The story of the Bibas children from October 7, 2023 until now has been horrific on every level, at every turn.
First, the four year-old and nine month old were ripped from their homes by the military of the ruling political-terrorist group Hamas in Gaza, along with the children’s terrified mother. They were abducted to the terrorist enclave of Gaza, murdered by Palestinian Arabs weeks later.
Their bodies were then held by the Palestinian Arabs without burial for over a year. They were not returned to Israel for proper, respectful burial.
Instead, they were held for ransom. The small Jewish corpses were ultimately paraded on stage before a crowd of hundreds of cheering Gazans – alongside their children – with a Gazan woman who was not their mother despite Hamas assurances, to be shipped to Israel.
The tiny innocent children were exchanged for dozens of Palestinian Arab terrorists convicted of murder, per Hamas demands. These released terrorists are alive and ready, willing and capable of slaughtering Jews once more.
The media falsely portrays this as a “prisoner exchange,” as though the two sides were swapping living adult prisoners of war. A blasphemy.
Every level of the story is a horror. Yet, there is only so much that Israel can do on its own to change the deep “deformity” in Gazan culture.
But it must try to dissuade at least some of the depraved actions.
Israel should commit to never holding onto any corpses of any Palestinian, whether soldiers, terrorists or anyone else UNLESS Palestinian Arabs are holding dead Israelis. As soon as Palestinians take a dead Israeli, every Palestinian killed should be retained by Israel. A future exchange will only have a single swap: all corpses for all corpses. It removes any bargaining power of killing people and holding the dead.
The Bibas story is pure torture. The Bibas Rule of only corpses for corpses might alleviate some death and pain in the years to come.
The media is going crazy about President Donald Trump’s social media post of an AI-generated video of what a “Trump Gaza” might resemble. The imaginary future isn’t the problem: it’s the United Nations policies which have produced the current reality of Gaza.
Gaza is led by Hamas, a deeply antisemitic jihadi group which is considered a terrorist group by the United States, Israel and many other countries. The UN thinks it’s a legitimate government, as UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator Martin Griffiths said “Hamas is not a terrorist group for us, of course, as you know. It’s a political movement.”
The UN’s stated mission is to move at least 73% of Gazans into Israel (the UNRWA wards), making Gazans indifferent to the local situation as they think they are just waiting to move into towns where grandparents used to live in Israel
The entrance to Aida Refugee Camp, near Bethlehem with a key on top to let Arabs know that the ticket to enter Israel is via the UN
The UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said on February 24, 2025 that his concern is for Gaza’s suffering in this war; not Israel. He said he was concerned about “Israeli settlers” but not Hamas.
The United Nations has long legitimized an antisemitic genocidal jihadist group next door to Israel and has protected it from facing justice. It has reared generations of Gazans to only know hatred for Jews and deny their history and rights in their homeland. It has systematically inverted victim and perpetrator by using an approach that the best defense is a good offense, to vilify Israel and its supporters, rather than put pressure on Palestinian Arabs to disarm and accept the Jewish State.
Gaza under Hamas and UNHamas under Hamas and UN leadership
The AI-generated fiction of a Trump Gaza is producing wild attacks, while the real tragedy of Gaza’s bankrupt morality and devastation under the banner of the United Nations is never considered.
The United Nations has a Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process (SCMEPP), a role so seeped in lofty goals and ineptitude, it sums up the farce and tragedy of the UN’s biased and pathetic involvement in the Muslim Arab- Israel conflict.
The “peace process” has long been hampered by a UN that teaches the Stateless Arabs from Palestine (SAPs) that they will all move into Israel, that Jews cannot live in their holiest city of Jerusalem nor pray at their holiest site on the Temple Mount. The UN schools teach only Arab students, vile propaganda that Jews are invaders with no history in the land, interlopers to be despised.
It is, therefore, not a surprise that the new UN Coordinator is not an impartial party but one long dedicated to the SAPs’ narrative and goals.
