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Jews Ask for Protection. America Responds With Skepticism

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For most Americans, armed guards outside synagogues still look unsettling. For Jews, they have become background scenery. And increasingly, so has something else: being mocked for wanting the guards there in the first place.

Security cameras and hardened doors. Police details and lockdown drills. Volunteers scanning crowds during services. This is now ordinary Jewish life in America.

Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, PA, scene of a mass shooting attack

And yet, at the very moment Jews are hardening schools and synagogues because they are under threat, influential voices across media, activist circles, and politics increasingly frame Jewish fear itself as manufactured.

Federal authorities recently uncovered what prosecutors describe as an Iran-linked terror network targeting Jews and synagogues across the United States and Europe. According to the allegations, operatives connected to Kata’ib Hezbollah coordinated surveillance and attack planning against Jewish institutions in New York, California, Arizona, London, Amsterdam, and Toronto.

The response from much of the cultural left was not moral clarity about why Jewish institutions feel endangered. Instead, the familiar machinery of minimization immediately activated.

Last Week Tonight with John Oliver aired a lengthy segment mocking undercover counterterror operations and emphasizing cases where authorities supposedly manufactured extremists through entrapment. The timing could hardly have been more revealing. Jews hear about Iranian proxy terror targeting synagogues while elite comedy television reassures audiences that perhaps the greater danger is excessive concern about terrorism.

At the same time, activist organizations like CAIR and civil-liberties groups fought efforts to create limited buffer zones around synagogues facing aggressive intimidation and harassment. Senators questioning Jewish witnesses during campus antisemitism hearings increasingly sounded less interested in confronting hatred than in interrogating whether Jews were exaggerating it.

The pattern repeats constantly. Jews are under attack and ask for protection. Influential institutions respond by interrogating whether Jews are too afraid and therefore undeserving of any support.

No other minority group is treated this way. If Black churches increased security after racist attacks, nobody would accuse them of hysteria. If mosques hardened entrances after terror threats, commentators would call it prudent. If Asian community centers hired guards after targeted violence, politicians would praise vigilance.

Only Jews are routinely told their fear may itself be socially dangerous.

That is what makes this moment so disturbing. Jews are not simply confronting rising antisemitism. They are confronting a cultural elite increasingly uncomfortable acknowledging why Jewish security measures became necessary in the first place.

So instead of confronting the ideology threatening Jews, many commentators, activists, and politicians redirect attention toward the people trying to protect them. The synagogue barrier becomes controversial. The undercover operation becomes suspicious. The frightened Jewish parent becomes the problem – a Chaya/Karen – to deconstruct. Much as Israel’s security barrier built to stop West Bank terrorists has been labeled by the alt-left an “apartheid wall,” they are broadly inverting Jewish defensive measures into offensive ones.

Let’s be clear: a society that grows more skeptical of synagogue security than synagogue attackers has lost its moral bearings.

Related

When Jews Are Attacked, The New York Times Worries About Jihadists (March 2026)

An Open Letter to Commencement Speakers: Use Your Podium for Moral Clarity

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To the commencement speakers stepping onto stages this spring:

You are about to speak at one of life’s defining moments. Graduates and their families will remember your words long after the ceremony ends. That podium carries weight. It should be used carefully.

And it should be used with moral clarity.

Do not praise the fashionable activism of the moment simply because it is loud, visible, and rewarded by the culture around it.

Do not mistake popular protest for courage. If you want to speak about courage, speak about the students who stood for Israel.

Speak about the students who defended Israel’s right to wage a just war against Hamas after October 7—the deadliest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.

Speak about the students who understood that when a terrorist army invades a country, murders civilians in their homes, kidnaps children, rapes women, and openly promises to repeat it, the moral obligation of that country is defense. It is victory. It is the destruction of the machinery of terror.

That is what Israel is doing. And on campuses across America, students who have said so have paid a price.

Speak about that.

