Category Archives: Middle East Analysis

Three Multinational Antisemitic Arcs, And World Jewry

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Over the past century, pressure on Jews has scaled, shifting from borders to regions to institutions, changing form while carrying a familiar direction.

The story begins in Europe 1938 with the Anschluss. Persecution inside Germany extends outward as Austria is absorbed and its Jewish population is pulled into the same system. Expansion of antisemitic forces follows conquest. Poland, France, Hungary, the Netherlands become extensions of a single design as control spreads across the continent.

An den Fenstern j¸discher Geschfte werden von Nationalsozialisten Plakate mit der Aufforderung “Deutsche, wehrt euch, kauft nicht bei Juden” angebracht.

Policy matures into infrastructure. Collaboration, coercion, and indifference form a landscape in which Jewish survival is unlikely. At the Wannsee Conference, extermination is organized across borders, ministries, and railways. The Holocaust becomes a continental system aligned toward a single end: the genocide of Jews.

That system collapses with the war’s end but the pattern carries forward, reshaped and redirected.

After 1948, pressure reappears across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Jewish communities rooted for centuries in Iraq, Egypt, Yemen, Morocco and elsewhere begin to unravel with striking speed.

Baghdad Iraq’s 1941 slaughter of Jews

Each country follows its own path. Laws restrict, property is seized, pressure builds, departures accelerate. In Iraq, the Farhud foreshadows a collapse that soon becomes mass departure. In Yemen, Operation Magic Carpet lifts an entire community into exile. In Egypt, the Suez Crisis accelerates expulsions. Across North Africa, uncertainty and nationalism press communities toward exit. By the 1970s, nearly one million Jews leave and a regional Jewish presence that endured for centuries nearly vanishes completely.

By the 1970s, the arena shifts again. The contest moves from territory into legitimacy itself.

In 1975, the United Nations adopts United Nations General Assembly Resolution 3379, recasting Jewish self-determination as a moral offense within the central forum of international diplomacy.

US Ambassador to the United Nations, Daniel Patrick Moynihan reversing the Zionism is Racism resolution

The repeal arrives in 1991 through United Nations General Assembly Resolution 46/86, yet the framing travels beyond formal votes. It resurfaces at the World Conference Against Racism in Durban in 2001 and diffuses through NGOs, campuses, and international forums, where evolving language carries forward an enduring challenge to Jewish sovereignty.

From there, the argument migrates into the civic fabric of Western democracies. In the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia, vile ideas become chants in universities, media, and politics.

The mechanisms differ from earlier eras, yet the effects shape daily life. Jewish institutions increase security. Synagogues that once stood open now operate behind layers of protection. Public expressions of Jewish identity carry new calculations. Debates about Israel expand into broader judgments about Jews, blurring lines that once held more clearly.

Across these shifts, the effect becomes visible in the map of Jewish life.

President Joe Biden’s Jewish liaison person suggests that Jews should hide their religious symbols in 2021

A century ago, Jewish communities spanned continents, anchored in Europe and present across the Middle East, North Africa, and the Americas. The destruction of European Jewry removed the largest center. The unraveling of communities across the Middle East and North Africa compressed what remained. Many moved to Israel. Others built new lives in the United States.

Today, roughly 85 percent of the world’s Jews live in those two countries. There are only seventeen countries with more than 25,000 Jews when there used to be dozens just a century ago.

That concentration follows a century in which environments that sustained Jewish life across dozens of countries collapsed, expelled, or eroded. Dispersion gave way to consolidation. Geography followed pressure.

The forces shaping that consolidation continue to evolve. As legitimacy is contested in broader arenas, communities orient toward places able to sustain security, identity, and continuity. The gravitational pull toward Israel strengthens under those conditions, even as the United States remains a central pillar of Jewish life.

While Yom Ha’atzmaut marks Israel’s independence, it also marks the emergence of a center of gravity forged through history rather than theory. Across a century, shifting forms of pressure reshaped where Jews could live, how they gathered, and where they anchored their future.

Three arcs across a century redrew the Jewish map. As the narrative arc is still underway, Israel’s percentage of world Jewry will likely become a majority from a plurality, in just a few years.

