Category Archives: 2023 Gaza War

Context For “Intifada”

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Hamas Defenders (like the Arab world and universities) and their defenders (politicians and progressive Jews) – HDDs – have tried to reeducate the West about both the English and Arabic languages.

At congressional hearings, HDDs told senators that “Intifada” just means “shaking off” and did not mean the slaughter of Jews, despite the Second Intifada killing 1,000 Jews – almost all civilians – and resulting in more restrictions on Palestinians, like the Security Barrier which ended that intifada.

Those hearings had the head of the Arab American Institute also share that “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free,” is not a call for killing Jews but just the liberation of local Arabs.

That same speaker said that “Glory to our martyrs” plastered on buildings might only be interpreted as antisemitic if the buildings were synagogues or Jewish centers, but simply free speech if it was in public where Jews would see it going to school.

WESPAC-backed Palestine Youth Movement masked members plastering “Glory To Our Martyrs” on top of the map of Israel, at train stations in New York

HDDs said there was no hate crime when professors said the massive slaughter of Jews on October 7 was “exhilarating” to a crowd, or when students held signs pointing at Jews that read “al Qassam next targets.” Not just not a crime, but not even hate.

Masked Columbia student calling for Hamas missile strike on Jewish students

They accuse Jews of being too sensitive.

When HDDs accuse Israel of committing “genocide” and behaving like “Nazis” committing “ethnic cleansing” while engaged in “apartheid,” they attempt to strip the victims of European and Arab countries’ atrocities of their history and memory and desecrate the memories of 6 million Jews.

As HDDs refer to the raping of Jewish women, burning families alive and kidnapping Holocaust survivors a form of “justified resistance,” they seek to insult the memories of the Jewish dead and have the world condemn the innocent as evil “occupiers.”

NYC mob waving flags of Palestinian terrorist groups including Hamas and Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine chanting for “Intifada revolution” in front of exhibit about the Gazan slaughter of innocents at the Nova Music Festival in Israel on October 7, 2023

It is an attempted institutional gaslighting of Jews.

When HDDs testify that chants like “there is only one solution, Intifada Revolution,” require “context” and must be “targeted and pervasive” in order for school administrations to even consider taking action, they don’t pause to consider Jews being locked in rooms for their safety or fleeing campus because schools won’t protect them. FOR MONTHS.

Jewish students in downtown NYC barricade themselves in a library from a horde

They believe that Jews are too powerful to be at risk and are crying wolf.

The Democratic Socialists have declared every White person and Israeli part of the colonialist regime and are therefore all guilty and thereby legitimate targets for violence. Even babies.

Democratic Socialists of America siding with Hamas arguing that all forms of violence are legitimate in an effort of “liberation”

Jewish HDDs (they are mostly in the second ‘D’ in HDD) accuse their fellow Jews of being tools of antisemitic Republicans who are using them to dismantle the education system and suppress free speech. They add that those Jews who complain about antisemitism are right-wing racists who are putting international and minority groups at risk by complaining to authorities.

These Jewish members of the socialist-jihadi alliance don’t fret acting as fig leaves for genocidal antisemitic comrades.

That has become the American landscape into which Jews step out of their front doors every day. Walking the streets, quietly wearing a yellow ribbon for the hostages held by Gazans and members of the United Nations, they are accosted with accusations that Jews and Zionists are evil and deserve neither dignity nor empathy. Even more, that Jews must relinquish their history and rights or face the firing squad before a cheering crowd.

Diaspora Jews are being groomed for slaughter. The operators of the slaughterhouses are in the awkward early days of learning how to keep the human cattle from acting up as they get processed. For the moment, they are playing with language and attempting to invert victim and assailant to enlist sympathy from the masses to join in the massacre.

Watching their growing ranks including progressive and anti-Zionist Jews as well as politicians, empowers the HDD movement that it is on the right track.

