Category Archives: Israel

A Capital Crime for Jews—and a Paper and World That Look Away

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One fact should dominate any serious discussion of land and power in the West Bank: under Palestinian Authority law, a Palestinian who sells land to a Jew can face the death penalty.

That is not rumor or polemic. It is statute.

In areas governed by the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and by Hamas in Gaza, selling land to Israeli Jews is prosecuted as treason. The charge is brought under Jordanian Penal Code No. 16 of 1960 — particularly Articles 113–118 and Article 114 on aiding the enemy — still in force in the West Bank, along with the PLO Revolutionary Penal Code of 1979. A 2014 decree by Mahmoud Abbas reaffirmed that such land sales constitute “collaboration with the enemy.” Courts have issued death sentences under these provisions.

The defining element is the identity of the buyer. A private real-estate transaction becomes a capital crime because the purchaser is Jewish and therefore legally framed as part of the “enemy.” Most countries reserve treason for espionage, armed rebellion, or wartime assistance to a hostile state. The Palestinian framework instead applies classic treason law to a civilian property sale — explicitly treating Jews, as a national collective, as the enemy for purposes of capital punishment.

Yet when the New York Times recently acknowledged this, it did so quietly, almost apologetically, inside an article whose primary concern was Israeli policy. The focus was not the law itself, but the risk that Israeli transparency might expose Palestinian Arabs to danger because the law exists.

That framing reverses cause and effect.

Israel was portrayed as aggressive and ideological, while the Palestinian Authority’s capital punishment for a racially defined transaction was treated as background context. Israeli officials were labeled “right-wing” and scrutinized by name. The PA, which enforces a law rooted in religious antisemitism, was spared comparable description. Its ideology went largely uninterrogated.

The article even suggested that sealed land records once served as a form of protection for Palestinians. That sentence alone concedes the nature of the regime. A governing authority from which citizens must be shielded because it may kill them for selling property to Jews is not a peace partner. It is a theocratic system enforcing ethnic taboos with lethal force.

If a Jewish state executed Jews for selling land to Arabs, that law would dominate media coverage. Instead, when Jews are the forbidden buyers, the death penalty becomes an inconvenience and the exposure of it becomes the problem.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres “warns that the current trajectory on the ground, including this decision [to unseal the names of the owners of land making private real estate transactions easier], is eroding the prospect for the two-State solution. He reiterates that all Israeli settlements [the physical presence of Jews east of the 1949 Armistice Lines between Israel and the Kingdom of Transjordan, which specifically stated were not to be considered borders] in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and their associated regime and infrastructure, have no legal validity and are in flagrant violation of international law, including relevant United Nations resolutions.”

This is how extremist antisemitism is normalized: by treating it as an immutable local condition, while directing moral outrage at those who reveal it. When selling land to a Jew carries a death sentence, that fact is not incidental. It is the moral center of the conflict.

Two Condemnations, One Moral Collapse

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By any ordinary moral standard, the murder of worshippers in a house of prayer should provoke the clearest possible response: name the crime, demand justice, stand with the people and the government under attack. No hedging. No balancing. No political caveats.

The United Nations does that, except when Israeli Jews are the victims.

Read the paired statements issued by António Guterres after two attacks on places of worship: one at a mosque in Pakistan, the other at a synagogue in Jerusalem. The contrast reveals a complete moral collapse at the heart of the global body.

This matters even more because the Jerusalem statement was issued before Israel responded to October 7, 2023. Before Gaza. Before counteroffensives. Before a single Israeli military action the UN would later cite as justification for its posture.

Restraint was not urged because of Israeli action. It was urged instead of justice itself.

Statement by UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres in February 2026 about the bombing of a mosque in Pakistan

In Pakistan, the Secretary-General “condemns in the strongest terms” the attack on worshippers. He demands that the perpetrators be “identified and brought to justice.” He affirms the “solidarity of the United Nations with the Government and people of Pakistan” and situates the crime squarely within the global fight against terrorism and violent extremism.

That is what moral clarity looks like.

Yet in Jerusalem, when Jews are murdered outside a synagogue in 2023—on International Holocaust Remembrance Day- a whisper. The Secretary-General “strongly condemns” the attack. He offers condolences. He notes that it is abhorrent to attack a place of worship. And then he pivots—not to justice, not to accountability, not to solidarity with the state charged with protecting its citizens.

He pivots to restraint.

