In October 2025, the Baháʼí Gardens in Haifa Israel shimmered under evening lights as thousands strolled the terraces surrounding the golden Shrine of the Báb. The event, “Terraces by Night,” invited everyone — Israelis, tourists, diplomats, Muslims, Christians, Jews — to share in quiet wonder. It was a celebration of beauty and peace, the essence of a faith that teaches the unity of mankind.
“The Bahá’í Gardens and the Shrine located in them are a religious and cultural asset of the highest order for Haifa and the State of Israel, and their spectacular beauty is an extraordinary global phenomenon. The connection between the city of Haifa and the Bahá’í Faith and the gardens is a unique bond of brotherhood and connection, because Haifa is a symbol of shared life.”
– Haifa Mayor Yona Yahav
That same faith is banned or persecuted across much of the Middle East. In Iran, where the Baháʼí Faith began, believers are barred from universities, their cemeteries desecrated, their homes seized. In Yemen, the Houthi regime has deported Baháʼís and outlawed their assemblies. In Qatar, a country that funds global propaganda about human rights, Baháʼís have been detained and denied employment. The list goes on: Christians face church burnings in Iraq and Egypt; Yazidis were enslaved by ISIS; Jews are long gone from the Arab world that once housed thriving communities.
The pattern is unmistakable — a region where religion is invoked constantly, yet religious freedom barely exists. Theocratic and authoritarian regimes claim divine legitimacy while erasing those who believe differently. Hatred of Jews may be the most visible strain, but the intolerance runs deeper: a rejection of pluralism itself.
Against that backdrop, Israel stands as an anomaly. The Baháʼí World Centre — the faith’s spiritual heart — sits on Mount Carmel, Haifa, Israel by choice, not exile. Baháʼís are forbidden by their own laws to proselytize in Israel, yet they flourish there. Muslims pray in mosques, Christians ring church bells, Druze maintain their shrines. It is imperfect coexistence, but coexistence nonetheless — a rare reality in a region where diversity elsewhere draws death sentences. Israel is the only country in the world where the religious majority does not make up the majority of annual tourists (Christians make up more than 50% of tourists to Israel each year).
Various pilgrims file in through the Jaffa Gate in the Old City of Jerusalem in April 2017 (photo: First One Through)
Even the United Nations, which rarely misses a chance to criticize Israel, cannot ignore this hypocrisy. In December 2024, it condemned Iran stating the “dramatic rise in persecution against Baha’i women is an alarming escalation.” Yet it has remained silent on Qatar, whose wealth buys global silence — from universities, media, and even diplomats who recite the language of tolerance while pocketing the proceeds of repression.
The Baháʼí Faith preaches that humanity is one family. In Haifa, that message is literal — thousands of visitors walking through open gates, cared for by volunteers of every background. It’s a vision of what the Middle East could be if faith were not used as a weapon.
The Baháʼís open their gardens in Israel while their co-religionists suffer in silence around the Muslim Middle East. They celebrate while others cower. And they do it in the one nation in the region where the doors of worship remain open for those willing to coexist peacefully.
Much of the attention on the Balfour Declaration—issued on November 2, 1917—focuses on the United Kingdom’s pledge to “facilitate” “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” Israel-haters rage at this clause, claiming that Jews had no historical connection to their ancestral homeland and that Britain had no right to “hand over” immigration rights from local Arabs to Jews.
Balfour Declaration
On the anniversary of the Declaration in 1943, Heinrich Himmler of Nazi Germany sent a telegram to the “Grand Mufti” of Jerusalem that Nazis and Arabs had the same enemies – Jewish invaders. In 2016, the President of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas demanded an apology and reparations from Britain for issuing the Balfour Declaration, having repeatedly failed to destroy the Jewish State.
Telegram from Heinrich Himmler to Amin al-Husseini on November 2, 1943
But there’s another part of that same document that antisemites also detest. The closing line reads:
“…nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.”
That final clause—protecting Jews’ rights around the world—is precisely what modern antisemitic movements are trying to undermine. Groups like Within Our Lifetime, CAIR, and the Democratic Socialists of America openly campaign to dismantle what they deride as “Jewish power” in America.