Members of Jewish Voice for Peace take over Trump Tower on March 13, 2025

The context of the Global Intifada is that Jews and the Jewish State are considered part of the White Imperialist and Capitalist world. All are inherently guilty and therefore should not be allowed to defend themselves. HDDs are telling you that to be on the right side of history, everyone has to take up the cause and confront Zionists and White people wherever they are.

The pathetic joke is that the mantra is being stoked principally by foreign actors of the Global South on American soil under our own noses.

Gaza’s Defenders Condemn It (February 2025)

The Quantitative Shield For A Qualitative Problem (March 2024)

Jordan’s King Abdullah Excuses Palestinian Barbarity (October 2023)

Palestinian Inversion Of Facts Based On Refusal To Coexist (July 2022)

Hamas’s Willing Executioners (July 2021)

Names and Narrative: Zionist Entity and Colonial Occupier (May 2019)

The Palestinians aren’t “Resorting to Violence”; They are Murdering and Waging War (November 2014)

Eyal Gilad Naftali Klinghoffer. The new Blood Libel. (June 2014)

Does Gaza Fall Outside Humanitarian Laws?

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International humanitarian law (IHL) has been established for decades, and many are principally designed to protect civilians during armed conflict. In the case of the Gaza war against Israel, it is questionable whether the laws can be applied to Israel’s actions in the war, not whether Israel is abusing such laws.

Principle of Distinction

The driving themes of IHL surrounds mitigating the harm to non-combatants during hostilities. The first driver is, therefore, to distinguish between combatants and non-combatants. In most battles, this is easy to accomplish: during a clash on a battlefield, the only participants are soldiers. In urban warfare, this is much more difficult.

In the dense Gaza strip, this is virtually impossible.

The various military groups in Gaza are embedded and underneath almost every building and road. Hamas, the popular political-terrorist group that rules Gaza, built an entire infrastructure underneath the city with a maze of 500 kilometers of tunnels and storerooms. The hundreds of exit shafts for much of this infrastructure is located in houses and schools.

Hamas soldiers in Gaza tunnels

Additionally, Gazan combatants dress in civilian clothing and are members of groups which are touted to be neutral including the United Nations, the press and hospital staff.

UNRWA employees and Hamas militants

If civilians and related infrastructure are enmeshed by premeditated design with an active military, then the civilians have become integrated into the war effort and renounced protections of distinction.

Principles of Proportionality and Precaution

IHL’s Principle of Proportionality is designed to minimize collateral damage to civilians when attacking legitimate military targets. It calls for a review of the situation and reducing armaments to make any incidental civilian harm be aligned to the relative military gain achieved. The related Precaution principle is one step further, to try to prevent any military action, if possible.

Israel has taken many actions to limit the harm to civilians – which have been harshly criticized, nevertheless.

  • Withholding electricity and other aid. Israel has attempted to pressure Hamas and other militant groups – which seize all goods into Gaza – by withholding basic items like electricity so Israel would not have to use military force in the region. For those efforts, Israel is accused of causing a humanitarian catastrophe, rather than adhering to the Principles of Precaution
  • Move civilians out of the field of battle. Israel has moved and continues to urge civilians to leave “hot” areas, only to be accused of “ethnic cleansing”
  • Using ground forces. Israel could minimize its own casualties by only using air power against the terrorist enclave. Instead, it seeks a more targeted effort to eliminate combatants and protect civilians, for which it is criticized.

The vast majority of Gazans are in favor of killing Israeli civilians, voted for Hamas with its antisemitic genocidal charter, and supported the October 7 massacre. Gazans are part of the Hamas machinery, and the United Nations defends Hamas and demands that Israel not seek justice for its murdered civilians.

While Gazan authorities threaten to commit the October 7 barbarity over and again, Israel attempts to adhere to international law yet is criticized for it. Even though Israel left Gaza in 2005, and put in place a blockade only when Hamas took full control of the strip in 2007 to follow the Principle of Precaution, it is laughingly accused by international “human rights” groups of a “belligerent occupation.”

