J Street has long described itself as “pro-Israel.”
This week, after the House vote on military aid to Israel, it celebrated what it called the end of the old Washington consensus.
It welcomed House Democratic leaders for taking “a stronger stance” by using American leverage to pressure Israel’s government. It called for ending the “blank check” of military support. It declared that the debate was no longer whether U.S. policy toward Israel should change, but “how it must change.” [bold in original]
Those are remarkable statements.
They are not expressions of disagreement with a particular Israeli policy. They are a lobbying agenda urging the United States to use its military and financial support to compel Israel’s democratically elected government to change course while Israel is fighting the most complex, multi-front war in its history.
That is no longer simply criticism. It is an organized effort to change Israeli policy through pressure from a foreign government.
Every organization has the right to advocate for the policies it believes are best. But organizations should also be honestly described by what they do.
If an organization’s central mission is persuading Washington to pressure Israel, reduce military support, and override the strategic decisions of Israel’s elected government during wartime as its enemies desire, it is fair to ask whether “pro-Israel” remains the most accurate description.
And that question should extend to the institutions that continue to grant it the legitimacy of the broader organized Jewish community, such as those which represent the pro-Israel consensus within umbrella organizations.
These umbrella organizations exist to build Jewish consensus and strengthen support for Israel.
If one member organization is actively lobbying the United States to use military aid as leverage against Israel during wartime, then the question is no longer merely one of ideological diversity. It is whether the organization’s mission remains compatible with the mission of the coalition itself.
Pluralism is an important Jewish value but so is intellectual honesty.
The organized Jewish community has a right—and perhaps an obligation—to decide whether an organization dedicated to lobbying against the policies of Israel’s elected government during war should continue to be presented as part of the mainstream pro-Israel tent.
As these pages wrote back in 2017, “the Jewish State and pro-Israel groups will never have uniformity of opinions, but it should have unity of purpose,” especially within umbrella organizations. J Street has affirmed that its mission is more akin to Jewish Voice for Peace and the New Israel Fund, who occupy a very different tent.
And it knows this, which is why it created its own umbrella group, Progressive Israel Network. It is why they banded together to boycott a major pro-Israel event in Washington, D.C. in 2024, sponsored by the other mainstream groups.
It was one thing for the Conference of Presidents and AZM to not admit J Street. Will Jewish groups which have J Street as a member organization, now finally ask it to leave?
This week’s House debate over Israel’s $3.3 billion in annual military assistance was more than a vote. It was a test of leadership.
Many Democratic members of Congress allowed the debate to become one of competing sympathies: Israel versus American families, Israel versus veterans, Israel versus schools and health care. Some even embraced that framing themselves.
But leadership is not about amplifying the loudest voices in your coalition. It is about explaining difficult truths.
Over the past months, I wrote two essays that made straightforward strategic arguments.
In “Nobody Protests the Military Bases in Germany,” I argued that Americans have long understood military commitments abroad not as charity, but as investments in American security. We maintain troops, aircraft, and bases around the world because we believe confronting threats abroad is less costly than confronting them at home. It runs around $75 billion annually.
In “America’s Greatest and Quietest Military Victory in Nearly a Century,“ I argued that the wars in Israel and Ukraine should be viewed together, not separately. Two American allies have spent the last several years severely weakening two of America’s principal adversaries—Iran and Russia—while requiring virtually no American combat casualties and only a fraction of the cost of wars like Iraq and Afghanistan.
One can disagree with either argument. What is remarkable is how rarely Democratic leaders even attempted to make it.
Instead of explaining that military aid is part of a broader American strategy, they allowed it to be portrayed as a gift to a foreign country. And to only one country – Israel.
Instead of explaining that weakening Russia and Iran advances American interests, they permitted the conversation to revolve almost entirely around domestic tradeoffs. Only relative to Israel.
Instead of educating their constituents about seventy-five years of American global defense strategy, they surrendered the debate to slogans about “blank checks.” Specifically to the Jewish State.
Leadership requires more than counting votes. It requires helping citizens understand why America stations forces overseas, why it supports allies under attack, why it spends money beyond its borders, and why deterrence is almost always less expensive than war.
That conversation becomes even more important when the facts are uncomfortable.
The United States has committed far more aid to Ukraine than to Israel. Over eight times as much.
