Jerusalem is a city of gates. Stone thresholds worn smooth by centuries of feet. Arches that promise passage, and others that deny it.
Nowhere is this more literal—and more symbolic—than at the gates to the Temple Mount.
There are many gates along its walls. Some are sealed, some are ceremonial, and some are active. But in practice, Muslims ascend and descend freely through multiple entrances, while non-Muslims are funneled through a single ramp, tightly controlled, time-limited, and revocable at will.
Group of Muslim women come down from the Jewish Temple Mount at the Cotton Merchants’ Gate (photo: First One Through)
This is not accidental. It is policy.
Muslims enter through gates embedded naturally in the Old City’s fabric—the Cotton Merchants’ Gate among them. There, the walls are alive. Candy shops spill color onto the stones. Children’s clothing hangs in soft defiance of gravity. The scent of sweets mixes with dust and history. Life flows in and out, up and down, as it has for generations.
Jews, by contrast, are stopped.
They are turned away from nearly every gate. Not questioned. Not debated. Simply blocked.
Despite the Temple Mount being the holiest site in Judaism, Jews are told—by police, by signs, by precedent—that they may not enter as worshippers.
A solitary Jew is blocked from ascending the steps to the Jewish Temple Mount, the holiest location in Judaism, because he is a Jew. (photo: First One Through)
They are redirected instead to a single entrance ramp, detached from the Old City’s living arteries. The ramp rises from the edge of the Western Wall plaza, a vast open expanse that functions less like a neighborhood and more like a giant stone parking lot. From there, Jews may ascend only during narrow windows, under escort, forbidden to pray, forbidden to whisper, forbidden even to move their lips in devotion.
Jews are limited to prayer at the Western Wall, a supporting wall to the Temple Mount. The ramp to the Mughrabi Gate (top right) is the only gate of the ten operating gates where Jews can pass onto the Temple Mount, in limited numbers, at limited times. (photo: First One Through)
Jews are told to make do.
Make do with praying to a retaining wall of the Temple Mount. Make do with history filtered through permission. Make do with holiness at a distance.
This arrangement is often called the “status quo,” as if it were ancient, neutral, or inevitable. It is none of those things. It is modern. It is enforced. And it rests on a single premise: Islamic supremacy over the site requires Jewish silence at Judaism’s holiest place.
The irony is almost unbearable. Judaism sanctified this mountain long before Islam existed. The Temples stood here before the Qur’an was written, before the Dome of the Rock was imagined, before the word “status quo” could be used to freeze injustice in place.
And yet today, Jewish presence itself is treated as a provocation.
Not violence. Not disruption. Presence.
The gates tell the story more honestly than any diplomatic statement ever could. Gates that welcome. Gates that redirect. Gates that close.
It’s a caste system familiar to Black Americans. “For Whites Only” is now “For Muslims Only” for 90% of the gates to the Temple Mount. “Negro Entrance” read “Non-Muslim Entrance” is plastered atop a ramp in the far corner of the Temple Mount. While racial Jim Crow laws ended in the U.S. decades ago, Jews remain subject to open religious discrimination at their holiest location. At the insistence of the United Nations.
In Jerusalem, everyone speaks of coexistence. But coexistence cannot survive when one faith ascends freely and another is barred from its own summit.
People tend to both forget and exaggerate. Today, many Americans speak as if antisemitism vanished for decades and only resurfaced after the October 7, 2023 massacre of Israelis by the Arabs of Gaza. The narrative goes: everything was fine, and then suddenly the world turned against Jews.
Jews have always been the most targeted group for hate crimes in the United States on a per-capita basis. Jews were assaulted, synagogues were attacked, and Jewish centers were bombed long before social media existed to broadcast the hate. The 1970s alone saw a litany of terror: Jewish places targeted, flights to Israel hijacked, hostages separated by religion, and Jewish children born into a world where the UN itself declared Zionism—a core component of Jewish identity—to be racism. That infamous 1975 UN General Assembly Resolution 3379 did not merely insult Jews; it institutionalized antisemitism on a global stage.
