The escalation of the war between Iranian Proxies and Israel continues to lay bare the alias armies of Iran embedded around the region.
The United Nations is demanding diplomatic negotiations commence between Israel and the Palestinian Authority while only narrowly condemning the Hamas (not Palestinian) savage massacre in Israel on October 7, 2023. For the UN, Hamas is at once distinct from Palestine, and simultaneously a legitimate Palestinian political group, as UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator Martin Griffiths said “Hamas is not a terrorist group for us, of course, as you know. It’s a political movement.”
Does the UN think that Hamas is a separate group inside of Gaza or does it acknowledge that Palestine launched a genocidal war against Israel?
In Lebanon, Hezbollah has vast military capabilities, estimated to be around 150,000 missiles. In conjunction with Hamas’s October 7 war, Hezbollah began its attack on Israel. Israel’s response to Hezbollah has been characterized as an attack on Lebanon rather than Hezbollah.
The shifting nouns makes Israel appear to be the aggressor against a neutral party: while Hamas attacks Israel, Israel attacks Gaza; while Hezbollah attacks Israel, Israel attacks Lebanon.
Hamas controls Gaza and has 58% of the seats in the Palestinian parliament. Hezbollah controls southern Lebanon and has 48% of the Lebanese government.
In no other sphere can a country claim that its military is not a functioning arm of the government. Such fictitious divide affords the government a veneer of peaceful intentions while its army wages war.
Simultaneously, both are proxy groups of the Islamic Republic of Iran, colonial outposts on the borders of Israel.
Hezbollah’s attacks on Israel are either 1) a rogue third party terrorist group attack on the Jewish State, 2) a Lebanese attack, or 3) an Iranian attack. If it is a separate entity, than a diplomatic solution must a) have the Lebanese government confiscate all its weapons, b) strip the group of all seats in parliament, and c) expel it from Lebanon. If the attacks on Israel were from Lebanon, than Israel has full right to attack all of Lebanon. If the attacks were spearheaded by Iran, than we have long been in a regional war.
Multiple countries issue a release calling for a ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon (people and government), making no mention of Hezbollah or Iran, tacitly accepting that Hezbollah is part of Lebanon and that Lebanon launched an unprovoked attack on Israel.
The same should hold for Hamas and Palestinian territories: Palestinians launched a war against Israel, not Iran or a limited wicked entity.
Labeling armies with unique names distances the governments and population from the violence they perpetrated. It falsely shields the attacking government and people from fault and casts the defensive response as unwarranted and sinister.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez calls members of Hezbollah “innocent civilians” and Israel’s attack a violation of “international humanitarian law,” which implies that she believes that the people and government of Lebanon started a war with Israel and Israel is acting in self defense.
The anti-Israel world does not believe that non-Hamas Gazans who are killed by Israel’s defensive war are civilians caught in a war that its government started, but defenseless targets of an Israeli initiated attack. The “Hamas attacks Israel / Israel attacks Gaza” (not Hamas) narrative obfuscates the culpability of the people and government of Gaza.
The antisemitic jihadists in Iran, Lebanon and Gaza launched a war of annihilation against the Jewish State using alias armies, attempting to shield the people and governments as uninvolved bystanders. Much of the world has ingested the red herring and is defaming Israel’s just war in the latest incarnation of a blood libel.
The Pro-Palestinian camp has attempted to separate anti-Zionism and antisemitism, even when the overlap is almost exact. The pro-Israel camp typically points to that fact without acknowledging that some comments which are anti-Israel are indeed not antisemitic.
So let’s make the breakdown a little clearer by separating four components of anti-Israel rhetoric, those against the:
Government of Israel
State of Israel
Israelis
Land of Israel
Government of Israel
Criticizing the policy of a government, as a general matter, does not mean that someone hates the leaders as individuals or the country itself. It applies to Israel as much as the United Kingdom, Ecuador or India. In fact, many people who criticize a government’s policies are often big fans of that country, and want to see it be the best version of itself that it can be.
In the case of Israel, criticism of the government and policies veers into antisemitism based on the language and intent. Saying that the Israeli government is like Nazis is antisemitic as the intent is to specifically call them out in the manner of the worst antisemites. Declaring that the Jewish State is a puppet master of global powers is to promote antisemitic tropes.
Cartoon posted in The New York Times showing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a dog, leading a blind U.S. President Donald Trump
Criticizing the Israeli government’s policies is not generally antisemitic, except when the attacks specifically incite and use antisemitic language.
State of Israel
Contrary to popular belief, NO COUNTRY has an inherent right to exist. Neither Montenegro nor South Sudan needed to be created. Cyprus need not be divided. PEOPLE have an inherent right to self determination but no country inherently deserves to exist.
That said, the world is much better off with good sovereign entities, with governments that care and protect their populace. The United States and Japan care for hundreds of millions of people who consent to be governed. The governments try to maintain peaceful relations inside and outside their borders.
So it is with Israel, a country which remarkably has added millions of people since it was founded, absorbing immigrants from around the world. It built a thriving economy and liberal democracy in the heart of an illiberal region.
