The most consequential move in the New York Times coverage was quiet. It described Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s response to pro-Hamas chants as an effort to avoid inflaming “tensions on either side of the Israel–Gaza war.” The language sounded responsible. It also erased the central reality.
The New York Times is attempting to allay fears of Jewish New Yorkers but softening image of extremist mayor Zohran Mamdani on January 17, 2026
There were no equivalent sides involved. One group openly chanted support for Hamas, a U.S.-designated terrorist organization responsible for mass murder, rape, kidnapping, and calls for genocide. The other side was a Jewish community standing outside its own synagogue, defending it from terrorist sympathizers.
That location matters. This did not unfold at City Hall or on a random street corner. It took place in front of a synagogue. For Jews, synagogues are communal sanctuaries, not neutral backdrops for geopolitical theater. Geography conveys intent. Bringing terror slogans to a Jewish house of worship transforms speech into targeting.
The New York Times chose to smooth this away. By framing the episode as “tension on either side,” it recast explicit support for Hamas as a legitimate pole of community expression. The chant was softened. The targeting dissolved into abstraction. Readers were reassured that calm was being preserved with statements such as “Mr. Mamdani’s team repeatedly debated the wording and fairness of the language,” as if a group chanting for the genocide of Jews required “fairness.”
This is how extremism gets normalized. When terror advocacy demands careful calibration rather than moral clarity, the boundary quietly shifts. Such framing would collapse instantly if crowds praised ISIS outside a mosque or neo-Nazis gathered at a Black church.
Protesters understand what editors seem determined to whitewash: location is the message. No amount of “Palestine-washing” can absolve the antisemitism in the Times coverage.
Reassurance purchased at the cost of truth carries consequences. It teaches extremists that intimidation can be reframed as passion and that targeted terror speech will be treated as just another civic grievance. That does not cool tensions. It redraws the line of what is acceptable.
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 near-term ramifications of Hamas’s war against Israel are being crystalized. Hamas’s leadership is decimated and Gaza is in ruins. The political-terrorist group’s allies in Lebanon, Syria, Iran and Yemen have been dealt severe blows, perhaps fatal for some. Hamas’s cheerleaders in the Global North are the only ones to have gathered momentum, particularly in Australia and the United States where hunting season for Jews has a seemingly open permit.
To gain insight for the next tactical steps, world leaders are looking at the current situation and polls since October 7, 2023 and have drafted proposals and taken initial actions: The United Kingdom and Canada recognized a Palestinian State. The U.S.’s Trump administration put forward a plan for Gaza which would include a new governing entity. The West hopes that the targeted assaults and murder of Jews will peter out along with the end of war. And the United Nations keeps playing the same tune about supporting UNRWA.
These are bad decisions and conclusions, made on faulty assumptions.
There is an organization that has been polling Palestinian Arabs for decades, called the Palestinian Center for POLICY and SURVEY RESEARCH (PCPSR). It conducted a poll of Arabs in Gaza and the West Bank, just before the Hamas-led war, from September 28 to October 8, 2023. Because of the war, the results did not get published until June 26, 2024, and the world was too focused on the war to pay it any attention. It is deeply unfortunate, and it is required reading to help chart a better future for the region.
To start with the poll’s conclusions:
A large percentage of Palestinian Arabs have wanted to leave Gaza and the West Bank for years, not from the current destruction
Arabs are fed up with their own government – Hamas and the Palestinian Authority – much more than Israeli “occupation”
Canada is viewed much like Qatar for Gazans, a sympathetic haven
Palestinian Arabs Wanted to Emigrate Before the War
According to PCPSR, whether in October 2023 or November 2021, roughly 33% of Gazans and 20% of West Bank Arabs wanted to leave the region.
Men below age 30 make up the vast majority of those seeking to emigrate. As opposed to Gaza where both educated and uneducated people want to leave, it is the educated West Bank population that wants to move away. Among those wishing to leave, many would not vote in Palestinian elections, or if they would, they would sooner vote for third parties over Fatah or Hamas.
Palestinian Leadership is the Curse, More than Israel
The number one reason for wanting to leave was economic conditions by a far margin. Reasons two and three were political reasons and educational opportunities. “Security reasons” came in fourth, with only 7% of Gazans focused on security; 12% overall. Corruption, religious reasons and to reunite with family rounded out the poll.
Canada as a Beacon
Turkey and Germany were the two most favorite destinations, especially for Gazans. Very few Gazans (3%) considered the United States, while West Bank Arabs put it as the number one choice (17%), likely seeking advanced degrees at left-wing universities. What is remarkable, is more of the Stateless Arabs (SAPs) would prefer going to Canada (11%) than Qatar (9%), the wealthy Muslim Arab nation that is a main sponsor of Hamas.