But something remarkable happened in 1991. U.S. Ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s crusade finally came to fruition, and the UN revoked its poisonous declaration. For the first time in modern history, the Jewish story—people, land, and identity—was not officially stigmatized by the world’s central diplomatic body. Israel was no longer framed as a racist project; Zionism was permitted to exist as a normal national movement. With that reversal, Jews in the diaspora experienced something astonishing: a geopolitical tailwind.
Begin Center hosts event in Jerusalem about 50th anniversary of UNGA Resolution 3379, in December 2025 – a condemnation of the United Nations
The Jewish Golden Years had begun.
From 1991 through 2016, Jewish life flourished across the West. Israel integrated into global markets, made peace with former enemies, and became a hub of innovation admired even by countries without diplomatic ties. Antisemitic incidents did not disappear, but they lost their ideological legitimacy. The world’s leading institutions were no longer branding Jewish self-determination as a crime. Jews could breathe—never fully secure, but broadly accepted.
That period ended with a vote.
In December 2016, the Obama administration allowed UN Security Council Resolution 2334 to pass—a measure far more extreme than the 1975 resolution it resembled. The 1975 General Assembly resolution slandered Zionism; UNSC 2334 criminalized Jewish presence. It declared that Jews living anywhere east of the 1949 Armistice Lines—including the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City, the holiest ground in Judaism—are in violation of international law. Jewish prayer at the Western Wall was, according to the world’s most powerful diplomatic forum, an offense.
Hasidic Jews at the Kotel in Jerusalem’s Old City, learning, praying, and inserting wishes into cracks in the wall (photo: First One Through)
It was not merely a political resolution. It was the legalization of antisemitism.
By 2018, Jews were being murdered in Pittsburgh and Poway. On college campuses, BDS campaigns metastasized into doctrinal dogma. In public schools, students were taught that Jews are not indigenous to the Land of Israel but “white Europeans” with no ancestral claim—a complete inversion of historical fact. Jews were physically beaten in the streets of New York and Los Angeles during the May 2021 Gaza conflict, years before the post–October 7 mobs marched with chants to “globalize the intifada.”
By the time American cities filled with crowds celebrating Hamas’s massacre, the unraveling was already underway.
The Golden Years—the 25 years of relative acceptance—were gone.
For generations, Jews believed that Israel’s existence itself guaranteed Jewish safety. The 1970s proved that was untrue. The present moment proves it again. A Jewish state cannot protect its people if the world delegitimizes it, demonizes it, or criminalizes Jewish presence in Judaism’s holiest places.
The real guarantor of Jewish safety is not Israel’s strength, but the world’s willingness to accept the basic history and human rights of Jews. That legitimacy existed only in a narrow window: from the UN’s repudiation of its Zionism-is-racism libel in 1991 to Obama’s decision to let UNSC Resolution 2334 pass in final days of 2016.
Those twenty-five years were an intermission in a much longer historical pattern. A rare pause in which Jews were not told by the world that their existence—national, historical, spiritual—was a crime.
Since 2016, the message has returned with force: Jews may live, but not there. Jews may pray, but not here. Jews may exist, but only on someone else’s terms.
The Golden Years did not end because Israel faltered, but because the world revoked its permission. Without it, the old hatreds rushed back as if they had never left.
Jews are not witnessing a sudden outbreak of antisemitism. They are living through the collapse of the only era in modern history when the world briefly pretended to accept the Jewish story.
For twenty years, Israel relied on a security barrier to prevent the suicide bombings and shootings of the Second Intifada. It worked. While ninety percent of that barrier was not a concrete wall, but a high-tech fence—cameras, sensors, patrol roads, and layered detection system – it still reduced terror attacks from the West Bank by over 90 percent. Israelis and the Stateless Arabs from Palestine (SAPs) rebuilt their lives believing that a fence, not a fortress, was enough.