No Hashtag for Khartoum or Mogadishu

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Before October 7 reordered the world’s attention, a war in Sudan had already begun killing at scale. April 15 marked the three year anniversary of the latest incarnation of war. It has since produced one of the largest humanitarian crises on earth—millions displaced, famine conditions spreading, entire cities shattered. Over 2,000 healthcare workers killed. And yet it has generated almost none of the global mobilization that defines our era of outrage.

No encampments. No slogans. No sustained moral urgency that travels.

Two forces—the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces—fight for control. Civilians are not incidental to the conflict; they are its terrain. Hospitals are looted, neighborhoods erased, aid convoys blocked. Darfur, a name once synonymous with “never again,” has quietly returned to the same vocabulary of mass killing.

The scale should compel attention. It doesn’t.

For years, much of the global discourse—across media, universities, and international institutions—has sorted conflict through a particular lens: Global North and Global South. The North is cast as inherently evil, colonial and imperial. The South as perpetual victim.

Sudan does not fit neatly inside such lens. There is no clear external oppressor to anchor outrage, no simple narrative that translates easily into the moral shorthand of our time. The violence is internal, complex, resistant to reduction. And so the system hesitates. Attention drifts. Outrage never organizes.

Look at the response architecture. The United Nations convenes, issues appeals, and struggles to convert urgency into action. Funding remains short of need. Access remains constrained. The gap between rhetoric and relief is not marginal—it is structural. Mechanisms that elsewhere become focal points of accountability have not galvanized comparable pressure here. Even institutions like the International Court of Justice sit far from the center of global attention on Sudan, not because the crimes are lesser, but because the political energy that drives action is missing.

Attention follows narrative. Narrative follows familiarity. Sudan offers neither.

The victims do not map cleanly onto categories that travel well. There is no easy compression into a slogan or a symbol. And in a world that increasingly organizes around moral shorthand, what cannot be simplified is often ignored.

This is not only about Sudan. Or Somalia where war has also ravaged the landscape. It is about how the past is taught—and how its lessons travel.

Holocaust education stands as a cornerstone of moral instruction across much of the Global North. Its lessons are intended to be universal. But when it is absorbed as a contained European tragedy, rather than a case study in how societies turn inward, weaponize identity, and destroy their own, its warning loses portability. It becomes history, not instruction. The Global South doesn’t bother to listen to the lesson, and the Global North is focused elsewhere.

In Sudan, mass violence is just statistics without racism and a colonial script. Here is a catastrophe that should activate every alarm built in the twentieth century—and does not. An estimated 400,000 killed in Sudan. Over 500,000 killed in nearby Somalia.

Reducing these to “internal conflicts” explains nothing. It does something worse. It lowers the urgency. It signals, quietly, that this is a tragedy the world can observe rather than confront.

Universities that mobilize rapidly around conflicts that fit prevailing frameworks struggle to sustain engagement here. Media cycles that can fixate for months elsewhere let Sudan and Somalia slip into the margins. International bodies calibrated to respond to pressure find little of it applied.

Sudan is a statistic. Somalia is a statistic. Yet Gaza has a narrative.

Victims should not need a more compelling narrative. They need corridors that function, aid that arrives, and accountability that does not wait for a more convenient story. They need a world capable of responding to human suffering even when it does not fit the frameworks that dominate discourse.

Gazans who launched a genocidal jihadi war never deserved particular sympathy. Especially compared to nearly a million killed in Sudan and Somalia.

Storming Words, Not Mosques

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The jihadi war begins in the headline: “Israeli colonists storm Al-Aqsa Mosque under police protection.” Before a single fact appears, the verdict is already written—by the Palestinian Authority’s media outlet—in words designed to inflame.

  • Colonists erases history, recasting Jews as foreign intruders with no connection to the Temple Mount. 
  • Storm supplies violence whether any occurred or not. 
  • Al-Aqsa Mosque collapses the entire compound into the most sensitive Islamic structure to heighten the sense of desecration. 
  • Under police protection reframes standard security by the Israel Police, coordinated with the Jerusalem Islamic Waqf, as state-backed aggression.

