrorist organizations.

The second question is just cause.

Israel did not manufacture this conflict. On October 7, Hamas crossed into Israel and deliberately massacred civilians, raped women, tortured families, burned people alive in their homes, and kidnapped more than 250 men, women, children, and elderly people. Hezbollah opened a northern front with sustained rocket attacks, while Iran’s regional proxy network joined the conflict.

Catholic teaching has long recognized that governments possess both the right and the obligation to defend innocent life against grave aggression.

The third question is right intention.

Israel has repeatedly stated that its objective is the dismantling of Hamas’s military capability, the removal of Hezbollah’s threat along its northern border, and the degradation of Iran’s ability to wage war through proxies. Those are military objectives directed toward restoring security.

Its enemies have declared something fundamentally different: that the Jewish state should be destroyed. One side seeks to eliminate a military threat. The other seeks to eliminate a nation.

The Catechism next asks whether war is truly the last resort.

Israel withdrew every soldier and civilian from Gaza in 2005. Instead of peace, Hamas transformed Gaza into an armed fortress, investing billions in rockets, tunnels, command centers, and military infrastructure embedded beneath civilian neighborhoods. Ceasefires repeatedly collapsed. Diplomatic initiatives failed to end the attacks. Every pause became an opportunity for Hamas and Hezbollah to rearm.

Hamas tunnels

Catholic teaching does not require a nation to absorb repeated massacres while endlessly hoping the next ceasefire will succeed where every previous one failed.

There must also be a reasonable chance of success.

Israel’s objectives have been difficult but attainable: dismantling terrorist command structures, destroying military infrastructure, rescuing hostages, degrading missile capabilities, and reducing Iran’s capacity to project violence through its proxies. Success doesn’t mean perfect peace. It means substantially reducing a continuing threat to innocent life.

Finally comes proportionality and discrimination.

These principles are often reduced to comparing casualty figures. That is not how Catholic teaching understands proportionality. The question is whether the military response is proportionate to removing the evil being confronted and whether civilians are intentionally protected.

Hamas deliberately embeds military assets beneath hospitals, schools, mosques, and residential neighborhoods. It stores weapons among civilians, fires rockets from civilian areas, steals humanitarian aid, and has long been accused of using civilians as shields. It refuses to let civilians enter the tunnels for shelter. Hezbollah has similarly embedded military infrastructure within Lebanese civilian communities.

Those realities fundamentally shape how Israel’s responsibilities must be judged.

The Catholic just war tradition was never intended to evaluate only one participant in a conflict. Every criterion applies equally to every combatant. A moral framework that scrutinizes Israel while ignoring Hamas, Hezbollah, or Iran is no longer applying Catholic teaching consistently.

When the Church’s own criteria are applied carefully – legitimate authority, just cause, right intention, last resort, reasonable hope of success, proportionality, and discrimination – Israel’s campaign against Hamas and Iran’s proxy network presents a strong case for satisfying the classical requirements of a just war.

From Jesus the Jew to Gaza: The Vatican’s Dangerous Narrative

Posted on by
Reply

For years, pro-Palestinian activists have promoted the false claim that Jesus was a Palestinian.

Jesus was a Jew, born to a Jewish family, living in the Jewish homeland, speaking to Jewish audiences, teaching from the Hebrew Bible, and making pilgrimages to the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem. The word “Palestine” was not even the name of the province during His lifetime. The Roman renaming of Judea to Syria Palaestina occurred about a century after His death.

Yet the claim persists because it serves an ahistorical but political purpose: If Jesus can be transformed from a Jew into a Arab, then the central figure of Christianity can be detached from Jewish history and reinserted into a modern political narrative. Suddenly, Jews are no longer obvious indigenous people in the Holy Land, but Arabs – who did not arrive en masse to region for another six centuries – are the real Jews.

The recent Vatican News article about Gaza takes that process one step further.

The article does not explicitly call Jesus a Palestinian. Instead, it wraps a Gazan narrative in the language of Christ’s passion, death, and resurrection. Gaza becomes the tomb. The refugee becomes the suffering servant. The journey out becomes resurrection.

The symbolism is unmistakable.

For centuries, Christians looked to the suffering of Jesus as a uniquely sacred story. Increasingly, anti-Israel agitators are attempting to woo parts of the Christian world by recasting that story through the lens of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with Palestinian Arabs occupying the role once reserved for Christ Himself.

The war in Gaza did not begin with suffering descending from heaven. It began with decisions made by thousands of Gazans. Hamas invaded Israel, murdered civilians and took hostages. Hamas launched a war that it knew would bring devastating consequences to Gaza as it hid it tunnels and refused to let women and children enter the shelters.

Does that resemble Jesus?

Genocidal psychopaths are being transformed into the innocent sufferer. The political and military context disappears from view. Agency gives way to symbolism.

What makes this especially troubling for many Jews is that the institution promoting this narrative is no longer just fringe anti-Israel groups or university protest movements.

It is the Vatican itself.

For two thousand years, the Church has wrestled with the consequences of separating Christianity from its Jewish roots. In recent decades, Catholic-Jewish relations made enormous progress by reaffirming the Jewishness of Jesus and Christianity’s historical connection to the Jewish people.

That progress is undermined when contemporary narratives replace Jesus the Jew with a new symbolic figure: the Palestinian sufferer who cheered Jews being burned alive.

From a Hamas Double Standard to the Hamas Dangerous Standard

Posted on by
Reply

United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres recently declared that he supports “a monopoly on weapons by the Lebanese Government.”

He is right.

No sovereign state can exist when an organization maintains its own army outside central government control. Hezbollah may hold seats in parliament and participate in Lebanese politics, but that does not give it the right to possess an independent military force and wage war outside the direction of the government.

The obvious question is why the Secretary-General does not apply the same principle to Gaza.

If Lebanon requires a state monopoly on force, then so does any future Palestinian state. Hamas must be disarmed. There is no path to peace while an independent army remains outside governmental authority.

Yet the United Nations does not say so. Instead, it issues endless calls for ceasefires, negotiations, and diplomacy while avoiding the central reality that an armed movement dedicated to Israel’s destruction cannot simultaneously be the foundation for coexistence.

That double standard helps sustain the current conflict. Israelis and Gazans continue to suffer while international institutions refuse to confront the most basic requirement for ending the war.

But today’s war is not the real danger.

The real danger is what comes next.

Every major Palestinian poll points in the same direction. Palestinians are increasingly likely to hand control of the Palestinian Authority itself to Hamas or leaders who share Hamas’s objectives.

The result will not be a Palestinian Authority that replaces Hamas but Hamas becoming the Palestinian Authority.

At that point, Hamas will no longer be an armed movement operating from Gaza. It will be the internationally recognized government of Palestinian Arabs in Gaza and the West Bank. Its army will no longer be described as a militia but the armed forces of Palestine, internationally recognized, and still committed to the destruction of the Jewish state.

If so, the suffering of Israelis and Gazans today will pale in comparison to the conflict that follows.

Difficult situations are sometimes referred to as being between a rock and a hard place. The popular Palestinian terrorist group places the Middle East between a double standard and a destructive standard.

Related:

When Founding Fathers Are Psychopaths And Cowards (January 2024)

Gazans Own This War

Posted on by
Reply

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.

The Great Return to Sender

Posted on by
Reply

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.