Then came October 7.
SAPs crashing through the fence between Gaza and Israel on October 7, 2023
Hamas gunmen bulldozed, exploded, and burned their way through what was—on paper—one of the most advanced border fences in the world. They murdered, raped, tortured, and kidnapped civilians in a genocidal assault that shattered the central premise of Israel’s security doctrine: that a fence and technology could stop an army of terrorists long enough for the IDF to respond.
That assumption is gone.
If a similar surprise assault were launched from the West Bank near the country’s major population centers—Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, the coastal cities—the casualties could be catastrophic. Israel is nine miles wide at its narrowest point. One breach is not a tactical event. It is an existential one.
The Barrier Must Change Because the Threat Has Changed
A fence can be cut, rammed, or climbed. A reinforced, multi-layered wall—physical, electronic, aerial, and subterranean—is a different proposition. The lesson of Gaza is not to abandon the idea of separation, but to upgrade it to match the enemy’s capabilities and intentions.
Israel does not have the luxury of guessing whether future attackers will try to slaughter dozens or thousands. The security architecture must assume the worst case—because the worst case already happened.
In Hashmonaim, Israeli backyards are a stone’s through away from the Security Barrier (photo: First One Through)
Disarming Militias Is Not Just for Gaza
The world is focused on disarming Hamas in Gaza. It must also confront a parallel obligation: militant groups in the West Bank cannot remain armed if there is to be any political horizon, for Palestinian Arabs or Israelis.
If Gaza is demilitarized but the West Bank is not, the threat simply shifts geography. The barrier is not a substitute for disarmament. It is a second line of defense, not the first.
Lasting security requires:
1️⃣ Complete disarmament of organized militant groups seeking Israel’s destruction. 2️⃣ Security control capable of preventing re-armament. 3️⃣ A barrier strong enough to make a surprise attack militarily unachievable.
Without those three components, diplomatic talk of a “future Palestinian state” is not a peace process—it is a gamble with tens of thousands of civilian lives.
A wall is not a symbol of failure. It is the price of survival when the alternative is the erasure of towns near the 1949 Armistice Lines with Jordan.
A move towards coexistence between Israelis and Palestinian Arabs cannot be limited to the threat from Gazans but from West Bank Arabs as well. Disarmament of West Bank Arabs and an upgrade of the security fence must happen now as well.
Peace requires trust. Trust requires time. Time requires security that cannot be breached in seven minutes by men with bulldozers and grenades and genocidal jihadi rage.
Until a day comes when coexistence is real—not chanted, not theorized, not negotiated—Israel must ensure that no armed faction can cross its border. The time to implement that plan is now.
The Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) recently issued yet another condemnation of Israel — this time for considering the death penalty for terrorists who murder Israelis. The outrage was immediate and performative. For one, it claimed that the proposed law was “racist” and being solely for “Palestinian detainees,” as opposed to people who murder. It further argued that Arabs who slaughter Jews should simply be treated as “Prisoners of War,” erasing any and all lines between soldiers and civilians and thereby condemning coexistence.
Wafa report on OIC condemning Israel for considering death penalty for Palestinian “detainees”
Here’s another uncomfortable truth: more than half of the OIC’s 57 member states have the death penalty — and not just for murder.
In Saudi Arabia, people are executed for drug trafficking, sorcery, and “crimes against God.” In Iran, the gallows await not only murderers, but those guilty of “corruption on earth” — a charge so elastic it includes political dissent, homosexuality, and apostasy. In Pakistan, blasphemy can mean death. In Mauritania and Sudan, apostasy itself is a capital crime. In Nigeria, men have been sentenced to death under Sharia courts for same-sex relations.
Yet these same governments now gather in moral indignation because Israel — a democracy under relentless terrorist attack — dares to debate capital punishment for those who slit the throats of families in their beds.
The hypocrisy is staggering.
