Category Archives: Israel

The Losers’ Echo of the Six Day War

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When armies lose wars, the battlefield does not always disappear. It often moves to softer targets.

That is what happened after the Six-Day War, when Israel delivered a devastating defeat to the combined armies of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. In six days, territories changed hands, military reputations collapsed, and the promise that Israel would soon be destroyed evaporated.

The defeat reverberated far beyond the battlefield. It humiliated governments across the Arab world and shattered the image of inevitable victory that had surrounded the campaign against Israel.

But the war did not end. It simply changed form.

In the years that followed, militant organizations such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Black September Organization exported the conflict around the world.

The targets were no longer Israeli armies; they were civilians.

Airplanes became battlegrounds. Diplomats became targets. Jewish institutions across the diaspora suddenly found themselves on the front lines of a war being fought thousands of miles away.

The Munich massacre shocked the world when Israeli athletes were murdered at the Olympic Games by Palestinian Arab terrorists. It demonstrated that the battlefield could be moved to the most international stage imaginable.

Another defining moment came with the Entebbe hijacking, when Palestinian terrorists seized an Air France flight and diverted it to Uganda. There, Jewish and Israeli passengers were separated from the others and held hostage in an old airport terminal. The episode ended with a daring Israeli rescue, but the hijacking revealed something chilling: Jews anywhere could be turned into targets for a war militants could not win against Israel itself.

Synagogues and Jewish community centers were attacked in cities far removed from the Middle East battlefield. Rome. Athens. Istanbul. Hezbollah and Iran were often behind the atrocities.

These were not military targets. They were chosen precisely because they were vulnerable.

The message was unmistakable: if Israel could not be defeated in the Middle East, Jews everywhere would become targets.

Today there are worrying signs that the same pattern may be returning.

Iran and its regional network of militias face mounting military pressure from Israel and the United States. When regimes and movements cannot confront stronger armies directly, history shows they often search for targets they can reach more easily.

Recent intelligence chatter has suggested that Iran may have issued signals intended to activate sleeper operatives abroad. Western security services have increased monitoring of potential networks across North America, Europe, and Australia. Whether these warnings prove accurate or not, the concern reflects a familiar strategic logic: when the battlefield is lost in one region, pressure is applied elsewhere.

As the United States becomes the central military opponent of Iran, American Jews may face the threat most acutely.

Extremist movements have repeatedly treated Jewish communities abroad as symbolic stand ins for Israel and its allies. When Israel gains the upper hand militarily, Jews in distant cities have often become the targets that terrorists believe they can reach.

This time the danger may be compounded by a new environment.

Terror no longer requires direct command structures. Groups such as Islamic State pioneered a model of “inspiration terrorism,” where individuals absorb propaganda online and act independently without formal membership or training, such as happened this week in New York City.

At the same time, a troubling ideological convergence has taken shape in parts of Western society. Radical Islamist movements and segments of the revolutionary left increasingly share a political vocabulary built around anti-imperialism, anti-colonialism, and the demonization of Israel. In that narrative, Israel becomes the embodiment of oppression. Jews are portrayed as agents of imperial power rather than a people with a three thousand year connection to their homeland.

When those ideas spread through social media, activist networks, and even parts of the educational system, hostility toward Israel can easily spill over into hostility toward Jews themselves.

The result is combustible.

A generation is growing up hearing that violence against Israel is “resistance,” that Jews represent colonial domination, and that the conflict is part of a global struggle against oppression.

History shows where that logic can lead.

If history is echoing once again, the streets of Western cities may soon remind us of a grim truth: the losers of wars do not always accept defeat.

We are witnessing the next phase of the War on Zionists.

Related:

Genocidal Jihadists Come For ‘Soft Targets’ (September 2024)

Politicians In Their Own Words: Why We Don’t Support Defending Jews (January 2022)

Spain Breaks With Israel, Not Washington

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

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

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

The contrast is striking.

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

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

Instead, the rupture fell on Israel alone.

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

Angering Washington carries risk. Angering Israel carries almost none.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jihadi-washing and the Ideology the Times Won’t Name

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A bombing attempt near Gracie Mansion followed a pattern Americans have seen before: young men radicalized online, pledging allegiance to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, and attempting violence in the name of jihad.

But if you read the The New York Times, you might never notice the pattern at all.