Yet there are many countries that still refuse to recognize the Jewish State, including thirty Muslim-majority countries. They object to Jewish control of what they perceive of as “Muslim Arab land” in what they hope will be a Muslim-majority (only) State of Palestine. Those countries’ leaders call Israel a “cancer” which should be destroyed.
Iranian leader called Israel an “unclean rabid dog” and a “cancerous tumor”
The Jewish people are the most persecuted people in the world and have been for thousands of years. Calling for the destruction of a thriving country of the most persecuted people in their historic homeland, and only that country of the nearly 200 countries in the world, stinks of antisemitism.
Israeli People
Many western countries are diverse, while many countries in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) are homogenous. Israel is unique in being very diverse while being in the middle of MENA.
Israel consists of Black Jews, Brown Jews, White Jews, Muslims, Christians and Druze. Yet the hate targeting Israelis narrowly targets just Jewish Israelis, making the attacks inherently antisemitic.
The United Nations declared that Jews cannot live in the Old City of Jerusalem and cannot pray at their holiest location on the Temple Mount
Almost every type of anti-Israel comment – including those from the United Nations – are deeply antisemitic. Those that relate to debating policy as happens in every country, are the only ones that typically do not veer into Jew hatred.
This four stage battle plan was used by Arab nations leading up to the 1967 Six Day War. It is being used again now on a broader scale, as jihadi extremists brought in the whole world to the third stage on September 18, 2024.
Stage 1: Attack Jews As Foreigners, 1960s-
Shortly after the Balfour Declaration of 1917 become codified in the San Remo Agreement of 1920, the Arabs in Palestine began to attack local Palestinian Jews. They objected to the global powers putting forth what would become the Palestine Mandate of 1922, calling for Jews to return to their homeland. While the Arabs never much objected to Jews living in Palestine, the idea that they would reestablish their homeland was appalling.
After a decade of on-and-off again pogroms killing Palestinian Jews in the 1920s to mid-1930s, Palestinian Arabs began a multi-year riot from 1936 to 1939 which effectively got the British to stop allowing Jews into Palestine, even as the Holocaust was unfolding in Europe. While at first they simply claimed that the land was Arab, over time they developed a narrative coined “decolonization” which swept through Africa in the 1960s and 1970s, and misapplied it to the Jewish State.
Stage 2: Gather the Masses to the Cause, 1973-
The humiliating defeat of the Arab armies in the 1967 war to destroy Israel set the stage for the Arabs to go broader and enlist the world in their genocidal quest. The Yom Kippur War was accompanied by an oil embargo to force the world to bend the knee to the Arab oil kings and blacklist Israel.
The Arabs pushed through a United Nations Resolution to declare “Zionism is racism” in 1975 and slowly dripped the idea that Israel was a European invention and part-and-parcel of colonial imperialism. The notion gathered more steam at the 2001 Durban Conference and fully captured the United States’ attention in the 2014-2016 advancement of Black-Palestinian intersectionality in the wake of several Black men being killed by police. Socialists took up the banner in the cause of a broad redistribution of wealth and power from the first world Jewish State in the midst of the impoverished Arab world that surrounded it, much as people of color were aiming to tear down perceived structures of “white privilege.”
The masses somehow absorbed the lie that Jews are not native to the Jewish homeland, and the Obama Administration turned that falsification of history into antisemitic international law in December 2016 with the passing of UN Security Council Resolution 2334, making it illegal for Jews to even live in their holiest city in the Old City of Jerusalem.
Stage 3: Remove the Enemy’s Defenses, 2024-
On September 18, 2024, the UN General Assembly voted 124-14 to strip Israel of its right to self defense in Gaza, the West Bank and eastern Jerusalem. A large block of 43 countries were too chicken to vote against the absurd notion that a country cannot defend itself from barbarous murderers who killed thousands and threatened to commit the atrocities “again and again.”
UN General Assembly vote to deny Israel the ability to use self defense, September 18, 2024
The short list of Israeli friends were: Argentina; Czechia; Fiji; Hungary; Malawi; Micronesia; Nauru; Palau; Papua New Guinea; Paraguay; Tonga; Tuvalu and the United States.
BBC cited the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) which stated that the major arms suppliers to Israel were the USA (66%/ voted against the resolution), Germany (30%/ abstained), Italy (5%/ abstained) and some from the United Kingdom (abstained; figures don’t add to 100% due to rounding). It means that while some countries like Canada (abstained) may announce a halt of selling arms to Israel as it did in March 2024, the impact is limited. It is the USA and Germany that are the main suppliers to Israel.
And the anti-Israel radical left-wing in the United States is targeting those very arms.
Radical socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders was quick to advance a resolution “to stop the sale of U.S. arms to Israel.” Alt-left Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez retweeted her approval.
The situation may become more dire.
Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) of the Foreign Relations Committee, might be the next Secretary of State should Vice President Kamala Harris win the election in November. He has made clear that he supports conditioning aid to Israel, which would leave the Jewish State vulnerable to the many jihadist armies which surround it.
Stage 4: Assemble the Armies, ?