Honest Takeaways
These pre-war results leads to some basic and critical conclusions.
Complete Overhaul of Palestinian leadership, not just in Gaza
The desire of Arabs to leave was evident across both Gaza and the West Bank for many years. This was not a reaction to bombing or siege; it was a verdict on governance.
Hamas in Gaza rules through repression, diversion of aid, and religious militarism. The Palestinian Authority in the West Bank offers corruption, authoritarianism, and political stagnation. Together they have produced a society with no credible economic horizon, no accountable leadership, and no peaceful mechanism for change.
While a new entity is needed to administer Gaza, that role should be akin to a Chief Operating Officer overseeing construction. The Palestinian Authority itself needs to be gutted and rebuilt as it is a corrupt, unpopular and ineffective entity.
The United Nations Must Withdraw from Gaza and the West Bank
In its desire to create a Palestinian state, the U.N. has stripped the titular heads of Palestine of any responsibility. The UN protects Hamas despite its savagery. It props up the Palestinian Authority despite its rampant corruption. Palestinian leadership is a bed of paper scorpions.
The UN must withdraw from Gaza and the West Bank and allow local authorities to build a functioning leadership team.
The West Should Rescind Recognition of Palestine
There is no functioning Palestinian government and therefore no basic standard to recognize a Palestinian State. The United Kingdom, Australia and others should withdraw their recognition and make it conditional on building governing institutions that can lead and make peace with the Jewish State next door.
Reeducation in the West
The massacre did not arise from a sudden spike in pressure. It emerged from long-standing internal failure. Hamas chose atrocity because it couldn’t commit a complete genocide of Jews so exploited its own population to be fodder for Israel.
Western audiences were then handed a familiar script, complete with pictures. But the data taken just before the massacre tells a different story—one far more consequential. What is being taught in western public schools is divorced from reality and feeds global and local antisemitism.
Oh No, Canada
While the fears of antisemitism are focused on the United States and Australia because of recent attacks on Jews, Canada is in the hearts and minds of Palestinian Arabs seeking a warm diaspora community. Perhaps it started a decade ago under Justin Trudeau who followed U.S.’s President Barack Obama to embrace the Palestinian cause and Iranian regime over Israel. Perhaps it is because of the welcome mat for extremists groups like Samidoun. Or perhaps it is the perception that the heckler’s veto is fair game, and can run Jewish families off Canadian streets.
Whatever the inspiration, Canada is widely perceived as permissive, ideologically indulgent, and administratively porous—an attractive environment for “political activism” untethered from civic responsibility. It is a ticking time bomb.
The poll of Palestinian Arabs on the eve of the October 7 war reveals deeper truths than surface shots of leveled homes. The PCPSR findings point to a single truth: the Palestinian problem is fundamentally internal.
Ending Israeli control over territory without dismantling corrupt and extremist institutions will not deliver prosperity or peace. Statehood layered on top of dysfunction will harden it. And exporting populations shaped by jihadist rule into permissive Western societies without serious screening and integration, risks importing instability rather than relieving it.
Modern political language compresses history into slogans. The United Nations speaks of “occupied Palestinian territory,” which it insists be Jew-free. The “pro-Palestinian” movements echo false claims of Jewish colonialism, as if Jews are newcomers.
Archaeology answers differently—through the infrastructure of everyday life.
Across Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and the Galilee, ancient mikva’ot—Jewish ritual immersion baths—appear in homes, villages, farms, and neighborhoods. They date from the First Temple and Second Temple periods and into the Mishnaic era. Their construction follows strict Jewish law. Their distribution tracks permanent settlement. Their purpose is singular: Jews lived here as a rooted society, organizing life around inherited religious practice.
This is not an argument from ideology. It is a statement of fact.
Jerusalem—Including the East: A City Immersed
Jerusalem contains the highest concentration of ancient mikva’ot anywhere in the world, with hundreds surrounding the Jewish Temple Mount as people immersed themselves before entering. In the City of David—today known as Silwan, a village established by Yementite Jews in the 19th century—dozens of ritual baths are embedded in residential quarters dated from the 1st century BCE to 70 CE. North and east of the later city walls, mikva’ot appear in neighborhoods now called Shuafat and Sheikh Jarrah, including the Shimon HaTzadik complex. The ancient mikvahs are also found to the west and south.