Statement by UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres in January 2023 about murder of Jews outside Jerusalem synagogue

The synagogue becomes a geographic detail. The murders are folded into “the current escalation in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territory.” There is no demand that the killers be found. No insistence on prosecution. No solidarity with the Government of Israel. No recognition that deterrence requires consequence.

This is not diplomatic caution. It is moral abdication.

This did not begin with Guterres

If this were merely the idiosyncrasy of one Secretary-General nearing the end of his ten year tenure, it might be dismissed as tone or temperament. It is not.

In 2014, after Arab terrorists entered a synagogue in Jerusalem wielding meat cleavers and hacked Jewish worshippers to death, Ban Ki-moon issued a statement that follows the exact same structure.

Statement by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon in January 2014 about murder of Jews inside Jerusalem synagogue

He “strongly condemns” the attack. He offers condolences. And then—almost immediately—he moves “beyond today’s reprehensible incident” to discuss “clashes between Palestinian youths and Israeli security forces.” The massacre is submerged into “the situation.” The killers disappear into context.

There is no call to bring the perpetrators to justice.
No solidarity with the Israeli government.
No affirmation of Israel’s duty to eradicate the threat.

Instead, Ban Ki-moon calls for leadership on “both sides”, urges all parties to avoid “provocative rhetoric,” and frames the slaughter of Jews in a synagogue as a destabilizing dimension of the conflict—not as terrorism demanding elimination.

Different Secretary-General. Same choreography.

The explanation is not mysterious because the United Nations does not conceptualize Palestinian violence as extremism.

Extremism, in UN doctrine, is something that happens elsewhere—to states battling jihadists, insurgents, or transnational terror networks. Palestinian murder, by contrast, is treated as political expression: contextualized by grievance, softened by narrative, absorbed into a permanent dispute. It is violence to be managed, not defeated.

That is why justice is demanded in Pakistan and restraint is demanded in Jerusalem. One fits the UN’s extremism framework. The other does not.

“Restraint” here is not a plea for peace. It is a veto on justice.

When Jews are murdered, the UN permits mourning but denies agency. Condolences are extended to families, while the legitimacy of Jewish self-defense and Jewish sovereignty is quietly withheld. Sympathy is offered—but solidarity with the state is conspicuously absent.

The global body created in the shadow of the Holocaust cannot bring itself to say, plainly, that Jews murdered in synagogues deserve the same moral response as anyone else. It cannot say that Jewish sovereignty is legitimate. It cannot say that justice must follow Jewish bloodshed.

And the Stateless Arabs from Palestine (SAPs), its perennial wards, must be granted absolution.

Israel should draw the only conclusion that matters: the United Nations is not a moral compass or humanitarian organization. It is purely a political instrument.

#terrorismnotterrorism

Two Story Arcs and Parshat Yitro

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The final season of Game of Thrones disappointed many viewers.

For years the show carried two storylines: an existential threat to humanity and a political struggle for the throne. When the ending came, the cosmic danger faded first and the camera returned to palace intrigue. Technically both plots resolved but emotionally, it felt like the story had mistaken the setup for the destination.

That structural tension comes to mind every year at Parshat Yitro.

The most dramatic moment in Jewish history — Sinai, revelation to the entire people, the Ten Commandments — arrives astonishingly early in the Torah. If receiving the law is the climax, why does it appear so soon in the Bible?

Because it isn’t the ending; it’s the beginning.

Sinai gives the people a constitution. It shapes their character, their obligations, their relationship with God and each other. But from the very first promise to Abraham, the Torah’s narrative is moving somewhere concrete — toward a land.

Walk the text and it reads like a map: journeys, wells, borders, inheritances. The story is geographic as much as spiritual. It is about building a nation in a place.

Torah and land were always meant to live together.

Torah without a homeland leaves Jewish life suspended in theory. A homeland without Torah loses its moral compass. Sinai forms the people; the land is where that formation is meant to be lived.

Over a thousand years of exile forced a different emphasis. When Jews lost soil, they carried scrolls. When borders disappeared, mitzvot became portable homeland and identity. That devotion was critical for survival.

Now history has shifted again.

For the first time since antiquity, a plurality of Jews lives in the Land of Israel, and soon it will likely be a majority. The part of the Torah that once felt distant and theoretical — sovereignty, agriculture, public responsibility, national life — is no longer abstract. It is daily reality.

