The late comedian George Carlin had a famous routine about “the seven words you can’t say on television.” It was funny because everyone knew the words, and everyone knew the absurdity of pretending they didn’t exist. Then came cable television — HBO, Showtime, and the rest — and suddenly those words were everywhere. What once felt taboo became common, even boring.
So it is with the language used against Israel.
In 1991, after intense U.S. diplomatic pressure, the United Nations revoked its infamous “Zionism is racism” resolution. For a moment, it seemed like the libel had been buried. There was hope that the relentless delegitimization campaign against Israel would fade, that the language of hate would finally be retired.
But in 2001, just days before the jihadist terror attacks of September 11, the Durban Conference in South Africa blew the doors wide open again. A coalition of NGOs issued a statement accusing Israel of no fewer than five of the gravest crimes known to humanity:
Apartheid
Genocide
Ethnic cleansing
Racism
Crimes against humanity
This wasn’t fringe rhetoric. It was delivered under the UN umbrella, with global media present. Durban made it “respectable” to say the unsayable — and to say it loudly.
Since then, those accusations have seeped into mainstream discourse. Palestinian “human rights” groups echo the smears repeatedly. They are repeated on college campuses, in international tribunals, in op-eds from major newspapers, and by activists on social media. What was once a shocking smear has become routine — as casual as an f-bomb on late-night cable TV.
Graffiti that Israel is committing “Genocide” in Venice, August 2025
Durban didn’t just make it acceptable to slander Israel — it made it obligatory for the “serious” activist class. To not accuse Israel of apartheid or genocide – and now especially after Israel’s defensive war against Gaza – is to risk being called naive, a sellout, or worse. The same way edgy comics feel compelled to swear to prove they’re authentic, self-styled “human rights defenders” now compete over who can level the most outrageous accusation against the Jewish state.
The world has gone from debating Israel’s policies to cheering on its demonization. The libels have become cultural wallpaper — so constant that people stop noticing they’re lies. Durban didn’t merely open the floodgates. It built a sewer main, hooked it up to the global conversation, and has been pumping raw hate through it ever since — with the United Nations playing plumber, making sure the pipes never run dry.
The medieval accusation of Jews poisoning wells has been updated: now the “poison” is alleged genocide, apartheid, and crimes against humanity — and once again, the world is drinking it without question.
On October 28, 2011, Lord Jonathan Sacks, the Chief Rabbi of England, came to New York City and sat with Rabbi Meir Soloviechik at Yeshiva University. Their hour long talk touched on Lord Sacks’ book The Home We Build Together, and the role of religion in society, focusing on the United States and the United Kingdom, in particular.
Chief Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks Speaks at Yeshiva University with Rabbi Meir Soloveichik, October 2011
In the opening remarks (3:10), Rabbi Soloveichik shared a story about Senator Joseph Lieberman, who once observed that on Simchat Torah, Jews dance with the Torah in the streets with joy, yet often fail to carry that Torah into the world during the rest of the year. It was a reminder that religion cannot remain confined to ritual but must be brought into society.
Lord Sacks followed with a story of his own. Prime Minister Tony Blair once teased him that he had reached the “boring part” of the Hebrew Bible—the lengthy passages about the building of the Mishkan (Tabernacle). Why, Blair asked, does the Torah devote hundreds of verses to it, compared to just 34 for the creation of the universe?
Lord Sacks replied:
Prime Minister, it is not difficult for an omniscient, omnipotent, infinite God to create a home for human beings. But for finite, fallible human beings to create a home for the infinite God, that is difficult.
The Mishkan, Sacks explained, was not just architecture—it was a project that united the people. More than what God does for us, it is what we do for God that transforms and binds us together. “If you want to take this diverse, fractured culture of Britain and turn it into a united nation,” Sacks said, “you have to get them to build something together.”
Rabbi Soloveichik and Lord Sacks went on to describe that the decline of religious life and secularization of Europe was tied to fewer children being born. A self-centered focus weakens families, weakens faith, and weakens society. In contrast, raising children—caring for someone more than oneself—provides both the foundation of belief and the roots of charity: “having somebody whose life you care about more than yourself, that could actually be the foundation of faith for many of us.”