The Jewish State is becoming more and more isolated. Should the United States and Germany withhold arms to the country, just as the Islamic Republic of Iran obtains full nuclear weapons capability, the Jewish State will be critically vulnerable.
For the last fifty years, the Arab world convinced the world to embrace the idea that Jews have no rights or legitimacy in their holy land, capped by Obama’s blessing of UNSC 2334. That has metastasized over the past decade to bring the world to the point of trying to strangle Israel of its inherent right to self defense in the face of genocidal jihadists.
We are at a very dangerous point in history. It is now up to the United States and Germany, two foes who fought each other 75 years ago over the fate of Jews, to declare that they stand by Jews in regards to their history, heritage and human rights to live in peace and security, including having the capability to appropriately defend themselves from genocidal jihadists next door.
The Muslim American community is a rapidly growing segment of the United States. It is projected to surpass the Jewish community by 2040 and be entrenched as the second largest religious group, estimated to become 8.1 million by 2050, according to Pew Research.
Like the Jewish community, a major consideration in the group’s focus is the Middle East. For Muslims, the region holds the major Islamic centers of Mecca and Medina in Saudi Arabia, while for Jews it is the Jewish holy land of Israel.
Beyond the sanctity of the land are co-religionists. There are 1.8 billion Muslims, with 50 Muslim-majority countries, with most being in the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) region. This compares to just 15 million Jews globally and a single Jewish country, Israel.
Muslim population for Sunni and Shia (dark green), with Israel a dot in the middle
In 2024, several Muslim countries and territories surrounding Israel are waging a war to destroy the Jewish State, and the United States has backed Israel in defending itself. This Iranian Axis-Israel war is weighing heavily on how Muslim Americans are thinking about the 2024 U.S. presidential elections.
The community has long been outraged by former President Trump’s anti-Islamic comments and angered by his strongly pro-Israel actions during his term from 2017 through 2020. Muslims were upset about his cutting funds to Palestinians, placing sanctions on Iran, and normalizing Israel into the Arab Middle East with the Abraham Accords.
But Muslim Americans are also disgusted with the Biden-Harris administration’s support for Israel fighting against Hamas, Hezbollah, Syria and Iran. They cannot fathom voting for Harris in the upcoming presidential election, even as they view her more favorably than Trump.
Resigned to the fact that both candidates are not anti-Zionist, a significant part of the community has decided to send a message, and hopefully play spoiler in the upcoming presidential election, in the hope of drawing attention to their position to influence future elections.
The Turkish news site Andalu posted a talk featuring Islamic preachers and members of CAIR, the Council of American Islamic Relations. The discussion called for Muslim Americans to vote for third party candidates like Jill Stein and Cornel West. While they have no chance of winning, the aim is to make the two dominant political parties start to cater to their demands, especially in halting support for the Jewish State.
According to polls released by CAIR, the Muslim vote in Michigan and Wisconsin – two important swing states to securing the presidency – should have an enormous turnout for Stein. Their hope is to show the Democratic party that had they changed policy course on Israel, those votes could have been theirs. The Muslim American community would rather lose the election to Trump whom they despise, to influence the future direction of the Democratic Party, which is already infiltrated by members of the “Squad.”
Donald Trump may win a larger percentage of the Jewish vote than any Republican nominee over the past cycles which might make him keep pro-Israel positions, but Muslims have a soft back-up hope that Trump will credit the Muslim community for abandoning Harris to help him secure the presidency.
While the vast majority of Americans don’t focus on foreign affairs as the primary concern in elections beyond the border crisis, the Muslim and Jewish communities are putting the Hamas-Israel war at the top of their list, and each group may tip the scales to Donald Trump for very different reasons. Jews will focus on continuing to support Israel in its war against genocidal jihadists, while Muslims will argue that the U.S. should abandon Israel and foreign policy and funding altogether, to let the Iranian axis devour the sole Jewish State.
The Jewish community is taking a very near-term view of the American presidential election, concerned about the terrible spike in antisemitism in the U.S. and the ring of evil attacking Israel right now. The Muslim community is playing the long game, and is willing to simply place a marker on the table in 2024 that they are an emerging force to be reckoned with.
Jews are small in number with a single state and are beset by existential fear, so are pushing for immediate action. Meanwhile, the Muslim world has no existential worries, and can focus on the ultimate prize in which their numbers and power overwhelm American Jews, just as they encircle the Jewish State. In the near-term, they will work to infiltrate the educational system and overtake the Democratic Party to breed a new generation of socialist-jihadists who will normalize anti-Zionism and antisemitism.
It’s called the Insidious Jihad in America and is over five years old now. Imagine where the country will be in five more years.
The current Palestinian war on Israel is much less about borders and land swaps, security matters and the status of Jerusalem, and much more about the so-called “right of return” of descendants of Palestinian Arab refugees to move into Israel rather than a new Palestinian State. Any discussions between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, as well as at the United Nations, must bring the matter to the forefront and make clear that settling that point will be done at the national level.
If that sounds obvious, you do not understand the U.N.’s adoption of the Palestinian negotiating point, that the ‘right of return’ is for every individual to decide on his/her own about moving to Israel, outside of governmental negotiations.
