Category Archives: Opinion

A Pact for the Future of Religious Heritage

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The United Nations has a Pact for the Future. It looks ahead to artificial intelligence, digital governance, climate change, sustainable development, financing, debt and even discussions of global taxation. The underlying premise is that humanity faces challenges unlike those of previous generations and that international cooperation must evolve accordingly.

Yet there is one omission that is difficult to ignore. While the international community has developed increasingly sophisticated frameworks to protect biodiversity, endangered languages, cultural artifacts and World Heritage Sites, it has produced no comparable vision for preserving one of humanity’s oldest living inheritances: its religions.

We have become remarkably good at preserving the products of civilization. Archaeologists restore temples after earthquakes. UNESCO protects historic churches, synagogues and mosques. Museums conserve ancient manuscripts while linguists race to document disappearing languages before the last native speakers die. We understand instinctively that once these treasures are lost, they cannot truly be recreated. Yet we devote far less attention to the living communities that gave those monuments meaning. A restored monastery is no substitute for the monks who once prayed there. An ancient synagogue is just beautiful stone if the Jewish community that sustained it for centuries has vanished. Preserving the architecture while allowing the faith itself to disappear is to save the shell while losing the civilization.

This is no longer a hypothetical concern. In only a generation, ISIS nearly exterminated the Yazidis while devastating ancient Christian communities whose roots stretched back to the earliest centuries of Christianity. The Taliban’s return to power accelerated the disappearance of Afghanistan’s Hindu and Sikh communities and forced Christians even deeper underground. Across parts of Africa, jihadist movements have burned churches, murdered clergy and displaced entire Christian villages. Indigenous and tribal religions continue to fade through modernization, migration and demographic collapse, while Jewish communities that had flourished across much of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) for two millennia have largely disappeared. These are different stories unfolding on different continents, but together they reveal the same pattern: humanity’s religious diversity is steadily shrinking.

There were once an estimated 250,000 Jews in Morocco. They are have almost all left since 1948

Recent years have demonstrated how fragile minority religious and ethnic groups can be. Christians have seen ancient churches destroyed or emptied by war. Pilgrimages have been disrupted by conflict in multiple regions. Jews continue to be barred from praying openly at the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, the holiest site in Judaism.

The legal foundations for religious liberty already exist. Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights recognizes the freedom of thought, conscience and religion, including the right to change one’s religion. Yet millions still live where that freedom exists only on paper. Apostasy remains punishable under law or through the application of religious law in several countries, while blasphemy laws continue to imprison people or expose them to severe punishment simply for changing or expressing their beliefs. At the same time, digital surveillance, online incitement and transnational extremist movements have created entirely new forms of religious persecution that the architects of the postwar human rights system could scarcely have imagined.

Radical Islamists call for killing converts from Islam

Perhaps the world needs a Pact for the Future of Religious Heritage – one that treats living religious communities with the same urgency that we reserve for endangered species, disappearing languages and historic monuments. Such a framework would protect sacred sites, preserve endangered faith traditions, defend freedom of conscience, encourage the repeal of laws criminalizing apostasy and blasphemy, establish rapid international responses to religious persecution, and affirm that followers of every religion should be able to freely, safely and openly worship at their sacred sites and undertake traditional pilgrimages.

Civilizations are remembered not only for the monuments they leave behind, but for the beliefs that inspired them and the communities that kept those beliefs alive. Humanity has learned to preserve forests, wildlife, manuscripts and archaeological treasures. The next step is to preserve something even older and even more fragile: the living faiths that have shaped civilizations for thousands of years.

Was the JNS International Policy Summit Worthwhile?

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A friend noticed I had attended the JNS International Policy Summit in Jerusalem and asked if it was worthwhile.

I paused. “That’s actually a harder question than it sounds. I have too many thoughts for a text message.”

This article is my answer.

The event. Alex Traiman, CEO of JNS, and Richard Heideman, Chairman of the JNS International Policy Summit, assembled an impressive three-day program. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, President Isaac Herzog, U.S. Ambassador Mike Huckabee, the “Green Prince” Mosab Hassan Yousef and dozens of leading policymakers, legal experts and advocates discussed nearly every dimension of Israel’s current challenges.