Which reframes Parshat Yitro.

Sinai is not the finale of the Jewish story. It is the preparation. The training. The moment a people receives the tools it will need to build something lasting in its own land.

The Torah itself tells us this by where it ends: at the edge of the land, looking forward.

After centuries of mastering how to live as guests in other people’s history, Jews are being invited back to the main storyline: living in the land, with the Torah in hand.

The Travels of Benjamin of Tudela was an eight year travelog from circa 1165 to 1173, chronicling the pilgrimage of a Jew from Spain to the Jewish holy land.

The UN Says It Must Change. Gaza Is Where It Refuses To.

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António Guterres keeps saying the United Nations is no longer the institution it was 80 years ago. Power must be rebalanced he claims. The Security Council must reflect today’s world he urges. Post–World War II structures must evolve.

Fine. But if that claim is serious, the UN’s most glaring failure to modernize is Gaza.

The system built never to end

One UN body remains frozen in 1948: UNRWA. One vision for a state is lost to contours proposed in 1947: Palestine.

“The world of 2026 is not the world of 1946.” – UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, January 17, 2026

UNRWA administers a refugee regime found nowhere else:

  • Refugee status is inherited indefinitely
  • It never expires through citizenship or resettlement
  • It is tied to a “right of return” not to Gaza or a future Palestinian state, but to Israel itself

No other refugee population is treated this way.
Bosnians were not. Syrians are not. Ukrainians are not.

Every other refugee crisis is handled by UNHCR, where refugee status is temporary and meant to end. Only Palestinians are placed in a system designed to remain permanent.

Ending inherited refugee status would not end humanitarian aid.
It would end the political weaponization of refugeehood.

Why Bosnia exposes the category error

After the Balkan wars, the Dayton Accords included a right of return—but it was finite, individual, and intra-state. It applied to homes lost in the same war for the same people, and aimed to undo ethnic cleansing, not undo borders.

Gaza’s claimed “right of return” is fundamentally different: intergenerational, extra-territorial, and demographic—designed to reopen 1948 and negate another UN member state.

Guterres’ contradiction

Guterres calls for reform everywhere except where reform would actually make peace possible.

As long as the UN maintains an inherited right of return into Israel and the proposed borders which have long since past their expiry:

  • Maximalism is rewarded
  • Compromise is delegitimized
  • Negotiations become theater
  • Gaza remains permanently “temporary”

This is not neutrality; it is an institutional choice to preserve claims that prevent settlement.

Reform that applies everywhere except where it matters most is not reform.
It is avoidance.

The unavoidable conclusion

Until the UN ends the one system designed never to end, Gaza will not be governed toward peace—but toward the permanence of conflict.

And no amount of rhetoric about modernization can disguise that refusal.

Guterres Informs That Holocaust Remembrance Is About the UN, Not Jews

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On Holocaust Remembrance Day, António Guterres reached for the safest symbol available: Nuremberg. He spoke of universal lessons, multilateralism, and the dangers of unchecked hatred. It sounded solemn, but it was evasive. By invoking Nuremberg instead of Eichmann, the UN spun a story in which institutions matter more than victims, and legality matters more than justice.

That choice is not accidental. It is institutional self-protection.

Why the UN Prefers Nuremberg

The International Military Tribunal flatters multilateral ideals. It universalizes guilt, diffuses responsibility, and allows the UN to present itself as the heir to postwar justice. It avoids a harder truth: the world did not finish the job. Genocide went unnamed. Jewish extermination was evidence, not the charge. Many perpetrators melted back into ordinary life.

The Nuremberg trials were necessary but insufficient. And on Holocaust Remembrance Day, sufficiency is the point.

“I have always understood the clear link between the horrors of the Holocaust and the spirit of multilateralism, justice and rights that founded our organization. Just over 80 years ago, the Nuremberg trials began. These trials represented the beginning of a new era in international criminal law; an era 78 which individuals, including the most powerful, are held accountable. Today, more than ever, we need to reclaim that spirit.” – UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres on Holocaust Remembrance Day

Eichmann Is the Missing Sentence—And the Turning Hinge

The trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem did what Nuremberg did not. It named genocide as genocide. It put survivor testimony at the center. It replaced bureaucratic fog with individual culpability. Eichmann was not tried as a generic war criminal; he was judged as an architect of the annihilation of Jews.