Washington (D.C.) and Rembrandt
Nearly fourteen years later, on September 8, 2025, U.S. President Donald Trump held an event at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C. He invited members of the newly established (May 1, 2025) Religious Liberty Commission to hear how he was advancing the centrality of religion in American public life. He said “When faith gets weaker, our country seems to get weaker. When faith gets stronger… good things happen for our country…. To have a great nation, you have to have religion.”
One of the members of the Presidential Committee on Religious Liberty is Rabbi Meir Soloveichik. He was unable to attend the speech by the president in Washington because he was giving a day long-lecture in New York City at the home of Mem and Zalman Bernstein and the Metropolitan Museum of Art for the Tikvah Fund about art, religion and western society.
Rabbi Solveichik focused on Rembrandt’s two versions of the Sacrifice of Isaac. He contrasted Abraham’s devotion to God’s command to offer his son Isaac, to the investment of love and devotion he had made in his son. The angel broke the conflict, and with it, the end of human sacrifice which was prevalent in the world at that time. From this point onward, belief in a higher power could be accompanied by protecting and investing in our children.
Religion, Children and Western Democracy
It made for an interesting sermon triptych connecting religion, children and western values: Lord Sachs, Rabbi Soloveichik and President Trump all emphasized that religion has the power to strengthen ourselves, our families, our communities and our nation.
In Lord Sacks book, The Great Partnership, published in June 2011, right before his talk at YU, he wrote:
My argument has been that contrary to the received narrative, freedom has been better served in the modern world by a religious vision rather than a secular one. The Abrahamic vision, with its insistence on the non-negotiable dignity of the human person and the importance of protected space – the families and communities that make up civil society – where relationships are not based on power, saved England and America from the worst excesses of the revolutionary politics that cost tens of thousands of lives in France and tens of millions in Russia….
Abrahamic politics, by contrast, is politics with a human face, the politics that knows the limits of power, as well as the transformative effect of free persons freely joining together to make social institutions worthy of being a home for the divine presence. Abraham politics never forgets that there are things more important than politics, and that is what makes it the best defense of liberty.”
That is the motion before Western democracies: can humble faith as embodied in “Abraham politics” lead our different faiths to help build a cohesive society of respect and growth.
Concluding Circle
The discussion of religion and democracy is being advanced passionately today because it feels abandoned.
According to Lord Sacks, democracy under secularism preached intersectionality which yielded segregation and isolationism. Rabbi Solveichik responded that “a Mayflower of persecuted religions might leave England and Europe to come to safer shores [like America].” For his part, President Trump established the Religious Liberty Commission to deal with such matters, with the first group’s term ending on July 4, 2026, on the nation’s 250th anniversary.
So it was fitting that Rabbi Soloveichik should end his talk to the Tikvah Fund, a group whose motto is “Advancing Jewish Excellence and Western Civilization through Education & Ideas,” before Emanuel Leutze’s Washington Crossing the Delaware, while President Trump was concluding his remarks in Washington, D.C.
Rabbi Soloveichik at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, September 2025
In the 1851 painting, the future president of the United States stood aboard a boat filled with a diverse crew, readying to end the rule of England and break with the British monarchy and Church of England, to establish a new democratic state in 1776. Nearly 250 years later, the Chief Rabbi of England, the president of the United States, and the rabbi leading the oldest synagogue in the United States were championing the importance of religion in strengthening democracies everywhere. A quiet revolution to return to the foundations of faith to help build a more perfect union.
Six Jewish civilians were killed simply for being Jews. Surely, a world leader would stand firm, demand justice, and declare solidarity with the victims. Yet UN Secretary-General António Guterres offered only a perfunctory “strong condemnation” via his spokesperson—no mention of justice, no demand for the murderers to be brought to account, no affirmation of solidarity.
Because these murdered Jews were in Israel.
That’s the moral vacuum of the UN.
In Mali, after a terror attack on 17 September 2024, Guterres said he “strongly condemns the terrorist attack,” extended his “sincere condolences” to victims and the government, and—crucially—urged the Malian transitional government “to ensure that those responsible for this despicable attack are held to account.”