Topics: The summit covered twelve main topics with a few breakaway panels for each so people could listen to various subjects. It covered everything from antisemitism and regional security to international law, Judea and Samaria, Israel’s democracy, Christian-Israel relations and the narrative war playing out across traditional and social media.

JNS panel discussion on Regional Security

What makes a conference worthwhile? Many conferences share the discussions online – as did JNS – so people often question the value of devoting so much time to listening to so many speakers. I usually attend conferences to become energized and to meet like-minded people. That has been my experience at Tikvah events in New York, for example. I will share that it was not my feeling at this JNS conference.

For one thing, the attendees here were much more engaged in politics professionally than at a Tikvah Leadership Conference. Most of the people at the Waldorf Astoria knew everyone on the panels, worked with them and could have joined any of the discussions. It felt like the crowd was full of understudies ready to assume an empty chair on stage, or ready to have working sessions in side rooms. It made talking to fellow attendees extremely interesting for anyone looking to fully engage in the various subject matters.

However, the vibe of the Jerusalem News Syndicate conference was much more right-wing than I had anticipated. I had thought of JNS as simply an alternative to AP and Reuters, providing an Israeli perspective on the news. While I expected it to be right-of-center, I was surprised at how many deeply right-wing people were both speakers and attendees.

Two Themes: Trump-Iran/Lebanon: The backdrop for the event must be set, as events in the Middle East move quickly.

At the time of the conference, June 21-23, it appeared that the Trump Administration was striking a deal with Iran that was viewed by the speakers as profoundly weak regarding Iran, and deeply flawed as it related to Israel’s war with Hezbollah. Speakers went out of their way to say how much they love Donald Trump and Israel could never ask for a better friend, so such a skilled negotiator obviously just needed to buy time through July 4 celebrations and the World Cup, and would then return to finishing the Iranian nuclear and ballistic threats. Speakers avoided smearing Vice President JD Vance in public, but the quiet discussions near the cookies in the hallway were that they would like to see Marco Rubio as the president after Trump.

The opinions were definitely hawkish: Israel needs to maintain a buffer in Lebanon until Hezbollah is disarmed and terrorist infrastructure is removed. The same format is required in Gaza for Hamas. Iran must continue to be attacked until a long-term favorable deal can be struck.

It was interesting to hear how the various speakers thought of the regimes and people in each theater: In Iran, the government is horrible and must be removed while the people are intelligent and wonderful allies-in-waiting. Hezbollah is a rogue Iranian proxy that must be expunged so Israel can develop a long-term peace with the legitimate government of Lebanon. However, the situation in Gaza had no rainbow at the end. While the determination to finish Hamas and disarm it was viewed as non-negotiable, the prognosis for peace with everyday Gazans was viewed as so distant in the future to not even warrant near-term discussions.

Antisemitism/ Narrative: The “eighth front” of the current war is sometimes referred to as the narrative war in the global media and social media by Netanyahu. I believe Israel’s deteriorating image around the world has fueled antisemitism, even if hostility toward Israel and hatred of Jews ultimately remain distinct phenomena.

Michal Cotler-Wunsh, CEO of the International Legal Forum, called “October 7 the Kristallnacht of our times” that will ultimately “come for all democracies.” Lori Lowenthal Marcus of the Deborah Project said that “teacher unions are like the Hamas tunnels in American education,” part of an insidious infrastructure that systemically vilifies Israel. David Brog of the Maccabee Task Force suggested bringing social media influencers to Israel to see the truth, and that those people will become strong advocates when they realize that they’ve been fed lies for years. Miss Israel, Melanie Shiraz suggested changing the entire dynamic: to engage in sports, cultural events and other places where people engage directly in a common arena. “Let them see Israel, not as an argument to be won but a beauty to be shared…. Not with better corrections but better invitations.”

Sara Friedman, CEO WJC Israel; Lori Lowenthal Marcus, Legal Director of the Deborah Project; David Brog, Executive Director of Macabee task Force, and Elan Carr, CEO Israeli-American Council

She received one of only a handful of standing ovations.

So, was the JNS International Policy Summit worthwhile?

Yes, but not for the reason I expected.