The wars involving Ukraine and Russia have produced far greater casualties than the war in Gaza. As much as eight times as much.
It spends vastly more each year defending allies through bases and military deployments across Europe and Asia. About 18 times as much.
Yet Israel alone has become the symbol of America’s supposedly misplaced priorities.
Statesmanship is not measured by how well elected officials echo the passions of the moment. It is measured by whether they are willing to explain complex realities even when doing so is politically difficult.
This week’s vote exposed more than a divide over Israel.
It exposed a failure to teach. A failure to lead. And a willingness to lean into vile antisemitic tropes.
There are many ways to measure whether politicians are guided by principle or politics. One is to compare what provokes their outrage and what does not.
In April 2024, a Jewish student at UCLA tried to walk across his own campus.
Pro-Palestinian protesters physically blocked his path and decided, on their own authority, who could and could not pass. UCLA security officers stood by and did nothing. A federal judge later ruled that UCLA could not permit Jewish students to be excluded from parts of campus because of their identity or beliefs, calling such exclusion “unimaginable” and “abhorrent.”
Where were California’s Democratic members of Congress about the incident? Other “progressive” members of Congress? Where were the press conferences, the demands for investigations and the flood of social media condemnations?
Their silence was striking.
Then came Rep. Ro Khanna’s recent 7,500-mile trip to the West Bank in July 2026.
Khanna claimed that armed settlers and Israeli soldiers prevented his delegation from proceeding and that U.S. Embassy involvement helped resolve the situation. Israeli officials, the U.S. embassy, and various partiesdispute key parts of that account, saying the delegation entered a restricted security area without proper coordination and denying Khanna’s characterization of the encounter.
Yet progressive members of Congress like Ilhan Omar quickly rallied behind Khanna, condemning Israel and amplifying his account around the world.
The comparison is not between two people who were blocked. It is between two very different reasons for being blocked and the reactions that followed.
At UCLA, private protesters established their own checkpoint and allegedly decided which Americans could pass based on who they were or what they believed. A federal court concluded that a public university could not allow that to happen.
In the West Bank, the issue was about security. The area was subject to access restrictions because it was an active conflict zone. The dispute is over whether those security measures were properly applied not whether Ro Khanna had a right to unrestricted entry.
One concerns equal treatment under American law, the other concerns the exercise of security authority in a foreign conflict zone. Yet the louder political outrage came in response to the latter.
If elected officials cannot summon the same moral urgency when a Jewish American student is excluded from his own campus as they do when a colleague encounters a disputed security checkpoint overseas, the question is no longer whether they oppose injustice. It is what kinds of injustice – and for whom – they choose to notice.
We are witnessing more and more of the elected progressive wing marking American and Israeli Jews as “absolutely vile” people unworthy of basic protections and rights who “must be stopped.”
There is a popular belief that Palestine was a country stolen and occupied by invading Jews in 1948. This has no basis in fact.
When the British Mandate ended in May 1948, there was no sovereign Palestinian Arab government waiting to assume power. There was no functioning Arab parliament, cabinet, constitution, or national administration prepared to govern an independent state.
The Jewish community took a different path. Over decades it had built the institutions of self-government: representative political bodies, courts, schools, hospitals, financial institutions, and a defense force. When Britain withdrew, those institutions became the foundation of the State of Israel.
The local Arab leadership did not establish comparable institutions of national government. Not before 1948 nor after.
Instead, neighboring Arab armies invaded the newly declared Jewish state. Transjordan assumed control of the West Bank. Egypt administered Gaza. A short-lived All-Palestine Government was announced later that year, but it exercised little authority and never became an effective sovereign government.
For the next sixteen years, there was no effort to start a Palestinian State.
Only in 1964 did the Arab League create the Palestine Liberation Organization.
Even its name is revealing.
It was not called the State of Palestine. It was not called the Government of Palestine. It was called the Palestine “Liberation” Organization.
Governments are created to govern. Liberation movements are created to liberate territory from an existing sovereign.
First Chairman of the PLO, Ahmad al-Shukeiri, was born in Lebanon and served as both Syrian and Saudi Arabian delegate to the United Nations at different times. He had to resign in shame after failing to destroy Israel in 1967.