They smear Jews as self-serving “capitalists,” accuse them of exploiting “Black and Brown bodies” for profit (as Rep. Rashida Tlaib has said), and seek to push Jews to the margins of public life—all because Jews affirm that the land of Israel is their homeland.
A century after the Balfour Declaration, its promise remains under attack—not only in the Jewish homeland but wherever Jews dare to live proud and free.
The United Nations Relief and Works Agency, UNRWA, declares that it operates on four humanitarian principles — humanity, neutrality, impartiality, and independence. It is none of those things.
UNRWA is unlike any other UN agency. It is not the UNHCR, which manages refugees from every nation and conflict on earth. UNRWA is a creature of exception — created for a particular people, in a particular region, in a particular war.
The agency claims it was established to address the plight of refugees from Palestine following the 1948–49 Arab-Israeli War. But was that truly its purpose? When the fighting ended, thousands of Jews were also expelled from their homes east of the 1949 Armistice Lines (E49AL) — from Jerusalem’s Old City, from Hebron, and across Transjordan’s illegally occupied territory. They, too, were refugees from Palestine. Did UNRWA help any of them? No.
Jews expelled from the Old City of Jerusalem via the Zion Gate by the army of Transjordan
From its inception, UNRWA was built to serve Arabs alone. Even when those same Arabs became full Jordanian citizens, the agency continued to provide them with housing, food, education, and medical care — benefits that by any logical standard should have ended once citizenship was granted. Instead, UNRWA preserved refugeehood as an inheritance, not a temporary condition.
Over time, UNRWA’s mission has morphed from relief to perpetuation. It has shown itself highly partisan, politically entangled, and morally compromised. Its schools and clinics may operate under the UN flag, but the agency’s allegiance is often indistinguishable from the politics of rejectionism that dominate its host territories.
During the 2023 Gaza war, UNRWA boasted that only it had the infrastructure to provide food, education, and healthcare to the Gazan population. Yet when 250 Israelis were dragged into Gaza as hostages, where was this agency of “humanity”? Did it deliver a single bandage or calorie to the kidnapped Israelis held underground? Did it condemn their abduction, or even acknowledge their suffering? It did not. UNRWA’s humanity proved selective, its independence nonexistent.
Its operations in Gaza function only through integration with Hamas, the political-terrorist organization that rules the territory. Schools double as weapons depots; employees have been implicated in massacres; aid is distributed by political loyalty, not human need. Leaders at the OCHA, another UN “humanitarian” group, are not shy to say they view Hamas a legitimate political representatives of Palestinians, not as a terrorist group.
UNRWA now has additional offices outside of its field operations. It opened an office in Turkey to “expand its political and financial support base,” backed by the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), a political group. Very political. Neither independent nor neutral.
UNRWA is not a neutral humanitarian actor. It is a political instrument masquerading as one. It fails every principle it proclaims.
So long as UNRWA exists, it will preserve resentment, dependency and hatred. That agency founded in the shadow of war is the leading obstacle to peace.
To visit Poland is to walk among ghosts. The thriving Jewish civilization that once filled its towns and marketplaces was almost completely erased. Three million Jews were targeted for extermination — a number too vast to grasp by walking through silent cemeteries. The absence alone cannot speak the full horror.
To stand where synagogues were razed, where schools once taught Torah and arithmetic, where playgrounds once rang with Yiddish laughter, is to feel the emptiness press against your chest. It forces the imagination to repopulate the void — to summon the Jewish ghosts who linger, waiting for conscience to remember them.
It is easier to look at the living. Many Poles today are the grandchildren of those who watched as their Jewish neighbors were rounded up — and sometimes finished the work themselves when survivors returned seeking their homes. They became stand-ins for the killers of yesteryear, heirs to silence, envy, and complicity.
Now another people walks amid ruins. In Gaza, millions return to their shattered neighborhoods under a ceasefire, and we are told they have survived a “genocide” at the hands of Jews. Yet the number of Palestinian Arabs has grown, not diminished — a population larger than before the war they themselves began. They tread among the skeletons of broken buildings built atop their army’s tunnels, while ghosts — Israeli civilians burned alive in their kibbutzim and those taken hostage and murdered in Gaza — cry out from the ashes.