Two men were charged after attempting the ISIS-inspired bombing near Gracie Mansion. Prosecutors say the suspects pledged allegiance to ISIS and threw improvised explosive devices toward a protest crowd and police. The bombs failed to detonate, but the casualties could have been catastrophic. The bombing suspects were 18-year-old Emir Balat, a high school student, and Ibrahim Kayumi, 19.

The plot followed a model ISIS has promoted for years: radicalize individuals already living in Western societies and encourage them to strike where they live. No training camps. No command structure. Just ideology delivered through propaganda, social media and Muslim countries money in American schools.

America has already seen the results.

In 2015, a radicalized couple carried out the San Bernardino attack. Syed Rizwan Farook was 28 and Tashfeen Malik was 29.

In 2016, Omar Mateen, 29, murdered forty nine people in the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando while declaring loyalty to ISIS.

In 2017, Sayfullo Saipov, also 29, drove a rented truck onto the Hudson River bike path in Manhattan in the 2017 New York City truck attack, killing eight people and leaving a note pledging allegiance to ISIS.

This pattern is not accidental. ISIS propaganda deliberately targets young Muslims in their late teens and twenties, the age when identity and grievance can be shaped by ideology. The strategy is not to import terrorists into the West. It is to cultivate them here.

Yet when the New York Times recently referenced the Hudson River attack, it described it simply as “a terrorist driving a truck killed eight people.”

The ideology behind the attack vanished from the story.

When the ideology behind violence disappears, the violence itself begins to look random. But it is not random. It is ideological.

The same pattern of New York Times’ language appears elsewhere.

After the October 7 massacre carried out by Hamas, the New York Times described social media posts celebrating the attack as being “supportive of the Palestinian cause.” One of the examples involved Rama Duwaji, the wife of New York mayor Zohran Mamdani, who had liked posts praising the attack shortly after it occurred. At the time, Duwaji was 26 years old.

October 7 was a terrorist assault in which more than a thousand Israelis were murdered and civilians were kidnapped. Describing celebration of that massacre as support for a “cause” transforms the event itself, and radical jihadi terrorism disappears.

ISIS and Hamas operate in different places and pursue different strategies, but they draw from the same radical Islamist narrative that frames Jews as enemies and violence as religious duty.

Online, that narrative increasingly reaches the same audience: young people in Western societies, including young Muslims searching for identity and purpose.

In New York the consequences are already visible. According to the New York City Police Department, Jews consistently account for the largest share of hate crime victims in the city, far out of proportion to their share of the population.

We now face two related problems.

First, there is an ideology problem. Radical Islamist movements openly encourage violence against Western societies and portray Jews as enemies in a religious struggle.

Second, there is a sanitization problem. When that ideology is softened, blurred, or renamed as a “cause,” the public cannot see the pattern.

San Bernardino.
Orlando.
The Hudson River bike path.
Bombing attempt near Gracie Mansion.
Young people celebrating Muslim massacres of Jews.

A sick 60% of Americans aged 18-24 polled said the October 7 massacre was “justified,” 50% support Hamas, and 51% said Israel should end and be handed to Hamas

Different attacks with the same ideological current reaching the same young audience, and pointing toward the same enemies.

The violence makes headlines yet the ideology poisoning western youth is being whitewashed. That is jihadi-washing, and it endangers us all.

Perhaps It Is Time to Ask Israel What Two States Look Like

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For decades the international community has insisted it already knew what a two-state solution should look like. The United Nations drew the parameters. Diplomats repeated the formula. Conferences were held. Resolutions were passed.

And tens of thousands of people died.

The problem may not be the idea of two states. The problem may be that the plan was written without the participation of the country expected to live beside that second state, after countless wars waged to eliminate it.

Israel accepted the concept of two states repeatedly. The Arab world rejected it outright in 1947 and chose war instead. For decades the objective was not coexistence but the elimination of the Jewish state “in any part of Palestine.“

Only much later did some Palestinian leaders begin to speak about accepting two states. Even then the proposal contained a remarkable asymmetry: Arabs could potentially live in both Israel and a future Palestinian state while Jews would be barred from living in Palestine. Even under these terms, acceptance amongst the stateless Arabs from Palestine (SAPs) remained partial and fragile. Large segments of Palestinian society continued to reject the legitimacy of Israel itself.

War therefore continued.

The deeper flaw lay in the diplomatic architecture. The UN framework repeatedly demanded territorial concessions from Israel while simultaneously challenging the basic elements of Israeli sovereignty. The proposed Palestinian state would claim rights that no other neighboring state claims over another country, including constraints on Israel’s control over borders and immigration.