The PLO’s founding charter reinforces that distinction. Rather than outlining the institutions of a future Palestinian state, Article 24 declared:
“This Organization does not exercise any regional sovereignty over the West Bank in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, on the Gaza Strip, or in the Himmah Area [where Israel, Jordan and Syria meet].”
The PLO’s founding charter expressly declined to claim sovereignty over the parts of historic Palestine then under Arab administration. Yet throughout the document, its central mission was the “liberation of Palestine” – a struggle directed at Israel, the Jewish State. At its core, local Arabs wanted Arab rule, wherever it may come from. They opposed the so-called “Zionist invasion” and Jewish sovereignty “in any part of Palestine.“
When the first lasting Palestinian national organization finally appeared in 1964, it was constituted not as a government-in-waiting or a reclamation government but as a liberation movement, and its own charter expressly disclaimed sovereignty over the West Bank and Gaza while solely focusing its mission on Israel.
The Palestinian “liberation” movement is a pan-Arab effort to remove the Jewish state first and foremost. Current efforts to portray it as a people seeking to reclaim their historic country is without any basis in fact.
From June 26–28, 2026, activists, academics, politicians, lawyers, and religious figures gathered in Dublin, Ireland for the Second Jewish Anti-Zionist Congress (JAZIC). The stated purpose was to build an international movement dedicated to dismantling Zionism and replacing the State of Israel with a different political order in the region of historic Palestine.
Despite its name, the congress was far from exclusively Jewish. The program featured well-known Jewish anti-Zionists such as Rabbi Brant Rosen, Ilan Pappé, Haim Bresheeth-Žabner, Ronnie Barkan, and Andrew Feinstein alongside prominent non-Jewish figures including Palestinian journalist Ramzy Baroud, UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese, former UN official Craig Mokhiber, rocker Roger Waters, Irish parliamentarians, South African activists, and other international advocates.
On the central questions, there was remarkable agreement: Jewish and non-Jewish speakers alike described Israel as an apartheid state engaged in genocide. Both groups rejected Zionism as the legitimate expression of Jewish self-determination. Both endorsed Palestinian Arab “liberation” and opposed the continued existence of Israel as a Jewish state. Discussions of Hamas were comparatively limited; the conference overwhelmingly focused on Israeli conduct rather than Hamas’s governance of Gaza or the October 7 massacre. They spoke about the defeat of Zionism as the key to dismantling “western imperialism.”
Yet beneath this broad consensus was a subtle but revealing difference.
The Jewish speakers generally spent considerable time describing what they believed should replace Israel. Rabbi Brant Rosen, Ilan Pappé, and others spoke of a single democratic state in which Jews and Palestinians would remain together as equal citizens. Whether one finds that vision realistic or not, it was at least an attempt to answer a fundamental question: If Israel ceases to exist as a Jewish state, what becomes of the millions of Jews who live there?
In contrast, most of the non-Jewish speakers spoke of “liberation,” “decolonization,” “resistance,” “return,” and dismantling Zionism. In almost all of these presentations, the future political status, security, and place of Israel’s Jewish population after “decolonization” received little or no attention.
The silence is significant. If a movement calls for replacing an existing state, one of its most basic responsibilities is to explain what protections, rights, and security will exist for the people who currently live there. At JAZIC, that question received far more attention from the Jewish speakers than from their non-Jewish counterparts.
Many progressive Zionist Jews in the United States woke up on October 8, 2023 to realize that the people with whom they had fought together as allies really wanted them dead. At some point in the future, far-left anti-Zionist Jews will have their own awakening of their current comrades-in-arms.
The Palestinian Authority had no trouble explaining what every nation deserves.
In a statement condemning Iran’s attacks on Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Oman, and Jordan, the PA repeatedly invokes the same principles: sovereignty, security, stability, and protection of civilians.
Where were these principles when Israel was attacked?
When Iran launched missiles at Israel, did the Palestinian Authority defend Israel’s sovereignty?
When Hezbollah rained rockets on Israeli cities for months, did it affirm Israel’s right to security and stability?
states “refrain… from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.” UN Charter (Article 2(4))
When the Houthis fired missiles toward Israel, did it support Israel’s right to protect its people?
And most pointedly, when Hamas – fellow local Arabs of the Palestinian parliament – crossed an international border on October 7, murdered civilians, kidnapped hostages, and occupied Israeli communities, did the PA condemn it as an assault on Israel’s sovereignty?