I ponder the ghosts of genocide: the murdered and the murderers; the societies that spawned the slaughter; the peaceful towns that became infernos.
Infrastructure shelters ghosts. Societies are haunted by the ones they create, both killer and killed. The unseen dead can no longer showcase their dancing on the one hand, or lust to murder, on the other.
There are scarcely any Jews left in Poland; their ghosts appear only to those who seek them. In Gaza, the ghosts are not gone. They walk the streets, armed and unrepentant — not spirits of victims, but kinsmen of murderers, now turning on one another.
Poland’s haunting is one of silence — an absence so total it chills the air. The ghosts there do not cry out; they wait to be remembered. Gaza’s haunting is the opposite: a cacophony of rage that refuses reflection. Its ghosts are not silent but screaming — not victims unburied, but hatreds unrepented.
Poland’s soil holds the murdered; Gaza’s streets still host the spirit of the murderers. One ghost asks to be mourned; the other demands to be judged.
The haunting does not end with time. It lingers wherever truth is buried, and it deepens each time the living deny the past that shaped them.
Only when a people can face its ghosts — naming both the murdered and the murderers — can it begin to live freely again.
For decades, Arab and Muslim leaders have fed their people a poisonous myth — that Israel dreams of ruling the Middle East, that it seeks to drive out Arabs and Muslims, that its goal is a genocidal “Greater Israel.” They have said it from Cairo pulpits and Riyadh conferences, shouted it at the United Nations, and woven it into the political DNA of generations.
Yet reality told a different story — 230 straight days of restraint.
From October 26, 2024, when Israel obliterated Iran’s air-defense network, until June 13, 2025, when it finally struck Iran’s nuclear weapons sites, Israel had total air supremacy over the Islamic Republic. For more than seven months, Israel could have flattened Tehran, crippled the oil fields of Khuzestan, or plunged the country into darkness by bombing power plants and airports. Instead, it waited.
The Iranian regime — the self-declared spearhead of the “Axis of Resistance” — had launched a multi-front war: Hezbollah in the north, the Houthis from the south, militias in Iraq, drones from Syria. Yet Israel responded surgically, destroying Iran’s air defenses and exposing the regime’s weakness. Then it stopped. No mass civilian targets, no vengeance against cities — only vigilance.
When Israel finally acted again, its aim was limited and precise: the nuclear enrichment facilities that Tehran had openly threatened to use to annihilate the Jewish state. The operation was not about conquest; it was about survival.
Had the situation been reversed — had Iran dismantled Israel’s air defenses — the results would have been catastrophic. Iran’s own rhetoric, and its record of missile and drone attacks on Israeli cities, show exactly what it would have done: unleashed devastation on civilian population centers. Annihilating the “Zionist regime” as an excuse for eliminating the the threat of a “Greater Israel.”
For 230 days, Israel had the power to destroy Iran and chose not to, just as it could have obliterated Gaza from the first day of the war. Those months are the clearest refutation of the propaganda long sold across the Muslim world about “Greater Israel” and “genocide.” Israel does not seek domination or extermination — it seeks to live.
Two hundred thirty days of restraint. Two hundred thirty days of truth.
There is a growing movement around the world to label the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization. It is a cause whose time has come — and whose passage is long overdue.
The Muslim Brotherhood is not merely a political or religious movement. It is the ideological parent of countless extremist groups, from al-Qaeda to Hamas. The Brotherhood’s goal has always been clear: the creation of an Islamist world order governed by sharia law and fueled by perpetual jihad. It is the intellectual engine behind modern Islamic terrorism.
Hamas — officially designated by the United States and European Union as a Foreign Terrorist Organization — is the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. Its 1988 charter cites the Brotherhood as its ideological and organizational source. The brutal October 7 massacre, the ongoing rocket attacks, and the indoctrination of Gazan youth into genocidal hatred all stem from this same poisonous root.