The OIC has nothing to say when Hamas executes Palestinians in Gaza’s public squares for “collaboration.” It looks away when Iran hangs protesters from cranes, or when Afghanistan’s Taliban conduct public stonings. But when Jews, after burying their children, consider the ultimate penalty for their killers, suddenly the OIC finds its moral voice.
If morality were truly the concern, the OIC would start at home. It would demand an end to hangings for prayer and firing squads for love. But this is theater. Raw antisemitism redressed in sanctimony.
Israel’s debate over the death penalty is about justice for the innocent. The OIC’s silence over its members’ executions is about control of the obedient.
And that’s the dividing line between civilizations: one values life enough to punish those who destroy it; the other kills in the name of piety and calls it peace.
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?
The Palestinian Authority (PA) has perfected the art of self-deception — and the spectacle has become an embarrassment to watch. Its leaders trade in fantasies while their people – and the entire region – suffer the consequences of their delusions.
When President Donald Trump released his 20-point Comprehensive Plan to End the Gaza Conflict, it was explicit: the focus was on fixing Gaza and the PA would have no role. The document said in plain language that the PA would need to be overhauled and reformed before it could ever be trusted as a partner for peace. It deliberately withheld any credit or recognition for the current leadership, recognizing its corruption, incitement, and support for terror. “A technocratic, apolitical Palestinian committee” headed by Trump himself would be the day-after plan for Gaza. Only “qualified Palestinians” would get to sit on such committee, not the UN-lauded PA.
President Trump’s peace plan specifically did not hand control of Gaza to the PA and said the group had to “complete its reform program.”
The plan’s very structure was layered with conditionality — each potential step toward a Palestinian state contingent on verifiable reforms, renunciation of violence and demilitarization. Even then, the most it offered was that maybe one day, post-reform, there could be a pathway to a two-state solution.
The Trump plan layered conditions of “when,” “may” and “pathway” to Palestinian “statehood”
And yet, in a surreal twist, the official PA news agency WAFA ran an article in which Mahmoud Abbas claimed that Trump stood ready to endorse a Palestinian state with “East Jerusalem” as its capital. It was an astonishing fabrication — a complete lie, meant to mask Abbas’s very public humiliation and preserve his illusion of relevance.
Official PA media lied that Trump’s peace plan would establish a new Palestinian State which would follow the “June 4, 1967 borders, with East Jerusalem as its capital”
This distortion was not a misunderstanding; it was intentional misrepresentation, propaganda designed to convince Palestinian Arabs that Abbas still holds the key to their future. But everyone can see through the act. All Abbas and Hamas have delivered is destruction, division, and hatred.
The PA’s falsehoods no longer even convince its own people. Each new lie only underscores its impotence — a government in name only, ruling by inertia and deceit. The tragedy – like the lies – has layers of corruption, hatred, murder and deceit.
The Palestinian people, too, bear responsibility for their choices. They voted for Hamas, a genocidal terrorist movement to 58% of the parliamentary seats which brought death and destruction not only to Israelis but to Palestinians themselves – which the vast majority supported. They elected Mahmoud Abbas, a Holocaust denier and an ineffective president, and now watch him recycle lies and propaganda instead of leadership and reform. The Palestinians voted for failure — and the region has paid the price.
WAFA called the Israeli government an “occupation government”, clearly showing the PA was upset by being sidelined because it sorely needs reform
The Trump plan recognized that hard truth. It was not a welcome mat for Fatah or Hamas, nor a reward for decades of violence and corruption. The plan envisioned a different future entirely. The “day after” will not be another PA regime or HAMAS ruling Gaza, but the first step in a new chapter of deradicalization, where education replaces indoctrination, coexistence replaces hate, and peace is no longer a slogan but a shared reality.
Trump’s plan – as endorsed by Qatar, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, Indonesia, Pakistan, Türkiye, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt – states clearly that a possible Palestinian State will come as a BYPRODUCT of deradicalization and peace, not in order to CREATE the forum for coexistence as offered by France and the United Kingdom. All of which may or may not happen, and most likely after Abbas is long gone.