Speak about the Jewish students who have walked through hostile encampments and angry demonstrations to get to class.

Speak about the students who removed their kippot, hid their Stars of David, or stopped speaking openly because the atmosphere around them had become threatening.

Speak about the students who stood their ground anyway.

The students who wore hostage pins.

The students who defended the truth of October 7 when others rushed to justify it.

That is moral courage.

Real courage is not standing with a crowd chanting slogans. Real courage is standing when the crowd turns on you.

And that has been the experience of many Jewish students this year.

They have faced harassment, exclusion, intimidation, and hostility—often from classmates and sometimes with the silence or complicity of faculty and administrators.

That reality deserves acknowledgment. It deserves honor.

So if you are going to use your commencement speech to speak about justice, begin there.

To organizations like the American Federation of Teachers and the American Association of University Professors, who speak often about academic freedom and the right of educators to speak their conscience: prove those principles mean something.

Stand behind the educators who speak in defense of Israel.

Stand behind those who praise students fighting antisemitism.

Stand behind those who say openly that Jewish self-defense is moral.

Because if you defend speech only when it flatters your politics, you are not defending freedom. You are defending ideology.

Commencement should be better than ideology. It should tell the truth.

The truth of this year on campus is that some of the bravest students were the ones who stood visibly, unapologetically, and often alone with the Jewish people.

If you want to honor courage from the podium, honor them. That would be a commencement speech worth remembering.

Derek Peterson, chair of the University of Michigan Faculty Senate, speaks during the University of Michigan’s 2026 Spring Commencement at Michigan Stadium in Ann Arbor celebrating pro-Palestinian “activists.”

An American Jewish Blueprint

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When Reality Changes

The first great strategic correction in Jewish history came in the hills of Judea.

In the early days of the Hasmonean revolt 2,100 years ago, Jews hiding from Seleucid persecution were attacked on Shabbat but they refused to fight on the holy day. Their piety became their vulnerability. The enemy understood the pattern and exploited it. Jews died because they would not defend themselves on the Sabbath.

Then came one of the most consequential rulings in Jewish history: if attacked on Shabbat, Jews would fight.

That was more than a legal adjustment. It was a civilizational doctrine. Reality had changed and Jewish survival required adaptation.

Hanukkah is remembered through oil and light, but before the miracle of the oil came the correction in strategy. The Jews who survived understood something fundamental: the law existed to preserve Jewish life, and Jewish life could not be preserved through passive fidelity to assumptions that enemies had learned to weaponize.

That is the enduring Hanukkah doctrine. When reality changes, Jewish strategy must change with it.

The Three Jewish Illusions

Jewish history has often been shaped by three recurring illusions.

The first is the illusion of piety without defense.

That was the lesson of Hanukkah itself. Holiness without strategic realism became a mechanism for slaughter. What began as faith became fatal passivity until Jewish leadership corrected course.

The second is the illusion of integration without power.

This was the great mistake of medieval Jewry and later German Jewry.

In medieval Europe, Jews often flourished under royal protection, economic necessity, and communal tolerance. These arrangements created stability until rulers changed, social pressures mounted, or religious hostility sharpened. Then the protections vanished.

The lesson was brutal: usefulness is not security.

German Jews carried that illusion to its highest expression. They were among the most integrated Jews in history. Patriotic, educated, prosperous, woven deeply into German civic life. They believed they had secured permanence through contribution.

Then came The Holocaust.

No Jewish community had climbed higher inside a host society. None fell faster.

Integration is real. It matters. It enriches Jewish life. It is insufficient.

The third illusion is hope without strategy.

The Bar Kokhba Revolt embodied this danger. Jewish sovereignty briefly returned, messianic expectations surged, and military ambition outran political reality. Rome crushed the revolt and shattered Judea.

Hope is essential to Jewish life. Hope detached from sustainable power becomes catastrophe.

The Jewish Paradox of Power

Jewish history presents a permanent paradox. Jews are vulnerable when powerless and Jews are vulnerable when powerful.