US and Israel On ‘Right Of Return’
When President Bill Clinton formulated a peace agreement between the Israelis and Palestinians in 2000, mediator Dennis Ross summarized the working proposal as follows: “On the issue of refugees, there would be a right of return for the refugees to their own state, not to Israel, but there would also be a fund of $30 billion internationally that would be put together for either compensation or to cover repatriation, resettlement, rehabilitation costs. And when it came to security, there would be a international presence, in place of the Israelis, in the Jordan Valley.”
This was the stated policy of both Democratic and Republican parties for years. Republican President George W. Bush sent a letter to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in April 2004 that stated a “just, fair, and realistic framework for a solution to the Palestinian refugee issue as part of any final status agreement will need to be found through the establishment of a Palestinian state, and the settling of Palestinian refugees there, rather than in Israel.” The 2008 Democratic platform echoed the sentiment that “The creation of a Palestinian state through final status negotiations, together with an international compensation mechanism, should resolve the issue of Palestinian refugees by allowing them to settle there, rather than in Israel.“
Palestinians and UN On ‘Right of Return’
But when John Kerry tried to negotiate an agreement between the parties in 2014, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas pulled back from any discussion about refugees and said “Let me put it simply: the right of return is a personal decision. What does this mean? That neither the PA, nor the state, nor the PLO, nor Abu-Mazen [Abbas], nor any Palestinian or Arab leader has the right to deprive someone from his right to return…. The choice is yours. You want to return? You will return. You don’t? You’re free to remain; there is compensation and other details … I just wanted to remark on this point, that the right of return is a personal right. Even a father cannot forgo his children’s right.”
This ended any possibility of concluding the conflict via negotiations as Abbas handed the matter of refugees to millions of individuals.
The United Nations agrees with the Palestinian position.
In June 2023, the UN Office of Human Rights issued a report on World Refugee Day called “Right of return of Palestinian refugees must be prioritised over political considerations: UN experts.” It stated that “We urgently call upon the international community to adopt a rights-based approach that addresses the root causes of violence and prioritises the individual and collective right of return for refugees and internally displaced persons, over political considerations.”
The current formulation that Israel has no say on who it allows into its country and that 5.7 million Palestinian Arabs can unilaterally decide they can move to towns where ancestors lived will never be accepted by any Israeli government – right, left or centrist – EVER. It is a recipe for perpetual bloodshed and animosity.
To enable any chance for there to ever be a negotiated solution, the United Nations must be clear that the matter of the descendants of Palestinian Arabs who once lived in modern Israel is a matter to be handled by the PA, and not for individuals. Alternatively, the UN can state clearly that the ‘right of return’ is only limited to individuals who actually left Israel and not for their descendants.
The ‘two-state solution’ became unviable when the UN and Palestinian leadership decided that a ‘right of return’ for millions of Palestinians into Israel is an inalienable individual right. For there to be a chance of ending the bloodshed and conflict, it must be made clear that Palestinian leadership will negotiate the parameters of a “right of return” with Israel.
The media narrative on the Gaza war is very much informed by whom the media opts to quote. The Israeli press as well as Jewish and pro-Zionist voices cite the Israeli government or military. For the rest of the world, it seems to only be the Palestinian political-terrorist group Hamas and its minions.
Israel recently attacked a school which several Palestinian Arab terrorist groups were using as a command center from which to plan attacks. Israel killed 19 terrorists according to an account by The Jerusalem Post.
While featuring the strike in the headline, JPost added that the United Nations condemned the attack, leaving a reader to ponder the deep anti-Israel UN bias for criticizing attacking terrorists. The JPost article went on to state that the “Israeli Army disputes Hamas’ claim that 100 civilians [were] killed,” putting the source of the Arab casualties squarely on Hamas and citing Israeli denial. The article would also name a senior Hamas terrorist killed in the attack.
This is in sharp contrast to headlines and articles found elsewhere in the increasingly anti-Israel western world.
The Associated Press only quoted “Palestinian officials” in the headline, making the source appear somewhat neutral while it mentioned “at least 80” killed, not breaking out the number of terrorists. The sub-header similarly quoted “Palestinian health authorities,” not identified as working hand-in-glove with Hamas, which governs the territory.
The British publications did much the same, with BBC News headlining a seemingly unbiased “hospital head,” while the Independent attempted to inflame readers with the headline “Terror and death as Israel strikes school in Gaza during prayers,” quoting generic “Palestinians.”
In France, Le Monde quoted “Gaza’s civil defense agency,” as if the region was acting in a defensive mode in a war it started, headlining that “World leaders ‘appalled’ by deadly Israeli strike on Gaza school.” Barron’s quoted Agence France-Presse that “France condemned Gaza school strike,” and quoted generic “rescuers” about the death toll.
Reuters’ headline led with a death toll by generic “officials,” but the article did quote a range of people including “the Israeli army,” “medics,” residents,” “Gaza health ministry,” and “Gaza health officials.” Almost all parties quoted were Palestinian Arabs, including “Hamas and Islamic Jihad” which denied the Israeli charge that there were militants in the building. There was no quote from the Israeli army questioning the death toll.