In Pakistan, following a deadly blast, he “strongly condemned the ‘abhorrent’ attack” and offering “solidarity” with the “Government and people of Pakistan in their efforts to address terrorism and violent extremism.“
Why does Guterres morph into a fierce defender of victims—and demand justice—when the targets are not Israelis, but merely issue a dry statement when Jews are murdered? Perhaps he is waiting to find out if this Palestinian Arab terrorist was also a UN employee?
This is not nuance. It’s deliberate abandonment. A moral inversion because the villains have long ago been beatified, and Guterres has internalized that 2 billion Muslims are his real clients.
The UN has become a place where Jewish lives are treated as collateral, while other victims are granted full moral and political recognition. Guterres’s pattern isn’t subtle—it’s a glaring indictment of the UN’s moral bankruptcy.
In an astonishing development, a majority of U.S. Senate Democrats voted to withhold “offensive weapons” from Israel. It was a symbolic vote — the measure failed with Republicans opposing the bill — but the message is clear: Israel may block rockets but not destroy the launchers. Defense in this new moral order means absorbing blows gracefully, not ending the threat.
At the same time, France — home to the third-largest Jewish population in the world — announced it will recognize a State of Palestine without requiring demilitarization. Paris is prepared to bless a future Palestine that could legally import tanks, rockets, and drones — even as its largest faction, Hamas, wages a genocidal war.
The Illusion of Morality
This is not a call for peace but a demand that Israel remain permanently in the center of the bullseye. Washington Democrats and European leaders want to look moral by limiting “excessive force,” but they are scripting a world where Jews may bleed — just not too much at once.
Recognizing a Palestinian state without disarming it legitimizes Hamas’s war aim. It signals that mass murder, hostage-taking, and open calls for Israel’s destruction do not block your path to statehood — they accelerate it. That is appeasement, not diplomacy.
Hamas kidnapping Israeli women on October 7, 2023
The Right to Finish the Fight
Israel was built on thousands of years of history, and the vow “never again.” That means more than survival — it means the right to end the threat. Defensive weapons stop today’s rockets; offensive weapons prevent tomorrow’s.
If Democrats in Washington vote to deny Israel offensive weapons, and if Paris recognizes an armed Palestine, the message is the same: the Jewish state must fight forever.
True peace will not come from tying Israel’s hands — it will come from removing those committed to its destruction and extinguishing their dream.
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There are contests in which people do not simply want to beat their opponents but to so thoroughly dominate them that the opponent never dares to rise again. In sports, the knockout punch sends a boxer down and the victor up the rankings and into bigger purses. In war, nations aim not just to win but to deter future attacks.
But there is such a thing as “overwinning” — appearing so dominant that it does a disservice to the victor’s own long-term cause.
The Historical Lesson: Versailles
Many historians argue that France and its allies so humiliated Germany at the end of World War I that they guaranteed the next war. The Versailles Treaty stripped Germany of territory, imposed crushing reparations, and forbade them from rebuilding their military. Rather than simply deterring aggression, it created a nation humiliated and seething for revenge.
Instead of permanent peace, Versailles delivered two decades of festering resentment and, ultimately, World War II.
The Modern Parallel: Politics
Overwinning plays out in politics as well. Consider the Democratic primary in New York’s 16th District in 2024. Jamaal Bowman was a polarizing, unpopular incumbent facing a strong challenger, Westchester County Executive George Latimer, who had deep local support. Latimer was likely to win on his own — but AIPAC decided to spend a reported $20 million to ensure Bowman’s defeat.
The message was not just about removing Bowman; it was a flex. It told every other member of Congress: oppose us and we will spend you into political oblivion. It told donors: your money buys results.
But in doing so, AIPAC risked looking like a bludgeon rather than a scalpel. It gave critics a perfect narrative — that elections can be bought — and turned a local race into a national referendum on outside influence. Instead of simply retiring an unpopular incumbent, AIPAC risked martyring him.
The race became a rallying cry for left-wing radicals to claim that “AIPAC and their right-wing billionaires” were buying elections, and not about the disgraceful track record of Bowman
Netanyahu and the World’s Judgment
Israel faces a similar dilemma. After Hamas’s barbaric October 7 massacre, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed “total victory” to “destroy Hamas.” The Israeli Defense Forces have pounded Gaza, killing thousands of Hamas fighters and dismantling its command structure. Militarily, the campaign has been successful.