The accusation of Jewish power is one of antisemitism’s oldest reflexes. Jews have been accused of controlling kingdoms when dependent on kings, accused of controlling economies while confined to ghettos, accused of controlling politics while excluded from political life.

Powerlessness never prevented the accusation. Weakness has never protected Jews.

So the answer cannot be withdrawal from power. The answer is understanding what kind of power matters.

German Jews had social prominence but lacked defensive power. They had visibility, achievement, influence, prestige but did not control the institutions that would determine whether rights remained rights when political conditions changed.

That distinction matters now.

American Jews have extraordinary social prominence. In business, law, medicine, media, academia, and politics, Jewish achievement is immense.

But social prominence is not defensive power.

Success creates comfort. Comfort creates assumptions. Assumptions create blindness.

That is where Jewish history becomes dangerous.

The task is not to seek dominance. It is to build durability.

The American Jewish Doctrine

What does that mean in practical terms? How should American Jews position themselves in the current environment?

First, political power.

Diaspora Jews have often treated politics as secondary, entering political life through universal causes and only later recognizing Jewish interests. History argues for the reverse.

Jewish interests are legitimate political interests. Communal safety is political before it is physical. Before mobs move, laws shift. Before violence erupts, institutions bend. Before exclusion becomes visible, narratives are rewritten.

Political power means relationships with governors, mayors, district attorneys, legislators, police commissioners, school boards, university administrations.

It means voting coherently when Jewish interests are implicated.

Not because politics is everything but because politics determines what protections remain when sentiment changes.

Second, rights.

Modern Jewish communal life often leans heavily on allyship. Allies matter. Coalitions matter.

But allyship is rented. Rights are owned.

Diaspora Jews need to become more comfortable asserting rights directly.

  • The right to visible Jewish life.
  • The right to religious practice.
  • The right to define antisemitism.
  • The right to communal defense.
  • The right to political particularism.

Rights do not depend on approval. That is why they matter.

Third, communal resilience.

Jewish prosperity in America has created a dangerous temptation: assuming that integration reduces the need for internal communal strength. History teaches the opposite.

Strong Jewish life requires thick Jewish institutions.

  • Jewish schools.
  • Jewish civic organizations.
  • Jewish legal defense organizations.
  • Jewish security systems.
  • Jewish philanthropy directed inward.
  • Jewish media institutions.

Strong institutions convert prosperity into durability.

Capital moves. Institutions endure.

The First Signs of Danger

Jewish history teaches that violence rarely begins with violence. It begins with language.

Before pogroms, Jews become symbols.

Before expulsions, Jews become abstractions.

Before extermination, Jews become explanations. Parasites. Foreigners. Exploiters. Poisoners. Colonizers.

The vocabulary evolves. The function remains.

Language creates permission.

That is why Jews must take ideological shifts seriously before they become physical threats.

Universities matter.

Activist ecosystems matter.

Social media matters.

Political rhetoric matters.

Religious radicalization matters.

Institutional capture matters.

By the time violence arrives, the moral groundwork has often already been laid. Jewish history punishes those who dismiss rhetoric as harmless.

The Sovereign Difference

There is one structural difference in modern Jewish history that changes everything.

Israel exists.

For nearly two thousand years, Jewish history was entirely dependent on host societies. That changed in 1948.

For the first time since antiquity, Jews had sovereign power, an army, intelligence services, borders, and a place where Jewish defense was not dependent on the goodwill of others.

That transformed Jewish vulnerability. Yet diaspora Jews remain diaspora Jews. Their fate is still deeply tied to the health of their host societies. Or perhaps more complicated, become local stand-ins to attack policies for which they have no control.

Jewish history now has a sovereign center which points in two directions: an option for refuge for diaspora Jews and also an excuse for pogroms for local antisemites.

The Hanukkah Question

The question facing American Jews is not whether to adopt a wartime mindset. America in 2026 is not Germany in 1932.