Adolf Eichmann on trial in Jerusalem, many years after the Nuremberg trials

As Hannah Arendt observed, the case exposed how extermination was operationalized by ordinary men. And it exposed a global failure: Eichmann lived freely for years after the war. Many like him were never tried at all.

That is why Eichmann is not an “example” to be mentioned in passing. He is the pivot of postwar justice—the moment when the Holocaust was finally understood, named, and judged as what it was.

Universalism That Erases the Crime

Guterres’s language collapses the Holocaust into a general warning about hatred. of course hatred matters. But flattening the crime turns extermination into general prejudice and genocide into an abstraction. The Holocaust was not simply bigotry run amok; it was a state-organized project to destroy a people everywhere it could reach them.

“let us together pledge to stand against antisemitism and all forms of hatred — and against bigotry, racism and discrimination anywhere and everywhere.” – UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres on Holocaust Remembrance Day

Universalism should follow truth—not replace it. When remembrance avoids naming genocide plainly, “Never Again” becomes a slogan that comforts institutions rather than indicts them.

The Uncomfortable Lesson the UN Avoids

The defining act of Holocaust justice did not come from the UN system. It came from a Jewish state acting unilaterally. Without Israel, Eichmann would have died untried, his crimes dissolved into postwar amnesia. That is not a political claim; it is a historical conclusion.

The UN prefers Nuremberg because Eichmann exposes its limits. Nuremberg affirms process; Eichmann exposes failure. One reviews general war crimes while the other points the finger squarely at demonic antisemitism. One is safe to cite as the other forces accountability.

Holocaust Remembrance Day is not a seminar on international law. It is a reckoning with a singular crime and a singular abandonment. The Jewish state does not exist to teach the world lessons, but we see plainly that the world failed to protect Jews—and then failed to prosecute their murderers. And it fails to recognize the clear difference to this day – on the very day designated to remember.

The Line That Cannot Be Dodged

Remembrance without judgment is theater. On Holocaust Remembrance Day, the honest citation is not Nuremberg’s promise but Eichmann’s dock. One symbolizes aspiration. The other delivered judgment.

If the UN wants this day to mean more than ritual, it must say the truth it avoids: the Holocaust was finally understood, named, and judged because Jews had a state willing to act when the world would not. That is not a complication of remembrance. It is its core.

No Human Is Illegal—Until It’s a Jew

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The modern left claims to speak in absolutes. Borders are immoral. Enforcement is cruelty. Language itself must be purified so that no human is illegal. That creed is recited with missionary confidence—until the subject becomes Jews in the Middle East. Then the absolutes vanish. The language hardens. Expulsion becomes justice.

When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says “no human being is illegal,” she isn’t hedging. When Ilhan Omar insists “undocumented does not mean illegal,” the point is categorical. When Julián Castro calls the word illegal dehumanizing, the doctrine is clear: presence confers legitimacy.

“This bill prohibits any executive agency from using the term alien to refer to an individual who is not a U.S. citizen or national, or illegal alien to refer to such an individual who is unlawfully present in the United States or lacks lawful immigration status. This prohibition does not apply when quoting certain texts.” – H.R.457 — 117th Congress (2021-2022) submitted by Joaquin Castro (D-TX) with 13 Democratic co-sponsors

And then Jews cross the only line that matters.

Beyond the 1949 armistice lines—lines drawn to stop a war, never to define a state—the same mouths reverse themselves. Jews become “illegal settlers.” Homes become “violations.” Removal becomes moral necessity. The word that supposedly dehumanizes migrants is suddenly deployed eagerly against Jews. The same politicians who recoil at deportation rhetoric now demand the dismantling of Jewish communities that have existed for decades.

The contrast is not accidental. Rashida Tlaib brands Jewish towns “illegal” and calls for their removal. Bernie Sanders repeats the charge as if the label itself settles every moral question. Even Omar—who rejects illegality as a concept at home—embraces it fully when applied to Jews. Same actors. Same vocabulary. Opposite rules.

This is where anti-Zionism sheds its disguise. A politics that claims to defend Black and Brown people from delegitimization turns around and singles out Jews—alone—for collective criminalization. When a political doctrine singles out Jews—alone—for criminalization and expulsion, it stops being anti-Zionism and becomes antisemitism, full stop. If a principle applies to everyone except Jews, it isn’t principle. It’s prejudice.