The speeches were informative, and many are available online for anyone willing to invest the time. What cannot be livestreamed are the conversations over lunch, the chance encounters in the hallway, and the immersion in an ecosystem of people who have dedicated their lives to defending Israel and Jews in ways most of us never see. Some fight in courtrooms. Others rewrite school textbooks, monitor the United Nations, expose campus antisemitism, advocate for terror victims, build alliances with Christians, or wage the daily battle for truth on social media.

Miss Israel, Melanie Shiraz, surprised the crowd with passionate advocacy for greater cultural exchanges and received a standing ovation

Like any gathering of passionate people, I did not agree with everyone. Some speakers left me inspired; others left me shaking my head. But perhaps that is part of the value of attending in person. A conference is not worthwhile because it confirms everything you already believe. It is worthwhile because it exposes you to the people, personalities, and competing ideas that shape a movement.

The summit reminded me that the defense of Israel and Jewish people around the world is no longer just the work of soldiers and diplomats. It is also carried by lawyers, educators, journalists, researchers, politicians, influencers, and ordinary citizens who understand that ideas, narratives, and public opinion have become battlefields of their own.

That, more than any individual panel, was the lasting lesson I brought home from Jerusalem.

How New York City Was Lost

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There was a time when many New Yorkers dismissed the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) as a fringe movement. Their rallies were loud. Their rhetoric was provocative. But surely the city that built Wall Street, welcomed millions of immigrants, and was attacked on September 11 would never hand real political power to a movement whose rhetoric after October 7 shocked so many Americans.

Rally in Times Square the day after the massacre of 1,200 people in Israel and abduction of 251.

Yet here we are.

The new mayor is part of the DSA. DSA-backed candidates continue to win elections across New York City.

This is not merely a debate over tax rates or rent control. After Hamas murdered more than 1,200 Israelis on October 7, the New York City chapter of DSA helped organize demonstrations almost immediately afterward. Slogans and statements in Times Square celebrated the attack as “resistance” and chanted for it to continue “long live the Intifada!” DSA-NYC had long argued that Israeli civilians should not be viewed as innocent because they were participants in a “settler-colonial” society.

One might have expected that such rhetoric would permanently marginalize it. Instead, it grew. How?

Because its opponents fought the wrong war.

Organizations such as AIPAC concentrated enormous resources on defeating individual candidates where the ground game already indicated it could win. Sometimes they succeeded spectacularly. Millions of dollars were spent. Headlines proclaimed another victory over the anti-Israel Left.

But every expensive primary also reinforced the story DSA wanted to tell.

They were no longer simply neighborhood activists. They became the underdogs standing up to a wealthy political establishment. Every television advertisement became another fundraising email. Every outside dollar became another recruiting tool. Every victory over one candidate left the movement itself intact and often stronger.

AIPAC won campaigns but DSA built a movement.

Politics is ultimately about culture before it is about elections. Elections simply reveal where the culture already stands.

While establishment organizations measured success by defeating a particular candidate, DSA measured success by opening another neighborhood chapter, training another organizer, recruiting another volunteer, and persuading another generation that its worldview represented justice.

The results are now visible. A virtual sweep of DSA candidates in New York this week.

New York did not suddenly become socialist. It was organized into becoming more receptive to socialist candidates over many years. One neighborhood at a time. One group at a time.

J Street spent considerable time and effort over the past few years bashing AIPAC to build better alliances with the far-left. Now that multiple anti-Israel extremists have entered office while effectively echoing J Street’s smears of AIPAC, the left-wing “pro-Israel” group stayed mum and didn’t print a single press release.

That should be the lesson – not only for those who support Israel, but for anyone concerned about the city’s future.

Money can influence an election. It cannot substitute for a movement.

If New York is to change course, it will not happen because one organization writes larger checks. It will happen because people who believe in liberal democracy, civic responsibility, pluralism, and the moral distinction between murdering civilians and defending them begin organizing with the same patience and persistence that their opponents have displayed for years.

Jacobin lead is that Socialists defeated “AIPAC, racism” before anything else

Cities are not lost in a single election. They are lost one neighborhood at a time.

Related:

Overwinning (Sept 2025)

Palestinian Authority Mocks Jewish Children Murdered in Holocaust

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How do you comprehend six million murdered Jews? One million murdered children?