Jewish life in America remains among the freest and most prosperous in Jewish history. The challenge is different.

It is to abandon passive history. To stop assuming that flourishing means permanence.

To recognize that strategic conditions can shift. To adapt before threats become kinetic.

That is the Hanukkah doctrine.

The Jews in those caves died believing they were preserving the law. The Jews who survived understood something harder. The law had to preserve the Jews.

That remains the enduring Jewish challenge.

Not panic. Preparedness.

Not militancy. Strategic realism.

Not permanent war. Permanent vigilance.

Jewish history has rarely punished the Jews for being too alert. It has punished them, again and again, for waiting too long.

The Fire That Doesn’t Go Out

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Parshat Tzav centers on a single, stubborn image: a fire that must keep burning.
Day and night, without interruption, the flame is sustained. Wood is added. Ash is cleared. The rhythm continues.

No drama surrounds it. That is the point.

The Torah uses a precise word: tamid—continuous.
Rashi sharpens it further: continuous means that the fire burns through Shabbat. It burns even when conditions are imperfect. There are no pauses built into the system.

Continuity is not aspirational. It is enforced.

Continuity is fragile. It breaks in small gaps—missed days, skipped responsibilities, moments when no one shows up. Enough of those moments, and what once felt permanent disappears quietly.

Tzav eliminates the gap.

The tradition holds that the original fire descended from heaven—a moment of revelation. And then the responsibility shifts.

Ramban notes that even with that divine beginning, the command remains: keep it burning. What begins from above survives only through what is sustained below.

This is how permanence is built.

The Kohanim return each day to the same tasks. The altar is prepared again. The fire is fed again. Over time, repetition becomes structure. Structure becomes identity.

Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch sees in this a broader model. A people endures through daily acts that reaffirm what it stands for.

The fire becomes a signal:

Something is still here. The commitment continues. Yesterday carries into today.

In much of the worls today we have built a culture of moments. A flash of outrage. A declaration. A cause that surges and disappears as quickly as it arrived.

Tzav points in the opposite direction.

What matters is not who lights the fire. It is who keeps it burning.

Ner Tamid and lights in synagogue in Gibraltar (photo: FirstOneThrough)

The Jewish world speaks often about continuity. It invests heavily in beginnings—early education, bar mitzvah preparation, the moment a child stands before a community and reads from the Torah.

And then, too often, the system loosens its grip.

The years that follow—high school, when identity is tested, challenged, and reshaped—are treated as optional, as if the fire will somehow continue on its own.

It doesn’t.

As Adam Teitelbaum argues in Sapir, the drop-off after bar mitzvah is not a minor leak; it is the structural break. Jewish education often peaks at the moment it should begin to deepen, especially for boys.

The system celebrates ignition and neglects continuity.

The result is predictable: a generation trained for performance at thirteen, and left without reinforcement at seventeen—precisely when identity is challenged, not assumed.

Continuity cannot be front-loaded.

It requires reinforcement when the surrounding culture is strongest, when belonging becomes a choice rather than an inheritance. Those are the years when the fire must be tended most carefully.

Continuity is not sustained by intention. It is sustained by people who refuse to let the fire go out.

Retaliation?

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A single word can change the story of a war.

In its live coverage of the conflict with Iran, the New York Times warned that Europe was preparing for “Iran’s retaliatory attacks.” In the same reporting, the paper noted that Iranian drones struck Azerbaijan and that a missile headed toward Turkish airspace was intercepted by NATO defenses.

The New York Times coverage of Iran attacking countries still as “retaliatory”

Neither Turkey nor Azerbaijan had attacked Iran, yet the strikes were still described as “retaliatory.”

This is more than sloppy wording. It subtly changes how readers understand who initiated violence and who expanded the war.

In ordinary language, retaliation means striking back at the party that attacked you. If A attacks B and B strikes A, that is retaliation. But if A attacks B and B launches missiles at C, that is something else. That is expansion of the war.