Mikvah under the Western Wall in the Old City of Jerusalem
“The widespread distribution of ritual baths in and around Jerusalem reflects strict observance of Jewish purity laws as part of everyday life.”
These installations predate Islam by centuries. They show a city whose rhythm followed Jewish law across its full geographic footprint—west and east alike.
Judea: Bethlehem, Jericho, Hebron, and the Southern Hills
South of Jerusalem, the Judean Hills—now routinely labeled “occupied”—were a Jewish heartland in antiquity. Around Bethlehem, archaeological surveys identify rock-hewn mikva’ot associated with agricultural estates and villages from the Hasmonean and Herodian periods. Comparable installations appear near Hebron and Tekoa.
“Ritual baths, agricultural installations, and burial caves indicate dense Jewish settlement throughout the Judean Hills during the Second Temple period.”
These were family communities organized around Jewish practice, embedded in the land over generations.
Samaria: Villages of Law and Land
In Samaria—today’s northern “West Bank”—mikva’ot appear in rural villages and estates tied to farming and household life. Near Shiloh, stepped pools carved into limestone meet halakhic requirements and date to the late Second Temple period.
These finds demonstrate continuity between biblical Israelite centers and later Jewish communities. They record a population living according to inherited law, rooted to fields and seasons, long before later demographic changes.
What Mikva’ot Prove
Mikva’ot appear only where Jewish law structured daily behavior. They require permanence, planning, and communal norms. They cluster where families lived and expected their children to live.
Plotted together, they form a map that predates:
Arabic language in the region
Creation of Islam
Medieval and modern political boundaries
They belong to a Jewish civilization indigenous to the land for centuries before the Arab conquests of the seventh century.
Conclusion
International bodies can rename the land and activists can repeat slander but archaeology restores history to human scale. Mikva’ot record where Jews prepared for worship, marriage, birth, and community life. They mark neighborhoods, not narratives.
Across all of Jerusalem and through Judea and Samaria, these ritual baths establish a simple historical truth: Jews are indigenous to this land, and their daily life shaped it long before later conquests and long before modern politics.
The world likes to pretend it is debating policy. In many ways, it is actually debating whether civilization itself deserves defense—whether restraint remains a virtue or has become a liability.
That choice is one individuals are weighing, and on a macro scale, it now runs through the United Nations, through the rhetoric of reform and revolution, and through a relentless fixation on one small country—Israel—which has been made the moral test case for the survival of a rules-based order.
An Ancient Conflict, Restated
In 1944 as World War II raged, Reinhold Niebuhr described the permanent struggle of politics in The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness. The children of light believe in higher law, institutions, and restraint and try to build a just civilization. The children of darkness believe power is the only reality. They understand fear, pride, resentment—and how to use them.
Niebuhr’s delivered an unsentimental warning: civilization fails not because darkness appears, but because light refuses to learn how aggressively darkness operates.
As Portrayed Today in the Arts
That moral tension is dramatized—accidentally, but perfectly—in Game of Thrones.
Petyr Baelish (“Littlefinger”) believes nothing is sacred. Institutions are illusions; morality is theater. When order breaks, the ambitious climb. His worldview that “Chaos is a ladder” is not poetry—it is strategy. He does not want to fix the system. He wants to use its collapse to gain power.
Opposite him stands Varys, who believes in “the realm”—stability, continuity, restraint. Varys is not innocent. He lies and plots as much as Littlefinger. But he does so defensively, to preserve something larger than himself. Chaos, to him, is not liberation; it is mass suffering.
“Chaos isn’t a pit. Chaos is a ladder. Many who try to climb it fail and never get to try again. The fall breaks them. And some are given a chance to climb. They refuse, they cling to the realm or the gods or love. Illusions. Only the ladder is real. The climb is all there is.”- Littlefinger
This is the argument now playing out on the world stage.
The United Nations and the “Age of Chaos”
In September 2025, Antonio Guterres warned that the world had entered an “Age of Chaos,” where multilateralism failed repeatedly. His message was neither complacent nor revolutionary. The post-1945 order, he acknowledged, was built by Western powers and often abused. It needs reform and broader inclusion. But it must be preserved.
Guterres is a modern Varys: clear-eyed about corruption, fearful of what replaces restraint. The tragedy is that he delivers this warning while presiding over an institution that enables the very chaos he names, and where lies and bias are systemic.
Moral failure: It erases Jewish indigeneity and recasts Jewish self-determination as a moral crime.
Legal failure: It treats 1949 armistice lines as borders, declares “flagrant violation” absent negotiations, and invents a categorical illegality applied nowhere else.