“the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations.” UN Charter (Article 51)
A principle that applies only to friends is not a principle. It is a preference.
The Palestinian Authority’s own statement demonstrates that it understands exactly what every nation deserves. Its silence when those same principles are violated openly and repeatedly against Israel says just as much as its words.
The debate over American support for Ukraine and Israel has largely focused on the cost. Politicians argue over billions of dollars appropriated, weapons transferred, and whether American taxpayers are carrying too much of the burden. Far less attention has been paid to the return on that investment.
Since 2022, the United States has authorized roughly $195 billion related to Ukraine and approximately $16–22 billion in supplemental wartime assistance for Israel. Critics see enormous expenditures. Strategically, however, those dollars have enabled two allies to inflict historic damage on two of America’s principal adversaries – Russia and Iran – without the United States deploying large combat formations or suffering the thousands of battlefield casualties that defined Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan.
That comparison matters.
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan cost the United States more than $5 trillion in direct and related costs, with broader post-9/11 war obligations rising above $8 trillion when future veteran care, interest, and long-term commitments are included. Nearly 7,000 American service members were killed. More than 52,000 were wounded.
And what was the lasting strategic benefit?
Afghanistan ended with the Taliban back in power. Iraq removed Saddam Hussein, but the aftermath empowered Iran, fractured the region, drained American credibility, and produced years of instability. The United States paid in terrible blood and treasure, and the final balance sheet is hard to defend.
Ukraine and Israel present a very different model.
Consider Russia.
More than four years after launching its invasion of Ukraine, Russia has suffered an estimated1.4 million military casualties, including approximately 450,000 dead. Its armored forces have been severely depleted. The Black Sea Fleet has largely been driven from its historic operating areas. Ukraine has repeatedly demonstrated the ability to strike deep inside Russian territory. The military once regarded as NATO’s greatest conventional threat has been dramatically weakened.
“The number of Russian casualties and fatalities are astonishing. Since World War II, no major power has suffered anywhere near these numbers of casualties or fatalities in any war…. Russia’s economy is in distress, and Russia’s wartime spending may be increasingly untenable.” – Center for Strategic and International Studies July 2026
Now consider Iran.
For four decades the leading state sponsor of terrorism invested billions of dollars constructing what it proudly called the “Axis of Resistance” – a network stretching from Iran through Iraq and Syria to Lebanon and Gaza. Hamas, Hezbollah, Shiite militias, the Houthis, and the Assad regime were components of a single strategy designed to project Iranian power, surround Israel and challenge American influence in the region and threaten much of the global oil supply.
That strategy has suffered a tremendous setback.
Hamas has lost much of its military and infrastructure. Hezbollah has absorbed devastating blows to its command structure and missile capabilities. The Assad regime in Syria – Tehran’s indispensable Arab ally and the geographic bridge connecting Iran to Hezbollah – has fallen, shattering the land corridor that Iran spent decades building. The regional network that once appeared to surround Israel and terrorize America’s Arab allies now is dramatically weakened.
Iran’s nuclear ambitions have suffered major setbacks as well. Israeli and American strikes severely damaged key nuclear facilities, disrupted important elements of Iran’s enrichment infrastructure, and forced Tehran to devote enormous resources simply to rebuilding capabilities it once assumed were secure. Intelligence agencies continue to debate precisely how long the program has been delayed, but there is broad agreement that it suffered one of the most significant setbacks in its history.
None of this diminishes the immense human suffering. Ukraine has endured staggering casualties and destruction. Israel suffered the deadliest attack in its history on October 7 and has paid a heavy military, economic, and emotional price ever since.
But viewed through an American lens of grand strategy, another reality emerges.
Rather than sending hundreds of thousands of American troops to fight Russia or Iran directly as was done in Afghanistan and Iraq, the United States enabled allies already under attack to defend themselves. Those allies have imposed extraordinary military and strategic costs on governments that have spent decades challenging American interests.
This is what is so often missing from the public debate.
The wars are typically discussed separately. Ukraine is presented as a European conflict while Israel is portrayed as a Middle Eastern conflict. Yet both Russia and Iran were strategic partners, cooperating militarily, economically, and diplomatically while sharing an interest in weakening the United States and the Western alliance. Seen together, Ukraine and Israel have not merely been fighting for their own survival, they have been successfully degrading two pillars of a powerful anti-Western axis.