The terrorist enclave of Gaza has removed distinctions between civilians and militants, aid workers and terrorists, state and non-state actors, locals and international operators, and civilian infrastructure and military bases in a toxic brew. It defecates on all humanitarian norms while pointing both armaments and accusing fingers at Israel.

As the United Nations and Gazans have themselves destroyed all distinctions between combatants and non-combatants, and declared that Israel can never meet the standards of international humanitarian law, there is no basis to criticize Israel’s handling of its defensive war on such basis.

Related articles:

First Time In History, People Under ‘Genocide’ Reject Ceasefire. Repeatedly. (December 2024)

Palestinians Publicly Go Full Genocidal Jihadi (August 2024)

Ban Ki Moon Defecates on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (December 2016)

UN’s Confusion on the Legality of Israel’s Blockade of Gaza (July 2015)

Palestinian Authority Whitewashes Hostage-Taking Torture

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The United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture, Alice Jill Edwards, delivered her latest thematic report on torture which defined hostage-taking as a “cruel game” and definitely a form of torture. The lengthy report highlighted several examples of the practice, and specifically called out a number of countries – China, North Korea, Iran, Russia, United Arab Emirates and Venezuela – as particularly notorious state offenders.

Edwards called out non-state actors as well, including those backed by Iran, such as the Houthis in Yemen “holding at least 30 humanitarians,” and “Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups” which abducted 251 people in Israel on October 7, 2023.

Calling out the obvious evil was controversial in the morally-bankrupt institution.

In a press conference after the release of the report to the Human Rights Council, Edwards said (5:55) that several countries and NGOs asked her to remove certain countries from the report and criticized the timing of the release, presumably because it is coming amidst the horrific reports emerging from captives held by the Palestinian Arab political-terrorist group, Hamas. Edwards was accused for bias for her actions but refused to be silenced as she believes that hostage-taking should be viewed as a critical component in discussing human rights.

Edwards criticized the draft document of international crimes against humanity for not including hostage-taking. She argued for the families of hostages to have a point person in governments and at the UN with whom to liaise.

Most significantly, Edwards called on those taking hostages, “and those that aid and abet them,” to be held accountable and punished severely, as hostage-taking has become a “low-risk high-reward crime” (15:20) on the global stage. She argued for compensation for survivors.

This seemed a bit much for the socialist-jihadi alliance which roams the halls of the UN. Almost no one attended the briefing and only two reporters asked questions of Edwards. Both featured whataboutery, asking about Israel’s treatment of captives, and whether the Jewish State was just as guilty as Hamas And Friends.

Edwards responded (24:19) that Gazans took hostages as negotiating leverage, while Israel took prisoners of war in the middle of the ongoing war. Those taken from Israel were done so for leverage and ransom, while those taken by Israel were placed in detention and removed from the war effort, and therefore could not be considered hostages.

This was all way too much for the Palestinian Authority.

The PA’s official media arm, WAFA, produced its own reporting of the UN report on torture. It claimed that the special rapporteur “report focused on torture during captivity” which criticized the “Israeli attacks on Gaza” and “ill-treatment endures by Palestinians detained by Israel.” Nowhere does the PA’s account explain that Palestinian Arabs held by Israel are not hostages, the main theme of the report, nor does the “news” summary review the axis of evil which supports the Palestinian Arabs, as the worst offenders of hostage-taking.

The Palestinian Authority, propped up by the United Nations, tolerates the terrorist activities of local Arab terrorist groups – including the taking of civilian hostages and sexual violence -because the armed jihadi groups are much more popular amongst the Stateless Arabs from Palestine (SAPs). The puppet regime is either a worthless veneer or complicit, and should be held similarly accountable.

ACTION ITEM

Demand all officials condemn Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the other terrorist groups which participated in the October 7 barbarity and demand that they face maximum justice.

Related articles:

Excerpt of Hamas Charter to Share with Your Elected Officials (May 2021)

The United Nations’ Adoption of Palestinians, Enables It to Only Find Fault With Israel (March 2016)

Only Corpses For Corpses

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The story of the Bibas children from October 7, 2023 until now has been horrific on every level, at every turn.