Institutional failure: It weaponizes international law through selective enforcement, degrading the credibility of law itself.
UNSC 2334 is not merely flawed. It is structurally antisemitic, legally incoherent, and corrosive to the rules it claims to uphold. Any serious effort to defend and remake the UN must begin by rejecting and discarding UNSC 2334—not as a political concession, but as a moral necessity. No legitimate order can be rebuilt on a prominent pernicious lie.
The Global South’s Demand—and the Line It Cannot Cross
The Global South is right about one thing: the UN reflects a Global North power structure frozen in time. Representation must change. Influence must broaden. That reckoning is overdue.
But reform cannot be purchased by sacrificing the most vulnerable and attacked minority on earth.
Using Israel as the symbol of colonial evil is not reform; it is delegitimization by fiction. It turns history upside down, rebrands violence as virtue, and tells Jews that their survival is negotiable. Israel is targeted not because it is uniquely guilty, but because it is symbolically central.
Israel has become the ladder.
Modern Littlefingers
This logic spans ideologies.
On the left, movements such as the Democratic Socialists of America argue that markets, property, and liberal institutions are inherently illegitimate—delegitimize first, rebuild later. On the right, Donald Trump treats international norms as inconveniences, speaking casually about seizing Venezuelan oil and replacing rules with deals.
They oppose each other rhetorically, but share a premise: restraint is weakness; destruction is honesty. Chaos creates leverage.
They are modern Littlefingers.
The Failure of Passive Moderation
Between these forces stand moderates who see hypocrisy, feel exhaustion, and withdraw in disgust. That retreat feels virtuous. It is not.
As David Brooks argues by drawing on Niebuhr, moderation without courage becomes complicity. When decent people refuse to defend flawed institutions, they leave the field to those who understand power best.
Niebuhr’s answer was not extremism, but what he called “a sublime madness in the soul”—a fierce commitment to liberal institutions precisely because they restrain human savagery. The children of light must learn the wisdom of the serpent without inheriting its malice.
An Ancient Return—and a Choice
Modern politics, which prides itself on being post-religious, has returned to the oldest moral frame: absolute light versus absolute darkness. One side is pure; the other illegitimate. Violence becomes cleansing; institutions corrupt by definition. This language was written two thousand years ago in the land of Israel and discovered in caves as the Jewish State was being reestablished. And now that rebirthed country is being falsely accused of embodying the darkness.
The choice before us is not between justice and injustice. It is between reform and rupture.
Children of light today defend law and restraint aggressively while reforming them honestly.
Children of darkness weaponize grievance and moral absolutism to climb amid collapse.
Defending and remaking the UN must start with basic truths: reject antisemitic falsehoods, discard UNSC 2334, and pursue inclusion without scapegoats. Multipolarity cannot be built on moral nihilism. Reform cannot be purchased with lies.
The reckoning Niebuhr warned of is here. The ladder is already standing and it is being climbed by both right and left. Civilization survives only if those who believe in it act—clearly, courageously, and now.
Of the many classic lines from the TV sitcom Seinfeld, “it’s not you, it’s me,” is a great one, used as an excuse to get out of a relationship. It’s a phrase familiar to anyone who has ever been in a relationship which one party simply does not enjoy and wants to terminate gently.
There is no relationship so poorly constructed and toxic today as between Israel and the United Nations, harmonious at the start but broken bit by bit since that time. In an effort to complete it’s desire of completing the creation of two states, a Jewish one and Arab one as conceived in the General Assembly vote of partition in November 1947, the institution has fabricated lies and noxious resolutions against Israel and Jewish dignity everywhere.
Follow what the UN does, and what it says, and a stark pattern emerges: Palestinian Arabs are granted surplus political rights across the entire map, while Israel is denied the basic attributes of sovereignty. This is not mediation. It is architecture, scaffolding producing a permanent conflict.
1) Start with the most basic injustice: where Jews may live and pray
Begin where ideology becomes lived reality.
Across territory, the UN labels Palestinian Arab non-Jewish residence as inherently legitimate everywhere, while Jewish residence is declared subject in advance, legal where a Jewish State was once allotted but illegal everywhere else. Through instruments like United Nations Security Council Resolution 2334, Jewish civilians are criminalized simply for living beyond armistice lines—before borders are agreed, before negotiations conclude, before sovereignty is determined.
This is unprecedented. In every other territorial dispute on earth, civilian life is separated from sovereignty. Here, it is collapsed—selectively.
Then comes the religious core.