Sigrid Kaag of the Netherlands took over for Tor Wennesland in January 2025. Her European appearance masks her affiliation with the Palestinian cause.
Sigrid Kaag, new UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process
Kaag was a Dutch politician and involved in foreign affairs which soon brought her to get involved with UNRWA, the long-standing temporary UN agency tasked with tending to the descendants of Arabs who left Israel at its founding, as well as UNICEF. Soon after she took on UN roles in Syria and Lebanon. This background seemingly made her an ideal choice in January 2024 to become UN Senior Humanitarian and Reconstruction Coordinator for Gaza.
With such pro-Arab bona fides (and a Palestinian husband), UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres appointed her his Personal Representative of the Secretary-General to the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Palestinian Authority (PA) in January 2025 when Wennesland’s term expired.
Guterres also appointed Kaag to be UN’s SCMEPP, even though such role is meant to be – theoretically – an unbiased party to bring peace to all parties in the Middle East conflict. How can the SCMEPP be a party who is deeply enmeshed with only one side?
Kaag addressed the UN Security Council on February 25, 2025 and her comments repeated the same inanity spoken at the global chambers: no Palestinian Arabs are terrorists, cannot be condemned nor brought to justice, even if they commit the most barbaric atrocities.
Kaag began her comments in her new capacity as UN’s point person for Middle East Peace with “It cannot be repeated enough; nothing justifies the appalling October 7 terror attacks executed by Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups. I welcome the implementation of the first phase of the ceasefire including the release of 34 hostages. I echo the Secretary-General’s condemnation of the public parading of hostages released by Hamas, including statements made under duress, and the appalling display of the coffins of deceased hostages.” Nowhere in her comments was there a condemnation of the October 7 massacre nor calling for all those SAPs to be held accountable.
Not surprisingly, Kaag would go on to tell the Security Council that Gazans need relief, Israeli actions are bad and the Palestinian Authority is good. She concluded her remarks declaring that the UN has already determined the correct borders of two states and that they are not a matter of negotiations between Israel and the PA, and that Israel must leave Gaza even though nothing is mentioned about Hamas.
Kaag comments before UN Security Council on February 25, 2025
The United Nations has been one of the primary causes of the Middle East conflict, masquerading as the champion for human rights and peace. Its new point person to address the conflict is once again a tool of the global body to defend local Arabs at all costs, regardless of their actions and intentions.
J.D. Vance’s 2016 book Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, began with a short story of how everyone in his small town would come to the street and stand when a funeral hearse passed by. When he asked his grandmother the reason for the tradition she replied “because honey, we’re hill people. And we respect our dead.”
It was an interesting device to educate readers that they were about to be introduced to a subset of society. They may know Americans and people from Kentucky, but the “hill people” in Vance’s life had a special bond. Whether living or dead, old or young, they stood together and apart from others, even while a casual eye might miss the divide.
Rabbi Scott Kahn, a Jewish American-Israeli podcaster of a show called Orthodox Conundrum, posed a similar story as a question while he was on a tour in the U.S. from his home in Israel, in the fall of 2024. He provocatively asked a gathering of Orthodox Jews whether a cleft had opened between the American and Israeli Orthodox communities over the current war from Gaza. He observed that while U.S. Orthodox Jews remained the most committed to Israel in terms of visiting, moving and supporting Israel, he felt that support waning as the latest war extended past one year.
When some from the audience protested that many of the people present had children who volunteered for the Israeli army, Kahn paused to admit that while true, American Jews simply no longer understood the pain of Israeli Jews who get up and go to funerals and shiva houses week after week, for so long.
The global modern Orthodox community in which Kahn felt completely at home for so long seemingly was fracturing before him into distinct Israeli and diaspora communities.
