Hamas, the political-terrorist group which rules Gaza, refused to release the remaining Israeli hostages and step down from power, after weeks of stalled negotiations with Israel. In the face of the impasse, Israel restarted its military campaign, killing at least five members of Hamas leadership.
In a statement about the death of the terrorists, Hamas offered a eulogy as reported in the Jerusalem Post, saying that its genocidal jihad against Israel was “fulfilling our national duty” and that it remains “committed to our religious obligation and our ethical and professional role… supporting their [Gazans] resilience.” The Hamas War, which it initiated amidst a long stretch of calm with Israel and refuse to abandon, has laid waste to Gaza. In the face of death and destruction, the last of Hamas leadership says that it is “standing firm.”
Hamas believes that it is serving a religious calling to destroy the Jewish State. It cannot compromise on its mission or face a deep reckoning with its religious beliefs. It refers to its antisemitic killing squad members as “martyrs” for a holy jihad, with many more to willingly follow. No compromise is possible with such party.
Hamas is not simply eulogizing five slain leaders of its death cult; it is eulogizing the future of Gazans.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
The UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said on February 24, 2025 that his concern is for Gaza’s suffering in this war; not Israel. He said he was concerned about “Israeli settlers” but not Hamas.
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 UNHamas 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.
The United Nations has a Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process (SCMEPP), a role so seeped in lofty goals and ineptitude, it sums up the farce and tragedy of the UN’s biased and pathetic involvement in the Muslim Arab- Israel conflict.
The “peace process” has long been hampered by a UN that teaches the Stateless Arabs from Palestine (SAPs) that they will all move into Israel, that Jews cannot live in their holiest city of Jerusalem nor pray at their holiest site on the Temple Mount. The UN schools teach only Arab students, vile propaganda that Jews are invaders with no history in the land, interlopers to be despised.
It is, therefore, not a surprise that the new UN Coordinator is not an impartial party but one long dedicated to the SAPs’ narrative and goals.
Sigrid Kaag of the Netherlands took over for Tor Wennesland in January 2025. Her European appearance masks her affiliation with the Palestinian cause.
Sigrid Kaag, new UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process
Kaag was a Dutch politician and involved in foreign affairs which soon brought her to get involved with UNRWA, the long-standing temporary UN agency tasked with tending to the descendants of Arabs who left Israel at its founding, as well as UNICEF. Soon after she took on UN roles in Syria and Lebanon. This background seemingly made her an ideal choice in January 2024 to become UN Senior Humanitarian and Reconstruction Coordinator for Gaza.
With such pro-Arab bona fides (and a Palestinian husband), UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres appointed her his Personal Representative of the Secretary-General to the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Palestinian Authority (PA) in January 2025 when Wennesland’s term expired.
Guterres also appointed Kaag to be UN’s SCMEPP, even though such role is meant to be – theoretically – an unbiased party to bring peace to all parties in the Middle East conflict. How can the SCMEPP be a party who is deeply enmeshed with only one side?
Kaag addressed the UN Security Council on February 25, 2025 and her comments repeated the same inanity spoken at the global chambers: no Palestinian Arabs are terrorists, cannot be condemned nor brought to justice, even if they commit the most barbaric atrocities.
Kaag began her comments in her new capacity as UN’s point person for Middle East Peace with “It cannot be repeated enough; nothing justifies the appalling October 7 terror attacks executed by Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups. I welcome the implementation of the first phase of the ceasefire including the release of 34 hostages. I echo the Secretary-General’s condemnation of the public parading of hostages released by Hamas, including statements made under duress, and the appalling display of the coffins of deceased hostages.” Nowhere in her comments was there a condemnation of the October 7 massacre nor calling for all those SAPs to be held accountable.
Not surprisingly, Kaag would go on to tell the Security Council that Gazans need relief, Israeli actions are bad and the Palestinian Authority is good. She concluded her remarks declaring that the UN has already determined the correct borders of two states and that they are not a matter of negotiations between Israel and the PA, and that Israel must leave Gaza even though nothing is mentioned about Hamas.
