For decades, the pro-Palestinian narrative labeled any Jew living east of the 1949 Jordanian Armistice Lines a “settler.” The term was never about accuracy but about framing. “Settler” implied that Jews were foreign interlopers, distinct from Arab residents who were cast as the indigenous population. So when Jewish and Arab families from Jaffa moved to Jerusalem’s Old City, only the Jews were called settlers. The transplanted Arab was considered at home, while the transplanted Jew was branded an intruder.
Even more strangely, the label of “settler” wasn’t tied to the founding of a new community. A Jew moving into an existing neighborhood—or even just a single apartment—could suddenly transform the entire edifice into a “settlement.” Words bent reality; the label carried the weight of illegitimacy.
But the terminology seems to be shifting. Wafa, the Palestinian Authority’s official media arm, now increasingly calls Jews in these areas not “settlers,” but “colonists.” The updated lingo seems to fit better with the intellectual currents flowing through Western universities, where post-colonial studies cast Jews as Europeans imposing themselves on native lands. Never mind that Jews are the indigenous people of Judea, Samaria, and Jerusalem, and that there are more Mizrachi Israeli Jews than Ashkenazi—the narrative works if repeated often enough.
Wafa website on August 19, 2025
If the key to eroding U.S. support for Israel lies in framing Jews as oppressors and colonizers, then the Palestinian Authority is adapting accordingly. By embracing this academic jargon, it aligns itself with progressive activists abroad.
Expect the United Nations, NGOs, and sympathetic media outlets to follow suit. Language is a weapon, and the word “colonist” sharpens the blade. The campaign is not just to vilify Jews east of an arbitrary line—it is to recast Jewish presence anywhere in the land as alien, invasive, and illegitimate.
Further, “settlers” is deeply embedded with an anti-Jewish narrative. A pivot to a generic smear appears less antisemitic as well as more universal in condemning the entire Western world’s imperialism and colonialism. Take on Jews everywhere in “Palestine.” Take on Americans throughout “Turtle Island.”
“Colonists” are the new cudgel in the effort to purge Jews from their homeland. It’s a deliberate term and effort, crafted so as to be easily next replicated against Americans by radicals as the new school year begins.
In 1975, film theorist Laura Mulvey coined the term “male gaze” to describe how women are portrayed on screen. The camera does not simply show reality — it frames women for a heterosexual male viewer. Women become visual objects, defined by how they serve the viewer’s pleasure, not by their own full humanity.
The concept applies far beyond film. A “gaze” is any dominant perspective that controls how another group is seen. The one doing the looking holds power; the one being looked at is flattened, reduced, and judged. The colonial gaze. The white gaze. The antisemitic gaze. In each, the subject is stripped of complexity and placed in a role that makes sense to the audience, not to themselves.
Israel is caught in such a gaze. Call it the “Israel Gaze.”
In the Israel Gaze, the Jewish state is the object, never the subject. It is to be observed, graded, managed — but rarely allowed to speak or act on its own terms. Its security concerns are minimized; its legitimacy treated as conditional.
Like the male gaze that zooms in on a woman’s body while ignoring the rest of her life, the Israel Gaze focuses on narrow, selective snapshots. Cameras linger on a checkpoint — but not the suicide bombings that created the need for it. They magnify airstrikes — but crop out the rockets that triggered them.
The framing serves the outside viewer, often a Western political elite, who want a morality play: powerful oppressor vs. powerless victim. Israel is assigned the role of aggressor. No matter the reality on the ground, the narrative is cast before the curtain rises.
And just as the male gaze reduces women to archetypes — seductress, mother, damsel — the Israel Gaze flattens Israel into “occupier,” “aggressor,” “settler state.” The country’s remarkable complexity — the ultimate decolonization project, a refuge for a persecuted people, a diverse democracy, a hub of innovation, a nation under constant threat — disappears from view.
This gaze is not neutral. It is a tool of power. In film, it props up patriarchy. In global politics, it reinforces the idea that Israel’s right to exist, defend itself, or define its own future depends on approval from outsiders who claim the right to judge.