Several nations – Muslim Arab nations – understand the threat. Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain have all formally banned the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist entity. So have other responsible actors in the global north, including Austria and Russia. Yet the group still finds safe haven in Qatar and Turkey — two countries that finance, arm, and politically shield Hamas.
These sponsors of Islamist militancy must not be allowed any role in Gaza’s future. To invite them into post-war planning is to guarantee the next war. As Khaled Abu Toameh says “Inviting Qatar and Turkey to play a role in the Gaza Strip means again bringing Iran in through the back door.” To empower these countries diplomatically is to ensure that peace will never take hold. The Brotherhood’s network thrives on chaos, martyrdom, and perpetual victimhood; its ideology is incompatible with coexistence or modernization.
Turkey’s first lady, Emine Erdogan, was recognized with an award by the US Council of Muslim Organizations (USCMO) in New York in 2022. The award was personally delivered by Ousama Jammal, a key Muslim Brotherhood figure in the US. USCMO has been accused of ties to the Muslim Brotherhood.
If the international community truly seeks an enduring peace in the Middle East, it must begin with moral clarity. The Muslim Brotherhood and its affiliates must be banned — everywhere. Those who fund or defend them must be excluded from the table. Only when the root of jihadist ideology is removed can the region finally begin to heal.
U.S. President Donald Trump and Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan shake hands. Turkey’s involvement in Gaza with Trump’s blessing guarantees future bloodshed with Israel; and the next US president may not care.
If one were to build a museum chronicling how a people educated generations toward hatred and eradication, the Palestinian Arabs would tragically merit their own institution. The Museum of Genocidal Intent would not showcase armies, the tools of genocide. It would display ideas, laws, sermons, and schoolbooks that made destruction a virtue and coexistence a sin.
Entrance Hall – The Charter of Death
Visitors first encounter the founding documents: the Hamas Charter (1988) and early Fatah Constitution passages promising Israel’s annihilation. There are ballots underneath from the 2006 parliamentary elections with articles alongside showing the Stateless Arabs from Palestine (SAPs) electing Hamas to 58% of parliament as a first action of breathing self-determination. As one leaves the room, leaders—from Arafat to Abbas to Haniyeh—chant “From the River to the Sea” and “We love death more than you love life.“
Gallery I – Educating for Erasure
School desks and children’s cartoons line the room. In cases, textbooks from the Palestinian Authority show lessons which erase Israel from maps. UNRWA teachers like Afaf Talab have Facebook posts featuring wishes that God kills the Jews. A 9th grade lesson calls the firebombing of an Israeli bus a “barbeque party.” There is a coloring book hanging on the wall used in a fifth grade class in an UNRWA school which has a flag dripping in blood in front of the al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, with a map of Israel alongside, erased into “Palestine.”
Coloring book from an UNRWA fifth grade class tying religion, prayer, death and destruction of the Jewish State
A television plays cartoons from Hamas TV shows, showing ultra-Orthodox Jews and Israeli soldiers digging under al Aqsa mocking Arabs and Muslims who are “asleep” as the crooked nosed-Jews threaten the mosque.
Interactive displays allow visitors to click on various videos from summer camps in Gaza and east of the 1949 Armistice Lines (E49AL/ “West Bank”). Young girls sing about “igniting an intifada,” encouraged “to shoot all the Jews” and taught if the Jews don’t leave Palestine, all of them should be “slaughtered.”
And the music. Popular Arabic songs play throughout the museum. They call for Jews to leave the land or be killed or kidnapped.
Gallery II – Icons of Murder
Here hang portraits of those celebrated for killing Jews: Dalal Mughrabi, Yahya Ayyash, and others. Under each image scroll the names of their victims—families, schoolchildren, passengers. Nearby, official “martyrs’ fund” ledgers show stipends paid to convicted attackers from the Palestinian government. In the center of the room are mock ups of the various schools, public squares and soccer tournaments named for the “martyrs.”
Gallery III – International Complicity
Painted UN blue, this hall traces how global institutions enabled indoctrination. Pictures of leaders of various European countries including Belgium and Norway that fund the schools and squares named after terrorists. Copies of numerous United Nations resolutions cover the walls, which condemn Israel but not Hamas, which make it illegal for Jews to live in the Old City of Jerusalem, and illegal to pray at their holiest site on the Temple Mount.