At Judaism’s holiest site—the Temple Mount / Al-Haram al-Sharif—the UN endorses a so-called “status quo” that allows Muslim prayer as a matter of course while forbidding Jewish prayer outright. Jews may visit in finite numbers. They may not worship.
No neutral body sanctifies a regime where one faith’s prayer is normal and another’s is treated as provocation. That is not stability. It is hierarchy—polished with diplomatic language.
2) Escalate to sovereignty itself: borders without control
Every sovereign state controls who enters and who becomes a citizen. Israel is uniquely told this right is negotiable.
Through endless reaffirmations of a mass “right of return,” the UN demands that Israel absorb millions of Palestinian Arabs who never lived there—descendants of a war launched to destroy the state—thereby erasing Jewish self-determination by arithmetic rather than war.
No other UN member is ordered to commit demographic self-nullification as a condition of legitimacy. Only Israel is told that survival itself is subject to international approval. International demand.
A state that cannot control entry is not sovereign. A state treated this way is not being mediated in a peace process—it is being managed.
3) Why this only happens here: permanent UN wardship
The cause is clear.
The UN did not simply sympathize with Palestinian Arabs; it adopted them as permanent wards, institutionalized most clearly through UNRWA—a bespoke agency unlike anything else in the world.
Refugee status became hereditary. Dependency became intergenerational. There is no sunset, no graduation, no expectation of resolution. Failure carries no cost because accountability is externalized.
A guardian cannot be an honest broker. An institution whose relevance depends on a client’s grievance cannot afford peace. This isn’t humanitarianism anymore. It’s custodianship—and custodianship is the enemy of compromise.
4) The doctrinal rupture: inventing a “right to a state”
Only after the machinery is in place does the UN supply its legal fiction.
The UN rewrote this rule only and specifically for Palestinian Arabs, treating sovereignty as a pre-awarded verdict because of a partition plan it voted upon in 1947 that the party refused to accept. Once the destination is guaranteed, compromise becomes optional. Negotiations become theater. Pressure flows in only one direction.
No other people receive this upgrade. Only here does the UN convert aspiration into entitlement—and then insist it is merely being neutral.
5) The smoking gun: December 1990 recasting the conflict and the legitimation of violence
Then the mask slips.
In December 1990, the UN General Assembly adopted Resolution 45/130, reaffirming “the legitimacy of the struggle of peoples … for liberation from colonial and foreign domination by all available means.” The resolution was designed to close the chapter of apartheid in South Africa, but took a heavy detour into the Israel-Palestine conflict, recasting the entire partition plan of 1947. It referenced “colonial” entities fifteen times, “Palestinians” twenty-five times, and made the establishment of an Arab state a matter of freedom from racist and external oppression, not a discussion about self-determination.
In UN practice, this language cast Israel as a colonial entity and Palestinian Arabs as a people entitled to armed struggle to dismantle it.
From that moment on, terror could be reframed as resistance, and compromise as collaboration. The UN crossed the line from mediator to moral endorser of one side’s maximalist narrative.
6) The arithmetic of the fraud
Add it up and the numbers don’t lie.
Under the UN framework, Palestinian Arabs receive:
A guaranteed future state
Political rights inside Israel
A trans-sovereign right of return into Israel
Permanent UN patronage and advocacy
International legitimation of “armed struggle” against Israel
Israel, meanwhile, is left with:
Provisional borders
Conditional legitimacy
Criminalized civilian residence in disputed territory
Restricted religious freedom
Denied control over immigration
Violence against it rhetorically excused
In this jaundiced framework, Jerusalem, which was NEVER designated to be a Palestinian city even under the 1947 partition plan, can be called “occupied Palestinian territory,” a complete fabrication even according to the UN itself.
The United Nations is not an honest broker; it is an interested architect whose rules ensure the conflict cannot end, and Jewish dignity remains conditional around the world.
By sanctifying exclusion, denying sovereignty, adopting one side as a permanent ward, inventing rights it had no authority to grant, and legitimizing violence as “anti-colonial,” the UN has guaranteed perpetual war—then blamed one of the parties for refusing peace.
In Seinfeld, one party is afforded the opportunity to end the relationship; one party has the option of providing a face-saving excuse to part ways quickly and smoothly. Not so for Israel and the United Nations, where the UN continues to manufacture obstacles and then gaslight the Jewish State that it is the root of the problem.
The UN speaks as if it is a “moral compass” in an “age of chaos.” Perhaps it once was, at least directionally. It is definitely not in the Middle East today, where its votes and actions have led to the death and misery of millions.
UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres speaks at the UN headquarters in New York in September 2025
The Torah’s first image of Moses is of a man split against himself. Born a Hebrew and raised in Pharaoh’s palace, he lives between worlds. When he kills an Egyptian beating a Hebrew slave, the act is instinctive. Yet when another Hebrew confronts him—“Who made you ruler and judge over us?” (Exodus 2:14)—Moses has no answer. He cannot say who he is or why he has the right to act.
So he runs.
The flight is explained as fear of Pharaoh because the attack was discovered. A deeper cause is identity fracture. Moses is caught between Egyptian and Jew, insider and outsider. When identity is unsettled, even a disgraceful question feels existential. Retreat becomes the reflex.
That pattern did not end in Egypt.
Today, for much of the diaspora, Jewish life has carried a similar split. Jews learned to survive by blending, qualifying, and softening. Identity became situational. Answers changed with the room. When questioned—about history, belonging, or the land of Israel—the instinct has often been Moses’ instinct: explain carefully, hedge, or leave the room. Running becomes habit when the self feels divided.
Israel changes that equation.
Israeli Jews do not experience Jewishness as a negotiation. It is civic, cultural, linguistic, and historical all at once. There is no internal argument to resolve before answering an external challenge. Questions that unsettle diaspora Jews rarely destabilize Israelis because the identity beneath them is settled.
Kotel Plaza with Israeli flag (photo: First One Through)
The philosophical approach even applies to non-Jews in Israel. Consider Quentin Tarantino, who married an Israeli, lives in Israel, and raises his children there without explanation or apology. His life models something diaspora Jews are rarely encouraged to try: resolve the split by living a whole integrated self rather than defending it. Belonging practiced instinctually requires no justification.
That clarity was shown clearly in Tarantino’s 2003 film Kill Bill: Vol. 1. In the film, O-Ren Ishii responds to an attack on her heritage immediately and violently. She recognizes the move as an attempt to diminish her and rejects the premise entirely. The table turns the instant she stops answering the charge and starts judging the judge.
For diaspora Jews—and for anyone of mixed heritage—the lesson is continuity. Identity settled internally removes the need for fleeing externally. When the self is whole, interrogation loses its force. Disgraceful questions do not deserve better answers; they deserve exposure and repudiation.
Moses ran because his identity was divided while modern Israelis do not. O-Ren stands because she knows exactly who she is and will not entertain accusers.
Diaspora Jews today should not need to relive Moses’ uncertainty of self. The work now is not to run, but firmer clarity. Better education and rootedness. Firmer responses.
Stop running. Stop defending. Condemn the question—and the room will follow.
Television executives are simple people. Show them a uniform that polls well, give it a badge or a helmet, add flashing lights and a gravel-voiced commander, and they will green-light twelve seasons before the pilot airs.
Police dramas? A civic religion. Firefighters? Basically saints with abs. Doctors? Gods in scrubs.
So it was only a matter of time.
This fall, after decades of training America to reflexively trust anyone wearing navy blue with a shoulder radio, Fox Broadcasting Company proudly unveils its boldest procedural yet:
ICE.
Hollywood already cracked the code.
Law & Order taught us crime is endless but solvable in exactly 44 minutes. Chicago Fire proved every blaze requires both heroism and unresolved childhood trauma. NCIS confirmed that investigations are best handled by quirky geniuses with unlimited jurisdiction.
The lesson was clear: If America will emotionally invest in fictional cops chasing fictional criminals, surely it’s ready to fall in love with fictional immigration enforcement agents chasing fictional paperwork.
Meet the Heroes
ICE follows a ragtag team of elite agents who don’t just enforce the law — they wrestle with it.
Agent Jack Pitt — By-the-book, square jaw, conflicted soul. His father immigrated legally in 1983 and he mentions it in every episode.
Agent Angela Reyes — Fluent in four languages, morally complicated, always reminding Jack that “it’s not black and white.”
Deputy Director Hank Robinson — A grizzled veteran who growls, “We don’t make the laws — we just dramatically stare at them.”
Every episode opens with a breathless reminder: “These stories are fictional… but the feelings are real.”
The Cases
The crimes are designed to pull at heartstrings.
A man with an expired visa… who volunteers at a soup kitchen.
A family missing a single document… somewhere.
A tense raid interrupted by a heartfelt monologue about the American Dream.
Sirens blare. Agents run. Someone yells “NOW!” even though no one explains why now is different from the last commercial break.
The Emotional Arc
Like all great procedurals, ICE isn’t really about enforcement.
It’s about family.