The United Nations provides the laundering. Resolutions passed by automatic anti-Israel majorities are treated as moral verdicts rather than political artifacts. When the Barack Obama administration chose not to veto Security Council Resolution 2334, it handed activists a legal-sounding alibi. The appeal is obvious: demand expulsions while pretending your hands are clean. Outsource conscience. Invoke “international law.” Move on.

“any decisions and actions which purport to have altered the character, status or demographic composition [added Jews] of the Holy City of Jerusalem have no legal effect, are null and void and must be rescinded in compliance with relevant resolutions of the Security Council” – UN General Assembly

The hypocrisy spills into the street. Protestors harass synagogues and Jewish institutions, targeting Jews for contemplating life in Israel. That behavior would be condemned instantly if aimed at any other minority. Instead, it’s excused as activism—supposed to make people uncomfortable, as Cori Bush once put it. When the discomfort belongs to Jews, the moral bar drops through the floor.

Strip away the slogans and the pattern is unmistakable: hierarchy. Some groups are granted innocence without agency. Jews exercising sovereignty are denied legitimacy regardless of history, law, or fact. The left that insists words can wound has no trouble criminalizing Jewish existence.

If no human is illegal, Jews aren’t illegal.
If deportation is immoral, ethnic cleansing is immoral.
If harassment is violence, it applies outside synagogues too.

Yet the antisemitic anti-Israel crowd miss the entire point and attempt to reframe the story. Palestine Chronicle wrote that “Israel has come home to roost in Minnesota. The people of Minneapolis and St. Paul have become the Palestinians of Minnesota,” misdirecting people that Arabs are targeted by Israel, when in fact it is Jews being targeted for being “illegal” by the UN and the Muslim world.

The rules change only for Jews. That isn’t progressivism. It’s selective morality—rigged, tribal, and exposed.

The Kotel Plaza Is an Open-Air Prison

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In July 2023 alone, 67,769 Gazans were allowed to exit Gaza through Israeli crossings according to the United Nations. In the entire year of 2023, only 50,098 Jews were allowed onto the Temple Mount — Judaism’s holiest site — in Jerusalem, the capital of the Jewish state according to Beyadenu a Jewish rights advocacy group.

One month versus one year.
A border crossing versus a holy site in a nation’s capital.
The comparison is damning.

The Jewish state allowed more Gazans to cross its border in one month before the Gaza leadership launched a war, than it allowed Jews to step foot on their holiest site over an entire year.

That is not security policy. That is civilizational self-sabotage.

Every country controls its borders. That is normal. What is not normal is a nation blocking its own people from their central religious site in their own capital city.

Jews face time windows, group limits, police escorts, and de-facto prayer bans to walk on ground their ancestors sanctified 3,000 years ago. The result is obvious: Jewish presence is suppressed by design.

Fifty thousand Jews in a year is not demand.
It is managed scarcity.

Thousands of Jews congregate in the Kotel plaza on Passover, unable to ascend onto the Jewish Temple Mount

The Western Wall Plaza is sold as Jewish religious freedom. It isn’t. It is a containment zone — a consolation prize engineered to keep Jews away from the mountain that actually matters.

This is why the Gaza comparison cuts so deep.

Israeli policy makers allowed in more Gazans into Israel, during a blockade, knowing that the area is led by an antisemitic genocidal jihadist group sworn to destroy the Jewish State, than for Jews just seeking a basic human right of prayer.

A sovereign nation that polices Jewish prayer more aggressively than cross-border traffic has lost the plot. A capital that cages its own sacred history is not free.

Until Jews can walk onto the Temple Mount without escorts, quotas, and humiliation, the Kotel Plaza remains exactly what it is: an open-air prison with good lighting and a propaganda budget.

UNRWA’s Jerusalem Exception

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Every UN humanitarian agency coordinates with the authority that governs where it operates—except in Jerusalem. That exception is not a footnote. It is the story. And it exposes a mandate failure driven by politics, not humanitarian necessity.

UNRWA holds that humanitarian work requires coordination with governing authorities. In practice, it does so almost everywhere: with Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, the Palestinian Authority—and even with Hamas in Gaza, despite Hamas’s terrorist designation by the United States, the EU, the UK, and others.

In Jerusalem alone, UNRWA refuses to coordinate with Israel, the authority exercising full municipal, policing, and regulatory control over the city.