First, the four year-old and nine month old were ripped from their homes by the military of the ruling political-terrorist group Hamas in Gaza, along with the children’s terrified mother. They were abducted to the terrorist enclave of Gaza, murdered by Palestinian Arabs weeks later.

Their bodies were then held by the Palestinian Arabs without burial for over a year. They were not returned to Israel for proper, respectful burial.

Instead, they were held for ransom. The small Jewish corpses were ultimately paraded on stage before a crowd of hundreds of cheering Gazans – alongside their children – with a Gazan woman who was not their mother despite Hamas assurances, to be shipped to Israel.

The tiny innocent children were exchanged for dozens of Palestinian Arab terrorists convicted of murder, per Hamas demands. These released terrorists are alive and ready, willing and capable of slaughtering Jews once more.

The media falsely portrays this as a “prisoner exchange,” as though the two sides were swapping living adult prisoners of war. A blasphemy.

Every level of the story is a horror. Yet, there is only so much that Israel can do on its own to change the deep “deformity” in Gazan culture.

But it must try to dissuade at least some of the depraved actions.

Israel should commit to never holding onto any corpses of any Palestinian, whether soldiers, terrorists or anyone else UNLESS Palestinian Arabs are holding dead Israelis. As soon as Palestinians take a dead Israeli, every Palestinian killed should be retained by Israel. A future exchange will only have a single swap: all corpses for all corpses. It removes any bargaining power of killing people and holding the dead.

The Bibas story is pure torture. The Bibas Rule of only corpses for corpses might alleviate some death and pain in the years to come.

Related articles:

Israelis Targeting Terrorists, Palestinians Targeting Civilians (January 2023)

Every Picture Tells A Story: Palestinian Terrorists are Victims (November 2020)

On Killing Terrorists (May 2018)

Alternatives for Punishing Dead Terrorists (November 2014)

The Issue Is The UN’s Gaza, Not Trump’s Gaza

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The media is going crazy about President Donald Trump’s social media post of an AI-generated video of what a “Trump Gaza” might resemble. The imaginary future isn’t the problem: it’s the United Nations policies which have produced the current reality of Gaza.

  • Gaza is led by Hamas, a deeply antisemitic jihadi group which is considered a terrorist group by the United States, Israel and many other countries. The UN thinks it’s a legitimate government, as UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator Martin Griffiths said “Hamas is not a terrorist group for us, of course, as you know. It’s a political movement.”
  • The UN’s stated mission is to move at least 73% of Gazans into Israel (the UNRWA wards), making Gazans indifferent to the local situation as they think they are just waiting to move into towns where grandparents used to live in Israel
The entrance to Aida Refugee Camp, near Bethlehem with a key on top to let Arabs know that the ticket to enter Israel is via the UN
UNSG Guterres comments on February 24, 2025 about human rights

The United Nations has long legitimized an antisemitic genocidal jihadist group next door to Israel and has protected it from facing justice. It has reared generations of Gazans to only know hatred for Jews and deny their history and rights in their homeland. It has systematically inverted victim and perpetrator by using an approach that the best defense is a good offense, to vilify Israel and its supporters, rather than put pressure on Palestinian Arabs to disarm and accept the Jewish State.

Gaza under Hamas and UN
Hamas under Hamas and UN leadership

The AI-generated fiction of a Trump Gaza is producing wild attacks, while the real tragedy of Gaza’s bankrupt morality and devastation under the banner of the United Nations is never considered.

Related articles:

The United Nations Welcomes “Peace-Loving” Palestine (September 2024)

Sue The United Nations For Supporting Terrorism (February 2024)

The Grave Humanitarian Crisis In Gaza Is About Values (January 2024)

Excerpt of Hamas Charter to Share with Your Elected Officials (May 2021)

CUNY’s New Anti-Education Professor Of Intimidation

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The City University of New York schools have long been home to anti-Israel and antisemitic incidents. In the wake of the Iranian Proxies-Israel War, CUNY has decided it needs to ratchet up the temperature as Israel defeats the various armies of Iran, Syria, Hezbollah and Palestinian Arab terrorist groups.