The Oslo Accords attempted to move the process forward through gradual autonomy. Palestinians gained control of Gaza, Area A of the West Bank, and some control in Area B. These territories were meant to become the early foundations of Palestinian self-governance and peaceful coexistence.

Instead they became platforms for continued war. Rockets came from Gaza. Terror networks operated openly in areas under Palestinian control. October 7 was simply the most brutal expression of a reality that had been building for years.

After October 7 it is difficult to imagine any Israeli government accepting the same international blueprint that guided diplomacy for the past thirty years.

Which raises a simple question that has never been asked: What would a two state solution designed by Israel actually look like?

For decades the world has demanded that Israel accept a state designed by others. When Israel raised concerns about security, sovereignty, or enforcement, those concerns were treated as obstacles to peace rather than as conditions necessary to achieve it.

Perhaps the time has come to reverse the process.

Instead of repeating a diplomatic formula that has failed repeatedly, the international community could ask Israel to define the conditions under which it could realistically accept a Palestinian state. Security arrangements, borders, governance standards, demilitarization, and phased recognition could all become part of a framework designed around coexistence rather than wishful thinking.

Whether the SAPs are willing to accept such conditions is a separate matter. Neither side ever fully accepted the UN blueprint. But continuing to impose a model that both parties reject has already produced decades of bloodshed.

Hashmonaim and separation barrier
Hashmonaim and separation barrier

The first fruits of Oslo were rotten. Continuing to plant the same tree will not produce a different harvest.

If the world truly wants two states living in peace, it may finally be time to ask the state expected to survive beside that new second state what peace actually requires.

The New York Times Calls the Massacre of Jews a “Cause”

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Words matter. Especially when a newspaper chooses them carefully.

In a recent article, The New York Times wrote that New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s wife, Ms. Duwaji had “liked Instagram posts supportive of the Palestinian cause immediately after the attacks,” referring to October 7.

Read that sentence again.

October 7 was the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. Hamas terrorists murdered about 1,200 people, raped women, burned families alive, and kidnapped 251 civilians.

Yet approval of posts celebrating that moment is described by the Times as support for a cause.

A cause sounds political. Principled. Even noble.

But immediately after October 7 the images circulating online were not debates about borders or statehood. They were videos of murdered Israelis, kidnapped civilians, and triumphant Hamas fighters.

Calling appreciation of those posts “support for the Palestinian cause” launders the meaning of the act. The language turns approval of atrocities into activism. And it did the spin repeatedly.

Then the article pivots.

The Times raises concerns about a Jewish congressman from New York because his wife had “liked or reposted” posts from right wing accounts that some people considered hateful or insensitive.

So approval of posts DIRECTLY ABOUT a terrorist massacre is softened, while a Jewish public official becomes controversial through a chain of ASSOCIATIONS.

One situation involves praise for the moment Jews were slaughtered. The other involves subjective offense. Yet the newspaper treats them as comparable.

And this pattern did not begin here.

For years the Times has regularly described Israel’s elected government as “the most right wing in its history,” a political judgment embedded in news reporting. At the same time, the paper often avoids stating a simple fact: Hamas is a U.S.-designated terrorist organization.

So the judgmental language is applied freely to Israel and the factual label is avoided for Hamas.

Frighteningly, the framing has sunk even lower. The New York Times has moved from absolving terrorists to sanctifying the antisemitic genocidal terror itself as a “cause.”

It is a moral inversion that reflects a deeper rot in how the story is being told.

And it arrives at a moment when hostility toward Jews is rising once again across the world, seemingly with the endorsement of The New York Times.

What $3 Billion a Year Buys

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Every year, critics ask the same question about the roughly $3 billion in American military assistance to Israel. What does the United States get for it?

This week provided a reminder.

For decades that funding has supported joint missile defense systems, intelligence sharing, aircraft integration, cyber capabilities, and deep operational coordination between the two countries. American and Israeli militaries train together, build systems together, and prepare for the same threats.

The result is something unique in the Middle East.

The United States maintains major bases across the Gulf. American ships patrol the region. American aircraft fly from Qatar, Bahrain, and Kuwait. But the United States has no bases in Israel.

It does not need them.

Israel itself functions as one of America’s most capable strategic partners in the region. Its fighters, intelligence networks, cyber units, and missile defenses are deeply integrated with American systems and strategy.

When Washington faces a threat like Iran, Israel is already positioned on the front line. Already armed. Already aligned.