The numbers are so large that the human mind struggles to grasp it. Six million becomes a statistic. A statistic becomes an abstraction. And an abstraction risks becoming forgettable.

For decades, Holocaust educators wrestled with that problem. Their answer was simple: stop counting and start remembering.

Programs such as Names, Not Numbers were created in Jewish schools to teach students that every Holocaust victim was an individual human being. Students interviewed survivors, recorded testimonies, learned family histories, and transformed statistics back into people. The goal was not merely to teach history. It was to restore identity to those whom the Nazis sought to erase.

The same idea appeared in the remarkable documentary Paper Clips.

In the film, students in a small town in Tennessee learned that six million was too large a number to understand. They discovered that Norwegians had worn paper clips as symbols of resistance to Nazi occupation and decided to collect six million paper clips – one for every murdered Jew.

As the clips accumulated, the students began to understand something profound. It was hard to gather millions of ordinary clips – it required enormous resources and participation of people and organizations far and wide. That millions of people could be exterminated deliberately was terrifying.

The educational programs also sought to do more than humanize the victims and demonstrate the scale of the atrocities.

Nazis literally transformed people into numbers. Upon arrival at Auschwitz, many prisoners were stripped of their names and tattooed with identification numbers. It was part of a larger project to erase individuality, dignity, and humanity. The Holocaust was not only a campaign to murder Jews. It was a campaign to reduce them to anonymous units in a machinery of extermination.

Jewish children display tattooed numbers that Nazis put on their arms during the Holocaust

The Holocaust was not simply a story within a war. More than one million Jewish children were murdered not because they were caught in a battlefield, not because they belonged to an opposing army, but because they were Jewish. The Nazi regime actively hunted them for liquidation. Jewish babies, toddlers, and schoolchildren were marked for death from birth.

They were not collateral damage. They were targets.

For decades, educators, museums, survivors, and Jewish communities worked to preserve those names and those stories. The idea that victims should be remembered as human beings rather than statistics became one of the defining themes of Holocaust education around the world.

Which is why the recent Palestinian campaign, “Their Names Are Not Numbers,” is so striking.

The slogan echoes language that Holocaust educators spent generations developing. It draws upon a framework created to explain why victims of genocide should be remembered as individuals rather than numbers.

Palestinian Arabs are using a cruel tool in a flimsy attempt to wipe away their own guilt for launching a genocidal war with broad support, and for deliberately banning children from entering the tunnel infrastructure that leadership spent years and billions of dollars constructing. The Palestinian Authority is not merely making the dead children martyrs at someone else’s hands rather than their own, but deliberately lifting the campaign from an actual genocide. They have turned Holocaust remembrance against the Jewish state.

This is a moral perversion.

The Holocaust was a state-directed project of extermination whose goal was the disappearance of the Jewish people. Israel’s war against Hamas is a war against an armed movement that invaded Israel, massacred civilians, took hostages, and openly declares its intention to destroy the Jewish state.

Equating those realities with the Holocaust is not simply immoral but antisemitic. Borrowing the language developed to remember murdered Jews is not simply appropriation but sadistic.

Names, Not Numbers was created to ensure that the victims of history’s greatest campaign of anti-Jewish extermination would never be reduced to statistics. To take that language and deploy it as part of a campaign that casts Israel as Nazi Germany not only vilifies Israel unjustly but negates the Holocaust of its meaning and mocks the memory of a million murdered Jewish children.

Riding the Waves of New York

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I took this photograph at the 9/11 memorial in Westchester the morning after the Knicks’ victory. Above the memorial, two airplane contrails crossed in the sky. For a moment, the come from behind basketball victories and terrorist tragedies made time collapse. The memory of loss, the joy of victory, and the story of New York itself all appeared in a single frame.

No city I know lives more intensely between triumph and tragedy.

This is the city that stood at the center of the world, nearly went bankrupt, reinvented itself, endured the horror of September 11th, and somehow found a way to rise again. It is a place of breathtaking architecture, relentless ambition, and an economy that continues to attract dreamers from every corner of the globe.