Then the language tightens. “Talmudic and provocative rituals.” “Frequent Israeli provocations, including repeated raids.” These aren’t descriptions. They’re verdicts. Quiet presence becomes intent. Routine visits become raids. Silent prayer becomes something suspect.

And then the omission that completes the frame. The site is only described as Islam’s third holiest. It is never described as Judaism’s holiest. The reader is left with a single conclusion: sanctity on one side, violation on the other.

This is narrative design. Islamic Supremacy.

Strip legitimacy. Recast presence as desecration. Elevate exclusive holiness. Repeat it daily through a state-backed outlet overseen by the Palestinian Authority.

That is how a holy war is narrated into existence. By the “moderate” Palestinian Authority.

Peacekeeping Without Peace

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The international community keeps reaching for the same tool and calling it a solution.

It wasn’t in southern Lebanon. It won’t be in Gaza.

After the 2006 Lebanon War, the United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 1701 with clarity: no armed groups south of the Litani River except the Lebanese state and United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon. Hezbollah would withdraw. The area would be demilitarized.

It never happened.

Hezbollah didn’t disarm. It adapted. Fighters disappeared into civilian life. Weapons moved into homes and tunnels. Infrastructure embedded deeper. Over time, Hezbollah became stronger in the very zone it was supposed to vacate.

UNIFIL patrolled. It reported. It de-escalated when it could.

It did not enforce.

It could not.

That is not a tactical failure. It is the model.

A peacekeeping force without the authority or backing to impose outcomes becomes a bystander to violations it is tasked to prevent.

UNIFIL soldiers

Now the same model is being proposed for Gaza.

Disarm Hamas. Install a new authority. Deploy a multinational force to secure the peace.

It sounds familiar because it is.

Hamas, like Hezbollah, is not just a militia. It is a political and social organism backed by the Islamic Republic of Iran that is embedded in the population, sustained by ideology, and built to survive pressure. It will not voluntarily disarm into irrelevance.

And no external force—operating with limited mandate, constrained rules, and no appetite for sustained combat—will disarm it for them.

This is where the illusion breaks.

Peacekeeping works when peace already exists. It locks in outcomes. It does not create them. When deployed in the absence of resolution, it manages conflict. It does not end it.

That is what happened under 1701.

The “demilitarized zone” became a monitored one. Violations became routine. The temporary became permanent.

Hezbollah didn’t defy the system. It learned how to live inside it.

There is every reason to expect Hamas would do the same.

The problem is not execution. It is the belief that presence equals control. Blue helmets, patrols, liaison offices—they project order. They do not establish it.

Without a force willing and able to dismantle armed infrastructure and impose monopoly on violence, disarmament is not policy. It is aspiration.

Lebanon already ran this experiment. It didn’t produce peace.

It produced a battlefield with spectators.

The UN Has Wiped Raped Jewish Women From History

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The United Nations has released yet another report on violence against women. It reads like a catalogue of human depravity – Sudan, Congo, Haiti, Ukraine, Gaza – each documented, each calibrated to shock the conscience.

And it does but not for the reason the authors intend.

Because one of the most documented episodes of mass sexual violence in recent history is missing. Not debated. Not contextualized.

Absent.

On October 7, an estimated 6,000 Gazans invaded Israel and carried out atrocities that included the systematic rape and mutilation of women. This is not a matter of competing narratives. It has been documented by eyewitnesses, first responders, forensic teams, and subsequent investigations.

And yet, in a sweeping global report about violence against women, these victims disappear.

The report finds space for a child raped every half hour in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, for the explosion of abuse in Haiti, for war deaths in Ukraine, and for casualty figures in Gaza. Horrific and worthy of attention.

But the omission is not accidental. It is instructive.

Because what the United Nations is quietly establishing is a hierarchy of victims. Some suffering is elevated. Some is ignored. And some – when it disrupts a preferred political narrative – is erased altogether.

Jewish women fall into that last category.

That is not human rights reporting. It is narrative management.

And that distortion does not stay confined to UN documents. It bleeds outward. When the international system refuses to clearly name and center atrocities committed against Jews, it creates a form of moral cover. The record itself becomes a kind of absolution.