Kaag comments before UN Security Council on February 25, 2025
The United Nations has been one of the primary causes of the Middle East conflict, masquerading as the champion for human rights and peace. Its new point person to address the conflict is once again a tool of the global body to defend local Arabs at all costs, regardless of their actions and intentions.
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.
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.
The war between Hamas and related Palestinian militant groups in Gaza with Israel has evoked many passions. Defenders of both sides point to either the barbaric October 7 massacre and the taking of hostages on one side, or the lack of freedom of movement, dignity and sovereignty on the other.
Where the defenders of Gaza and those in Israel agree is that Hamas has not been completed eliminated and its ideology remains popular among Palestinian Arabs. Lost among Gaza’s defenders is that their comments and philosophy condemn any prospect for peace and should prevent any rebuilding efforts.
Palestinian Arabs believe that ALL of the land is being “occupied” and that Jews are foreigners with no rights as illegal invaders. They oppose the existence of Israel and that peace with Israel is a disgrace and insult to their dignity.
Unmentioned is the Palestinian Authority, deeply unloved by local Palestinians. The United Nations and American Democrats pretend that the PA President has support and power among the Stateless Arabs from Palestine (SAPs) but he doesn’t. Even The New York Times finally shared opinions of a range of Palestinian Arabs from around the world who mock the PA as worthless and must be reconstituted to include the voices of the “resistance” against Israel, like Hamas.
The New York Times Opinion piece sharing voices from Palestinian Arabs who mock the Palestinian Authority and support Hamas and its viewpoints
Even after a war in which Hamas and Gaza got obliterated, its supporters of Hezbollah in Lebanon had to sue for a ceasefire and Iran became defanged, Palestinian Arabs still refuse to accept the legitimacy of the Jewish State. After the local failures to destroy Israel, SAPs pray for global efforts from the United Nations and antisemites worldwide to end the “Zionist project” and enable Arabs to retake all of the Jewish Promised Land.
The United States under President Trump has made clear that it will not let that happen. Trump has pulled money and the U.S. out of United Nations groups which condemn Israel. He has expedited military equipment to Israel. And he has made clear that he expects American allies to do much the same.
Hamas’s defenders want the war against Israel to continue, which will likely delay any rebuilding of Gaza and holding elections which would likely see Hamas gain power. Those opposing Hamas do so silently, and focus on pushing the world to embrace the charade of the Palestinian Authority to fast-track aid into Gaza.
Palestinian Arabs have condemned themselves to an ongoing ‘Nakba’ since they continue to reject the Jewish State. Until that ideology ends, the only rebuilding of Gaza that should happen is the wall separating the enclave from Israel.
For years, politicians tried to resolve conflicts via “shuttle diplomacy.” A senior official would act as mediator by running to one side of a conflict and take notes, then shuttle to the counterparty to relay information and take notes, all the while, attempting to bridge the gap between the parties.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry under President Obama was a classic example of this approach in the Arab-Israeli conflict. Convinced that nothing could be done that would upset the broad Palestinian Arab street, he hammered home that Israel, the stronger party, must continue to do more to placate Palestinian demands. His list of demands from Palestinians grew ever longer, never applying pressure on the Palestinian Authority.
Kerry is the prime example of a failed negotiator in shuttle diplomacy. He remained to the very end, too dense to consider how bad he approached the Middle East, making parting comments as he left office as if he had earned any credibility.
In Donald Trump’s first term in office, he immediately reversed the Kerry failed thinking of peace-making. He adopted an “outside-in” tactic of not letting the weak and ever-demanding Palestinian Authority stop broader peace in the region, and established the Abraham Accords, creating normalization agreements between Israel and several Muslim Arab countries.