Other reporting on the same events makes this clear. Reuters described NATO defenses intercepting an Iranian missile headed toward Turkey, while Azerbaijan raised its military alert after drones linked to Iran struck near an airport in Nakhchivan. Those incidents marked the conflict spilling into countries that were not previously part of the fighting.
Yet the New York Times still placed these events under the heading of “Iran’s retaliatory attacks.”

That word does important narrative work. If readers repeatedly see the sequence framed this way, the implied storyline becomes simple:
Israel strikes.
Iran retaliates.

But the actual chain of events across the Middle East is far more complicated.

Iran has spent decades building a network of proxy forces across the region. Hezbollah in Lebanon, militias in Syria and Iraq, and the Houthis in Yemen have all launched rockets, drones, and missiles at Israel and at U.S. forces. Israeli strikes on Iranian commanders, weapons depots, or missile factories often follow those attacks.

Yet the language describing the two sides differs. Israeli operations are commonly described as “strikes,” “attacks,” or “escalations.” Iranian missile launches are frequently described as retaliation, even when the missiles land in countries that were not the attacker.

Precision matters. A missile aimed at Turkey, a NATO member, cannot be retaliation against Turkey if Turkey did not attack Iran. A drone strike in Azerbaijan cannot be retaliation against Azerbaijan for the same reason.
Those are new fronts.

Iran may claim it is responding to earlier Israeli or American strikes. But when its missiles and drones land in countries that were not fighting it, that is not retaliation.
It is the widening of a war.

And when journalism blurs that distinction, the reader is left with the impression that the war began somewhere else.

From Defanging to Beheading Islamic Extremism

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The primary goal of a defensive war is to end the fighting for good. The goal is not to conquer land or take spoils but to stop the bloodshed. This objective can be realized with not just defeating the foe but having them relinquish their weapons for good.

Sometimes this happens with the enemy losing much of its army while occasionally it is with the elimination of the leadership. This is mostly true with secular nations who concede the battlefield when any chance to victory has been squashed.

Yet religious wars seem to seep into the future. It is difficult for the faithful to abandon the battle if such effort forces a challenge to faith.

We see that today with radical Islam. Hamas, the popular leaders of Gaza, waged their version of a holy war to annihilate the Jews in what they consider a “waqf”, Islamic land. Even when the fighters were vanquished and the leaders killed, the remaining zealots continue to hold onto weapons and refuse to allow calm to take root. The jihadists’ deeply radical and religious orientation obliterate the chance for coexistence with non-believers.

So the defensive war carries on much longer than required in a secular war. The destruction is more widespread because the jihadists refuse to relent.

The same front is now in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Its leadership is not as popular locally as Hamas is in Gaza. Months ago, the United States and Israel were able to take out the country’s nuclear weapons program in a 12 day war. The Iranian people did not rally to its leaders and press for war as they did in Gaza and the “West Bank”/ east of the 1949 Armistice lines “E49AL” against Israel, but took to the streets to challenge their own leadership.

But the jihadi leaders took aim at their people. Iranian soldiers mowed their own citizens down by the tens of thousands. The radical clerics would not abandon their plans for intercontinental ballistic missiles nor weapons of mass destruction, to be used to threaten and wage war against the “Big Satan” and “Little Satan” of the United States and Israel, respectively.

So the U.S. and Israel have reluctantly returned to Iran. The defanging of the regime escalated to beheading the rulers. On the first day of this next iteration of battle, Khamenei was killed as were other leaders.

Unlike the Stateless Arabs from Palestine (SAPs), the Iranian people are more secular. They want to live a quality life and are not obsessed with killing Jews hundreds of miles away. One therefore hopes that this war will end quickly.

The past two years has pushed back radical Islam significantly in the Middle East, which may pave a path for peace. It is incumbent on the world to encourage a form of humble faith which channels devotion towards personal humility rather than asserting supremacy, as the course towards coexistence.