Call it “coordination for access” if you like. It is still coordination. And municipal coordination is not a sovereignty concession (if one believes that Israel does not have sovereignty over eastern Jerusalem despite annexing it in 1980); it is a humanitarian necessity.

How the Facilities Came to Exist

UNRWA’s Jerusalem facilities were established between 1949 and 1967, when Jordan seized and annexed the eastern half of the city in a move not recognized by the UN or the international community. UNRWA nonetheless coordinated with the Hashemite authorities to build schools, clinics, and service centers—because humanitarian work requires coordination with whoever governs in fact.

That history matters. UNRWA’s Jerusalem footprint exists specifically because it once coordinated with an unrecognized occupier.

UNRWA offices in Jerusalem (photo: First One Through)

The Reversal

In 1967, Jordan entered the war, violated the armistice, and lost control of Jerusalem. Israel assumed governance and unified the city. Palestinian Arab residents became permanent residents with access to Israeli courts, healthcare, municipal services, and the right to apply for citizenship.

At that point, UNRWA reversed its logic. Where it coordinated with Jordan despite non-recognition, it now refuses to coordinate with Israel—by labeling eastern Jerusalem “occupied Palestinian territory,” theoretically negating its obligation to work with Israel.

That label sits uneasily with the UN’s own history. The 1947 Partition Plan never intended Jerusalem—east or west—to belong to an Arab state. The city was designated a corpus separatum, an internationally administered entity. Jerusalem was never meant to be Arab sovereign territory.

The contours of “Corpus Separatum” (in pink) in the United Nations 1947 Partition Plan stretched over Greater Bethlehem and Greater Jerusalem, marking the region as an international Holy Basin to be administered by the UN

An Outlier by Design

UNRWA’s mandate emphasizes cooperation with local authorities to ensure access, security, and civilian protection. That cooperation exists everywhere except Jerusalem. UNRWA coordinates with armed groups and unrecognized authorities elsewhere, yet refuses coordination with the governing authority in the city where coordination is most essential.

Refusing to coordinate with the authority responsible for public safety is not neutrality. It is an affirmative political act—one that inverts humanitarian logic by privileging narrative over civilian protection. UN immunity exists to facilitate coordination, not to replace it.

Continuity of Care—and the Standoff

Israel has enacted laws to shutter UNRWA offices in Jerusalem. UNRWA refuses to comply, invoking immunity and operating facilities largely outside municipal oversight. The confrontation exists because UNRWA chose inconsistency in the one city where consistency matters most.

“The UNRWA Jerusalem Health Centre, which serves hundreds of Palestine refugee patients every day is, for most of them, their only possibility of having access to primary healthcare….
These [Israeli] measures are a violation of the inviolability of United Nations premises and an obstacle to the implementation of the clear mandate of the General Assembly for UNRWA’s continued operations in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem.” – UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres January 15, 2026

The closure of UNRWA offices in Jerusalem would not create a humanitarian vacuum. Education, healthcare, and social services are already provided through municipal systems, national institutions, other UN bodies, and a dense NGO network operating in the city. What would end is not care delivery, but UNRWA’s parallel governance model.

Palestinian Arabs in Jerusalem rely daily on municipal emergency services, hospitals, and courts. UNRWA’s non-coordination removes the safety mechanisms coordination is meant to provide—for civilians, staff, students, and patients alike.

The Reckoning

UNRWA coordinated with Jordan when Jordan’s rule was unrecognized. It coordinates with Hamas despite terrorist designations. Yet it refuses to coordinate with Israel while Israel governs the city, extends legal status to its Arab residents, and has a network of service providers which can easily replace UNRWA in Jerusalem.

That is not humanitarian principle. It is selective politics.

Consistency is the minimum requirement of a mandate.
A mandate that works everywhere but Jerusalem is not a mandate—it is a message, and it is that UNRWA is not a humanitarian organization.

UNRWA remains a rusty tool of the 1947 Partition Plan which insists that holy sites in Jerusalem never fall under Jewish rule.

When Terror Is Rebranded as “Tension”

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The most consequential move in the New York Times coverage was quiet. It described Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s response to pro-Hamas chants as an effort to avoid inflaming “tensions on either side of the Israel–Gaza war.” The language sounded responsible. It also erased the central reality.

The New York Times is attempting to allay fears of Jewish New Yorkers but softening image of extremist mayor Zohran Mamdani on January 17, 2026

There were no equivalent sides involved. One group openly chanted support for Hamas, a U.S.-designated terrorist organization responsible for mass murder, rape, kidnapping, and calls for genocide. The other side was a Jewish community standing outside its own synagogue, defending it from terrorist sympathizers.