Some weeks later, Kahn shared the story on his podcast with three panelists – Rabbi Chaim Steinmetz, Dr. Logan Levkoff, and Shira Katz Shaulov – the first two from the U.S. and last from Israel. Halfway into the talk (38:30) he shared the conversation above to get reactions from the panel. Shaulov observed that the gap was more of a distinction between expecting sympathy and empathy. While the American Orthodox community may continue to have sympathy with their brothers and sisters in Israel, the local toll of the war made empathy virtually impossible.
The panel noted that Israelis often go to a wedding and a funeral on the same day in the same community for people the same ages. It has been brutal and exhausting, and they have been doing so for over a year. Every day they fear a knock at the door or observe their neighbors getting terrible news and gather together as a shaken community for mutual support.
That huddle is physical, local, tangible. And creates lasting and specialized bonds.
And many Israeli Jews feel that Jews in the diaspora are not present in the circle, and cannot comprehend the anguish.
The fatigue and emotional strain of this war has adjusted the contours of the Orthodox community in ways Kahn may well understand and appreciate but is despondent over as well. While the values and ritual practices may remain very similar, Diaspora Jews remain thousands of miles away from Israel during this massive pivot in history.
Respecting the dead alongside the living reinforces community. It remains true after shiva.
When Hostages Square in Tel Aviv gets dismantled – hopefully sometime soon when everyone returns home – Israel cannot only be left with the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial and Har Herzl national cemetery. The country must consider how the Jewish diaspora can properly engage with the fallen and injured, as well as their families and communities in the years ahead.
The New York Times seemingly operates in fantasy land and a time warp when it writes about Israel.
The Times uses a phrase “Palestinian citizens of Israel” as if the U.S. recognizes a state of Palestine, and these Arabs are dual citizens with Israel. It uses “East Jerusalem”, an area that existed only from 1949 to 1967 as an artifice of war.
New York Times article echoing anti-Israel narrative of United Nations, as if the United States has no policies about the region
Does the Times think that it’s 1915 when the region of Palestine existed as part of the Ottoman Empire? Maybe it should call Recep Erdogan, the “leader of the Ottoman Empire”, instead of Turkey.
The United States does not recognize “Palestine” or “East Jerusalem.” But the NY Times has become part of the United Nations press corps as it distances itself from the Trump administration, echoing anti-Israel narratives in support of its Victims of Preference, which can never be Jews.
The war between Hamas and related Palestinian militant groups in Gaza with Israel has evoked many passions. Defenders of both sides point to either the barbaric October 7 massacre and the taking of hostages on one side, or the lack of freedom of movement, dignity and sovereignty on the other.
Where the defenders of Gaza and those in Israel agree is that Hamas has not been completed eliminated and its ideology remains popular among Palestinian Arabs. Lost among Gaza’s defenders is that their comments and philosophy condemn any prospect for peace and should prevent any rebuilding efforts.
Palestinian Arabs believe that ALL of the land is being “occupied” and that Jews are foreigners with no rights as illegal invaders. They oppose the existence of Israel and that peace with Israel is a disgrace and insult to their dignity.
Unmentioned is the Palestinian Authority, deeply unloved by local Palestinians. The United Nations and American Democrats pretend that the PA President has support and power among the Stateless Arabs from Palestine (SAPs) but he doesn’t. Even The New York Times finally shared opinions of a range of Palestinian Arabs from around the world who mock the PA as worthless and must be reconstituted to include the voices of the “resistance” against Israel, like Hamas.
The New York Times Opinion piece sharing voices from Palestinian Arabs who mock the Palestinian Authority and support Hamas and its viewpoints
Even after a war in which Hamas and Gaza got obliterated, its supporters of Hezbollah in Lebanon had to sue for a ceasefire and Iran became defanged, Palestinian Arabs still refuse to accept the legitimacy of the Jewish State. After the local failures to destroy Israel, SAPs pray for global efforts from the United Nations and antisemites worldwide to end the “Zionist project” and enable Arabs to retake all of the Jewish Promised Land.