But “overwinning” here carries a different risk — alienating allies. Every bombed-out building and civilian casualty is broadcast globally. Allies that initially backed Israel’s right to self-defense have begun to call for restraint. What began as a just war risks being reframed as collective punishment.
Israel’s goal is security, not global isolation, especially amongst key allies. Overwinning could leave the country victorious on the battlefield but embattled diplomatically — pressured by allies, condemned in international forums, and stripped of the legitimacy it needs to deter future threats.
The Lesson: Win, But Don’t Become the Villain
Overwinning can turn clean victories into Pyrrhic ones. When the punishment becomes the story, the victor risks losing the moral high ground — and with it, the support of allies, donors, and history itself.
The job is to win, not to look like a bully. Versailles turned victors into jailers and fueled the next world war. AIPAC’s $20 million victory made a single congressional seat a national controversy. And if Israel destroys Hamas but is seen as destroying Gaza itself, it may win the war and lose the world.
True victory must be measured beyond the battlefield, especially when that war is basically won.
Ki Teitzei’s Call for Dignity vs. Hamas’ Celebration of Desecration
Parshat Ki Teitzei commands something extraordinary:
“If any party is guilty of a capital offense and is put to death, and you impale the body on a stake, you must not let the corpse remain on the stake overnight, but must bury it the same day. For an impaled body is an affront to G-d: you shall not defile the land that your G-d is giving you to possess.” – Deuteronomy 21:22-23
Even the guilty must not be left hanging overnight. The Torah demands swiftness in burial, even for one who deserved execution.
The biblical commentator Rashi (1040-1105) spells out the reason: “a degradation of the Divine King, for man is made in His image.” Since man is made in the image of G-d, it would be an insult to G-d to continue to embarrass the dead, even one who deserved capital punishment. The focus should be about restoring public order and nothing more.
Hamas: Desecration as Policy
Contrast that to Palestinian political-terrorist group Hamas. On October 7, terrorists not only murdered, but dragged Jewish bodies through the streets of Gaza, spat on them, and beat them before crowdscheering “Allahu Akhbar” – G-d is Great. Their deaths became props for Hamas’ theatre of hate.
Hamas took the dead and mutilated body of German-Israeli Shani Louk to Gaza, where the crowds spat on her body and beat her. Her head was later chopped off.
To this day, Hamas holds the bodies of Israeli hostages, denying their families the ability to bury them, to say Kaddish, to mourn. It is deliberate, drawn-out torture.
The Law of Nations Agrees
This is not only a biblical imperative — it is a universal one. Article 17 of the Geneva Convention states plainly “Parties to the conflict shall ensure that the dead are honorably interred… and that their graves respected and properly maintained.”
Even in war, even between enemies, the dead are to be treated with dignity.
Hamas has made clear it recognizes no such obligation. It does not simply kill — it advertises cruelty, turning murder into propaganda and humiliation into spectacle.
The Moral Divide
Ki Teitzei calls us to a higher standard. To quickly bury even the criminal, to shield the image of G-d from public shame. The radical Islamist group calls its people to something else entirely: to spit, to drag, to desecrate. To turn death into a carnival. Jews believe sanctifying G-d means sanctifying the human body, even a murderer. Fanatical jihadists believe that Gd wants the community to mock the dead, even a female dancer.
This is not just a fight over land. It is a war between those who sanctify life — even those they must punish — and those who have turned death into a brand identity.
The choice before the world could not be clearer: stand with those who respect the divine image, even in death — or with those who trample it.
Imagine someone telling the Jews of Europe in 1935: accept the butchering and burning of six million of your people, and in exchange, you will once more gain sovereignty in your promised land. Would world Jewry have accepted such a bargain? Unlikely. In Judaism, the value of life as supreme trumps all—perhaps even over the divine inheritance of the Land of Israel itself.