That alignment was built over decades. American assistance helped develop some of the most advanced missile defense systems in the world. Israeli intelligence cooperation has repeatedly protected American lives and interests. Joint technology programs have shaped modern air defense, battlefield awareness, and cyber security.

There are many countries that receive American aid. None return value like this.

Israel is the only country in the Middle East whose military doctrine, intelligence culture, and technological infrastructure are so closely integrated with that of the United States that they can effectively act as a unit to dismantle the military capabilities of the leading state sponsor of terrorism which has sworn to destroy both countries.

It is one of the most effective strategic investments the United States has ever made.

Names and Narrative: Administered There. Occupied Here.

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The choice of words reveals more than the facts.

In a recent article about Iranian influence among Shiite communities, The New York Times described Kashmir this way:

“Many Shiites live in Indian-administered Kashmir, a Muslim-majority Himalayan region with cultural ties to Iran that go back centuries.”

Pause for a moment and consider what is happening in that sentence.

The New York Times wrote about Kashmir in a manner totally different than how it writes about the West Bank

Kashmir is not a settled territory. It is one of the longest running territorial disputes in the world. Since 1947, the region has been fought over by India and Pakistan, with both claiming sovereignty and both controlling different portions of the territory.

Yet the phrasing chosen by the Times is calm and almost pastoral. Kashmir is “administered.” The Shiite population is described as having “cultural ties to Iran that go back centuries.” The wording conveys history, continuity, and legitimacy. It sounds organic, even inevitable.

Now compare that language with how the same newspaper routinely describes the territory known historically as Judea and Samaria, today commonly referred to as the West Bank.

There the language changes dramatically.

Israel does not “administer.” Israel “occupies.”

Jewish communities are rarely described as having ancient ties. Instead readers are told that settlements are new and “considered illegal by most countries.”

Notice what disappears in that framing. The region called the “West Bank” only since 1967, contains places that formed the very center of Jewish civilization for more than a millennium. Hebron, Bethlehem, and Shiloh appear throughout the Hebrew Bible and in continuous Jewish historical memory. The kingdoms of ancient Israel and Judah rose and fell in these hills long before modern states existed.

Before Islam existed.

In other words, if the standard applied to Kashmir were applied consistently, readers might encounter sentences like this:

“Many Jews live in Israeli-administered Area C in Judea and Samaria, a region with cultural and historical ties to the Jewish people that go back more than three thousand years.”

But that sentence never appears.

Instead, the history is compressed into the language of illegality and occupation, as if the Jewish connection to the land began in 1967 rather than in antiquity.

This is not merely semantic. Language frames legitimacy. When one disputed territory is described through the lens of administration and centuries-old cultural ties, while another is defined primarily through the vocabulary of occupation and illegality, readers absorb very different impressions of the conflict.

The facts on the ground may be complicated in both cases. Kashmir is disputed. So is the West Bank.

But journalism that claims neutrality should apply the same descriptive standards to both.

Otherwise the language itself becomes the argument.

New York Times Shows How To Mainstream Antisemitism

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Michelle Goldberg, an opinion columnist for The New York Times, wrote a piece called “How Israel Lost America,” which made it sound like a country actively did something to turn Americans on it. She wrote:

“Conspiracy theories about Israel manipulating America into another Middle Eastern conflict are bound to flourish, especially because there will be a grain of truth to them.”

Pause there.

The claim that Israel manipulates America into war is not new. It echoes dual loyalty accusations against Jews who support Israel. It echoes the suspicion of hidden influence. It echoes the charge that Jews entangle great powers in foreign conflicts.

To say such conspiracies will flourish is observation.
To say they contain “a grain of truth” is validation.

That sentence does not merely predict antisemitic rhetoric. It lends it credibility.

The column builds toward that moment.

Goldberg wrote:

“Israel, by behaving appallingly and then trying to silence any condemnation of its appalling behavior as antisemitic, gives ammunition to Jew haters.”

Israel behaves appallingly – seemingly against America’s values and/or interests – and then pulls out the antisemitism card to try to silence critics, and that combination arms the Jew haters.

The causal arrow points away from the antisemite and toward the Jewish state. Hatred becomes consequence. Antisemitism becomes reaction. And it becomes so, because Israel itself decided to flag it, not the Jew hater.

To give credence to her theory, Goldberg quotes Jeremy Ben-Ami of the left-wing group J Street, warning of “blowback” when antisemitism is invoked in political disputes:

“You’re going to get some blowback against the people doing that.”