Islamic supremacy is being both defanged and beheaded in the Middle East. There will likely be victories in the secular states, while the West will need to develop a different gameplan for the religious zealots, like those in Gaza.

Absence And Endurance

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“Remember what Amalek did to you on the way…”


In Book of Deuteronomy the Torah recalls the ambush first described in Exodus. A newly freed slave nation, weary and disoriented, is attacked from behind. The text lingers on a painful detail: Amalek struck the weak who lagged at the rear. Then comes the deeper indictment. Amalek did not fear God.


The assault carried a message about reality itself. Amalek targeted the stragglers and declared that the Jewish God could not protect his flock. The nation attacked Jewish flesh in order to wound their faith.


The Torah directs our attention to the rear of the camp because doubt begins there. The people who fall behind often feel exposed and unseen. In that space it becomes tempting to read hardship as proof of abandonment.


Across centuries the pattern returns. The Inquisition tried to sever Jews from memory and covenant. Pogroms turned humiliation into public ritual. The Holocaust mechanized death while desecrating Torah scrolls. Modern jihadi massacres are staged as proclamations that Jewish destiny can be mocked without consequence. Each generation repeats the same challenge. Where is your God now?


Zachor commands two acts that stand together. Remember what Amalek did. Blot out the memory of Amalek.


Jewish memory preserves the record of cruelty with precision. What must be erased is Amalek’s thesis that hiddenness equals absence and that suffering proves divine withdrawal. The mitzvah confronts the instinct to conclude that what cannot be seen has vanished.


That theme deepens in the story of Book of Esther, read days after Zachor. God’s name never appears in the Megillah. A genocidal decree is signed by Haman, identified as an Agagite and heir to Amalek’s legacy. The Jews of Persia stand vulnerable in exile.
Yet events turn solely with the human characters. A sleepless king. A courageous queen. The story bends without spectacle.


The absence of explicit mention of God becomes the teaching. Presence can operate beneath the surface. Providence can move without announcement.


Amalek’s worldview rests on a simple claim. If God cannot be seen, He is gone.
Zachor and Esther answer together. The covenant does not dissolve in silence. Hiddenness forms part of the design. The rear of the camp remains within divine promise and protection.


To blot out Amalek is to erase the interpretation that vulnerability equals rejection. It is to refuse despair when protection cannot be measured. It is to affirm that concealed presence still sustains.

For Jews, the invisible is core to faith, while active erasure of those who mock such faith strengthens belief. Absence as endurance componded.

Ending Evil Is Not Revenge

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Pharaoh stood unmoved as the Nile turned to blood.
Life-giving water became useless overnight, and the system held.
That moment captured the moral reality of the Exodus.

The plagues were not revenge. They were not emotional retaliation for suffering already endured. And they were not even, in the narrow sense, punishment for evil deeds. They were something far more deliberate: the dismantling of a system that could not be allowed to continue.

That distinction matters—then and now.

Revenge, Punishment, and Dismantlement

Revenge is backward-looking. It seeks emotional satisfaction for injury.
Punishment is judicial. It assigns guilt and imposes consequences.
Dismantlement is future-oriented. It exists to make continued evil impossible.

The plagues fit only the third category.

They were announced in advance. They escalated slowly. It wasn’t rage. It didn’t aim at humiliation. The Torah goes out of its way to show a paced methodology.

Even “punishment” does not fully explain what happens. Punishment targets perpetrators. The plagues targeted foundations: economy, theology, nature, and political myth. The Nile, the body, the sky—everything Egypt relied on to project permanence was stripped away piece by piece.

Why? Because slavery was not a policy failure within Egypt.
It was Egypt.

You cannot reform a system built on domination. You cannot shame it. You cannot negotiate it out of existence. You have to break the assumptions that make it feel eternal.

That is what the plagues did. They delivered a message: “You are not absolute—and the time for evil has ended.”