So when figures in the West – like the wife of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Rama Duwaji – publicly express approval for the October 7 massacre, the reaction is muted, rationalized, or ignored. The most grotesque elements of that day, including the sexual violence, have already been softened, blurred, or omitted by institutions that claim to stand for universal rights.

If the crime is not fully acknowledged, then the celebration of it can be more easily excused.

That is the downstream consequence of selective memory and outrage.

The United Nations is not failing to see. It is choosing not to look and remind the world about violent antisemitism. And in doing so, it transforms a report about protecting women into something far more revealing: a document that tells us which victims matter and which ones are inconvenient.

In that calculus, the rape and murder of Jewish women is not denied. It is deemed unworthy of inclusion. Perhaps even harmful, lest it paint its forever wards, the Stateless Arabs from Palestine (SAPs) in an unfavorable light.

Such silence is not neutral. It is the story.

“Screams Before Silence” movie

Will CAIR Support Jewish Prayer on the Temple Mount During Passover?

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CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations) recently accused Israel of “waging war on Islam” after security restrictions limited Muslim access to the Al-Aqsa compound during Ramadan.

According to CAIR, preventing Muslim worship at one of Islam’s holy sites is proof of hostility toward Islam itself.

If that is the standard, then a simple question follows:

Will CAIR support Jewish prayer on the Temple Mount during Passover?

Because if restricting prayer equals religious persecution, then Muslims have been denying Jews the right to pray at their holiest site for generations.

The Holiest Site in Judaism

The compound Muslims call Haram al-Sharif is the Jewish Temple Mount, the holiest site in Judaism.

It is where the First Temple of King Solomon stood.
It is where the Second Temple stood until the Romans destroyed it in 70 CE.

For nearly two thousand years Jews have prayed toward this location.

Yet today Jews are largely forbidden from praying there.

Under the “status quo” arrangement Israel maintained after capturing Jerusalem in the Six-Day War, Jews may visit the Temple Mount during narrow windows of time via a single entry portal, but are generally prohibited from praying, even silently.

The reason is simple: Muslim authorities insist Jewish prayer there is unacceptable.

A Short History of the Ban

The prohibition on Jewish worship at the site did not begin recently.

  • Under Ottoman rule, Jewish prayer on the Temple Mount was restricted.
  • From 1948 to 1967, when Jordan controlled eastern Jerusalem, Jews were banned entirely from visiting the Old City, even the Western Wall, Judaism’s most sacred accessible prayer site.
  • After 1967, Israel regained control of the Old City but maintained Muslim administrative authority over the mount to prevent unrest.

The result is an unusual reality:
The holiest site in Judaism is effectively the only major religious site in the world where adherents of that religion are largely barred from praying.

A One-Way Principle

CAIR’s accusation therefore reveals a remarkable double standard.

When Muslim access is restricted temporarily during wartime security conditions, it is framed as an attack on Islam. But when Jews are prevented from praying at their holiest site at all times, it is treated as normal.

Religious freedom, apparently, runs in only one direction.

The Passover Test

If CAIR genuinely believes preventing prayer at a holy site is an attack on religion, the principle should apply equally. Which leads to a straightforward test:

Will CAIR support Jewish prayer on the Temple Mount during Passover?

Not silent whispers quickly stopped by police. Actual prayer at Judaism’s holiest location.

If religious liberty is universal, that should be an easy position to endorse.

The Irony

Israel remains one of the few countries in the Middle East where Muslims freely maintain and worship at major holy sites. Yet Israel is accused of “waging war on Islam” for imposing security restrictions during a war.

The claim collapses the moment the broader reality is considered.

So instead of outrage, perhaps the most useful response to CAIR’s statement is curiosity: Will CAIR support Jewish prayer on the Temple Mount this Passover?

Or is religious freedom a principle that applies only when the worshippers are Muslim?

#IslamicSupermacy

Muslim – Muslim Wars

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When Iran attacks neighboring countries, many observers react with confusion.

How could the Islamic Republic of Iran strike Muslim countries, they ask?

The question reflects a misunderstanding. Throughout modern Middle Eastern history, many of the region’s bloodiest conflicts have been Muslims fighting other Muslims. The idea of a unified “Muslim world” standing together against outsiders is largely a Western illusion.