Every season features:
A wedding postponed due to a border emergency
A custody battle mirroring a deportation case
At least one episode where an agent asks, “Are we the bad guys?” before being reassured by swelling music that, no, they are not
By episode nine, viewers are crying over Form I-130 like it’s a fallen firefighter.
The Crossover Event
Mid-season, Fox delivers the event television America didn’t ask for but will absolutely watch:
Chicago Fire × ICE
A warehouse blaze. Undocumented workers trapped inside. Firefighters rescue everyone. ICE shows up. Everyone exchanges tense but respectful nods.
No one mentions politics. Everyone agrees the real villain is bureaucracy. Ratings explode.
Merchandising Opportunities
Fox executives are already salivating:
ICE hoodies (“Protecting the Dream”)
Limited-edition badges (plastic, for children)
A companion podcast hosted by a former agent turned consultant turned influencer
There’s even talk of a spinoff: ICE: Special Paperwork Unit
The Moral of the Story
Television has always been America’s civics class — just with better lighting and fewer consequences.
For decades, cops were heroes. Firefighters were angels. Federal agents were misunderstood geniuses.
Now, immigration enforcement gets the same glow-up: dramatic music, noble intentions, and just enough personal doubt to make everyone feel good by the closing credits.
Because if you put it on TV long enough, in prime time, with the right soundtrack…
Eventually, it’s not controversial or even politics. It’s just another show you binge on a Sunday night.
And somewhere in a Fox boardroom, someone is already pitching an ‘R’ rated version for direct to streaming.
Venezuela has arrived in New York City in two forms.
One arrives carrying the wreckage of a socialist system that hollowed out a country by redefining private property as moral corruption and state control as virtue. That experiment ended in scarcity, corruption, and mass flight. Its leaders now face judgment far from home, a coda to a long collapse.
The other arrival is quieter, bureaucratic, and far more consequential. It moves through City Hall.
Words That Become Policy
“Private property — especially homeownership — is a weapon of white supremacy masquerading as wealth-building public policy.”
Those words were written by Cea Weaver, who now holds authority inside New York City government over housing regulation, landlord enforcement, and real estate policy.
This is a moral judgment about ownership itself. Homeownership is framed as harm. Property is recast as a moral hazard. The implication is straightforward: what has long been treated as legitimate must be dismantled.
Knowing full well her position about private real estate and home ownership, Weaver was elevated into a role designed to shape housing outcomes by Democratic Socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
Real Estate as the Lever
Because housing is where ideology becomes operational.
Weaver’s portfolio centers on real estate because real estate concentrates independence, savings, and permanence. It is immobile, heavily regulated, and politically sensitive. Those traits make housing the easiest sector in which to normalize forced redistribution through regulation rather than spectacle.
Within Democratic Socialist thought, housing functions as the primary front for structural change. The stated objective is “decommodification” — removing housing from private markets through eminent domain and insulating it permanently from profit. Achieving that objective requires stripping ownership of legitimacy and transferring control to the state or state-backed collectives.
Jacobin Makes the Case Explicit
That program is reinforced repeatedly in Jacobin, the flagship publication of democratic socialism. Its housing coverage goes well beyond expanding public housing or strengthening tenant protections. It openly endorses removing homes from private ownership.
Jacobin has praised campaigns such as Berlin’s Deutsche Wohnen & Co Enteignen, which was approved by voters in 2021, calling for the expropriation of privately owned residential housing and its transfer to public control. It regularly argues that landlord property rights must yield to collective ownership if housing justice is to be achieved.
The logic is consistent: justice requires taking housing out of private hands.
Venezuela’s Sequence Is Familiar
Venezuela followed this same sequence.
Ownership was recast as exploitation. Returns were constrained. Controls expanded. Maintenance collapsed. Scarcity spread.
By the time property was openly seized, the groundwork had already been laid. Confiscation felt justified because ownership had already been condemned. Language prepared the public long before policy completed the transfer.
History records this pattern with grim consistency.
Ideological Alignment at City Hall
Zohran Mamdani placed Weaver precisely where her beliefs carry consequence.
“Impoverish the “white” middle class. Homeownership is racist/failed public policy.” – Cea Weaver
Democratic Socialists today debate pace and scope more than premise. Housing is the testing ground because it touches wealth, stability, and autonomy simultaneously. Alter the rules of ownership there, and broader economic control becomes easier to assert.
Donald Trump Begins to Align with Democratic Socialists on housing
And it seems that President Donald Trump is getting on board.
Trump just announced that he will ban institutional investors from buying single family homes. The goal is to keep the housing market acting rationally based on normal individual demand, rather than bowing to the force of massive realtors controlling rent prices.