Typical UN vote condemning Israel – lopsided
Mulvey noted in her analysis that “her visual presence tends to work against the development of a story line, to freeze the flow of action in moments of erotic contemplation.” So it is in global politics, with the viewer solely transfixed on Israel’s supposed evils that the actual storyline – and path to peace – is lost out of sight.
Both the male gaze and the Israel Gaze deny the subject the dignity of being whole. Both reduce identity to an image crafted for someone else’s satisfaction. And both sustain an imbalance in which the viewer’s comfort matters more than the subject’s survival.
Israel faces two battles at once: the immediate fight for security and the deeper fight to be seen truthfully. Until the gaze changes, the story will never be told honestly — and the verdict will be written before the trial even begins.
Trust is a curious thing. It can be so natural when it comes in small, unassuming packages. A neighbor offering a hand with the groceries. A stranger holding open a door. The innocent gaze of a child. These gestures, light as feathers, weigh more than they seem because they carry no hidden agenda.
Reading Sarah Tuttle-Singer on trust is like reading poetry. She writes with the hope that trust can bridge divides, that shared humanity can soothe ancient wounds. It’s tempting. It’s comforting. It makes us want to exhale and believe that the world really can turn softer, kinder, lighter.
But trust, in the realm of politics and war, is a word misused. Bus drivers and merchants may indeed know the art of coexistence, but their goodwill cannot stand against the fury of those consumed by hatred. History has shown this cruelly and clearly.
On October 7, Israel’s dreamers were shown what happens when trust meets rage. Peace-loving families along the Gaza envelope, who had spent years helping Gazans reach Israeli hospitals, were burned alive. Young people who came only for music and joy at the Nova festival were hunted, raped, and gunned down. Trust did not save them.
Leaders at war do not have the luxury of extending trust to enemies sworn to their destruction. Their duty is to protect their people, not to tell their adversaries where the defenses are weak or where to buy stronger weapons. In war, misplaced trust is not a virtue—it is a death sentence.
I like dreams. I enjoy Tuttle-Singer’s writings. But her kind of pre–October 7 dreaming feels like a dangerous nostalgia while Hamas still rules Gaza, while Israelis are still captives in tunnels, while so many Palestinian Arabs still celebrate the massacre and fantasize about taking over Israel itself.
Even more, I understand that I might have the luxury of fantasy, but the people in charge of keeping people safe do not.
Dreams belong in the safety of bed, not while driving a highway. Trust has a time and a place. For now, in the waking hours of the Middle East, those in charge with ensuring survival must act with clarity with dollops of charity.
It is better to trust in wartime leaders who are wide awake to reality than to believe in poets dreaming on the frontlines.
Parshat Eikev is about consequences. Love God and cherish the land, and there will be abundance. Turn away from them, and the blessings will vanish. It’s not just poetic scripture—it’s a binding principle embedded in Jewish destiny.
In 2005, Israel withdrew from Gaza, handing the Strip to the Palestinian Authority. The move was framed as a step toward peace, but Palestinians internalized a different lesson from the Second Intifada: violence works. Within two years, Hamas was elected to a majority of the Palestinian parliament, seized power in Gaza, and rockets became Gaza’s chief export.
The same pattern played out decades earlier. In 1967, Israel reclaimed eastern Jerusalem from Jordan in a defensive war and reunified the city. Yet, instead of asserting Jewish sovereignty on the Temple Mount—the holiest site in Judaism—Israel handed day-to-day control to the Islamic Waqf which banned Jewish prayer there. The Muslim world absorbed the message: Jews do not value their holy places as deeply as Muslims do.
These choices raise the uncomfortable question: do Jews truly love the land and God in the way Eikev commands? The Bible is not just a Jewish text. Billions of non-Jews around the globe read it. They know its covenantal clauses and its warnings. They understand—at least in their own terms—the consequences that befall Jews when we turn from God’s love and from the eternal heritage of the land. Some may even see themselves as agents in delivering divine justice.
God knows. The world knows.