Reality has always been far messier.

Muslims Fighting Muslims

One of the deadliest wars in the modern Middle East was the Iran–Iraq War. From 1980 to 1988, two Muslim-majority states fought a brutal conflict that killed hundreds of thousands and wounded millions. Both sides invoked Islam. It did nothing to prevent the slaughter.

More recently, the Syrian civil war has killed roughly 500,000 people, most of them Muslims, as factions divided along sectarian and political lines tore the country apart.

But these are far from isolated examples. Modern history is filled with wars in which Muslims killed other Muslims on a massive scale.

Major Muslim-vs-Muslim Conflicts

  • Iran–Iraq War (1980–1988)
    ~500,000–1,000,000 killed
    Shia Iran vs Sunni-led Iraq in one of the deadliest wars in modern Middle Eastern history.
  • Syrian Civil War (2011–present)
    ~500,000+ killed
    Assad regime, Sunni rebel groups, ISIS, and other militias fighting largely Muslim populations.
  • Yemen Civil War (2014–present)
    ~350,000+ killed (including famine and disease tied to the war)
    Iranian-backed Houthis vs Saudi-backed Yemeni government.
  • Sudan / Darfur conflicts (2003–present phases)
    ~300,000+ killed
    Fighting largely between Muslim militias and factions within Sudan.
  • ISIS war in Iraq and Syria (2013–2019)
    ~200,000+ killed
    ISIS fighting governments and populations that were overwhelmingly Muslim.
  • Algerian Civil War (1991–2002)
    ~150,000–200,000 killed
    Islamist insurgents vs Algerian government.
  • Iraq sectarian civil war (2006–2008 peak)
    ~100,000–200,000 killed
    Sunni and Shia militias fighting for control after the fall of Saddam Hussein.
  • Black September in Jordan (1970–1971)
    ~3,000–10,000 killed
    Jordanian army crushing Palestinian militant groups operating inside Jordan.
  • Hamas–Fatah conflict (2006–2007)
    ~600–1,000 killed
    Palestinian factions fighting for control of Gaza.

Together, these conflicts account for millions of deaths, overwhelmingly among Muslims themselves.

Members of ISIS about to burn Jordanian to death in a cage

Palestinians Killing Palestinians; Israel Arabs Killing Israeli Arabs

Even movements that claim to represent a single people often turn their guns inward.

In 2007, Hamas violently seized Gaza from Fatah, executing rivals and throwing some from rooftops in a bloody Palestinian power struggle.

The same pattern appears inside Israel.

Most Israeli Arabs who die from violence are killed by other Israeli Arabs, usually in criminal or clan disputes rather than in conflict with Jews.

Internal violence, not confrontation with Israel, accounts for the majority of these deaths.

Power Over Solidarity

Western observers often assume shared religion should produce political unity.

But the Middle East repeatedly shows otherwise.

Persians compete with Arabs.
Arabs compete with Turks.
Sunni compete with Shia.

Power, rivalry, and survival drive politics far more than religious solidarity.

A Familiar Pattern

Seen in this context, Iran attacking Muslim countries is not surprising.

It follows a long-standing regional pattern: Muslim states and factions frequently fight one another.

The Middle East’s wars are not unique. They follow the same rule that has governed politics everywhere:

Nations and movements fight for power and dominance—even when they share the same faith.

The Losers’ Echo of the Six Day War

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When armies lose wars, the battlefield does not always disappear. It often moves to softer targets.

That is what happened after the Six-Day War, when Israel delivered a devastating defeat to the combined armies of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. In six days, territories changed hands, military reputations collapsed, and the promise that Israel would soon be destroyed evaporated.

The defeat reverberated far beyond the battlefield. It humiliated governments across the Arab world and shattered the image of inevitable victory that had surrounded the campaign against Israel.

But the war did not end. It simply changed form.

In the years that followed, militant organizations such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Black September Organization exported the conflict around the world.

The targets were no longer Israeli armies; they were civilians.

Airplanes became battlegrounds. Diplomats became targets. Jewish institutions across the diaspora suddenly found themselves on the front lines of a war being fought thousands of miles away.