The long-term upside could be enormous. A surviving, Western-aligned Ukraine would become one of Europe’s most battle-tested militaries, a major reconstruction market, an energy and agricultural partner, and a permanent barrier to Russian expansion. A stronger Israel, with Iran weakened and Syria and Lebanon no longer functioning as Tehran’s strategic bridge, could help reshape the Middle East around technology, defense cooperation, energy corridors, trade, and normalization with Arab states that increasingly fear Iran more than they resent Israel.
That is the opportunity Iraq and Afghanistan never produced. Those wars consumed American power and America left no assets behind. These wars, fought by allies, may extend American power with powerful allies at the vanguard.
History may conclude that this period represents one of the most effective uses of American alliance power in generations. For roughly $215 billion – less than one-twentieth of the direct and related cost of Iraq and Afghanistan – the United States helped enable allies to severely weaken Russia’s conventional military, fracture Iran’s regional proxy empire, remove Syria and Lebanon from Tehran’s sphere of influence, and significantly set back Iran’s nuclear program, all without committing large American ground forces or sustaining the massive battlefield casualties that characterized previous generations of U.S. warfare.
America’s greatest military victory in the past 75 years may ultimately be its most subtle.
This week, the UN will commemorate the genocide at Srebrenica under the theme “From Words to Violence.“ The lesson is that language is never merely language. The words societies choose shape how they understand people, history, and ultimately what actions become acceptable.
That lesson should not stop with Srebrenica.
Over the past month, another campaign of words has accelerated – not directly aimed at the destruction of lives, but at the erasure of history.
A month ago, I wrote about the battle over Solomon’s Pools. At the time, the concern was that one of Judaism’s great archaeological treasures was being detached from the people who built it.
Today, the campaign has moved far beyond stewardship.
The Palestinian Authority’s official news agency, WAFA, now repeatedly describes Solomon’s Pools as “Palestinian archaeological and heritage sites,” “Palestinian cultural heritage,” and “an integral part of the Palestinian people’s national identity.” It accuses Israel of attempting to erase the site’s Palestinian identity while announcing plans to seek UNESCO protection for that very narrative.
This is historical revisionism.
For more than two thousand years, Solomon’s Pools have been recognized as part of the ancient water system that supplied Jerusalem and the Second Temple. Yet the new narrative increasingly erases that Jewish history while attempting to replace it with a Palestinian Arab one.
That is how historical erasure begins, with words.
It continues with cultural appropriation – taking another civilization’s achievements and presenting them as one’s own. A site built to sustain Jewish Jerusalem is no longer described as part of Jewish civilization, but as an expression of “Palestinian national identity.”
Solomon’s Pools is not an isolated example.
Over the years, Palestinian rhetoric has increasingly described biblical figures and ancient Jewish sites through a Palestinian national lens.
The Jewish Temples are falsely described as being located in Yemen.
Ancient Jewish heritage sites have increasingly been recast as Palestinian heritage, such as the Jewish Temple Mount being only called the “al Aqsa Complex” and as a purely Islamic site to prevent Jews from praying at their holiest site.
Individually these statements may appear rhetorical. Collectively they reveal a sustained and malicious effort to replace one people’s historical memory with another’s national story.
When a people’s documented history is systematically erased, it reveals a bigotry directed not only against living Jews but against Jewish civilization itself. It reflects national chauvinism, elevating one national identity by absorbing the achievements of another.
And it does this with particular purpose: to strip Jews of their indigeneity in their holy land, to recast them as interlopers and “European settler colonizers” which is deeply infused with a righteous sense of xenophobia.
That is why UNESCO’s role matters.
An organization created to preserve humanity’s cultural heritage should never become an instrument of historical revisionism. If it legitimizes narratives that obscure the well-documented Jewish origins of sites like Solomon’s Pools, it is no longer merely protecting monuments. It is helping redefine what future generations believe those monuments represent.
Turkish media TRT lies to the world that Solomon’s Pools are a 6,000 year-old Canaanite site, as Palestinian Arabs have attempted to recast themselves as ancient Canaanites to pre-date the Jewish forefather Abraham
The danger is larger than a single archaeological site. Words are attempting to erase Jewish history and heritage throughout the Jewish homeland.