It is time for Jews to internalize this truth. The Shema’s first line is often recited aloud with pride. But the second section (starting at Deuteronomy 11:13), with its stark outline of blessings for faithfulness and curses for betrayal, is whispered—if said at all. Perhaps it’s time to say it aloud, not just with our lips, but with our lives: affirming an unbreakable commitment to God and to the holiness of the land.
In Israel, that would be building homes in the area known as “E1,” cementing all of Jerusalem including the Temple Mount as integral to Israel. In the diaspora, it means putting mezuzahs on doorposts and wearing tefillin (11:18-20).
The Old City of Jerusalem including the Jewish Temple Mount/ Al Aqsa Compound
Consequences are not an abstraction in the Torah—they are the lived reality of Jewish history. Eikev’s message is as urgent now as it was on the plains of Moab.
Nothing so captures the European mindset like soccer. It’s a global sport with scant appreciation in North America, but Europeans are glued to it. Consequently, soccer (“football”) matches become backdrops for activists to shout their causes, knowing that it will attract millions – or perhaps billions – of eyeballs.
It was a moment anti-Israel advocates would not pass up.
UEFA had been criticized by pro-Gazan agitators for not coming out against Israel during this war. On August 12, the day before the match, UEFA announced an expansion of its existing “support for the humanitarian efforts for children in conflict zones,” to include Gaza. The wording was careful to not criticize either Israel or Hamas, and just focused on children.
Whatever the adults waging wars think they are doing, the children are innocent.
Aleksander Čeferin, UEFA President
UEFA took an added step during the match and had nine children from conflict zones where it supports humanitarian efforts – Afghanistan, Lebanon, Sudan, Syria and Yemen, and now Gaza – unfurl a banner on the field that read “stop killing children. stop killing civilians.”
Qatar-owned Al Jazeera would use the UEFA actions to generate its own anti-Israel story.
In an article titled “UEFA unfurls Gaza-related plea banner after Palestinian tribute fallout,” the pro-Hamas media site said that the banner was all about Gaza, even when children from multiple countries participated. The article pushed a Gaza narrative with “in the wake of heavy fallout over its meek tribute to a Palestinian player killed by Israel,” it mentioned Liverpool forward Mohamed Salah who condemned UEFA on August 10 for not calling out Israel in its statement.
Al Jazeera would then manufacture history, writing “Nine children refugees from Palestine, Afghanistan, Ukraine, and Iraq carried the banner onto the field of play before the game began.” But Afghanistan, Ukraine, and Iraq are actual countries, Palestine is not. The two children from Gaza who took part in the ceremony were in Milan receiving medical treatment, not fleeing persecution “owing to well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion,” which is the definition of a refugee according to the 1951 Convention on the Status of Refugees. Unless Al Jazeera believes these children are being targeted by Hamas.
Just days before this incident, on August 10, Al Jazeera had some of its journalists in Gaza killed by an Israeli strike. Israel said they were legitimate targets, as they were terrorists paid by Hamas. It was shocking to all that the media company which is owned by the wealthiest regime in the world needed its journalists to make some extra coin from an antisemitic genocidal organization that is supposedly “starving,” not that the journalists were terrorists, which was common knowledge.
The Qatari propaganda company has long accused Israel of committing a “genocide” in Gaza. It claims that “Israel kills an average 28 Palestinian children daily in Gaza,” attempting to make the Arab youth the primary victims and focus of the war, and portray Israel as a bloodthirsty monstrosity. It did not inform its readers that children under 18 account for 47% of the population of Gaza, but a much lower 31% of the fatalities according to OCHA, which gets its information from the Hamas run Ministry of Health (MoH) in Gaza.
When further considering that many of the children between 15 and 18 years old are part of the Hamas war machine, the much lower percentage of child fatalities points to Israel’s efforts to target Gazan fighters, not children. Even Hamas admits that nearly half of all fatalities in Gaza have been fighting-aged males (49%), even though they account for just one-quarter of the population (26%).
As for the 6,000 Gazans who invaded Israel on October 7, 2023, Al Jazeera had no concern for how they treated Jewish children. The Gazans killed 38 Israeli children in front of their parents. They took the same number as hostages to Gaza. What kind of people take babies as hostages as a matter of policy?