The Munich massacre shocked the world when Israeli athletes were murdered at the Olympic Games by Palestinian Arab terrorists. It demonstrated that the battlefield could be moved to the most international stage imaginable.

Another defining moment came with the Entebbe hijacking, when Palestinian terrorists seized an Air France flight and diverted it to Uganda. There, Jewish and Israeli passengers were separated from the others and held hostage in an old airport terminal. The episode ended with a daring Israeli rescue, but the hijacking revealed something chilling: Jews anywhere could be turned into targets for a war militants could not win against Israel itself.

Synagogues and Jewish community centers were attacked in cities far removed from the Middle East battlefield. Rome. Athens. Istanbul. Hezbollah and Iran were often behind the atrocities.

These were not military targets. They were chosen precisely because they were vulnerable.

The message was unmistakable: if Israel could not be defeated in the Middle East, Jews everywhere would become targets.

Today there are worrying signs that the same pattern may be returning.

Iran and its regional network of militias face mounting military pressure from Israel and the United States. When regimes and movements cannot confront stronger armies directly, history shows they often search for targets they can reach more easily.

Recent intelligence chatter has suggested that Iran may have issued signals intended to activate sleeper operatives abroad. Western security services have increased monitoring of potential networks across North America, Europe, and Australia. Whether these warnings prove accurate or not, the concern reflects a familiar strategic logic: when the battlefield is lost in one region, pressure is applied elsewhere.

As the United States becomes the central military opponent of Iran, American Jews may face the threat most acutely.

Extremist movements have repeatedly treated Jewish communities abroad as symbolic stand ins for Israel and its allies. When Israel gains the upper hand militarily, Jews in distant cities have often become the targets that terrorists believe they can reach.

This time the danger may be compounded by a new environment.

Terror no longer requires direct command structures. Groups such as Islamic State pioneered a model of “inspiration terrorism,” where individuals absorb propaganda online and act independently without formal membership or training, such as happened this week in New York City.

At the same time, a troubling ideological convergence has taken shape in parts of Western society. Radical Islamist movements and segments of the revolutionary left increasingly share a political vocabulary built around anti-imperialism, anti-colonialism, and the demonization of Israel. In that narrative, Israel becomes the embodiment of oppression. Jews are portrayed as agents of imperial power rather than a people with a three thousand year connection to their homeland.

When those ideas spread through social media, activist networks, and even parts of the educational system, hostility toward Israel can easily spill over into hostility toward Jews themselves.

The result is combustible.

A generation is growing up hearing that violence against Israel is “resistance,” that Jews represent colonial domination, and that the conflict is part of a global struggle against oppression.

History shows where that logic can lead.

If history is echoing once again, the streets of Western cities may soon remind us of a grim truth: the losers of wars do not always accept defeat.

We are witnessing the next phase of the War on Zionists.

Related:

Genocidal Jihadists Come For ‘Soft Targets’ (September 2024)

Politicians In Their Own Words: Why We Don’t Support Defending Jews (January 2022)

Spain Breaks With Israel, Not Washington

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In a sharp escalation of transatlantic tension, Donald Trump threatened to cut off trade with Spain, accusing Madrid of refusing to support operations against Iran and failing to meet its defense obligations within NATO.

Spain rejected the criticism, citing sovereignty and international law and refusing to allow U.S. forces to use Spanish bases in operations tied to the Iran conflict.

Yet at the same time Madrid made a different diplomatic move. Spain permanently withdrew its ambassador from Israel, citing the widening regional war.

The contrast is striking.

The military campaign against Iran has been led by the United States, with Israel acting alongside it. If participation in that conflict justified downgrading diplomatic relations, the same logic would apply first to Washington, yet Spain withdrew no ambassador from the United States.

Even after Trump threatened sweeping trade retaliation, Madrid left its diplomatic posture toward Washington unchanged.

Instead, the rupture fell on Israel alone.

The reason is not difficult to see. Confronting the United States carries consequences. The American economy dwarfs Spain’s, and Washington anchors the NATO security system protecting Europe. Spain benefits from that umbrella while contributing among the lowest shares of national income to defense within the alliance.