That is why Jews do not take pride in the defenseless millions murdered in the Holocaust. They mourn them, honor their memory, and vow “never again.” The lesson is not that Jewish blood must be spilled for redemption, but that Jewish life is sacred and must be protected at all costs.
This moral foundation has been a hallmark of Jewish thought for millennia. The Talmud (Sanhedrin 4:5) teaches that “whoever saves a life saves the world.” Zionism, too, was never about blood sacrifice but about safeguarding Jewish existence and ensuring dignity, freedom, and self-determination. The rebirth of Israel is framed as a triumph of survival, not of slaughter.
Yet for Palestinian Arabs, the moral calculus is inverted. Martyrdom is not mourned but celebrated. “Glory to the martyrs,” they shout, glorifying not only the dead but the genocidal jihadists of Hamas who carried out the October 7 massacre of unarmed Jews. Streets, schools, and summer camps are named for suicide bombers and killers. Death in the service of destroying Jews is not a tragedy but an achievement.
Columbia University placard of “Glory to the Martyrs”
This glorification of death is not limited to fringe radicals. The majority of Gazans have always supported slaughtering Jewish civilians in Israel. Yasser Arafat, the father of the Palestinian national movement, repeatedly praised the “martyrs” who died attacking Israelis, insisting that “our blood is cheap compared to the goal [Jerusalem].” His successor, Mahmoud Abbas, continues the same practice. He honors terrorists killed while attacking Israelis, declaring that “we bless every drop of blood that has been spilled for Jerusalem.” The Palestinian Authority, under Abbas, even pays stipends to the families of those who die murdering Jews—the so-called “martyrs’ fund.”
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas blesses blood “spilled for Jerusalem”
The same ethos echoed recently in the United States. At the People’s Conference for Palestine in Detroit, Michigan in August 2025, the crowd erupted in cheers for Gaza. Lameess Mahanna, sporting a shirt of the Palestine Youth Movement—employed at Columbia University—declared that the end of Israel would be “justice.” (1:35:00) She closed her remarks by leading the audience in a chant: “Say it clear and say it loud: Gaza, you make us proud!”
If Gaza, in her telling, is suffering a “genocide,” how can its dead make her and the thousands who echoed her cry, “proud?” The answer is chilling: because human life is secondary. For her, for Hamas, for the Palestinian leadership stretching from Arafat to Abbas, and from Gaza to Detroit, “justice” is not measured in lives saved, but in Israel’s disappearance. Every dead body is not a tragedy but a step toward their perverted form of “justice:” erasing the Jewish state and replacing it with Arab Muslim rule.
This is the precise inverse of the Jewish ideal. Jews mourn their murdered; Palestinians exalt theirs. Jews sanctify life; Hamas sanctifies death. Jews seek peace with dignity; Palestinian leaders glorify death as the path to victory. The Jewish lesson of the Holocaust is the necessity of Jewish strength to prevent further massacres. The Palestinian lesson of their own history is that more massacres are required for them to have “dignity.”
Which brings us to the central question: can two peoples animated by such irreconcilable values ever truly coexist? One side views life as sacred above all else. The other views life as expendable, even desirable, when spent in the service of destroying its cohabitants.
Coexistence demands a shared commitment to life. Without that, “peace” is a dangerous mirage—a prelude to slaughter, the ultimate source of perverted pride.
Hamas is genocidal. Evil. Its barbarous attacks on women and children are burned into the minds of anyone with a conscience. Its antisemitic charter leaves no doubt about its goal: kill the Jews, erase Israel, and replace it with a Sharia-run terror state.
As sick and twisted as that sounds, at least Hamas has a selfish motivation — they want the land, the power, the glory.
But what about the people waving Hamas flags on Western streets? The “activists” blocking bridges, intimidating students, and screaming for “resistance” while sipping lattes in safe democracies? They gain nothing material from Hamas’s success.
Their prize is watching Jews suffer.
Every synagogue with a new police guard. Every Jewish family installing security cameras. Every Jewish kid who removes a Star of David necklace before walking into school. People holding events at “undisclosed locations.” These moments are their theater. The sight of Jews — once confident, prosperous, “privileged” — now nervously glancing over their shoulders is the payoff.