Again, antisemitism is framed as backlash. The focus shifts from the existence of anti-Jewish hostility to whether Jews and Israel are provoking it.

Layer these claims together and the pattern emerges:

Israel behaves badly.
Antisemitism claims are overused.
Blowback follows.
Conspiracies flourish.
There is “a grain of truth.”

The article never touches upon the truth of Gazans slaughtering Jews. The column doesn’t write about the antisemitic genocidal Hamas Charter. Goldberg doesn’t discuss the anti-Israel mobs in America celebrating the slaughter of elderly Jews, raping of Jewish women, and the burning of Jewish families alive. Other than to validate their feelings.

But the most consequential move in the column is quieter.

Israelis are discussed in ways readers instinctively map onto Jews. Israeli Arabs are transformed into “Israel’s Palestinian citizenry”, separating them rhetorically from the category of “Israelis.” Roughly a quarter of Israel’s citizens are not Jewish, yet that demographic fact disappears from the frame. Israeli Arabs are no longer part of the “Israel” that is “losing America” because they are really part of the counterparty in the war. That means that only Israeli Jews are the problem. The contrast is especially stark as the world cannot conceive of a “Palestinian Jew.”

The result is a subtle transformation. The conflict shifts from a dispute between a sovereign state (Israel) and a national movement (Stateless Arabs from Palestine, SAPs, seeking a new state) into something older and more volatile: Jews versus non-Jews in the Middle East.

Once that transformation occurs, every Israeli policy becomes Jewish policy. Every American alignment becomes Jewish influence. The state and the people fuse.

Now return to the “grain of truth.”

If Israel has already been rhetorically collapsed into Jews, then the suggestion that conspiracies about Israeli manipulation contain truth does not land on a neutral government. It lands on a people historically accused of secret power.

This is how respectable language normalizes ancient suspicions. The words are measured. The tone is analytic. The effect is corrosive.

Criticizing Netanyahu is legitimate. Opposing war is legitimate. Debating American foreign policy is legitimate. People do it all of the time about leaders and policy for all countries all over the world.

Yet people don’t turn the vile behavior of Iran into criticism of all Muslims. People don’t say Catholics run the drug cartels of Colombia, where a greater percentage of the country is Catholic than Israel is Jewish. People do not make people of faith the subject, unless it’s Jews.

Framing antisemitism as a foreseeable reaction to Israel’s – which we are informed should be read as “Jews'” – conduct while granting partial legitimacy to manipulation conspiracies crosses a line. And it leads to a public that no longer wants to combat antisemitism, as it has become conditioned to rationalize the ancient hatred.

The Long Shadow of 1492

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In a sharp escalation of transatlantic tensions, U.S. President Donald Trump announced that the United States will “cut off all trade with Spain”, publicly castigating the Spanish government for refusing to allow U.S. military bases on its soil to be used in operations linked to strikes against the Islamic Republic of Iran and for what he termed Spain’s failure to contribute sufficiently to NATO defense spending. Trump declared that he “doesn’t want anything to do with Spain,” framing the dispute as a response to Madrid’s resistance to what he described as confronting evil in the Middle East and paying its fair share for collective defense. 

What follows is not about this immediate crisis. It’s about deeper historical currents that help explain some of the underlying dynamics in Spanish public life that stretch back to the fifteenth century and still matter today.

In Western Europe outside Scandinavia and the United Kingdom, the two countries with the smallest Jewish presence relative to population are Spain and Portugal (about 0.02% of each countries’ overall populations).

That is not a statistical curiosity. It is a civilizational fact.

Five centuries ago, the Iberian Peninsula expelled its Jews. What had been one of the great centers of Jewish life vanished over a five and a half year short window. The Alhambra Decree in 1492 ordered practicing Jews out of Spain. Portugal followed with forced conversions and the Inquisition. Open Jewish life disappeared. What had been woven into the intellectual, commercial, and spiritual fabric of the peninsula was purged.

And it stayed removed.

Unlike other parts of Western Europe where Jewish communities, even after catastrophe, remained visible and rebuilt, Iberia entered the modern era with almost no Jews at all. Medieval synagogues became churches, then museums. Sephardic music became heritage. Jewish quarters became tourist sites. The living community remained tiny.

Fast forward to the present.