It is also a city of contradictions. A city capable of extraordinary tolerance and extraordinary intolerance. A city that nurtured one of the greatest Jewish communities in history, yet today struggles with normalized antisemitism many thought belonged to the past. A city whose institutions remain among the world’s finest, yet whose values are constantly being tested.

For much of my life, I thought Sinatra’s line—“If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere”—meant New York was the ultimate destination. The summit. The place where success itself was measured.

Standing beneath this memorial, I wondered whether I had misunderstood the lyric.

Maybe New York’s greatest lesson is not that it’s the “top of the heap.” Maybe its lesson is resilience.

To make it in New York is to learn how to navigate uncertainty. To endure setbacks. To celebrate victories without believing they will last forever, and to face disappointments without believing they are permanent. The city rises, falls, and rises again. So do the people who call it home.

And if you learn to survive the waves here, you will never fear the next horizon.

From Salute to Celebrate to Am Yisrael: The Next Chapter of New York’s Israel Parade

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The children who dominate New York’s Israel parade are no longer the children who dominate Jewish education.

Each spring, Fifth Avenue fills with students from Modern Orthodox and Religious Zionist schools waving Israeli flags, singing Hebrew songs, and celebrating the Jewish state. Yet these students represent only a small fraction of Jewish children in the New York metropolitan area. The largest group of Jewish children attends public and secular private schools. The largest group attending Jewish schools is Chassidic and Yeshivish.

Jewish yeshiva day school students and faculty march up Fifth Avenue in New York City’s Israel parade, May 31, 2026 (photo: First One Through)

That reality raises an important question about the future of one of American Jewry’s most visible public events.

The parade’s own history reflects the evolution of American Jewish identity.

When it was founded in 1964, it was called the Youth Salute to Israel Parade. The name reflected its era. Israel was only sixteen years old. The Holocaust was still within living memory. American Jews were not merely celebrating Israel; they were standing with it.

In 2011, the event became the Celebrate Israel Parade. Israel was no longer a struggling young state. It was a global technology center, a military power, and home to millions of Jews. The emphasis shifted from solidarity to celebration.

After October 7, the parade adopted a third name: Israel Day on Fifth.

The parade’s three names trace the evolution of American Zionism itself. The first generation saluted Israel. The second celebrated Israel.

Today, the challenge is different. Support for Israel can no longer be assumed, and Jewish unity can no longer be taken for granted. The question is whether Israel can continue to serve as a bridge connecting an increasingly diverse Jewish community.

The challenge is particularly visible when looking at Jewish children in the greater NYC area.

The best available estimates suggest that roughly 450,000 to 500,000 Jewish school-age children live in the greater New York metropolitan area. About 170,000 attend Jewish day schools and yeshivot.

Of those, roughly 130,000 to 140,000 attend Chassidic and Yeshivish schools, compared with only 20,000 to 25,000 in Modern Orthodox schools. Outside the day-school world are another 280,000 to 330,000 Jewish children attending public schools, secular private schools, Catholic schools, and other educational settings.

Yet anyone watching the parade could be forgiven for drawing the opposite conclusion.

The schools most visible on Fifth Avenue are overwhelmingly Modern Orthodox and Religious Zionist institutions. They are among the most committed supporters of Israel in American Jewish life. But they represent only a small share of Jewish youth. The fastest-growing segment of Jewish education is Chassidic and Yeshivish. The largest segment of Jewish children overall attends public and secular private schools.

The parade therefore showcases some of the most engaged Jewish children in America, but not necessarily the full spectrum of Jewish youth.

That matters because Israel remains one of the few ideas capable of connecting Jews across denominational, ideological, and educational lines. At a moment when Jewish attachment to Israel is increasingly challenged on college campuses, contested on social media, and questioned in parts of American public life, institutions that connect young Jews to Israel have become more important, not less.

If the goal is Jewish unity in the decades ahead, the parade may need to ask a different question.

Rather than “How do we celebrate Israel?” the question may be “How do we bring the Jewish people together around Israel?”

A future parade organized around Am Yisrael rather than a particular expression of Zionism could create room for every community to participate in its own way.