The United Nations is correct: words can lead to terrible consequences.
And these words and actions have a particularly dangerous strain of antisemitism. It does not involve attacking Jews physically, which Palestinian Arabs have done repeatedly at scale. It is an insidious attempt to get the world to endorse a narrative that Jews are foreigners in the land to frame a future without the Jewish State. This is the destruction and genocide that emerges from language.
When international institutions lend their authority to that process, they cease to be guardians of history and become participants in its erasure.
The train rolled quietly toward Tel Aviv, its rhythm broken only by the soft buzz of conversations and the glow of phone screens. Across from me sat two young soldiers. Their rifles rested casually against their legs while their attention was fixed on their cellphones – one scrolling through messages, the other smiling at a photo someone had sent. It was a striking image of modern Israel: a generation carrying both the tools of war and the ordinary routines of youth.
Israeli soldier with cellphone and gun (created by First One Through)
After two years of war, the sight no longer seemed unusual. Uniforms had become part of daily life. The soldiers were not isolated behind military bases; they were students, siblings and neighbors riding the same commuter trains as everyone else.
Stepping off at Tel Aviv’s HaShalom – “the Peace” – station, another reminder of the country’s debate awaited. Stickers were plastered on walls and signposts declaring, “גיוס שווה לכולם” – “The draft should be equal for everyone.” The slogan was impossible to miss. It reflected the growing frustration of many Israelis who believe military service should be shared by all citizens, particularly as the controversy over exemptions for many ultra-Orthodox men has intensified during a prolonged war.
Sticker on train station in Tel Aviv about the draft (created by First One Through)
From the station I walked up the street toward Sarona.
The mood shifted almost instantly. The urgency of the train gave way to quiet streets lined with restored nineteenth-century stone buildings, their green shutters and warm walls carefully preserved. Families strolled through the park, office workers carried coffee between meetings, and children played on the lawns.
Sarona, with its mix of old buildings and new skyscrapers (created by First One Through)
Rising above this tranquil scene were gleaming glass towers – headquarters of technology companies, investment firms and startups reaching into the Mediterranean sky. The contrast was remarkable. The old Templar colony had not been erased by progress; it had been woven into it. History remained at street level while the future climbed overhead.
From Sarona I continued west beneath long rows of jacaranda trees. The sidewalks were broad and shaded despite the afternoon heat. Cyclists glided silently along dedicated bike paths while dog walkers stopped to exchange greetings in Hebrew, English, French and Russian. The city moved at an easy rhythm, confident and unhurried.
Tel Aviv street winding its way from the train station to the beach (created by First One Through)
By the time I reached the Mediterranean, the sky had begun to soften into cooler shades of blue. A young woman played a steel drum near the promenade, the Caribbean melody drifting above the soft crash of the waves. Just up the gentle hill, an ultra-Orthodox man sat quietly, listening. His eyes wandered beyond the music toward the sailboats slowly crossing the horizon, their sails turning black against the fading sun.
As darkness approached, I turned back toward my hotel. Along the route, fresh rails stretched down the center of the boulevard. Fences, construction equipment and unfinished stations marked the slow progress of Tel Aviv’s expanding light rail. The war had left its mark here, as many Israeli construction workers had been called into reserve duty, while restrictions on Palestinian Arab workers entering Israel had reduced another important source of labor. Even in a city racing toward the future, history and security continued to shape the speed of ordinary life.
Tel Aviv’s light rail under construction (created by First One Through)
Night settled over the White City. Above the Bauhaus facades and surprisingly green parks, a deep red crescent moon hung low before slipping toward the Mediterranean. It seemed a fitting end to the day. Tel Aviv is often celebrated for its beaches, cafés and nightlife, yet what lingered most was something less obvious: a city where soldiers and software engineers share commuter trains, where old stone houses stand beside glass towers, where debates over duty appear on stickers at the station, and where, despite the burdens of war, people still ride bicycles beneath leafy boulevards toward the sea as both sun and moon set over Israel.
Red crescent moon sets over Tel Aviv (created by First One Through)
The next morning I woke before dawn, courtesy of jet lag. It was barely five o’clock, and rather than fight the early hour, I headed outside and walked toward the beach, turning south in the direction of Jaffa.
The city was just beginning to stir.