Can you imagine people defacing the 9/11 memorial? For what purpose would they do such a thing? The carved names were innocent people murdered at work by fanatical jihadists. Yet hundreds of New Yorkers rip down posters of hostages held in Gaza. People in Boulder, CO, burn and shout at people who want innocent people reunited with their families. The attacks on hostage supporters is not for Gaza, but to torment Jews.
Memorial for victims of September 11, 2001 jihadi attack onthe Twin Towers in New York City (photo: First One Through)
Hamas is an antisemitic death cult, and its western supporters are sadists. They want Jews to run, to hide, to shrink. To stop asserting their place in society. To become ghettoized again. Marked as “enemies,” unwelcomed.
The “resistance” has been revealed to be against Jewish safety – anywhere.
“The recent fighting and grave risk of further aggravation in an already brutal and deadly conflict raise severe protection concerns, amid a pervasive culture of impunity for human rights violations.” – Volker Türk, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, June 2024
“The RSF and its allied militias have also committed other war crimes and crimes against humanity. These include widespread sexual and gender-based violence, rape, sexual slavery, abduction, and recruitment and use of children in hostilities. The RSF and its allied militias have also systematically engaged in pillage and looting. They have further committed large-scale attacks based on intersecting ethnicity and gender grounds, especially against the Masalit community in El Geneina, including killings, torture, rape, and other forms of sexual violence, amounting to persecution.” – Independent International Fact-Finding Mission for the Sudan, October 2024
“Famine is present in Darfur. Conflict is increasing. Children are targeted. Girls and women are subject to rape. And the whole landscape is one of destruction, and, we say, criminality. ” – ICC Prosecutor Karim A.A. Khan, January 2025
” I have now concluded that members of the RSF and allied militias have committed genocide in Sudan.” – US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, January 2025
With an estimated 150,000 people dead and some 12 million displaced, the conflict has paralysed Africa’s third-largest country. A catastrophic famine is ravaging the more remote areas, while a nightmare of sexual violence persists for women and girls across the country. – OCHA, April 2025
The numbers are staggering: as many as 150,000 people killed, millions displaced, thousands of women and children raped, villages in Darfur wiped off the map. It has been called “ethnic cleansing,” “genocide” in a land beset with “rape and sexual slavery” and “famine.” Children are dying daily, with half of El Fasher’s trapped population under five.
And yet — the streets of London, Paris, New York are quiet. No bridges are blocked. No university campuses are occupied. No faculty letters demand boycotts of Sudanese products.
The UN and Campus Activists Save Their Fury for Israel
When the UN convenes emergency sessions, it is rarely for Sudan. In 2024, the UN General Assembly passed 15 resolutions against Israel — and only seven against all other countries combined. The Human Rights Council maintains a permanent agenda item (Item 7) targeting only Israel.
On campus, Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) calls for “globalizing the intifada” and promotes BDS campaigns to cut economic, cultural, and academic ties with Israel. Faculty petitions accuse Israel of “genocide” while ignoring the UN’s own genocide determinations in Sudan.
The fake narrative is fixed: Israel is a “settler-colonial outpost,” a European implant, a Western beachhead in the Middle East. This is not merely bad history — it is a deliberate attempt to erase Jewish indigeneity and delegitimize Israel’s right to exist.
Limited travel and lack of burial space has led to burials expanding from existing graveyard perimeters to the city roads. (photo: Giles Clarke for OCHA)
Erasing History as Antisemitic Strategy
“Israel’s pattern of practice of dispossession and expansion of settlements dating back to its establishment as a settler colonial state in 1948 has been found to be illegal under international law.” – NY CUNY vote on BDS Divestment, June 2024 (Passed)
This framing is an antisemitic dog whistle: it rebrands Jews as foreign European invaders in their ancestral homeland, turning their self-defense into imperial conquest. It ignores that more than half of Israeli Jews are Mizrahi expelled from Arab and Muslim lands. It recasts Israel’s rebirth — championed by the same UN that voted for partition in 1947 — as a sin that must be repented by dismantling the Jewish state.
The Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism is attempting to move Israel Studies in universities out of the Jewish Studies department and into Colonial Studies, both attempting to sever Jews from the land of Israel, as well as mark Zionism as a point of European imperialism.
