Tag Archives: Israel

A Divide in Aid and Perception Between Ukraine and Israel

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Since 2022, the United States has funded two wars at historic scale.

  • ~$65–70 billion in direct U.S. military aid to Ukraine
  • ~$21–22 billion in U.S. wartime military aid to Israel since October 7, 2023

Ukraine’s funding is more than three times larger, delivered faster and sustained longer.
Israel’s is smaller, largely defensive, and focused on interception and resupply.

Yet only one of these aid streams has been treated as morally illegitimate.

The Moral Divergence

Aid to Ukraine is framed as defending democracy.
Aid to Israel is framed as complicity.

Both wars involve urban combat.
Both involve civilian casualties.
Both rely on U.S. weapons.

But only Israel’s aid is placed under moral indictment.

The Political Record

Progressive politicians aligned with the Democratic Socialists of America have been consistent in drawing this distinction.

Bernie Sanders voted for massive Ukraine aid packages while introducing resolutions to block or condition arms transfers to Israel.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez supported Ukraine military assistance as solidarity, while opposing emergency funding for Israel as morally disqualifying.

Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib made opposition to U.S. military aid to Israel a defining cause—calling for halts and embargoes—without mounting a comparable campaign against the much larger Ukraine funding stream.

“This is not only the Israeli government’s genocide, Mr. Speaker. this is our government’s genocide.” – Rep. Rashida Tlaib

No similar moral test was applied to Ukraine.

The erosion of support in long wars

As the wars in Ukraine and Israel dragged on, Americans began to tire of spending so much money abroad in both wars. In September 2025, a Pew Research poll found that one-third of Americans thought that the US was providing too much military aid to Israel, while 23% thought the figure was about right and only 8% said it was not enough.

The figures were about the same for Ukraine in a February 2025 poll – 30% said too much aid, 23% about the right amount, but a significantly different figure – 22% (versus 8%) said there was not enough aid going to Ukraine. The gap is likely due to the visuals of a totally devasted Gaza and the elimination of most of the Hamas leadership.

A deeper dive shows a significant divide between Republicans and Democrats, especially over time. Republicans moved from 9% feeling there was too much aid and 49% not enough aid in 2022, to 47% feeling there was too much aid and 10% not enough aid in 2025. While Democrats did change their views over time, it was not as dramatic as the Republican shift.

At least for Ukraine.

The Ideology Behind the Distinction

This asymmetry between Ukraine and Israel is not about budgets or battlefield conduct. It is ideological.

Within DSA thinking, Israel is not merely a state that acts wrongly; it is framed as an illegal colonial project. The claim rests on a core assertion: that Jews are not indigenous to the land of Israel and therefore have no legitimate sovereign claim to it.

That assertion is historically false — and morally bankrupt.

It denies Jewish history, identity, and continuity in their ancestral homeland. It treats Jewish self-determination as uniquely illegitimate. And it transforms Israeli self-defense from a security question into a moral offense.

Ukraine, by contrast, is granted full legitimacy. Its sovereignty is assumed. Its right to fight is unquestioned.

Further, the far left is trapped in an empathy swamp, with the destroyed pictures of Gaza trumping the immorality of the Hamas death cult.

The Conclusion

A war funded at $70 billion is treated as a cause.
A war funded at $22 billion is treated as a crime.

That gap has nothing to do with the weapons. It has everything to do with an ideology that denies Jewish indigeneity — and therefore Jewish legitimacy, and a perverted view of right and wrong seen through the lens of empathy rather than morality.

This is not a debate about military aid. Ukraine gets much more than Israel. As does NATO. This about the Jewish State overwinning and the depravity of antisemites who want to end the Jewish State.

When the UN Handed the Gavel to Failure

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A funny thing happened as Somalia assumed the rotating presidency of the United Nations Security Council in January 2026: Israel recognized a breakaway republic, Somaliland. The timing was rich.

Somalia’s presidency of the most powerful UN body exposed rank hypocrisy: formal recognition divorced from reality. Somalia is treated as a sovereign authority – one given prestige – while it has spent nearly twenty years losing a war to Al-Shabab, an Al-Qaeda–aligned movement that taxes civilians, runs courts, controls territory, and carries out mass-casualty attacks with impunity. International troops prop the state up while Somalia’s sovereignty is tenuous.

The failure is not abstract. Somalia’s collapse has repeatedly spilled beyond its borders—most visibly through maritime piracy in the Gulf of Aden, which for years threatened global shipping lanes, energy supply chains, and food security. Still, a state unable to police its own coastline now presides over the world’s security council. That alone tells you how hollow the United Nations has become.

Somaliland, by contrast, has done the unglamorous work of statehood since 1991: defined borders, elections, peaceful transfers of power, its own currency, police, and a monopoly on force. It meets the Montevideo criteria in substance, not just in name. Yet it remains unrecognized—because recognition at the UN is political, not factual.

Now layer “Palestine” onto this picture—and the farce deepens.