On a grassy stretch above the promenade, a group of women had gathered for morning exercise. Jews and Arabs stretched side by side as the first rays of sunlight crept across the lawn. No one seemed interested in the differences that so often dominate headlines. At that hour, they were simply neighbors greeting another day.
Jewish and Arab women stretching above Tel Aviv’s beach at daybreak (created by First One Through)
The rising sun appeared between the towers, casting long golden reflections across the sea. As I continued south, I crossed the invisible boundary where Tel Aviv gradually becomes Jaffa. There is no wall, no gate, no sign announcing the transition. Modern boulevards slowly yield to older stone buildings until, ahead, the ancient hill of Jaffa emerged from the morning haze.
Sunrise over Tel Aviv-Jaffa (created by First One Through)
The old city looked timeless. Its limestone walls glowed honey-gold beneath the rising sun, church towers rising above clusters of palms that have watched merchants, pilgrims and conquerors arrive for centuries. Behind me stretched one of the world’s youngest major cities; before me stood one of its oldest. Few places compress four thousand years into a morning walk.
Old City of Jaffa (created by First One Through)
Yet the promenade is also a walk through painful memory.
Every few hundred yards another monument interrupts the rhythm of the sea. A simple memorial recalls the Altalena, the tragic 1948 confrontation in which the fledgling Jewish state nearly fractured before it had fully been born. Farther along stands the memorial to the Dolphinarium bombing, where a Palestinian Arab suicide attack murdered young people waiting to enter a beachfront nightclub, freezing forever what should have been an ordinary summer evening.
The newest memorials are not carved in stone. They are printed on paper.
Walls, bus stops and utility boxes are covered with hundreds of stickers bearing the faces of young men and women killed since the October 7 massacre and the war that followed. Some are soldiers, others are civilians. Each bears a photograph, a name and often a brief message from family or friends. Individually they are easy to pass without notice. Together they form an unofficial memorial stretching across the city, reminding everyone that the smiling faces should still be walking these same streets.
Stickers of young people who were killed in the Iranian proxy war against Israel (created by First One Through)
Turning back toward my hotel, I watched the city awaken.
At first there were only a handful of runners. Then another dozen. Within minutes the promenade had become a river of joggers moving north and south along the shoreline. Cyclists moved passed them in dedicated lanes while the Mediterranean rolled steadily against the seawall. The volleyball courts still stood empty, their nets waiting for the first matches of the day.
Despite the hundreds of people already enjoying the morning, security remained almost invisible. The only uniformed officers I encountered were two young policewomen sitting beside their patrol car, laughing as they leaned together to take a selfie. It was another reminder that life here is lived in layers. A country still at war. A city that had known rockets and sirens. Yet on this morning, two officers paused, like young people anywhere else, to capture a moment with a cellphone.
Policewomen taking a selfie in Tel Aviv (created by First One Through)
As I approached my hotel, another juxtaposition caught my eye. Apartment balconies facing the street served as tiny windows into the lives of their occupants. On one balcony hung a rainbow Pride flag. Just a window away fluttered a yellow Chabad Moshiach flag, proclaiming hope for the coming of the Messiah. In many places, those symbols might be seem irreconcilable. The flags did not suggest agreement but coexistence. The residents likely disagreed about politics, religion and the future of Israeli society. Yet neither had torn down the other’s banner. The building itself had become a quiet lesson in democratic life.
Pride flag and Moshiach flag hang together facing the Tel Aviv beach (created by First One Through)
Back at the hotel, breakfast was every bit as impressive as the Mediterranean outside the windows. Fresh salads, nuts, cheeses, shakshuka, breads still warm from the oven, amazing fruit, squares of halva and strong Israeli coffee made lingering far too tempting.
Eventually, I pushed away from the table and traded dawn’s leisurely pace for another walk, this time inland.
In barely forty minutes, the sea breeze gave way to glass towers, venture capital offices and the headquarters of companies whose software, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity and communications products are used around the world. The transformation was remarkable. One moment I was watching paddleboarders on the Mediterranean; the next I was surrounded by one of the world’s great technology hubs. Tel Aviv’s reputation as the “Startup Nation” is not an abstract slogan. It is a city where people can begin the morning watching the sunrise by the sea and arrive at meetings shaping the future before most cities have finished their commute.