Bibas children Kfir and Ariel, with mother, Shiri, all taken as hostages by Gazans, later returned dead in an exchange for Gazan terrorists
“Don’t kill children. Don’t kill civilians,” should be the understood motto of all civilized people and organizations. That Qatar and Al Jazeera continue to stand by Hamas after all they have done – and then attempt to misdirect the world towards Israel – makes them deeply complicit in the deaths of thousands.
Desire Doué and Ousmane Dembélé of France St. Germain lift the UEFA Super Cup Trophy, sporting jerseys embossed by their sponsor, Qatar Airways
For Americans and Israelis, a summer vacation in Europe is almost instinctive. A relatively short flight offers a world away—new languages, different currencies, distinct cuisines. The joy is in the immersion: wandering museums, hearing street musicians in centuries-old plazas, staring up at Gothic spires, and feeling the weight of two millennia of history.
But the summer of 2025 was different. The walls of Europe’s cities told a darker story.
Alongside the usual student slogans and political tags were messages aimed squarely at one people and one country. Anti-Israel graffiti was everywhere—not just Palestinian flags but slogans in English declaring ” Smash Zionism” and “all Israeli soldiers are war criminals.” The words were not about policy disputes or borders. They were echoes of the Hamas charter, demanding the eradication of the Jewish state.
This was not the first time Europe’s streets had carried such messages. A century ago, it was pamphlets, posters, and shop signs. In the 1930s, “Kauft nicht bei Juden”—“Don’t buy from Jews”—was painted on storefronts. Nazi caricatures and blood libel imagery were plastered in public squares. These were not fringe ideas—they were mainstreamed into the civic landscape, normalizing antisemitism as part of public discourse.
Today’s slogans are more fluent in the language of modern activism, but the purpose is the same: to strip Jews of legitimacy and belonging. In the 1930s, the Jewish store owner was framed as a threat to society; in 2025, the Jewish state is framed as a threat to world peace. Then as now, the goal is erasure—economic, cultural, political, and, ultimately, physical.
What makes the present moment particularly jarring is its setting. The graffiti appears on the same walls that tourists pass on their way to see memorials to Europe’s murdered Jews. A plaque in the street may commemorate Jews deported to Auschwitz, but the wall above it proclaims “From the river to the sea,” a slogan advocating the removal of the Jewish State altogether. The contradiction is almost too much to process: “Never Again” in bronze, “Again Now” in spray paint.
Europe and the United States remain the last major powers to hold off on recognizing a Palestinian state somewhere in the Middle East. But that resistance is softening—not from a careful appreciation of the challenges of creating a peaceful, democratic state alongside Israel, but from the pressure of chants and hashtags lifted from jihadist manifestos. Politicians are not being persuaded by policy papers; they are being worn down by the relentlessness of street-level messaging and its seep into mainstream politics.
For Israeli and American Jewish tourists, the graffiti is not abstract. It’s aimed at them, personally. To walk through a city square and see your country branded as genocidal is not just uncomfortable—it’s alienating. It says: We know you’re here, and you’re not welcome IN HEBREW.
The tragedy is that many of the cities now hosting this wave of messaging were once vibrant centers of Jewish life, wiped out in living memory. The graffiti is a reminder that antisemitism, like the paint itself, seeps easily into old cracks, clings to old walls, and waits for the right political climate to dry in place.
There was scant commentary on the streets about the antisemitic genocidal group Hamas that launched the war. When it appeared, it was very small and seemingly in reaction to pro-Palestinian paint. It was a tank-versus-switchblade graffiti street brawl. The conflicts in Ukraine, Sudan, Myanmar and elsewhere were nowhere to be seen.
In the summer of 2025, Europe’s walls have become more than stone: they are mirrors that reflect not just the continent’s history, but its willingness to embrace its darkest periods. A reminder that the high brow culture frequently sinks in moral depravity.
Trieste’s Piazza Unità d’Italia is one of Europe’s great open-air salons, its grand architecture framing a breathtaking view of the Adriatic. On a sweltering August afternoon, only a handful of tourists dared cross the blazing expanse, hugging the shadowed strips along the colonnades for relief.