This helps explain why so many are silent about Sudan or Syria. Those wars do not serve the European imperialism narrative, a war between the Global South and Global North. They do not produce graffiti that says “globalize the intifada” or “river to the sea.”
Israel is Vulnerable
“They can crush the flowers, but they cannot delay the springtime.” MIT vote on BDS, September 2024 (passed)
Israel is a small democracy, one that can be pressured and condemned without risk. Many seem to feel the UN’s vote to create Israel in 1947 was a mistake that must be corrected. The endless parade of UN resolutions, the obsessive focus of NGOs, and the boycotts pushed by activists reveal a not-so-hidden goal: not to protect Gazans, but to destroy Israel.
When Hamas butchered 1,200 Israelis on October 7 — burning families alive, gang-raping women, kidnapping children — the global street roared. Not in sympathy, but in accusation. The protests called Israel “the real terrorist” and demanded its isolation. When Israel finally defended itself, the outrage multiplied.
Meanwhile, Sudan burns — and the world yawns.
Mohamed Maysara, 2, cries at the Al-Buluk Hospital in Omdurman. He was there to receive treatment for malnourishment (photo: Giles Clarke)
A Moral Compass Pointed the Wrong Way
The world has turned its outrage into a weapon, aimed squarely at the one Jewish state. Genocide in Sudan, mustard gas in Syria, mass killings in Yemen — they elicit murmurs. But Israel’s attempt to dismantle a terror army that openly calls for its annihilation provokes riots, boycotts, and international tribunals.
This is not human rights activism but a global campaign to strip Jews of sovereignty. And it is why the contrast between Sudan’s silence and Gaza’s deafening clamor is not just hypocrisy — it is proof of a deeper animus that cannot be explained by compassion. It is the validation and desired implementation of Hamas’s genocidal charter.
In Biblical times, wells were beacons of life. To dig and find water was to unlock the possibility of home and permanence. Water fed crops and cattle; it drew families and trade; it birthed cities. Wells were light in the desert.
But not every hole in the ground was a well. Some were empty pits, barren of water and purpose. They became places of danger—sites where wanderers fell or where enemies cast prisoners to languish. Wells meant sustenance, while pits meant despair.
Well in the Judean city of Lachish
Today, the search for peace in the Middle East feels much the same. Those who find the right spring, like the signatories of the Abraham Accords, discover flourishing opportunities for coexistence. New ties of trade, technology, and tourism have watered once-barren fields.
But failed efforts—like the Oslo Accords—are pits. They began with hope, but quickly turned treacherous. The optimism of 1993 was buried under the violence of the Second Intifada (2000–2004) and has been further extinguished by the ongoing Gazan War since 2023. What was meant to be a well has become a hazard, a pit in the sand that swallows the unsuspecting. Like any abandoned well, it should be filled in and covered, not revisited.
The digging was not in vain; the effort was noble. But it is time to recognize Oslo for what it became—a failed blueprint. A peace process crafted with antisemitic design that insisted Jews may not live in a Palestinian state or pray at their holiest site in Jerusalem, while promising a false faith that millions of Arabs would be welcomed into Israel, is not a formula for life. It is an unbalanced design destined for collapse.
And the Philistines stopped up all the wells which his father’s servants had dug in the days of his father Abraham, filling them with earth. (Genesis 26:15)
A new well must be dug with clear foundations:
A State of Palestine where millions of Arab “refugees” can live—but not in Israel.
A Palestine that allows Jews to live there, just as Arabs live in Israel.
A Jerusalem under Israeli sovereignty, open to all religions for access and worship.
Only once these parameters are accepted can the finer details of peace be discussed. Until then, the Oslo pit must be buried beneath the sand, its lessons remembered but its structure abandoned. The new effort can be called the Isaac Accords, to reflect the promise of wells of peace and abundance for everyone.
Isaac dug anew the wells which had been dug in the days of his father Abraham and which the Philistines had stopped up after Abraham’s death; and he gave them the same names that his father had given them. (Genesis 26:18)
Wells give life. Pits destroy. The task before us is to dig with the knowledge of past failures and not let ignorant hope set our shovels.
First One Through 