  • Charedi schools could march under banners celebrating Torah in the Land of Israel.
  • Public-school students could march through camps, youth groups, synagogue programs, and community organizations.
  • Modern Orthodox schools could continue expressing their Religious Zionist vision.
  • Israeli cultural groups, charities, universities, first responders, and innovation organizations would all still have their place.

This would be Am Yisrael Day on Fifth Avenue.

The original parade was created to demonstrate solidarity with a young Jewish state. The next challenge is ensuring that future generations of American Jews remain connected both to Israel and to one another.

Should the future of the parade remain with the niche schools that already fill Fifth Avenue, it will become a symbol of the fragmentation of Israel support even within the Jewish community, let around the broader world. That would not bode well for Jewish New Yorkers or Israel.

The first generation saluted Israel. The second celebrated Israel. The challenge for the third generation is to ensure that Israel remains a force capable of uniting the Jewish people.

Doctors Without Borders Is Coming For Israel

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Every modern humanitarian organization insists the same thing: suffering is not a business. The starving child is not a marketing asset. The bombed hospital is not a fundraising funnel. The crying mother under rubble is not a revenue generator.

Then the annual reports arrive.

Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) / Doctors Without Borders crossed roughly €2.3 billion in annual revenue in 2022. Then roughly €2.35 billion in 2023 and €2.36 billion in 2024. Three consecutive years above €2 billion. Ninety-eight percent of funding came from private donors. More than seven million donors worldwide.

The organization presents this as proof of global compassion. It is also evidence of something else: misery has become one of the most effective fundraising products on earth. Especially if loaded with charges: “Genocide.” “Starvation.” “Ethnic cleansing.”

The humanitarian industry now operates inside the same emotional attention economy that drives political campaigns, cable news, and social media outrage. The more horrifying the imagery, the more morally charged the narrative, the more emotionally shattered the audience becomes, the faster the money moves.

And nobody understands this dynamic better than MSF.

MSF’s public communications increasingly fused emotionally maximalist language with direct fundraising infrastructure. A visitor no longer encountered merely medical updates. They encountered emotional conversion architecture.

The modern humanitarian sector has discovered what every digital platform already knows: emotionally devastating content converts. A dusty child under rubble produces more engagement than a policy paper. A charge of genocide and starvation moves directly into emotional reflex.

The uglier the images and explosive the charges, the healthier the fundraising pipeline becomes.

Doctors Without Borders is very selective in its explosive terminology regarding Israel. For MSF, Israel is the cause of all the ills in Gaza, not Hamas. Israel is directly called out, not the genocidal terrorist group that launched the war and hides in tunnels without letting civilians use them for protection. No excuse proffered by Israel will satisfy.

Doctors Without Borders doesn’t do this in other conflicts. Not in Sudan nor Somalia. Not in Syria nor Haiti. In those wars, either no one is called out or “all sides” are vilified.

And MSF takes its anti-Israel campaign on the road. Wherever Israel is dragged into a defensive war against those determined to annihilate it, like Lebanon and Iran, MSF is standing guard and pointing fingers.

MSF does not limit itself to smear campaigns against Israel. It is a full lobbying shop, taking out full page ads in newspapers to rally the public against Israel. It pushes governments to stop supporting Israel in its defensive war.

So it is no surprise that MSF has officially backed the entire Iranian proxy war against Israel, telling the world that it rushes to protect “Gaza, Lebanon and Iran” from Israel.

Doctors Without Borders: 1) runs to assist jihadists in their active war against Israel; 2) raises money claiming the belligerent parties are the victims; 3) lobbies to have governments stop supporting Israel and 4) calls for the masses to protest the Jewish State. It does all of this, uniquely in Israel’s war.

Doctors Without Borders is not a humanitarian organization but an active instrument in the war to destroy Israel.

Stop Marching for 1948. Start Building 2048.

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Every May, “Nakba Day” protests erupt across Western cities under the claimed banner of justice and liberation. Organizers describe them as commemorations of displacement and suffering. Yet listen carefully to the chants, read the signs, and study the ideology driving many of these demonstrations, and a darker reality emerges.

Nakba Day events are not about building a future alongside a Jewish state. They are about keeping alive the dream that the Jewish state should never have existed at all, and must be destroyed.