In Spain, large protests erupt over the Israeli-Stateless Arabs from Palestine (SAPs) conflict. Municipal councils pass symbolic measures aligned with boycotts. Parliament debates recognition of Palestine. Streets fill with Palestinian flags while graffiti targets Israel.

Anti-Israel graffiti on Barcelona street in March 2026 (photo: First One Through)

In Portugal, while public demonstrations are generally smaller, political and diplomatic critiques of Israeli policy align with broader European debates.

And yet.

There are no comparable national protest cultures around Sudan. No sustained marches over Somalia. No municipal votes over Afghanistan. Iran’s repression and mass slaughter of its citizens cannot find a sympathetic voice in Iberian plazas, and the Rohingya tragedy never became a regular mobilizing cause.

The difference is not just geopolitical proximity or media cycles. It is structural.

Germany, by contrast, carries the Holocaust in living memory. Its leaders speak of Israel’s security as part of state responsibility. Jewish life is visible, rebuilt, acknowledged. The past is recent enough to shape policy language. The moral vocabulary is immediate.

Spain does not carry that twentieth-century reckoning. Its rupture with Jewish life occurred in 1492, so there is no generational memory of deportation trains. The story of Jews is medieval, not modern.

When a society has lived five hundred years without Jews, when Jewish presence is primarily historical exhibit rather than daily reality, does Israel become easier to turn into abstraction? Does outrage attach more easily to a distant Jewish state when there is little lived Jewish experience at home?

Or is it even worse than detachment?

A peninsula that removed its Jews in the fifteenth century now hosts some of the smallest Jewish communities in Western Europe, public squares with the most intensely anti-Israel protests, and a government unwilling to mobilize in the slightest manner to defang the leading state sponsor of terror, especially against Jews.

Five centuries is not only long enough for history to fade; it is long enough for it to harden into culture.

The Distant Hum at Mobile World Congress

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At Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, the dominant sound is usually ambition. Deals over espresso. AI demos on loop. Spectrum, towers, IoT, eSIM. The future negotiated in glass rooms.

This year there was noise at the gates.

Protesters in keffiyehs waved Palestinian flags and tried to slow the river of attendees entering Fira Gran Via. They demanded the conference bar “genocide supporters.” They blocked traffic briefly. They filmed themselves and shouted.

The doors stayed open. The show went on.

Inside, the tone was very different.

Because of the escalating confrontation between the United States and Israel, and the Islamic State of Iran, many executives from the Middle East never made it to Barcelona due to flight cancelations. The Israeli Pavilion, usually one of the most kinetic and crowded zones on the floor, felt restrained. A few local Jews stood behind booths helping scan QR codes and explain products for companies whose teams were grounded thousands of miles away.

There was no dramatic security ring. No spectacle. Just visible absence.

Attendees still came by. Investors still asked questions and carriers still wanted meetings. The international community, in practice, wants to do business with Israel. It wants the cybersecurity, the silicon, the network optimization, the AI driven infrastructure. The appetite for innovation did not vanish because activists shouted outside.

As in past years, there was no Iranian Pavilion, because there was no demand for that country’s technology despite the billions of dollars poured into nuclear weapons programs and ballistic missiles. There were also no street protests outside the hall condemning Tehran, even as reports attribute tens of thousands of civilian murders at the hands of Iranian police.

Barcelona offered no blockades over ballistic missile programs nor chants about enrichment levels.

The inversion was hard to miss. Accusations of genocide delivered by activists wrapped in the imagery of the very movements whose leaders openly call for the destruction of a state. Silence about a regime long designated by the United States as the leading state sponsor of terrorism.

Anti-Israel graffiti on Barcelona streets, March 2026 (photo: First One Through)

The true backdrop to this year’s MWC was not the shouting. It was the distant hum of war shaping travel and corporate decision making. It thinned a pavilion and changed calendars.

The protesters created friction. The war created gravity.

And Barcelona, for all its global brand and history of hosting the world’s premier telecom gathering, showed something troubling. Instead of projecting confidence as a neutral convening ground for global commerce, it allowed a small group of activists to frame the city’s welcome with hostility toward one delegation in particular, as more of the city streets became unsafe for visitors.

Neighborhoods in Barcelona have become havens for dozens of Muslim men, looking for pickpocketing opportunities

The international industry kept meeting. Deals kept forming. Business cards were still exchanged as the angry chants didn’t cross the convention hall doors.

But the hum of geopolitics settled inside, and the world, watching closely, saw which noise mattered and which one merely embarrassed the host.