A large picture of the entrance to the UN-run “refugee” camp in Bethlehem with a key on top of a keyhole portal emphasizes that the international community is the vehicle for Arabs to eradicate the Jewish State.
Gallery IV – Blood Narratives
Walls of newspapers and posters accuse Jews of medieval crimes: poisoning wells, harvesting organs. Animated panels compare Nazi caricatures to modern Palestinian cartoons—the imagery identical. Loudspeakers replay sermons calling Jews “descendants of apes and pigs.”
Interactive charts present PCPSR and other surveys over time:
December 2023 – about three-quarters of Palestinians called the October 7 attack “correct.”
Majorities favored continued “armed struggle.”
Roughly two-thirds support killing Jewish civilians in Israel in every poll since 2000
Gallery VI – Jerusalem: The Theater of Denial
A model of the Al-Aqsa plaza plays footage of Murabitat women harassing Jewish visitors to the Temple Mount.
PA President Mahmoud Abbas and other PA officials can be seen on videos claiming “Jews have no history in Jerusalem.” Audio of chants—“With blood and soul we will redeem you O Aqsa”—fills the room. Hamas leaders promise to repeat the October 7 “al Aqsa flood” massacre “again and again.”
PA president Mahmoud Abbas glorifying death on behalf of Jerusalem
Gallery VII – The Forgotten Ethnic Cleansing of Jews
Artifacts from before 1967 tell the story before the story:
The massacre and expulsion of Jews from Hebron in 1929
Synagogues Destroyed: photos of Jerusalem’s Old City after Jordan’s takeover—58 synagogues razed.
Expulsion: maps marking every Jewish family removed from the Old City.
Jordan’s illegal annexation of part of Israel in 1950.
Gallery VIII – Lynching: Public Violence as Spectacle
The public spectacle of the killing for the crowds is highlighted in the last room of the permanent collection.
Hebron 1929 – photos and testimonies of the massacre where 67 Jews were murdered
Ramallah 2000 – two Israeli reservists beaten to death by a mob; a photograph of a man showing blood-stained hands became an icon of the Second Intifada. The crowd cheers.
Gaza, 2023 – pictures of Gazans cheering as dead Israeli women are paraded through the streets.
The bloody hands of a Palestinian man after lynching an Israeli in Ramallah has become a symbol of the genocidal intent
Special Exhibit – The Sbarro Massacre: Innocence Targeted
At the museum’s center stands a quiet, glass-walled room marking August 9, 2001, the bombing of the Sbarro pizzeria in Jerusalem.
Bombing at Sbarro restaurant in the Palestinian terrorist war on Israeli Jews
Artifacts include: fragments of the restaurant sign and surviving menu board; the broken guitar of 15-year-old victim Malki Roth; children’s shoes and schoolbooks retrieved from the site.
Chronology Panel: maps trace the attacker’s route and later trials of the planners.
Testimony Wall: written reflections from victims’ families—the Roths, Greenbaums, Schijveschuurders—describe loss and their ongoing quest for justice.
Media Archive: displays neutral summaries of press interviews and court transcripts noting the convicted organizer’s open lack of remorse, contrasted with international outrage and U.S. extradition efforts.
A video concludes with the terrorist Ahlam al-Tamimi stating how proud she was to have killed “religious Jews” and eight children.
Her words hang over the door as one leaves the building: “the philosophy of death is very difficult to understand.” She lives as a free woman walking the streets of Jordan today, a hero to millions.
Interview with terrorist Ahlam al Tamimi who has no regrets for killing women and children at a pizzeria
Epilogue
The Museum of Genocidal Intent does not exist, yet its exhibits do—scattered through classrooms, speeches, and monuments. Each artifact documents a choice: to teach vengeance or to teach life. Only when the real-world versions of these exhibits are dismantled will the possibility of peace move from behind glass into the open air.
For decades, Palestinians have believed there were three paths to statehood—and they pursued them simultaneously.