There is a war against Israel being fought in western media in the coverage of the war, designed to influence – not inform – its readership. The narrative is highly partisan and anti-Israel, orchestrated to incite the mob against Zionists and protect the genocidal regime of Hamas.
I have been fortunate to visit Israel dozens of times. I have come for work and to vacation. To celebrate Jewish holidays and family and friends’ celebrations. During wars and “intifadas” as well as times of peace.
July 2024 was different. I came to a country held hostage.
The Individual Hostages In Gaza
The first thing one sees upon arrival at the airport is a large sign “Bring them home now!” with sample dog tags showing the date October 7 when over 250 people from Israel – living and dead – were seized by Palestinian Arabs and hauled into Gaza.
The faces of the hostages were found everywhere: in the airport, on the streets and in office lobbies. On stickers, banners and shirts. Israel is consumed with the people abducted by terrorists. Their faces, names and stories refuse to be forgotten.
Hostage To Memories And Emotions
Outside the Tel Aviv Museum is Hostage Square, an encampment of families and friends who sit in shelters to talk to people about the abducted amidst a range of emotional tributes and installations. Most of the people try to avoid talking about politics or the war, and are solely focused on the innocent people ripped from their homes and regular lives.
One of people I met in a tent for one of the kibbutz communities attacked was a Ukrainian-Israeli who confided that she liked to talk to tourists. She felt it difficult to talk to fellow Israelis who were enmeshed in the ongoing tragedy but could “unload” to strangers and not be alone.
She pointed to a picture over the door and said that the bearded man was her old boyfriend who was killed on October 7 and his body was hauled into Gaza. The Israel Defense Forces retrieved his body just a few weeks earlier.
While this woman talked to me, another women from the kibbutz had been talking to another female visitor. That kibbutz woman introduced a middle aged lady who shared that she was a neighbor of the Ukrainian’s old boyfriend. The Ukrainian covered her mouth and began to bawl. She attempted to speak and then fled the tent.
Hostages To War
I have visited the Shaare Zedek Medical Center in Jerusalem many times. In 2003, during the Second ‘Intifada’, I had the opportunity to get a tour of the new emergency room by Dr. David Applebaum two weeks before he and his daughter were killed in a Palestinian terrorist bombing on the eve of her wedding. I came to visit now to see how the hospital was functioning during a war.
The hospital lobby has a long table filled with pictures of family members of hospital workers who were killed over the nine months of war. Some were killed during the October 7 massacre while others died in the fighting to free the hostages and to bring the terrorists to justice.
Lobby of Shaare Zedek Medical Center in Jerusalem, July 2024
The guide shared that this war had an enormous casualty-to-death ratio relative to past wars. The reason is that many soldiers who would have been killed in the past were saved due to some tactical measures.
Firstly, Israeli soldiers entered the hornet’s nest of Gaza wearing tourniquets. With a battlefield loaded with booby traps, many people were losing limbs as bombs exploded. In the past, those soldiers would have bled to death but now, tourniquets provided precious time for them to be rescued.
Behind the wave of infantry were medics equipped with various equipment to stabilize the injured quickly for immediate transfer out of Gaza into Israel a short distance away. As soon as the injured entered Israel, well-equipped medical helicopters flew the seriously injured to hospitals like Shaare Zedek, a short 15 minute flight, while those in non-life threatening situations were transferred via ambulance. The sophisticated medical helicopters had advanced equipment like sonars which evaluate the soldier’s condition to prepare the emergency room at the hospital to receive the injured and operate quickly. There were cases that a person was on an operating table less than 45 minutes from the moment of attack.
The tour of the hospital also featured a large empty underground intensive care unit, should air sirens be blasted in Jerusalem and very sick patients need to be moved into a shelter.
Underground ICU in case of bombing
Hostages To The Government
Many Israelis are deeply upset with their leadership and Prime Minister Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu. They are angry at the failure to protect the border, allowing the October 7th massacre to occur. They are furious at the inability to finish off Hamas and release the hostages.
Graffiti around Jerusalem angry at Netanyahu
They are angry at Bibi’s failure to conclude a hostage deal and his refusal to step down and hold elections. They feel trapped by his incompetence and ego but have few tools to call for an early election.
The Saturday night protest near the prime minister’s house in Jerusalem was not shrill and it seemed like the the crowd was worn out from many months of little progress.
But they keep turning out.
Hostages To Family Fighting
Many Israelis are exhausted in every manner of the word. They have family members who have been fighting in Gaza or up north on-and-off for nine months. They all have or know of families who have lost loved ones. They are desperate to leave the country for a much needed respite but feel unable to do so while family is on the front lines.
Those who remain in the country ask each other difficult questions: do you postpone a wedding until after the war? Do you start dating someone who is on the front lines, who might suffer a terrible injury or death?
The soldiers occupy their every action and prayers. They have also been captured into a war zone since October 7, a war which no one wanted.