The Same Moral Error Reappears Today

That same confusion appears again in the way Israel’s war in Gaza is discussed.

Since October 7, critics have insisted that Israel is acting out of revenge, wounded pride, or collective punishment. That reading repeats the same error people make about the plagues: it projects human emotion onto a campaign that is structural in nature.

If Israel were seeking revenge, Gaza would already be erased.
If this were punishment, the war would end with confessions and symbolic justice.

Neither is happening.

Israel is trying to end a war by dismantling the system that made it inevitable.

Hamas is not a fringe militia. It is the elected majority of the Palestinian parliament and ruling authority in Gaza. It is immensely popular. Over years, it constructed a comprehensive war society: tunnels beneath homes, schools, and mosques; civilian infrastructure fused with military command; education and media organized around eradication; international aid converted into weapons. Violence was not a breakdown. It was the operating principle.

As in Egypt, brutality was not an abuse within the system.
It was the system.

You cannot coexist with that indefinitely. You cannot contain it forever. You cannot pause it and hope it reforms while leaving its foundations intact.

Why Ending the System Is Not Cruelty

Calls for ceasefire without dismantlement may sound compassionate but mirror Pharaoh’s promises: temporary relief with permanent structures preserved. The Torah teaches us to distrust that move. Pauses without transformation merely reset the cycle.

Israel’s campaign is not about humiliation. It is about limits. No governing authority may embed genocide into its ideology. No regime gains immunity by hiding behind civilians. No society organized around death gets an unlimited future.

Ending such a system is not revenge.
It is moral necessity.

The Darkest Dawn, and the End of “The Right of Return”

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There is an old saying that “it’s always darkest before the dawn.” It captures the turning point where exhaustion and despair crest just before clarity breaks through. It sounds sour but is actually optimistic in seeing that the darkness will soon yield to daylight.

The phrase fits perfectly for the century-long conflict surrounding the Stateless Arabs from Palestine (SAPs)—because the world has lingered in the darkness for generations, terrified to say out loud what every policymaker knows: there is no “right of return” to Israel. There never was. And acknowledging that truth is the dawn the region desperately needs.

Old City of Jerusalem (photo: FirstOneThrough)

For decades, diplomats, presidents, secretaries-general, and foreign ministers have spoken in hushed tones, pretending that the millions of Arab descendants of the 1948 refugees might somehow “return” to houses where grandparents lived in a sovereign Jewish state. No one believed it. But fear of political backlash from the Muslim world kept the fiction alive. UN resolutions were drafted with linguistic acrobatics; peace conferences avoided the topic like a contagion; European chancelleries adopted the convenient illusion that avoiding the subject was the same as solving it.

The result was darkness—deep, suffocating darkness. A generation raised on false hope. UNRWA built an education system anchored in grievance. Politicians in Ramallah and Gaza used the fantasy as a perpetual cudgel against compromise. The Arab League made it non-negotiable, ensuring negotiations never truly began.

Every time the world inched toward clarity, it recoiled. And the darkness thickened.

But dawn comes precisely when the night feels endless. Today, after the horrors of October 7, after the open celebration of massacres on Western streets, after the exposure of UNRWA’s radicalization pipelines, and the decimation of Gaza, the world is finally approaching that moment. Governments are beginning to say the once-unsayable: a two-state solution is incompatible with a mass influx of millions of SAPs into Israel. You cannot demand a Jewish state and simultaneously demand its demographic erasure. You cannot promote coexistence while promoting a “return” to towns long integrated into modern Israel.

The math, the politics, the security, the basic logic—none of it ever supported the claim. The world simply refused to admit it.

Now the truth is no longer optional. The dawn is forming whether the diplomats like it or not.

Sunrise at the Kotel (photo: FirstOneThrough)

For the first time, Western leaders are linking a future Palestinian state to the clear, final abandonment of the so-called right of return. Israel has always said this. Quietly, so have every serious negotiator from Washington, Brussels, and Cairo. Even Arab states normalizing relations with Israel recognize that “return” is code for endless war, not peace.