That is why the rhetoric so often revolves around “resistance until liberation,” “from the river to the sea,” and “globalize the intifada.” The message is unmistakable. The war of 1948 is not viewed as tragic history. It is viewed as unfinished business.

For 78 years, generations of the Stateless Arabs from Palestine (SAPs) and their supporters have been taught that the central injustice was not war itself, nor the suffering that war inevitably unleashed on all sides, but Jewish sovereignty. The catastrophe, in this telling, was that Jews regained independence anywhere in their ancestral homeland.

That poisonous premise has trapped both Palestinian Arabs and Israelis inside an endless cycle of bloodshed.

A movement built around the belief that Israel must someday disappear cannot produce coexistence. A political culture that teaches Jews are foreign colonial invaders rather than an indigenous Middle Eastern people returning to the land where Jewish civilization was born cannot produce peace. A worldview that refuses to acknowledge Jewish history in Jerusalem, Jewish ties to Hebron, or the sanctity of the Temple Mount to Judaism is rooted in antisemitism, not “anti-Zionism.” It is a deep “deformity” in Palestinian culture.

And so Nakba Day has increasingly become less a memorial to suffering than a ritual of perpetual war.

There is nothing wrong with mourning loss. Every nation remembers tragedy. The problem begins when remembrance becomes a doctrine that denies another people’s right to exist. To basic human rights. No peace movement can emerge from teaching generation after generation that coexistence itself is betrayal.

It is time to break that cycle.

Replace Nakba Day with Two State Day. A day dedicated not to reversing 1948, but to building 2048.

Imagine a new annual movement where Palestinian Arabs openly recognize that Jews are indigenous to the Land of Israel. One where activists acknowledge that Jewish attachment to Jerusalem did not begin in 1967 or 1948, but stretches back thousands of years. One where the Temple Mount is recognized not merely as a Muslim site built atop forgotten ruins, but as the spiritual center of Jewish civilization.

Imagine a Two State Day where Palestinian leaders finally say openly that Jews are not crusaders, not European interlopers, not temporary occupiers, but a people who originated in the very land they returned to.

And imagine Israeli Jews responding not with suspicion, but with an outstretched hand.

Imagine Israeli Independence Day celebrations where Muslim neighbors, Arab citizens, and Palestinians willing to embrace coexistence are invited to participate. Imagine Jewish speakers recognizing Palestinian suffering and aspirations, while Muslim speakers recognize Jewish indigenousness, Jewish history, and Israel’s permanence. Imagine both peoples publicly declaring that neither side is leaving and neither side’s history will be erased.

That would not erase either people’s narrative. It would humanize both.

The current version of Nakba politics freezes Palestinians psychologically in 1948, teaching generation after generation that justice means reversing history rather than building a future. It glorifies “resistance-violence” while discouraging reconciliation. It romanticizes intifada while Palestinians themselves continue paying the price in blood, corruption, isolation, and failed leadership.

This ideology has harmed Palestinians no less than Israelis.

Every year spent teaching children that Haifa, Jaffa, and Tel Aviv must someday be “liberated” is another year not spent building functioning institutions, economic opportunity, civil society, or genuine pathways to coexistence. Every rally that denies Jewish legitimacy hardens Israelis further against compromise and strengthens extremists on all sides.

The world has already seen where this road leads. October 7 was not born in a vacuum. It emerged from decades of indoctrination insisting that Jewish sovereignty itself is intolerable “in any part of Palestine” and that violence against it is inherently righteous “resistance.” The cheering crowds in Western capitals after the massacre exposed how deeply this toxic worldview has spread far beyond Gaza, chumming for the anti-Jewish horde.

But history is not destiny.

Two State Day could become something profoundly different. A day not of denial, but of mutual recognition. A day where SAPs mourn losses without denying Jewish legitimacy. A day where Jews acknowledge Palestinian Arab suffering without questioning Israel’s basic right to exist. A day where both peoples reject the poison of perpetual grievance and choose coexistence over endless war.

The future cannot belong to people still marching psychologically toward 1948. It must belong to those willing to build 2048.

A future where Palestinian children are not taught that Jews are foreign usurpers, but neighbors with ancient roots in the same land. A future where Jewish children no longer grow up expecting every concession to be answered with more violence. A future where the Temple Mount is not a symbol of exclusion, but proof that the land carries the sacred history of multiple peoples.