Hostages To Tradition
In the Jerusalem neighborhood of Romema, many new buildings are going up to accommodate the rapidly growing numbers of ultra-Orthodox Haredi Jews who want to live in Jerusalem, Judaism’s holiest city. While the vast majority of that community do not serve in the army, many are trying to contribute to the war effort in their own way.
On the first floor of a small building, a cramped kitchen has been set up by volunteers who cook and pack meals for families who have people fighting in Gaza or the Lebanese border. They pack hundreds of meals including soup, meatballs, spaghetti and dessert. Each package is customized according to the size of the family who has asked to receive the meals. The day I came to help pack, the meals were going to the community in Beit El.
Car packed with meals for families with people serving in the army, cooked and prepared by Haredi Jews in Jerusalem, July 2024
Economy Held Hostage
Israel has a citizen army in which everyone serves. While 18 to 21 year olds serve before they attend college, people also continue to get called up for milu’im, occasional service as the army needs people. In the course of this war, thousands of people in their 30s, 40s and 50s have left their jobs to fight the Palestinian Arab terrorists. Beyond the direct financial cost of the war, the impact on the country’s economy has been dramatic as millions of work-hours have vanished to defend the country.
There is still no end in sight all these months later, as fronts with Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houtis in Yemen open up further.
Homes Held Hostage
Many hotels and apartments in Jerusalem have unusual activity. Whole families from the country’s north near Lebanon, as well as from near the Gaza Strip have relocated to the middle of the country. For nine months, they have been living as internally-displaced people. In the immediate aftermath of October 7, the numbers surpassed 200,000 but is now closer to 90,000.
According to UN Watch, “Despite the unprecedented massive displacement within Israel, both the UN refugee agency (UNHCR) and the UN Special Rapporteur on Internally displaced people (IDPs), Paula Gaviria Betancur—the two UN representatives one would expect to champion the rights of the displaced Israelis—have been largely silent on the issue.”
Israelis – roughly the population of Duluth, MN – have lost access to their homes, and the world has remained silent.
Hostages To Creeping Ambivalence
So many Israelis share the refrain that they “do not want the situation of hostages to become normalized.” They refuse to live in a country in which it is accepted that more than one hundred people are trapped in Gaza. They rail against a world which cannot fathom the deep trauma of the country that innocent civilians were kidnapped from their homes by thousands of terrorists.
As each day morphs to another, people afix new numbers to tape on their chests: 278, 279, 280, 281… People are not only more fearful about the fate of the hostages as time goes by but that their lives and stories grow more distant to the world.
Resistance
While many feel trapped by the current war, Israelis are taking action incorporating the new reality. They try to transform points of pain to rays of light.
Shuva Junction, about 5km from Gaza, was originally the location where people brought dead and wounded people from the October 7 massacre. Since that time, it has become a makeshift hub where Israeli soldiers come to rest and get food. Roughly 1,500 people are fed every day at a cost of roughly $5,000, all done by volunteers.
Already an outlier among countries allowing sperm extraction from a dead man by a spouse, Israel is debating allowing parents to do posthumous sperm retrieval for their fallen sons post-October 7. The bereaved parents want their sons to live on somehow, after sacrificing everything for the nation.
Beyond the war is living life. While it felt strange to go out for dinner or shop while a war was raging and over a hundred people were still being held hostage, the overall environment always felt like it included both fighters and hostages.
I was fortunate to attend a Hanan Ben Ari concert in the Sultan’s Pool right outside the Old City of Jerusalem. The stage was illuminated by the number of days that hostages were captive along with a yellow ribbon.
Stage for Hanan Ben Ari concert at Sultan’s Pool, Jerusalem in July 2024
I was unfamiliar with the singer and my Hebrew is not great, so I needed to listen particularly closely to the words. I heard a man praying for his children. I listened to a singer honoring his grandfather who was buried on Har Meuchut, on the other side of the Old City walls.
Hanan Ben Ari at Sultan’s Pool
And I watched the crowd of secular, modern and ultra-Orthodox Jews sing along. I saw young and old, men and women dance and sway to the music.
And cry.
Hanan Ben Ari put up a picture of one of his road managers, along with one of him with his family. Hanan spoke of him and how he was working the Nova music festival and slaughtered on October 7. Ben Ari then showed two people in his crew who were still held captive in Gaza.
He then asked people to hold the flashlights on their phones if they know of someone killed in the war. All 6,000 people in the audience raised their arms and began crying to a mournful song, Shvurei lev, a song of a broken heart.
I have been to Israel durings wars and sensed a people who had long ago accepted that they lived in a region amongst people who did not accept their basic presence or humanity. Still, they believed the episode would pass; the country will prevail in the near-term battles and in the longer-term, peace will prevail when the Jewish State’s enemies internalize that they are never leaving.
But that was not the nation I visited in July 2024.
Woman crying over fate of the murdered, the fallen and the hostages while she surveyed her fellow countrymen raising their arms at a Hanan Ben Ari concert, that they have suffered deeply in the 2023-4 Hamas war.