When the world finally articulates the truth clearly—that Palestinian refugees and their descendants will build their future in a Palestinian state, not in Israel—that is the moment when peace becomes possible. It is the moment the darkness begins to lift, replaced by a realistic horizon instead of a hallucinatory demand.

The tragedy is that it took so long in time and lives: waves of terrorism, regional wars, Western riots, and the revelation of UN complicity to get here. But the proverb holds: it is always darkest before the dawn. And now, the sunlight is unavoidable.

The world must finally say it out loud:
There is no right of return into Israel. The dawn of a real two-state solution begins with accepting that truth.

Sunrise at the Citadel of David (photo: FirstOneThrough)

The Veil on Antisemitism is Gone

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For years, defense lawyers tried to blur the lines in terrorism cases. When police uncovered jihadist plots, attorneys floated the well-worn argument of entrapment — that officers merely nudged vulnerable young men into thinking about violence. If not entrapped, then “mentally ill.” “Impressionable.” “Confused.” A haze of excuses meant to rehabilitate the indefensible.

But look at the landscape now.

The people calling for violence against Jews aren’t hiding behind whispers in back rooms or being lured by undercover officers. They’re shouting it from megaphones under the banner of “free speech.” They’re organizing through groups like CAIR, Within Our Lifetime, and the Palestine Youth Movement. They openly describe Jews as “enemies” who must be “confronted by any means necessary.” They praise “resistance” in every form, stripping the word of euphemism and revealing precisely what they endorse.

Unlike past defendants, they haven’t yet been charged with providing weapons, scheming attacks, or casing synagogues. Not yet. But they are building the moral scaffolding for others to do so — a permission structure wrapped in slogans about “justice,” “liberation,” and “decolonization.” It is ideological, deliberate, and public.

This is not entrapment.
This is not mental instability.
This is not marginal, confused fury.

This is ideology. Hardened, intentional, and proud of itself.

For decades, antisemitism coming from “majority minorities” — segments of the Black community and the Muslim community — was treated differently. Explained away. Softened. Excused as an understandable reaction to oppression, poverty, policing, or trauma. Jews were asked to tolerate it, contextualize it, empathize with it. The burden of understanding was always placed on the victim. So much so, that when Jews were killed by Black people in Jersey City, Jews asked the Black community for forgiveness.

But the past few years have blown apart the pretense.

Anti-Israel activists outside a Jewish day school in Westchester calling for “liberation by any means necessary” in 2024

The hatred is no longer whispered. It is validated in academic departments, amplified on social media, and wrapped in moral language to disguise its ugliness. The same voices that once insisted they were merely “pro-human rights” now chant openly for the erasure of the Jewish people and state. They’ve dropped the mask because they believe the cultural winds are at their backs.

The veil is gone.

What remains is the raw reality: A movement that celebrates violence, justifies terror, and cloaks explicit antisemitism in the robes of social justice — and an America increasingly unwilling, or unable, to call it what it is.

Because the scaffolding of antisemitism for the alt-left is that Jews are a threat. They are powerful. They steal what is not theirs. And Jews then have the temerity to complain of “antisemitism” as if they aren’t privileged, their veil of protection to rip the victim card from the truly marginalized communities of color. For the alt-right, the rightful owners of this land are White Christians, and Jews are undermining them too.

This is FOLO, Fear Of Losing Out. The trepidation that what should rightly be yours is being snatched away by nefarious forces. The Jews. Perhaps alone, perhaps with other allies, whether they be minority groups, PACs or a foreign country.

It’s old antisemitism, magnified by social media and chat groups to instigate and mobilize the masses against the most persecuted people of the past centuries. The media veil can no longer conceal the barbarians at the gates of synagogues.

Roughly 200 protestors outside of New York City’s Park East Synagogue shouting “There is only one solution! Intifada revolution!” on November 19, 2025