Real peace will never emerge from chants demanding the disappearance of one side or the other. It begins only when both peoples recognize each other’s humanity, legitimacy, and permanence.

The End of Civilization

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The defining moral line of civilization is simple: civilians are off limits.

Once that line breaks, atrocity is no longer an exception. It becomes a method.

Over the last five years, some of the worst deliberate mass killings of civilians have come at the hands of jihadist movements and regimes built on political Islam.

In Sudan, militias tied to the Rapid Support Forces slaughtered an estimated 10,000 to 15,000 civilians, largely from the Masalit community. Whole neighborhoods were emptied through organized murder.

On October 7, thousands of Gazans crossed into Israel and hunted Jewish civilians deliberately—families in their homes, young people at the Nova Music Festival, children, the elderly. Terror itself was the objective.

In Iran, the regime’s 2025–2026 crackdown on protests has left more than 6,000 civilians dead, according to rights monitors, killed for dissent against an Islamic revolutionary order.

Across Nigeria and the Sahel, Boko Haram and Islamic State West Africa Province continue village massacres, church bombings, kidnappings, and executions. Civilians are the intended victims.

These conflicts differ in geography and politics. Sudan is tribal and ethnic. Hamas is nationalist and religious. Iran is a regime. Boko Haram is insurgent.

What unites them is the same moral collapse: the civilian is no longer protected by being uninvolved. Civilian blood becomes a signal of conviction.

And here is where the West has developed its own moral blind spot.

For years, parts of the activist left have embraced an oppressor-oppressed framework so rigid that civilian status itself becomes negotiable. The first question is no longer who was killed, but who held power.

That inversion was laid bare after October 7, when elements within Democratic Socialists of America and allied activist circles framed the massacre in the language of “resistance” and “decolonization,” making slaughter politically understandable so long as it came from the “oppressed.”

The jihadist says civilians may die because ideology sanctifies it. The regime says civilians may die because dissent threatens power. The activist says civilians may die because power determines innocence.

Different justifications. Same result.

Once innocence becomes conditional, civilization becomes conditional too.

Because the moment civilians become fair game, everyone eventually becomes fair game.

Children’s Book Authors Etch Antisemitism

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The new play Giant has revived the scandal of Roald Dahl, the beloved children’s author whose antisemitism became inseparable from his legacy. Dahl’s hatred had its roots in an obsession with Israel, especially after the 1982 Lebanon War, which hardened into something older and darker: Jews as a collective object of blame. Political fury dissolved the line between a state and a people.

Matt Chun shows where that road now leads.

Chun is an Australian children’s book illustrator, part of a profession entrusted with shaping how children understand innocence, cruelty, and empathy. But when Jews were murdered at a Jewish Hanukkah celebration in Bondi, his response in an article title “Never mourn a fascist,” exposed something far beyond political critique: raw antisemitism. The victims were neither Israelis nor soldiers. They were Australian Jews gathered in communal celebration, among them a ten-year-old girl. Chun denied their innocence and treated their deaths as politically qualified, as though Jewish identity itself diminished the claim to grief.

People stand near flowers laid as a tribute at Bondi Beach to honour the victims of a mass shooting that targeted a Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach on Sunday, in Sydney, Australia, December 16, 2025. (credit: REUTERS/Flavio Brancaleone)

That marks the evolution. Dahl saw war and blamed Jews. Chun sees Jews and explains away their murder.

That is why the cancellation of Chun’s forthcoming children’s book Bila by University of Queensland Press was fitting. Children’s books are an act of trust. Parents place them in their children’s hands believing that the people behind them understand something fundamental about innocence and human worth. A creator who cannot recognize the innocence of a murdered Jewish child at a Hanukkah celebration has forfeited any claim to shape the moral imagination of children.

Dahl’s antisemitism traveled through Israel before landing on Jews. Chun begins with Jews.

Chun wrote that “lands have been pillaged, poisoned, desecrated, and set ablaze by colonisers,” as he celebrates the slaughter of people at a holiday party. Alas, he is only the latest author instilling venom in the ink of books being marketed to children.