Israelis are deeply scarred by those killed and the manner in which they were butchered on October 7. They were rocked by the government and army’s failure to protect them. They are tortured by the ongoing hostage situation. They are deeply troubled by their strongest ally of the United States being rocked with rabid antisemitism which had previously only been displayed in Europe. They are livid at being blamed for a war they never wanted and want to end as quickly as possible.
The Jewish State is being held hostage in Gaza because Judaism believes that every life is a world. It is being held hostage by the scars of the barbarity of October 7 massacre. It is being held hostage by the fear of living next door to people who support such crimes against humanity. It is being held hostage by its own government that won’t step down and hold new elections. It is being held hostage by a false narrative at the United Nations and the ICC. It is being held hostage by a single powerful ally fading in its support.
There are more than 100 hostages. There are millions.
Israel has long known war and is confident that it can defeat Palestinian terrorists.
This is more than a war against a weak genocidal foe. This is a battle in the cramped crevices of hearts and minds to salvage humanity. Alone.
Air traffic control of Tel Aviv airport – the main international airport for the entire country – lit up with yellow ribbon for hostages held in Gaza, July 2024. Over the first nine months of the year, before the October 7 attacks by Hamas, passenger traffic surged by an annual 38.5 percent, to 19.1 million. But since then, traffic has plunged, culminating in a 78 percent drop in November and 71 percent dive in December, according to the Israel Airports Authority.
The top court of the United Nations, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled that Israel’s presence in territories it captured in the June 1967 Six Day War is illegal. Specifically, it decided that “Israel’s presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory unlawful.” ICJ’s President Nawaf Salam said that “Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and the regime associated with them, have been established and are being maintained in violation of international law.”
To arrive at such conclusion, the ICJ must believe that Jordan is Palestine.
The “West Bank and East Jerusalem” were captured in a defensive war that Israel fought after Jordan (Transjordan at the time) attacked it from those lands in 1967. TransJordan had annexed those lands in April 1950 after it fought a war to destroy the nascent Jewish State. Only Britain, Pakistan and Iraq recognized that annexation.
It would appear that the ICJ has now recognized that annexation as well.
The San Remo Conference of April 1920 set the outline for carving up the defeated Ottoman Empire into a number of mandates, including the Mandate of Palestine which covered today’s Israel, Gaza, West Bank and Jordan. According to the British Mandate which took effect in July 1922, Britain had the right to separate Mandate Palestine into two areas: one for the Jews west of the Jordan River and one area east of the river, according to Article 25. It did so on May 23, 1925 in the area that became Trans-Jordan. Trans-jordan declared its independence on May 25, 1946.
Britain was having difficulty dealing with the eastern Palestinian Mandate and turned to the United Nations for assistance. In November 1947, the UN General Assembly voted to partition the remaining eastern Palestine into a Jewish State and and Arab State, with the area of Greater Jerusalem and Greater Bethlehem to be held by the United Nations in a Corpus Separatum, an international zone.
UN’s plan for an internationally-controlled “Corpus Separatum” including Greater Bethlehem and Jerusalem
The UNGA and the Jews accepted the planned division but the Arabs rejected it. When Britain left the region in May 1948 and the Jews declared a new State of Israel, the Arab world attacked. At the end of the war, Transjordan seized the area that became known as the “West Bank”, the eastern part of Jerusalem and all of greater Bethlehem. Israel took the western part of Jerusalem. Transjordan ethnically cleansed its annexed lands of all Jews and gave citizenship to everyone who lived in those lands in 1954, except if they were Jews (Article 3).
“Corpus Separatum” in purple as divided between Israel (shaded grey) and Trans-Jordan (in white)
Palestine did not exist as a distinct country pre-1948, but was a subset of Greater Syria as part of the Ottoman Empire until 1917, and then under British rule. Under the British, the land was separated into a portion west of the Jordan River set up to be a reestablished Jewish homeland, and east of Jordan River to be Transjordan. After the Israeli war of independence, there was still no “Palestine” but an expanded Jordan which seized the western shores of the Jordan River which were to be part of the Jewish homeland, and eastern Jerusalem which was designated to be an international city.
Whether during the Ottoman Empire, British Mandate, or during Israeli and Jordanian rule, there was never a country called Palestine. Further, “East Jerusalem” a fragment of the city which existed only during 18 years from 1949-1967 under Jordanian rule, was never contemplated to be part of Palestine in any formulation.
Israel fought a defensive war with Transjordan in 1948-9 and then again in 1967 in land that was specifically designated in the San Remo Conference and the British Mandate to be an integral part of the Jewish homeland. In order to consider the “West Bank and East Jerusalem” to be “occupied” and “illegal”, one would have to declare that:
the British mandate to have been illegal
the annexation of the seized land west of the Jordan River by Transjordan in 1949 to be legal
Jordan’s ethnic cleansing of Jews from those lands and barring them from citizenship to be legal
Jordan to be Palestine
In no other configuration could the ICJ conclude that Israeli Jews living in eastern Jerusalem is illegal and should be expelled.
The ICJ ruling is revisionist history and deeply antisemitic. It shows the moral rot of the United Nations which still has “Zionism is racism” in its lifeblood.