Angering Washington carries risk. Angering Israel carries almost none.

Spain frames its decision as moral protest. But if war with Iran is the offense, the United States leads it. If regional escalation is the concern, Spain still maintains diplomatic relations with Iran itself, the leading state sponsor of terrorism.

If Spain were to look in the mirror, what would it see? A principled stand against war? That is the language Madrid uses.

But the reflection suggests something else. Spain keeps its ambassador in Washington, maintains relations with Tehran, and breaks with Jerusalem — the smallest actor in the conflict.

Spain is a nation of nearly fifty million compared to Israel, a country of ten million, a small state surrounded by hundreds of millions of Muslims where hostility toward Israel goes back to the Jewish State’s reestablishment.

That asymmetry will not go unnoticed in Washington or among Israel’s allies. Spain already faces pressure to increase its NATO defense spending. If Madrid is willing to rupture relations with Israel over the Iran war while maintaining relations with Iran itself, the contradiction may soon move from rhetoric to diplomacy.

The question could become blunt:
restore normal relations with Israel, end trade with Iran, and meet NATO defense commitments — or risk losing the security umbrella Spain depends on.

A nation looking honestly in the mirror might call that geopolitics. Or antisemitism.

Perhaps It Is Time to Ask Israel What Two States Look Like

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For decades the international community has insisted it already knew what a two-state solution should look like. The United Nations drew the parameters. Diplomats repeated the formula. Conferences were held. Resolutions were passed.

And tens of thousands of people died.

The problem may not be the idea of two states. The problem may be that the plan was written without the participation of the country expected to live beside that second state, after countless wars waged to eliminate it.

Israel accepted the concept of two states repeatedly. The Arab world rejected it outright in 1947 and chose war instead. For decades the objective was not coexistence but the elimination of the Jewish state “in any part of Palestine.“

Only much later did some Palestinian leaders begin to speak about accepting two states. Even then the proposal contained a remarkable asymmetry: Arabs could potentially live in both Israel and a future Palestinian state while Jews would be barred from living in Palestine. Even under these terms, acceptance amongst the stateless Arabs from Palestine (SAPs) remained partial and fragile. Large segments of Palestinian society continued to reject the legitimacy of Israel itself.

War therefore continued.

The deeper flaw lay in the diplomatic architecture. The UN framework repeatedly demanded territorial concessions from Israel while simultaneously challenging the basic elements of Israeli sovereignty. The proposed Palestinian state would claim rights that no other neighboring state claims over another country, including constraints on Israel’s control over borders and immigration.

The Oslo Accords attempted to move the process forward through gradual autonomy. Palestinians gained control of Gaza, Area A of the West Bank, and some control in Area B. These territories were meant to become the early foundations of Palestinian self-governance and peaceful coexistence.

Instead they became platforms for continued war. Rockets came from Gaza. Terror networks operated openly in areas under Palestinian control. October 7 was simply the most brutal expression of a reality that had been building for years.

After October 7 it is difficult to imagine any Israeli government accepting the same international blueprint that guided diplomacy for the past thirty years.

Which raises a simple question that has never been asked: What would a two state solution designed by Israel actually look like?

For decades the world has demanded that Israel accept a state designed by others. When Israel raised concerns about security, sovereignty, or enforcement, those concerns were treated as obstacles to peace rather than as conditions necessary to achieve it.

Perhaps the time has come to reverse the process.

Instead of repeating a diplomatic formula that has failed repeatedly, the international community could ask Israel to define the conditions under which it could realistically accept a Palestinian state. Security arrangements, borders, governance standards, demilitarization, and phased recognition could all become part of a framework designed around coexistence rather than wishful thinking.

Whether the SAPs are willing to accept such conditions is a separate matter. Neither side ever fully accepted the UN blueprint. But continuing to impose a model that both parties reject has already produced decades of bloodshed.

Hashmonaim and separation barrier
Hashmonaim and separation barrier

The first fruits of Oslo were rotten. Continuing to plant the same tree will not produce a different harvest.

If the world truly wants two states living in peace, it may finally be time to ask the state expected to survive beside that new second state what peace actually requires.