There, in the quiet underbelly of the central building’s portico, a plaque catches the eye. In large Hebrew letters: “Zachor”—Remember. A verse from the Torah commands the Jewish people for all generations to recall what Amalek did—attacking the weak and stragglers as the Israelites left Egypt. Beneath the Hebrew, the Italian inscription explains: this was the site where Benito Mussolini, in September 1938, delivered his edict of the “Racial Laws.” In his speech, Mussolini declared Jews “incompatible” with Fascist Italy and announced their expulsion from national life.
Plaque in Trieste, Italy
It was no accident he chose Trieste. The city’s 6,700 Jews—around 2.7% of the population—were prosperous, visible, and in his eyes, a perfect stage. Within five years, over 90% would be deported, murdered, or scattered to exile, never to return.
At the time, Time magazine cynically suggested Mussolini might be “bluffing,” seeking to please Hitler and “curry favor with Islam” in Palestine. Antisemitism, in this view, was not only about Jews—it was also geopolitical currency, among his people and traded to win influence with the Muslim world.
Time magazine, September 26, 1938
The plaque was installed in 2018, on the 80th anniversary of the Racial Laws. But memory is fickle. Five years later, in 2023, after Hamas terrorists and thousands of Gazans crossed into Israel to massacre 1,200 civilians in the most brutal ways imaginable, Italy’s leaders declared Hamas—not the Palestinian cause itself—the obstacle to peace. They argued that a two-state solution, minus Hamas, could integrate Israel into a broader Muslim world via expanded Abraham Accords. In their words, peace could “moderate Islam.”
Antonio Tajani, Deputy Italian Prime Minister, Foreign Minister in October 2023 about Hamas massacre
It’s a striking inversion of Trieste’s history: in 1938, antisemitism was weaponized to build a bridge to Germany and court the Muslim world; in 2023, peace with Israel is pitched as the tool to temper Jew-hatred. At the dawn of the Holocaust, ridding the Jews bound Europe and the Muslim world, while today, removing antisemitic genocidal Muslims and ensuring the permanence of the Jewish State could unite Europe and the Arab Middle East.
In each case, Jews are pawns, tossed on the Mediterranean Sea, to be submerged or floated in the grander political game. And there we must therefore ask, what are we remembering?
Dueling stickers in Trieste, Italy, fighting the Gaza War in 2025
The United States is experiencing the worst wave of antisemitism in modern memory. Jews are attacked in the streets of New York, vilified on college campuses, and shunned in social circles simply for being Jewish or supporting Israel. Synagogues and community centers are fortifying themselves like military outposts, while families weigh whether their children are safe wearing a Star of David in public.
The federation’s leadership points to precedent: they’ve sent funds abroad before—to Turkey after an earthquake, to Ukraine after the Russian invasion. But this is not Turkey. It is not Ukraine. It’s also not Canada and Australia undergoing horrible antisemitism.
Gaza is not a neutral disaster zone. Its people have elected and support leaders who openly call for the murder of Israeli Jews. Its ruling terror group, Hamas, slaughtered 1,200 people in Israel on October 7, 2023, and still holds hostages. Polling has long shown majority support among Gazans for killing Jewish Israeli civilians and to destroy Israel. This is not a passive bystander to tragedy; it is a society that has gone to war against the Jewish state again and again.
The difference matters. When the federation sends aid to a country struck by natural disaster, it’s an act of humanity. When it sends aid to a population whose political and militant factions seek Jewish extermination – while in the middle of a war – it’s an act freighted with moral confusion.
The leadership may believe that giving to Gazans proves Jewish compassion “even to our enemies,” or helps with global optics. But for Jews watching their own safety erode daily in the United States and in other communities around the world, it looks like a failure to stand with their own community. It risks alienating the very donors who built the federation in the first place.
Charity is not limitless. Every dollar has an opportunity cost. And while Jewish students are harassed on campus, Jewish businesses vandalized, and Jewish institutions desperate for security funding, this million-dollar gesture to Gaza sends a clear message: in our hour of greatest vulnerability, the suffering of those sworn to kill us will be prioritized alongside, or even above, our own survival.