On Saturday June 8, 2024, Israeli security forces rescued four of the Israeli hostages who were kidnapped to Gaza from the Nova Music Festival on October 7, 2023. In the action to bring everyone back to Israel, one of the Israeli vehicles got stuck and was surrounded by Palestinian terrorists. Israel called in the Air Force to provide protection and scores of Palestinians were reportedly killed.
Pro-Israel media portrayed the rescue operation as an enormous success. Israelis celebrated on the streets at the return of the seized peaceful party-goers who were held illegally in captivity for eight months by Gazans.
NY Post cover pageWall Street Journal cover page
The anti-Israel media lambasted the operation as it killed many Palestinians. It mocked the rescue as being inhumane because of the toll on Palestinians who were part of the Hamas infrastructure imprisoning the Israelis.
Pundits went on to speculate that Hamas would now likely move hostages from apartments to the underground tunnel network and embed them with Palestinian soldiers.
That is inverted logic.
Hamas has no possibility of militarily defeating Israel, a fact made abundantly clear over the past eight months. The only war Hamas is attempting to win is one of public opinion, which it tries to do by getting the woke anti-Israel media to see Israel as mercilessly killing civilians – ideally as many women and children as possible. Hamas watches the news, and celebrates the latest victory that so much of the media has not condemned it for keeping hostages in the heart of a residential neighborhood.
It will make the next attempt even more heinous.
After the daring rescue operation, Hamas is likely to move remaining hostages into nurseries, to force Israel to kill as many Arab infants as possible, should the Jewish State attempt another rescue. It would be a huge victory for Hamas, as it offers infant martyrs for the cameras.
On May 15, 2023, the United Nations held its first “Nakba Day” event. In discussing the various activities to be held, the UN stated it wanted to “highlight that the noble goals of justice and peace, require recognizing the reality and history of the Palestinian people’s plight and ensuring the fulfillment of their inalienable rights.”
The difference in understanding those “inalienable rights” is the crux of why no solution to the conflict has been realized.
Palestinian Authority President Mahmud Abbas speaks during a high-level event to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the Nakba at the United Nations headquarters in New York on May 15, 2023. (Photo by Ed JONES / AFP)
At the event, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas demanded “the return of Palestinian refugees to their homeland, to their cities and villages, of which they were displaced by aggression and terror.” Abbas added “the issue of the refugees must be resolved. There are refugees and they should return. I am a refugee. I am a Palestinian refugee. I want to return to my town. I cannot live even in Paris or New York. I won’t have it. I want Safed. It is such a small town. I want it.”
Several countries sent solidarity messages to the Nakba event including: Algeria; Venezuela; Indonesia; Senegal; Tunisia; Türkiye; Qatar; Egypt; Jordan; Iran; Suba; Kuwait; Guyana; Malaysia; Bangladesh; Saudi Arabia; Bahrain; Namibia; Nicaragua; China; Syria; UAE; Lebanon; Maldives; South Africa and Mozambique.
Most of the Western countries officially stayed away but the Palestinian diaspora made itself felt.
At the evening of the launch of the event, Abbas “praised the role of the Palestinian community in the United States in supporting the Palestinian people, stressing the importance of their work in forming an American public opinion in support of the Palestinian national cause.” He was referring to groups like Students for Justice in Palestine, CAIR, American Muslims for Palestine and Palestine Youth Movement, all of which have been fomenting unrest and antisemitism on American streets.
When addressing the UN at the event, Abbas furthered the point “that the Palestinian narrative of the Nakba has begun to make its way to the awareness of the peoples, who have come to uncover the fraudulence of the Israeli narrative and listening to the Palestinian narrative and their tragedy.” The anti-Zionist and anti-Jewish talk-track is now found in California public schools and on college campuses.
The United Nations led Palestinian Arabs to believe that they will all get to return to towns where ancestors once lived inside of Israel, and the world has begun to accept that narrative as told by local Muslims living in the West. It is a bastard of the fabled “two-state solution” in which a new country of Palestine is purely Arab and Jew-free, and Israel is transformed into a bi-national state. One and one-half states for Arabs and half a state for Jews.
United Nations “refugee” camp with a key on top informing Palestinians that the key to their homes inside of Israel is via the United Nations
A few weeks after the UN’s 2023 Nakba event, Palestinians polled themselves. A majority stated that they believe that the Jewish State will cease to exist within twenty-five years. Specifically, “two-thirds say Israel will not celebrate the centenary of its establishment, and the majority believes that the Palestinian people will be able in the future to recover Palestine and return its refugees to their homes.“
The logical outcome of such thinking soon became manifest. Why should Palestinians negotiate a compromise with Israel when they believe that they will achieve all of their aims with global support?
The United Nations handed the microphone and held a celebration for jihadists who seek to end the Jewish State, while colleges were educating their student bodies in a radical, antisemitic Palestinian narrative that Israel is a colonialist, imperialist, illegal project. The toxic belief became mainstreamed and realized in the heinous October 7th massacre, celebrated by an unholy socialist-jihadi alliance on Western campuses and streets.
First One Through 