“Decolonization” has become one of the most fashionable buzzwords of the modern age. It is taught in schools, shouted in protests, and deployed at the United Nations as a moral bludgeon against the West. European imperialists, we are told, robbed indigenous peoples of their land, stripped them of their culture, and erected foreign regimes on stolen soil. The work of decolonization — dismantling those legacies and restoring dignity — has been cast as the great ethical project of our time.
But what of the other colonial power that swept across continents, subjugating peoples and erasing their sacred spaces? What of Islamic imperialism, which invaded the Jewish promised land centuries ago, laying claim to sites that predated Muhammad’s birth by millennia?
Consider Hebron, the resting place of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Sarah, Rebecca, and Leah. For Jews, it is the Ma’arat HaMachpelah, the Cave of the Jewish Matriarchs and Patriarchs — a holy site woven into the very text of Genesis. When Muslim conquerors took over, they renamed it the “Ibrahimi Mosque,” transformed it into a shrine for their own creed, and barred Jews from entering. For seven hundred years, Jews were not even allowed to set foot past the seventh step of the building.
This was not preservation; it was expropriation. A classic colonial tactic: erase the indigenous name, overwrite the meaning, and forbid the natives from practicing their own faith.
But unlike the narratives drilled into young students about European settlers in Africa or Asia, the Jewish story is not told.
In 1967, Israel liberated Hebron, and Jews once again could pray at the burial site of their patriarchs and matriarchs. Slowly, painstakingly, the work of de-Islamification has begun — not by erasing the Muslim presence, but by restoring Jewish rights. Jews may now pray, Jews may now enter, Jews may now sanctify their ancestral home.
And in June 2025, a historic step was taken: the Israeli government transferred administration of the second holiest site in Judaism to Jewish leaders in Kiryat Arba, removing it from the sole control of the Islamic waqf. This was neither vengeance nor displacement. It was simple justice — the recognition that all of those buried at the site are the founders of Judaism (while only one is revered by Muslims), and Jews are the indigenous people in the land as proven by that fact.
Decolonization movements have received global endorsement. Universities run entire programs on “postcolonial studies.” Yet when Jews engage in the parallel project of reclaiming their holy spaces from centuries of Islamic imperial rule, the world looks away — or worse, condemns.
Why should “decolonization” be celebrated while “de-Islamification” is scorned? Both are projects of justice. Both undo centuries of cultural theft. Both restore indigenous peoples to their rightful heritage.
If the United Nations were consistent, it would champion de-Islamification alongside decolonization. It would recognize Jewish efforts as authentic acts of restoration, not “provocations.” Schools should teach children that just as Africans reclaimed their lands from European empires, Jews are reclaiming their sacred spaces from Islamic erasure.
Instead, the UN gives its platform to radical jihadists who claim that Israel is trying to “Judaize” the Jewish holy sites in Jerusalem and Hebron. It’s an offensive smear deliberately made to try to erase the reality of their Islamic imperialism, colonization, ethic cleansing and cultural appropriation.
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas talking about the “Judaization” of Jerusalem to conceal that Islamic cultural appropriation.
The jihadists fear that after Hebron, the Jews will come for the site they know is really Jewish – Jerusalem. They are calling the transfer of the Cave of the Jewish Matriarchs and Patriarchs from the Hebron Waqf to Jewish authorities a “rehearsal for al Aqsa” in Jerusalem. They know the Jewish Temple Mount is the holiest site for Jews and Muslims invaded and took the site. They are proud of the feat and fear a reversal would legitimize a people they consider “sons of apes and pigs.“
There is no “Judaization” of Jerusalem and Hebron. There is de-Islamification.
Decolonization may be decades old, but de-Islamification is still in its early chapters. It deserves not only legitimacy, but applause.
First One Through 