The empathy swamp is drowning us, blessed by community leaders.
American Jewry had managed with peacetime leadership for decades but it is time to replace them as the environment has shifted, and leaders have proven that they are not up to the moment.
In April 2004, U.S. President George W. Bush sent a letter to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon essentially blessing Sharon’s proposed withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in exchange for the US backing Israel’s positions that the future contours of Israel would account for “new realities on the ground” and not follow “the armistice lines of 1949,” as well as ending the Palestinian so-called right-of-return by “settling of Palestinian refugees there [in a new Palestinian State], rather than in Israel.” In response to the letter, Israel withdrew all Jewish civilians from Gaza and its military in September 2005.
Gaza has ravaged itself since then.
As a charitable generous gesture, several Jewish and Israeli businessmen purchased Israeli greenhouses and related equipment, and gifted them to the Palestinian Authority (PA) which had elected Mahmoud Abbas as president in January 2005. The PA never was able to secure any of it. Palestinian security officials were overrun, saying that the Gazans looted it completely, leaving nothing behind “like locusts,” as soon as Israel pulled out.
News reports at the time were prescient regarding “concerns about Gaza’s future.”
Abbas made grand and empty proclamations. The PA did not have the respect of Gazans and the region would not be controlled by its leader from the Fatah party.
A few months later, Palestinians elected Hamas to 58% of parliament. Then, in 2007, a mini civil war broke out it Gaza which routed the PA and gave Hamas exclusive control of the strip. Amid the public failure of Abbas, United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki Moon stressed his full support for Abbas and the PA, while he worried about food and aid getting to Gaza’s civilian population.
Does any of this ring familiar? Gazans overrun the Palestinian Authority; PA makes grand and empty declarations; Gazans saddle up with Hamas; UN worries about food and aid.
The underlying reality in Gaza is that the western-backed Palestinian Authority has never had a presence in the strip. The region has never truly been part of “Palestine” as envisaged by the many conferences over the last decades. How can there be a “two state solution” of Israel and Palestine, when the dreamed up “Palestine” is two distinct entities itself? What are countries “recognizing” when they cannot see reality?
The Greenhouses Swarm of 2005. The Fatah Swarm of 2007. The Israel Swarm of 2023. The Aid Swarm of 2025.
Gaza devours charity, donors, neighbors and itself so completely, that the request for ever more attention and aid is either completely nonsensical or understandable. Or both.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed that Israel will retake Gaza, dismantle Hamas, and free the hostages still held there. In response, the UK and France have rushed to apply diplomatic pressure — not on Hamas, but on Israel — pledging to recognize a Palestinian state in September. This move will only embolden Hamas to fight on, convinced it is winning a historic victory.
British Foreign Secretary David Lammy embraces Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammad MustafaCHARLY TRIBALLEAU
The flaw in this strategy is glaring: it’s not Israel that needs pressure — it’s Hamas, and that pressure must come from the Arab world, not just Europe. On July 30, 2025, Arab states took an overdue but welcome step, publicly calling on Hamas to disarm and hand authority over to the Palestinian Authority. This was a first in regional unity against Hamas.
Now Europe must pivot and press Arab states to go further: formally designate Hamas as a terrorist organization. This is not a radical suggestion. Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Jordan, Syria and the UAE already classify the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist group (the United States is on the cusp of doing so). Hamas is the Brotherhood’s Palestinian branch — extending the label is logical and overdue.
Such a declaration would signal to Hamas and to Stateless Arabs from Palestine (SAPs) that terrorism against Israel has no future and no backing in the Arab world, and that the region is moving towards normalization. It would also make it easier for the United States to advance pushing the United Nations Security Council to list Hamas alongside al-Qaeda and ISIS as a global pariah. To date, UN officials have described Hamas as a legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, keeping the terrorist group’s hopes alive.
Only then could Netanyahu ease military pressure, creating space for serious negotiations to dismantle Hamas and secure the return of the hostages.
First One Through 