The United States under President Trump has made clear that it will not let that happen. Trump has pulled money and the U.S. out of United Nations groups which condemn Israel. He has expedited military equipment to Israel. And he has made clear that he expects American allies to do much the same.
Hamas’s defenders want the war against Israel to continue, which will likely delay any rebuilding of Gaza and holding elections which would likely see Hamas gain power. Those opposing Hamas do so silently, and focus on pushing the world to embrace the charade of the Palestinian Authority to fast-track aid into Gaza.
Palestinian Arabs have condemned themselves to an ongoing ‘Nakba’ since they continue to reject the Jewish State. Until that ideology ends, the only rebuilding of Gaza that should happen is the wall separating the enclave from Israel.
The Bible’s Garden of Eden is the prototypical paradise. God’s first hand creation of nature in balance with man is the dream of many, a place of bliss and innocence. Philosophers and biblical commentators ponder what would the world have been like had the snake never teased people into disobeying God’s command of eating from the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. Would mankind be simple and peaceful, enjoying God’s grace?
Alas, the world we live in today is a product of that fateful day. Mankind was expelled from the garden and soon knew of murder, and the snake became one of the most feared and hated animals to man. A steep price to pay for the knowledge between good and evil.
There are almost no countries on Earth without snakes today, as the reptile thrives in a wide variety of climates. New Zealand, an island far removed from most inhabited locations is one of those snake-free homes. Its natural beauty is beyond comparison, with a habitat with few predators; quite a world apart from its closest neighbor Australia with crocodiles, Great White sharks and killer spiders, jellyfish, snakes and taipans.
New Zealand’s beauty and lack of lethal animals offers an initial peer into the inhabitants’ innocence. Its government makes visitors declare every food item and more upon entering the country, less its fragile environment become threatened by the introduction of new harmful elements.
This Eden Without Snakes fosters a socially conscious and environmentally-friendly culture, at least according to the European colonialists who took control of the islands from the indigenous Maori. White Europeans now constitute just shy of 70 per cent of the nation, Maori 16.5% and Asians 15.3%. The colonialists cemented their rule on February 6, 1840 with the signing of the Waitangi Treaty in which the Maori essentially handed over their land to the Europeans. The country celebrates Waitangi Day every February 6, without pausing how the European colonists importation of various animals and trees to make it resemble Scotland, destroyed the Eden that existed before their arrival, almost bringing the native flightless birds like the kiwi to extinction.
Residing thousands of miles from the nearest country – with whom it has warm bilateral relations – has insulated the country from wars. Its national assessment of the risk of terrorism is low, quite different than Australia (probable) and the United Kingdom (substantial).
The clueless New Zealanders (no admitted relationship to Ben Stiller’s Zoolander) broadcast their ignorance when they attack Israel in its defense against antisemitic genocidal jihadists who live next door. The country passed laws sniffing out Israelis visiting the country, while the actual local Kiwi colonists seek out Israelis for harassment on the streets.
Posters all over Christchurch seeking Israelis on vacation (photo: First One Through)
No Western democracy deals with threats to existence like Israel. Israel exists on one extreme, a small sliver of a country surrounded by jihadists who seek to destroy the country as a matter of open public policy, while the remote Eden of New Zealand is on the other extreme.
Wanted poster of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on street of Christchurch, NZ (photo: First One Through)
To watch the Kiwis stand in judgment of the Jewish State is a pathetic display of virtue signaling by naive and entitled actual colonists, about a situation thousands of miles away which has no direct bearing on their peaceful existence. One is left with concluding New Zealanders are either idiots or antisemites.
We can also let them declare their every bias before they proffer their views to avoid contaminating other democracies.
For years, politicians tried to resolve conflicts via “shuttle diplomacy.” A senior official would act as mediator by running to one side of a conflict and take notes, then shuttle to the counterparty to relay information and take notes, all the while, attempting to bridge the gap between the parties.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry under President Obama was a classic example of this approach in the Arab-Israeli conflict. Convinced that nothing could be done that would upset the broad Palestinian Arab street, he hammered home that Israel, the stronger party, must continue to do more to placate Palestinian demands. His list of demands from Palestinians grew ever longer, never applying pressure on the Palestinian Authority.