CUNY Hunter posted a job search for two new positions for “Palestinian Studies.” The positions were to be housed in one or more of various established departments including “Anthropology, History, Sociology, Political Science or Women’s and Gender Studies.” It is a chance for a creative teacher to craft stories for American students about common attributes of the Arabs in the region.

Or one would think. As the job description makes clear, this is a role to lambaste Israel, not to lay out the story of regional Arabs.

The administration wants the course to be critical of Jews living in the region via a manufactured “settler colonialism.” It wants to condemn the Israeli military of committing “genocide.” It expects a course to teach that the government of Israel practices “apartheid.”

It’s a course that is built on attacking Jews and the Jewish State.

The invitation for “diverse theoretical” approaches and “innovative courses” seems to offer the professors a chance to craft a syllabus with no anchor in fact. The anti-reality classes in Gender Studies may invert the reality that Palestinians are grossly homophonic, have beheaded gays and has a significant population that has fled to Israel, to a concoction that Hamas welcomes gay people in its leadership and hosts a “pride” parade. Perhaps courses will whitewash Palestinian “honor killings” and mother’s who pray for their children to be martyrs who kill Jews, with a fabricated narrative of liberated women.

The anti-Israel and anti-reality professor is further invited to “engage in collaboration across the college” and “spark our students’ imaginations” to envelop the entire university to become anti-Israel agitators.

The situation for Jews at CUNY has long been terrible. It seems that the institution is now preparing to join the “Global Intifada” to intimidate and harass those on campus, and educate a new generation on creative fiction to annihilate Jews thousands of miles away.

Related articles:

The Diaspora Intifada (September 2024)

Hamas At Hunter College (May 2024)

Considering Campus Antisemitism

Hamas’s Willing Executioners (July 2021)

This Purim’s Only Costume Is Bibas Batman

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The latest Batman movie franchise focused on his arch-villain Joker. The deranged psychopath had a restless fan club who relished Joker’s “resistance” and rejection of societal norms. The masses donned their own clown masks to feel empowered alongside their hero who took on authority in an attempt to unleash anarchy to redistribute wealth and power to the horde on the streets. Their affiliate masks also enabled themselves to remain anonymous to carry out mayhem without consequences.

The comic world is playing out in the real world as the genocidal jihadists of Hamas are celebrated in the West Bank and Gaza as well as several cities around the world. The depraved slaughtering of Jewish civilians inside Israel on October 7, 2023 was greeted with wide support in Gaza and east of the 1949 Armistice Lines (E49AL). Hamas enthusiasts outside the Middle East have likewise donned masks and attack and harass Jews and Jewish institutions around the world in support of a “global intifada” against Jews and their supporters.

Masked pro-Hamas people at Columbia University

Batman also wore a mask but for different reasons. He sought to protect society from the dark underbelly of man’s worst tendencies. He chose to remain anonymous so that he could work for society as a businessman, as well as to protect the people he loves from attack. He wanted his anonymity to be a motivator for the public, that anyone you saw on the street could be the secreted protector of peace.

Bruce Wayne explains why he wears a mask during The Dark Knight Rises

Jews have a tradition of wearing costumes during the holiday of Purim which commemorates when a genocidal lunatic sought to kill the Jews in Persia (modern Iran) 2,400 years ago but failed to do so. The Persian Jews were able to turn the genocide on its head, first killing the evil instigator, his family and 500 associates, before wiping out 75,000 enemies in the provinces. These days, some Jews dress up like characters from the story as conveyed in the Scroll of Esther, while others dress in costumes to comment on current events.

For Purim 2025, I suggest that people honor the memory of the Bibas children, Ariel and Kfir, who were four years old and nine months, respectively, when they were seized by members of the political-terrorist group Hamas and other Gazans on October 7, 2023. The children’s bodies were returned in coffins to Israel this week.