It is not stripping individuals of their homes the way Weaver desires, but a first step in meeting the mission part way.
Naming the Mechanism
When government redefines private assets as illegitimate and reallocates them through enforcement, penalties, and regulatory attrition, the economic effect remains consistent regardless of branding.
Control shifts away from owners. Value erodes. Decision-making migrates to the state.
“As landlords exit the market, using state action to acquire properties and leverage divestment to convert thousands of homes into publicly and democratically controlled land/housing.” – Cea Weaver
“The president and his team are discussing a range of options to pursue this important foreign policy goal [of seizing Greenland], and of course, utilizing the U.S. military is always an option at the commander-in-chief’s disposal.” – Trump’s White House
Language about equity or justice does not change outcomes for families whose homes become conditional assets rather than protected property. Redistribution through regulation or seizure is theft.
People think of Donald Trump as a true Conservative; he is not. He spent years as a Democratic real estate developer in New York City. Owning, controlling and licensing property is in his bloodstream.
We are entering a dangerous moment when government leaders of the right and left are converging on the thesis that the state is the arbiter of private property, including your house.
The Question That Matters
A society either treats private property as legitimate or places it at the discretion of the state.
Once ownership depends on ideological approval, it no longer functions as a right. Capital withdraws. Investment slows. Stability erodes. Liberty disappears.
Venezuela already supplied the answer.
History rarely announces itself as collapse. It usually arrives disguised as compassion, long before the consequences become unavoidable.
Palestinian terrorism has names when it is organized. Hamas. Palestinian Islamic Jihad. There is a long list of U.S.-designated foreign terrorist groups under the Palestinian banner. Yet the most persistent form of Palestinian terrorism over the last two decades carries no collective name at all.
More than a thousand Stateless Arabs from Palestine (SAPs) have carried out individual fatal terrorist attacks—stabbings, shootings, vehicle rammings, ambushes at bus stops and junctions. The numbers recur year after year. The pattern holds. The vast majority originate in the land east of the 1949 Armistice Lines (E49AL) / “West Bank”.
Monthly tally of attacks by SAPs and Jews in the first four months of 2022, according to the biased United Nations
Calling these attackers “Palestinian lone wolves” obscures reality. Calling them Palestinian residents either creates a country of Palestine or integrates them into a historic landscape. The term “lone wolves” suggests isolation, desperation, a last act. The record shows the opposite. These young attackers are recognized, rewarded, and revered. Their names and faces appear on posters. Schools and streets carry their memory. Their families receive honor and money. The murderers are beatified as “martyrs.”
Civil societies do not ritualize acts they consider shameful or marginal.
Now consider how language works in parallel. Jewish civilians beyond the Green Line are routinely grouped under a single brand: “settlers.” The word does not describe residence; it passes judgment. It frames their presence as inherently illegitimate before any act occurs. When they are attacked, their civilian identity is eclipsed by a political label.
Branding does the moral work in advance.
The empirical comparison is stark. Jewish extremist violence exists and must be prosecuted. Its character is overwhelmingly vandalism and property damage—graffiti, burned fields, slashed tires. Criminal acts that generate repairs, arrests, and charges.
By contrast, the murders committed by individual SAPs, dwarf Jewish extremist killings by orders of magnitude. Funerals versus invoices. Deaths versus damage. Yet language reverses scale: property crimes are collectivized and politicized, while a long ledger of killings is broken into nameless “incidents.”
People killed in West Bank according to United Nations report, over end of 2022 and start of 2023 in which Tor Wennesland vilified Israel and the “settlements”
The cultural backdrop makes this impossible to dismiss as fringe behavior. Polling by Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PCPSR) consistently shows that SAPs in the West Bank express higher levels of support for violent attacks—including October 7—than Arabs in Gaza.
Polls by PCPSR show West Bank Arabs more in favor than Gazans of killing Jews, the October 7 massacre, and destroying the Jewish State
Repetition is evidence. Veneration is evidence. Polling is evidence. Together they point to a culture of violent jihad in the West Bank, sustained socially even when it is executed individually.
Terror does not require a logo to qualify. It requires intent, repetition, and outcome. What persists in the West Bank is a durable campaign of individual terrorism, encouraged by culture and rewarded by society, while its victims are linguistically transformed into abstractions called “settlers,” not innocent Jewish civilians.
This is absolution via euphemism. Turning Jewish civilians into perpetrators for existing, while shielding Arab murderers under a cloak of topography.
First One Through 