Kerry is the prime example of a failed negotiator in shuttle diplomacy. He remained to the very end, too dense to consider how bad he approached the Middle East, making parting comments as he left office as if he had earned any credibility.
In Donald Trump’s first term in office, he immediately reversed the Kerry failed thinking of peace-making. He adopted an “outside-in” tactic of not letting the weak and ever-demanding Palestinian Authority stop broader peace in the region, and established the Abraham Accords, creating normalization agreements between Israel and several Muslim Arab countries.
Now in his second term, Trump made a bold announcement on February 5, 2025, tossing out the idea of shuttle diplomacy in the Middle East in favor of something I call “Anchor Diplomacy,” in which Trump will use the broad reach and power of the United States to impose peace between the Israelis and Palestinian Arabs. He will not run back-and-forth between the two sides, but will get the various parties to come to him, and attempt to dislodge or soften his stance in which he put the United States – not the two parties – in the center of the discussion.
Trump announced that the United States will take over the rebuilding of the demolished Gaza Strip, and Gazans will be relocated out of the area into Egypt, Jordan and other countries during the reconstruction. Gazans may return or opt to stay in the new locations with a much better standard of living.
There are many points to unpack in the Gaza statements but the practicality of one or another point is an aside. Trump is making the Arab world come to him, not the other way round. The Arab world will be forced to make Hamas disappear from the scene to prevent a U.S.-takeover, instead of the U.S. being worried whether Hamas or other terrorist groups will scuttle any progress towards calm. The United Nations will be dislodged as a biased and awful actor in the region, as the Arab street clamors for U.S. to engage monetarily but not overly intrusively.
President Teddy Roosevelt once said “speak softly and carry a big stick.” Trump has chosen a new path to waive the large stick over everyone’s head and to lay down a marker of his own. He has long built a reputation being a very loyal friend as well as a menacing enemy. He knows that the regimes of Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia have much to gain from the United States – or they can turn Trump into an enemy and run to the embrace of a new sponsor, perhaps China.
Trump has so far been able to get countries like Colombia to eat their words and reverse policies when he threatened economic hardship, and obviously feels that Arab countries will similarly get on board with at least some of his Gaza proposal. At the very least, they will learn that the days of treating the U.S. as an open faucet of money to abuse with unrealistic demands will not stand under Trump.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and U.S. President Donald Trump at White House February 5, 2025
Anchor Diplomacy, the muscle of entrenching a position and forcing the sides to react, can only be effective by a mediator with tremendous influence on each side. While pro-Palestinians/ anti-Americans will chant “imperialism” and “empire” in exasperation at Trump’s Gaza announcement, the shadows which will swing the outcome will be China and/or Saudi Arabia, who might magnify or counter American power.
The United Nations created a temporary agency in 1949 to care for Palestinian Arabs who left Israel during Israel’s founding. It’s called UNRWA, the United Nations Work and Relief Agency. The staff of over 30,000 people are almost all descendants of those Palestinian Arab “refugees” with a few White Europeans sprinkled on the leadership to make the organization appear as an international aid group, rather than an employment agency.
UNRWA has long abused its mandate, extending services to hundreds of thousands of people who are not descendants of “refugees”, essentially becoming a bank in distributing loans to local Arabs, and teaching millions of its Arab wards to hate Israeli Jews and that they will get to move into Israel with UNRWA’s help.
After years of perpetuating the conflict, Israel decided to ban UNRWA from operating in Israel as of January 30, 2025, as many of its members took part in the October 7 massacre and others worked for terrorist groups outside of Gaza, including in Lebanon. As UNRWA only operates in conjunction with the host country of operations, keeping operations in Jerusalem open after Israel declared it illegal would not just make it operating against Israeli law but its own principles.