The Bibas boys loved Batman. Many pictures have circulated online of the two redheads wearing Batman masks as well as their parents wearing Batman attire when they enjoyed a peaceful life in their small kibbutz in Israel.

Putting on a Batman mask with a bright red wig for Purim will not just show solidarity with the murdered small innocent boys, but declare that one stands for justice, peace, family and civility. It also highlights our determination to eradicate evil and those who wish to destroy the world behind the masks of madmen.

Related articles:

Palestinians Publicly Go Full Genocidal Jihadi (August 2024)

Palestinians And Their Supporters Hate America (August 2024)

Hamas Is The Very Definition Of A Genocidal Group (November 2023)

Deformity Of Palestinian Culture In America’s Youth (October 2023)

NYU’s “Israel Studies” Department Showcases Films By Gazans About The War

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New York University in New York City, home to the largest Jewish community in the Jewish diaspora, has a department called the Taub Center for Israel Studies. One would imagine that the department would feature a pro-Israel narrative, especially amidst the genocidal jihadist war started by Hamas on October 7, 2023.

Alas, in a deeply infected educational environment which has been sued over its handling of harassment and discrimination against Jewish students, even the Israel Studies department is a tool for lambasting the Jewish State during its defensive war.

On February 25, 2025, just days after the bodies of Jewish toddlers Ariel and Kfir Bibas were returned in coffins to Israel, the Taub Center will host a film series called “From Ground Zero,” which features 22 short films made by Gazans about the Iranian Proxies-Israel war. Each story portrays Gazans as victims of Israeli aggression, even though Hamas, the ruling power of Gaza, initiated the war with overwhelming support from the Gaza population.

The event is being co-sponsored by the Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies (that’s a single group, meant to convey that the Middle East is Islamic, as opposed to the singularly segmented Israel Studies Department). Unsurprisingly, the Islamic Studies department has not sponsored a pro-Israel film series.

This toxic mindset inside Israel studies departments is not confined to NYU. Brown University hosted a webinar about “new antisemitism” which included two Israeli professors, Amos Goldberg of Hebrew University and Raef Zreik of Ono Academic College. Both lambasted Zionism as the new form of antisemitism and “apartheid,” rather than call out the rampant Jew-hatred sweeping over the planet.

Just blocks from the actual Ground Zero where the Twin Towers were destroyed by radical jihadists on September 11, 2001, NYU’s Israel Studies department is mocking thousands of dead Americans and Jews, inverting genocidal Islamists as victims instead of perpetrators of crimes against humanity.

Self-flagellation is a specialized sport of liberal Jews, and they are enjoying the raucous roar of jihadists as they harpoon fellow Jews.

ACTION ITEM

Reserve a spot for the movie here, it’s free. Leave the theater dark.

Related articles:

The Normalization Deformity: No To Zionism and Peace; Yes To Massacres and Terrorism In a Global Intifada (January 2024)

Considering Campus Antisemitism (November 2023)

The Problem With Antisemitism On College Campuses Stems From Where Jews And Arabs Focused Their Donations (October 2023)

Anti-Semites Don’t Ride In Cattle Cars (September 2022)

DSA’s Dehumanization of Bibas Babies Is Coming For You

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The popular Palestinian Arab government of Gaza returned the murdered bodies of two Jewish redhead children and their mother to Israel today. The Bibas Babies were Ariel, aged four years and Kfir, aged 9 months, when Palestinian Arab terrorists kidnapped them on October 7, 2023.

Shiri Bibas and her two sons Ariel and Kfir

The far-left extremist group Democratic Socialists of America applauded the abduction and murder of these and other Jewish Israelis as part of “Palestine Liberation.” The day after the kidnapping, they held a rally in support of the massacre in Times Square. Weeks before the massacre the group tweeted that no Israeli Jews could be considered “civilians,” marking each a target for just violence.

The DSA’s genocidal rationale for abduction and murdering toddlers and infants is under the guise of the perceived crime of “settler colonialism,” despite the fact that Jews are indigenous to the land of Israel.