1. Violence. Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Fatah’s militias and several Palestinian Arab terrorist groups waged terror wars, convinced that bloodshed brought gains: the First Intifada led to the Oslo Accords; the Second Intifada drove Israel from Gaza and parts of the West Bank; the 2021 riots were hailed for halting evictions in Sheikh Jarrah. The October 7 massacre, backed by roughly 75% of Palestinians, was the latest in that grim pattern.
2. International Pressure. Even as rockets fell, Palestinian allies abroad pressed boycotts, divestment, sanctions, and United Nations resolutions, seeking to isolate Israel diplomatically and economically until it yielded territory.
3. Negotiations. The Palestinian Authority claimed to prefer talks to gain legitimacy and foreign aid—but insisted on maximalist demands: all the West Bank, all of eastern Jerusalem, a Jew-free Palestine, and a mass “right of return.” Yasser Arafat walked away from a state in 2000 and launched the Second Intifada instead. His successor, Mahmoud Abbas, also spoke of peace while undermining it—keeping the notorious “pay-to-slay” stipends for terrorists’ families and, in a January 2018 speech, blessing those who chose violence even as he professed support for diplomacy.
Polling has consistently shown the order of Palestinian preference: violence first, global pressure second, negotiations last.
The Cost of Failed Strategies
Both violence and sanctions have brought suffering to Palestinians themselves. Suicide bombings and rocket wars prompted Israel to build the security fence, which restricted movement and economic activity. The October 7 attack provoked a massive war in which Gaza was devastated and Hamas decimated. Attempts to use international pressure backfired as well, leading Israel to withhold funds from the PA and tighten restrictions.
Israel fights like a cornered raccoon—fiercely, without backing down when attacked. Every round of violence has left Palestinians weaker and poorer.
In the recent war, Israel scored a double victory: It destroyed Hamas’s military capability, killing an estimated 25,000 fighters, and it refused to bow to global pressure, pressing on despite UN condemnations, ICC threats, and warnings of diplomatic isolation.
This shattered the long-held belief that if terror failed, the world could still coerce Israel into retreat.
A New Reality — and a Call to the Arab World
The old strategies of terror and economic warfare have failed and only deepened Palestinian misery. The third path—real negotiations—remains the only way forward.
Israel and the United States now hope the Arab world will engage Israel constructively, encouraging Palestinian leaders to abandon impossible UN demands and accept the reality of Israel’s permanence. Clinging to maximalist positions will only bring more rounds of bloodshed and despair.
And an Alternative Reality — Coming for Diaspora Jews
While Israel feels that it may have finally fought a war that could lead to long-term peace, there are those who still cling to eradicating the Jewish State. The international “Free Palestine” fighters do not want to see Israel holding onto the Old City of Jerusalem nor limiting the entry of millions of Arabs who claim UN’s mantle of “refugees.” The light at the end of the tunnel for them is not coexistence but a continued “Nakba,” a disaster.
So they are revamping the second front of international pressure, from targeting Israel to the soft targets of diaspora Jews.
They are chanting to “globalize the Intifada” to bring the war to every Jew and pro-Israel person and organization. The incineration of the kibbutzim in Israel on the Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah was echoed in the burning of the Jewish governor of Pennsylvania’s home on the holiday of Passover. Burning Jews alive in Kibbutz Be’eri was mirrored in burning Jews in Boulder, Colorado.
Burned kibbutzGov. Shapiro burned home
While Israel sees that it is in a strongest position in the region since its reestablishment which may finally enable an enduring peace, the anti-Israel horde has opened a new front on the global diaspora.
The international pressure of the BDS camp has not been defeated but inflamed. They are ratcheting up their smears of “apartheid” to “genocide,” and marking local Jews as co-conspirators.
While Israel won the Iranian proxies war, the Free Palestine camp is taking millions of new hostages – diaspora Jewry. Who will fight for them?
“Why do the nations rage, and the peoples plot in vain?”— Psalm 2:1
Saudi Arabia – the kingdom which Israel hoped would next join the Abraham Accords – sought to pressure Israel into ending its defensive war in Gaza by rallying nations of the Global North to recognize a State of Palestine. It found a partner in France, which successfully pulled the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia into the orbit of recognition. In September 2025 at the United Nations, the group jointly declared their acknowledgment of a Palestinian state—with caveats—but the symbolism was unmistakable.