So UNRWA acts defiantly, even though in knows full well that it is doing so illegally.
It is reminiscent of UN Security Council Resolution 2334 which made it illegal for Israeli Jews to live east of the 1949 Armistice Lines with Jordan (E49AL), including the Old City of Jerusalem. It is a patently antisemitic law, enshrined after nearly three-quarters of a million Jews already live in the area, so Israel ignores it and allows Jews to continue to buy and build homes in the area.
The press often labels Jews who live in E49AL as “settlers,” whether they live in new settlements or large cities. The term “settlement” is a wandering noun which travels with antisemites who label Jews as illegal trespassers. Media compounds the narrative, often appending language “which most of the world considers illegal” whenever discussing a “settlement.”
Will that same media now label UNRWA’s operations in Gaza and the “West Bank” as illegal? Or will it prefer to mock Israeli law, quite the opposite of its christening antisemitic UNSC Res. 2334.
Will members of the UN Security Council consider trading Israel’s ban of UNRWA with rescinding the antisemitic UNSC Resolution 2334 to facilitate aid to Gaza and promote coexistence? It has never been the modus operandi of the United Nations, but the times, they are a changin’.
The New York Times, Al Jazeera and other anti-Israel media often quote the number of people killed by Hamas on October 7 and then the number of Gazans killed in an effort to show a disproportionate figure in casualties. As described on IsraelAnalysis.com “The Quantitative Shield for A Qualitative Problem,” the intentions of each side is erased, with the Palestinian Arabs seeking a genocidal ethnic cleansing of Jews, while Israel attempts to keep the jihadists from being able to commit such atrocities again.
The issue of the quantitative telling is also grossly misleading.
The New York Times deceptively frames the conflict of Israelis killed and Gazans killed
The anti-Israel propaganda uses a number of deliberately misleading tactics and phrases to inflame anger against Israel in its defensive war. The tactics include:
Israel’s dead are only from a single day, while Gazan dead are totaled over 15 months
Gazans are separated from their popular leadership of Hamas in describing the attackers as from “Hamas,” while the Gazan dead are “Palestinians”
Israel is described as launching the war in response to the Hamas attack, rather than Gazans launching the war
Iran, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen and several Palestinian Arab terrorist groups east of the 1949 Armistice Lines (E49AL) are part of the Iranian proxies war against Israel; this is not a war of one local militant group against Israel
Hamas is never highlighted as a declared terrorist group by the United States and several western countries
Qatar-owned Hamas propaganda outlet Al Jazeera describes the war as being launched by Israel
Many Israelis have been killed since October 7, 2023, but those hundreds of dead soldiers are excluded in the anti-Israel account. The multifront war with 10,000+ projectiles fired at Israel is completely ignored in trying to make Gaza look like the single, small party in a fight against Israel.
Hamas is not just a “group” or “militants.” They are the ruling the government of Gaza. They were popularly elected to 58% of the Palestinian parliament in 2006 and continue to hold such representation. They continue to be the most popular Palestinian political party in every poll, and a majority of Gazans supported the October 7 massacre of Israelis. The war wasn’t just led by Hamas militants but a genocidal war supported by Gazans.
And the war was also supported by jihadists around the Middle East including Hezbollah in Lebanon, the government of Iran and the Houthis in Yemen. Each launched numerous missiles against Israel in support of the Gazan genocidal war.
A proper accounting of the history of this war will show several jihadi armies attacking Israel and killing well over the 1,200 people murdered on the first day of the war, with each army routed by the Israeli Defense Forces. It will show that the initial perpetrators of the war hid like cowards underneath their families for fifteen months, and Israel managed to keep the civilian death toll much lower than the 74% of Gaza which are women and children under 18 years old.
History will also judge the socialist-jihadi alliance which waged a propaganda war against Israel, and the gross misstatements made repeatedly to fan the flames of antisemitism from Australia to Canada.