That location matters. This did not unfold at City Hall or on a random street corner. It took place in front of a synagogue. For Jews, synagogues are communal sanctuaries, not neutral backdrops for geopolitical theater. Geography conveys intent. Bringing terror slogans to a Jewish house of worship transforms speech into targeting.

The New York Times chose to smooth this away. By framing the episode as “tension on either side,” it recast explicit support for Hamas as a legitimate pole of community expression. The chant was softened. The targeting dissolved into abstraction. Readers were reassured that calm was being preserved with statements such as “Mr. Mamdani’s team repeatedly debated the wording and fairness of the language,” as if a group chanting for the genocide of Jews required “fairness.”

This is how extremism gets normalized. When terror advocacy demands careful calibration rather than moral clarity, the boundary quietly shifts. Such framing would collapse instantly if crowds praised ISIS outside a mosque or neo-Nazis gathered at a Black church.

Protesters understand what editors seem determined to whitewash: location is the message. No amount of “Palestine-washing” can absolve the antisemitism in the Times coverage.

Reassurance purchased at the cost of truth carries consequences. It teaches extremists that intimidation can be reframed as passion and that targeted terror speech will be treated as just another civic grievance. That does not cool tensions. It redraws the line of what is acceptable.

Ending Evil Is Not Revenge

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Pharaoh stood unmoved as the Nile turned to blood.
Life-giving water became useless overnight, and the system held.
That moment captured the moral reality of the Exodus.

The plagues were not revenge. They were not emotional retaliation for suffering already endured. And they were not even, in the narrow sense, punishment for evil deeds. They were something far more deliberate: the dismantling of a system that could not be allowed to continue.

That distinction matters—then and now.

Revenge, Punishment, and Dismantlement

Revenge is backward-looking. It seeks emotional satisfaction for injury.
Punishment is judicial. It assigns guilt and imposes consequences.
Dismantlement is future-oriented. It exists to make continued evil impossible.

The plagues fit only the third category.

They were announced in advance. They escalated slowly. It wasn’t rage. It didn’t aim at humiliation. The Torah goes out of its way to show a paced methodology.

Even “punishment” does not fully explain what happens. Punishment targets perpetrators. The plagues targeted foundations: economy, theology, nature, and political myth. The Nile, the body, the sky—everything Egypt relied on to project permanence was stripped away piece by piece.

Why? Because slavery was not a policy failure within Egypt.
It was Egypt.

You cannot reform a system built on domination. You cannot shame it. You cannot negotiate it out of existence. You have to break the assumptions that make it feel eternal.

That is what the plagues did. They delivered a message: “You are not absolute—and the time for evil has ended.”

The Same Moral Error Reappears Today

That same confusion appears again in the way Israel’s war in Gaza is discussed.

Since October 7, critics have insisted that Israel is acting out of revenge, wounded pride, or collective punishment. That reading repeats the same error people make about the plagues: it projects human emotion onto a campaign that is structural in nature.

If Israel were seeking revenge, Gaza would already be erased.
If this were punishment, the war would end with confessions and symbolic justice.

Neither is happening.

Israel is trying to end a war by dismantling the system that made it inevitable.

Hamas is not a fringe militia. It is the elected majority of the Palestinian parliament and ruling authority in Gaza. It is immensely popular. Over years, it constructed a comprehensive war society: tunnels beneath homes, schools, and mosques; civilian infrastructure fused with military command; education and media organized around eradication; international aid converted into weapons. Violence was not a breakdown. It was the operating principle.

As in Egypt, brutality was not an abuse within the system.
It was the system.

You cannot coexist with that indefinitely. You cannot contain it forever. You cannot pause it and hope it reforms while leaving its foundations intact.

Why Ending the System Is Not Cruelty

Calls for ceasefire without dismantlement may sound compassionate but mirror Pharaoh’s promises: temporary relief with permanent structures preserved. The Torah teaches us to distrust that move. Pauses without transformation merely reset the cycle.

Israel’s campaign is not about humiliation. It is about limits. No governing authority may embed genocide into its ideology. No regime gains immunity by hiding behind civilians. No society organized around death gets an unlimited future.

Ending such a system is not revenge.
It is moral necessity.