Israel did not budge. It viewed the coordinated announcement as an alarming reward for the genocidal Hamas regime that had unleashed war on October 7 two years earlier.
Enter the United States. President Donald Trump had tasked developer and confidant Steve Witkoff to lead a back-channel negotiation with Hamas for the release of Israeli hostages and an end to hostilities. Jared Kushner joined the effort more forcefully in September, unveiling a “20-point plan” aimed at ending the two-year war and reshaping the region’s political future.
To counter the Saudi-French gambit, Trump built his own coalition. The U.S. secured the backing of several Arab and Muslim nations from the Global South—including Qatar, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, Indonesia, Pakistan, Türkiye, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt —for its peace framework. By October, the administration succeeded in gathering the leaders of 27 countries from across the North and South, including some that had just recognized Palestine, to fly to Egypt to sign what was billed as a ceasefire agreement.
A summit to support ending the more than two-year Israel-Hamas war in Gaza after a breakthrough ceasefire deal, Monday, Oct. 13, 2025, in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt labeled “Peace 2025”
It was a mirage. Neither of the warring parties—Israel or Hamas—attended. The event was instead diplomatic theater, meant to transform a ceasefire proposal into a movement for regional peace. Trump designed the event to flip the script.
Where Saudi Arabia and France tried to impose the weight of the Global North on Israel, the United States sought to use the combined weight of both hemispheres on Hamas. The former demanded an immediate path to a two-state solution; the latter demanded the end of Hamas rule.
The Moral Gravity
The story of this moment is not only about geopolitics, but about moral gravity. The nations of the world have grown accustomed to weighing Israel’s every move while ignoring the crimes of its enemies. They call for “balance” in a war that began with mass murder, rape, and hostage-taking. They lecture the victim to compromise while the aggressor reloads. The UN Security Council could have easily passed resolutions to push for an end to the war if they had just condemned Hamas, but repeatedly refused to do so.
The weight of nations once meant the defense of justice and the pursuit of peace. Today, it is too often the ballast of perfidy—dragging down the innocent under the pretense of even-handedness.
Israel, standing increasingly alone, may yet prove that the true measure of a nation is not in the number of its allies, but in the steadiness of its conscience. It is fortunate to have President Trump in the White House as it shoulders this weight once again.
The tight bond between Israel and the United States has continued, despite Americans starting to sour on Israel since 2015.
“Well, thank you for asking that. To make sure I answer you fully, let’s first be clear on what a Zionist is. It’s someone who believes in two facts and one principle.
The first fact is that Jews are a people. The second fact is that the Jewish people originate in the Land of Israel.
The principle is that Jews should have self-determination in their homeland, the Land of Israel.
Yes, I believe in both of those facts and that principle. You can plainly see that nothing about Zionism has anything to do with any particular government, leader, or policy.”
That’s it. Calm, factual, and impossible to refute without revealing one’s true bias.
Now, it can very well be that some people simply believe Israel shouldn’t exist — and therefore call themselves anti-Zionists. But as Israel is a living, breathing reality today, to oppose its existence is not a theoretical stance about 1948; it’s a desire to dismantle a sovereign Jewish nation. That’s not political criticism — that’s eliminationism. That’s the desire of many groups including the People’s Forum, Within Our Lifetime and the Democratic Socialists of America.
In today’s world, anti-Zionism isn’t just a philosophical disagreement. It’s an active hostility toward Jewish self-determination, an echo of the same hate that fueled the October 7 massacre. It’s far more lethal and toxic than opposing the idea of creating another Arab state in the Middle East to be called “Palestine,” especially one that has opposed coexistence with the indigenous Jews for over a century.
To deny Jewish peoplehood, heritage, and rights in their homeland is not progressivism — it’s prejudice wrapped in the language of activism.
So, the next time someone smugly demands you “renounce Zionism,” repeat the verses above. Because once you strip away the slogans and hashtags, all that’s left of anti-Zionism is anti-Jewish animus.
First One Through 