Now in his second term, Trump made a bold announcement on February 5, 2025, tossing out the idea of shuttle diplomacy in the Middle East in favor of something I call “Anchor Diplomacy,” in which Trump will use the broad reach and power of the United States to impose peace between the Israelis and Palestinian Arabs. He will not run back-and-forth between the two sides, but will get the various parties to come to him, and attempt to dislodge or soften his stance in which he put the United States – not the two parties – in the center of the discussion.
Trump announced that the United States will take over the rebuilding of the demolished Gaza Strip, and Gazans will be relocated out of the area into Egypt, Jordan and other countries during the reconstruction. Gazans may return or opt to stay in the new locations with a much better standard of living.
There are many points to unpack in the Gaza statements but the practicality of one or another point is an aside. Trump is making the Arab world come to him, not the other way round. The Arab world will be forced to make Hamas disappear from the scene to prevent a U.S.-takeover, instead of the U.S. being worried whether Hamas or other terrorist groups will scuttle any progress towards calm. The United Nations will be dislodged as a biased and awful actor in the region, as the Arab street clamors for U.S. to engage monetarily but not overly intrusively.
President Teddy Roosevelt once said “speak softly and carry a big stick.” Trump has chosen a new path to waive the large stick over everyone’s head and to lay down a marker of his own. He has long built a reputation being a very loyal friend as well as a menacing enemy. He knows that the regimes of Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia have much to gain from the United States – or they can turn Trump into an enemy and run to the embrace of a new sponsor, perhaps China.
Trump has so far been able to get countries like Colombia to eat their words and reverse policies when he threatened economic hardship, and obviously feels that Arab countries will similarly get on board with at least some of his Gaza proposal. At the very least, they will learn that the days of treating the U.S. as an open faucet of money to abuse with unrealistic demands will not stand under Trump.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and U.S. President Donald Trump at White House February 5, 2025
Anchor Diplomacy, the muscle of entrenching a position and forcing the sides to react, can only be effective by a mediator with tremendous influence on each side. While pro-Palestinians/ anti-Americans will chant “imperialism” and “empire” in exasperation at Trump’s Gaza announcement, the shadows which will swing the outcome will be China and/or Saudi Arabia, who might magnify or counter American power.
U.S. President Donald Trump asked the governments of Egypt and Jordan to take in Gazans so the repair of the region could be expedited. Trump acknowledged that Jordan already had many Arabs who had come from Palestine in the country – over half the country’s population, including the king of Jordan’s wife – but “I said to him that I’d love you to take on more, because I’m looking at the whole Gaza Strip right now and it’s a mess, it’s a real mess…. I don’t know, something has to happen, but it’s literally a demolition site right now. Almost everything’s demolished, and people are dying there, so I’d rather get involved with some of the Arab nations and build housing in a different location where I think they could maybe live in peace for a change.”
Jordan has a large Palestinian Arab population because it invaded Israel in 1948 and ethnically cleansed Jews from the west bank of the Jordan River all the way through the Old City of Jerusalem. It then illegally annexed that region in 1950 and granted all Arabs – specifically excluding Jews – Jordanian citizenship in 1954.
Statements by Egypt and Jordan dismissed Trump’s suggestion. Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi said that “the deportation or displacement of the Palestinian people is an injustice in which we cannot participate.” The Jordanian monarch made similar comments.
Social media lit up as well. As hundreds of thousands of Gazans moved back to their towns in northern Gaza, The call of “return!” was echoed.
It’s a strange dynamic. The United Nations and its arm in the region, UNRWA, has insisted that 73% of Gazans do NOT belong in Gaza but in towns inside of Israel where grandparents left during their war to destroy the Jewish State in 1948. Yet now they insist that these same Arabs cannot be dislodged from Gaza, after they got decimated in a war initiated by their government.
The victim mentality is such an ingrained deformity in Palestinian Arab culture (courtesy of the United Nations), that attempts to efficiently rebuild infrastructure is met with the same tired complaint of “ethnic cleansing” as a “displacement plan” rather than a rebuilding plan.
Now is the time for Gazans to internalize that Gaza is their home, not Israel, as a condition to taking billions of dollars in aid in global charity.
First One Through 