If the DSA can endorse killing babies who are in their ancestral homeland, how much more will they embrace the slaughter of non-Native Americans in the United States? Even while members of the DSA themselves are settler colonialists, they have anointed themselves the guardians of good and generals of justice to mete out punishment like Nazi guards sending Jews to the right or left.

The DSA is not just deeply immoral, antisemitic and anti-American but a dangerous group of terrorist supporters. While mourning for the Bibas Babies ripped from their home, honor their memory and fight for your life by working to ban and discredit the DSA everywhere you can.

ACTION ITEM

Write members of Congress to strip the DSA of any tax-exempt status, declare the group “domestic terrorists,” place their leadership on “no fly lists” and deny their right to assemble and protest.

DSA Goes Full Antisemite (July 2024)

Hamas, CAIR, DSA, Within Our Lifetime, SJP Are All Gunning For Jews (May 2024)

Gazans Have Always Wanted To Kill Jews Inside Of Israel (October 2023)

The DSA Is Systematically Coming For Zionist Jews (August 2023)

Standing Divided

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J.D. Vance’s 2016 book Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, began with a short story of how everyone in his small town would come to the street and stand when a funeral hearse passed by. When he asked his grandmother the reason for the tradition she replied “because honey, we’re hill people. And we respect our dead.”

It was an interesting device to educate readers that they were about to be introduced to a subset of society. They may know Americans and people from Kentucky, but the “hill people” in Vance’s life had a special bond. Whether living or dead, old or young, they stood together and apart from others, even while a casual eye might miss the divide.

Rabbi Scott Kahn, a Jewish American-Israeli podcaster of a show called Orthodox Conundrum, posed a similar story as a question while he was on a tour in the U.S. from his home in Israel, in the fall of 2024. He provocatively asked a gathering of Orthodox Jews whether a cleft had opened between the American and Israeli Orthodox communities over the current war from Gaza. He observed that while U.S. Orthodox Jews remained the most committed to Israel in terms of visiting, moving and supporting Israel, he felt that support waning as the latest war extended past one year.

When some from the audience protested that many of the people present had children who volunteered for the Israeli army, Kahn paused to admit that while true, American Jews simply no longer understood the pain of Israeli Jews who get up and go to funerals and shiva houses week after week, for so long.

The global modern Orthodox community in which Kahn felt completely at home for so long seemingly was fracturing before him into distinct Israeli and diaspora communities.

Some weeks later, Kahn shared the story on his podcast with three panelists – Rabbi Chaim Steinmetz, Dr. Logan Levkoff, and Shira Katz Shaulov – the first two from the U.S. and last from Israel. Halfway into the talk (38:30) he shared the conversation above to get reactions from the panel. Shaulov observed that the gap was more of a distinction between expecting sympathy and empathy. While the American Orthodox community may continue to have sympathy with their brothers and sisters in Israel, the local toll of the war made empathy virtually impossible.

The panel noted that Israelis often go to a wedding and a funeral on the same day in the same community for people the same ages. It has been brutal and exhausting, and they have been doing so for over a year. Every day they fear a knock at the door or observe their neighbors getting terrible news and gather together as a shaken community for mutual support.

That huddle is physical, local, tangible. And creates lasting and specialized bonds.

And many Israeli Jews feel that Jews in the diaspora are not present in the circle, and cannot comprehend the anguish.

The fatigue and emotional strain of this war has adjusted the contours of the Orthodox community in ways Kahn may well understand and appreciate but is despondent over as well. While the values and ritual practices may remain very similar, Diaspora Jews remain thousands of miles away from Israel during this massive pivot in history.

Respecting the dead alongside the living reinforces community. It remains true after shiva.

When Hostages Square in Tel Aviv gets dismantled – hopefully sometime soon when everyone returns home – Israel cannot only be left with the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial and Har Herzl national cemetery. The country must consider how the Jewish diaspora can properly engage with the fallen and injured, as well as their families and communities in the years ahead.