Part of the Tel Aviv skyline near the train station (created by First One Through)
After the day’s meetings, I made the walk back toward the coast. The beach had transformed once again.
The jogging dawn promenade had given way to the rhythm of a summer afternoon. The surf clubs were busy, rows of brightly colored boards stacked outside while paddleboards waited for the next calm outing. A sign pointing toward the nearest bomb shelter hung beside the entrance, blending almost unnoticed into the scene.
Paddleboards for rent at Tel Aviv beach (created by First One Through)
The unmistakable crack of matkot echoed across the sand – the sharp wooden sound of paddle meeting ball, as much a part of an Israeli beach as the waves themselves. Surfers searched for the best breaks while others stood atop paddleboards gliding across the calm Mediterranean. Families spread towels across the sand. Friends settled into circles, talking for hours, absentmindedly cracking open sunflower seeds and dropping the shells into cups which had been drained of beer, as the afternoon slowly slipped toward evening.
After showering off the salt, I headed back into the city for dinner.
Tel Aviv has quietly become one of the world’s great food cities.
Its chefs draw inspiration from every corner of Jewish history and the Mediterranean – Galilean vegetables, Persian spices, North African traditions, Yemenite breads and European techniques – all combined with remarkable creativity. Restaurants that would command attention in New York, London or Paris line streets that only a generation ago were known more for falafel than fine dining.
One change particularly fascinated me.
Not long ago, many ambitious chefs viewed kosher certification as a limitation. Today, more and more of the city’s finest restaurants proudly operate under kosher supervision. The change has been driven as much by economics as religion. As Israel’s high-tech economy expanded, so too did a generation of young Modern Orthodox professionals – engineers, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and lawyers – who wanted exceptional dining without compromising Jewish dietary law. Restaurants discovered that serving remarkable food and remaining kosher were no longer competing ideas. In many neighborhoods, they had become a winning combination.
Dvora Restaurant on Ben Yehuda St. in Tel Aviv (created by First One Through)
Leaving Tel Aviv, I found myself thinking less about any single building or beach than about the extraordinary coexistence of opposites. Here, memory lives beside innovation. Faith shares walls with secular life. War intrudes, but never fully defines the city. Every morning begins with people running toward the sea rather than away from fear.
Perhaps that is Tel Aviv’s greatest contradiction. It has not escaped history’s burdens. It simply refuses to allow them to define the city. Despite carrying them every day, Tel Aviv has become one of the world’s most vibrant, creative and optimistic places to live.
Long before the current war began, prominent advocates for the Palestinian cause were describing Gaza as “hell on earth.”
In January 2009, Palestinian Queen Rania of Jordan released a video for UNRWA titled “Hell on Earth.” Eight months later, speaking at UNRWA’s 60th anniversary, she recalled that video and lamented that Gaza was still “Hell on Earth.”
Palestinian Queen of Jordan Rania called Gaza “Hell on Earth” in 2009
In May 2021, UN Secretary-General António Guterres declared, “If there is a hell on earth, it is the lives of children in Gaza today.”
When Israel began to respond to the war waged by Gazans in 2023, UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini said Gaza had become “a living hell.” In January 2024, UN humanitarian coordinator Sigrid Kaag told the Security Council, “Gaza is hell on earth.”
The description has been remarkably consistent. What has often been missing is the question: Why?
Hell is not merely a place of suffering. It is a place where evil reigns.
Hamas violently seized Gaza in 2007 after defeating Fatah in a brief but brutal civil war. Fighters executed political rivals, threw some from rooftops, publicly brutalized opponents, and dragged the bodies of alleged collaborators through the streets. Those who challenged Hamas risked imprisonment, torture, or death. Independent political life disappeared, and an entire generation grew up under the rule of an armed Islamist movement that prioritized rockets, tunnels, and perpetual conflict over building a prosperous society.
Hamas drags a disloyal Gazan through the streets to his death
And Hamas was a known entity, a political party which won 56% of Palestinian parliament in elections with the most antisemitic political charter ever written. It remains the most popular political group to this day, expected to win Palestinian elections in every poll.
Calling Gaza “hell on earth” without acknowledging who built that system leaves the story unfinished. Should people want to transform the region, they must work to end the evil rule and worldview that turned part of the holy land into such a place in the first place.
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