Somalia is a failed state struggling against jihadists. Gaza is a jihadist state in its own right. Since 2007, Hamas has governed Gaza fully and openly. Hamas controls schools, mosques, courts, welfare, media, police, and an army fused into one ideological machine. International aid does not shore up weakness; it subsidizes jihadist rule—tunnels instead of homes, rockets instead of infrastructure, civilians embedded into military doctrine.

Here is the moral inversion the UN refuses to confront:

  • Somalia fails to defeat Al-Shabab and is pitied. Gaza chooses Hamas and is excused.
  • Somaliland governs itself responsibly and is ignored. Israel defends itself against a jihadist regime and is condemned.

The recognition asymmetry makes this starker still. In September 2025, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia moved decisively toward recognizing “Palestine”—despite the absence of defined borders, unified governance, or a monopoly on violence, and despite Gaza being ruled by a designated terrorist organization. Meanwhile, Somaliland—stable, democratic, and self-policing for more than three decades—remains outside the diplomatic club. The message is unmistakable: symbolism is rewarded; governance is not.

When that contradiction became too visible to ignore, the talking points shift. Accusations – by Somalia, amplified by Qatar (Hamas’s principle sponsor) – are being made that Israel intends to “relocate Gazans to Somaliland.” The claim is complete fabrication, an attempt at damage control—a smear designed to redirect attention away from the exposed hypocrisy. By turning Somaliland into a prop in an imaginary Israeli scheme, critics attempt to avoid the harder question: why a functioning African democracy is denied recognition while jihadist-run entities are indulged.

That reality was never lost on U.S. President Donald Trump. His view of Somalia is blunt: a failed state exporting instability, relevant to the United States only as a counter-terrorism battlefield. His administration treats Somalia as territory unable to govern itself or suppress Al-Shabab. In that sense, Trump is more honest than the UN: he acknowledges failure, while the UN performs credibility rituals by handing Somalia the gavel of global security.

No one claims Al-Shabab represents Somali aspirations. Yet Hamas—whose antisemitic charter sanctifies genocide and whose strategy relies on civilian death—is routinely separated from the consequences of its rule and reframed as “resistance.” Somalia’s inability to secure a monopoly on violence is acknowledged as a defect. Gaza’s total jihadist capture is rebranded as national self-determination.

This is why Israel’s recognition of Somaliland at this time matters. It is not merely diplomatic; it is diagnostic. It forces a comparison the UN would rather avoid:

  • What actually constitutes a state?
  • Who governs responsibly?
  • Who controls violence—and who glorifies it?

The Security Council gavel in Somalia’s hand reveals the emptiness of UN moral authority. Gaza’s treatment—shielded from accountability despite being run by a designated terrorist organization—exposes complicity. Somaliland’s exclusion, despite three decades of stability, exposes cowardice.

Israel’s move did not break international norms. It exposed the rot.

Recognition, the episode made clear, is not about peace, governance, or security. It is about politics—and the willingness to look away when jihadist rule is useful to the narrative.

A Less Anti-Israel UN Security Council in 2026?

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The United Nations rarely changes. But sometimes the composition changes just enough that the temperature drops—even if the structure stays broken.

That is what January 1, 2026 quietly delivered at the United Nations Security Council.

Five countries rotated off. Five rotated on. No grand reform. No moral awakening. Just personnel. And yet, for Israel, the difference matters.

The Council Israel Had to Endure

For much of 2024–2025, the Security Council was not merely critical of Israel. It was performative. Ideological. Repetitive. Certain members treated the Council less as a forum for conflict resolution and more as a theater for delegitimization.
None more so than Algeria.

Algeria did not argue policy. Israel, it insisted—again and again—was an illegitimate colonial outpost of Europe, no different from French rule in North Africa. History, geography, and Jewish continuity were irrelevant. This framing was injected into draft resolutions, press statements, and emergency sessions with missionary zeal. The goal was not peace. It was erasure.

Then there was Guyana, a country which bonded with the terrorist Palestinian Liberation Organization in the 1970s, which spoke with confidence and without knowledge—accusing Israel, rather than Arab states, of rejecting partition since 1948. One did not need to agree with Israel to recognize the historical absurdity. But the UN often rewards certainty over accuracy.

And Slovenia—a country with no meaningful role in the conflict—seemed to relish its moment on the moral stage. During Israel’s defensive war, it never called out Hamas. Slovenia repeatedly accused Israel of genocide. The charge was not legal analysis; it was rhetoric. And rhetoric, once introduced, metastasizes.

These countries rotated off quietly. No ceremony. No reckoning. Just gone.

The Council Israel Is Getting Instead

Their replacements are not “pro-Israel.” That bar is too high. But they are something rarer: less ideological.

Bahrain now occupies Algeria’s Arab Muslim chair. Bahrain is a signatory to the Abraham Accords and has diplomatic relations with Israel. It understands that shouting “colonialism” does not feed people, build ports, or stabilize regions. Bahrain may not defend Israel loudly—but it will not poison the well reflexively.

Colombia replaces Guyana in South America. Colombia is a serious country with a serious economy. It trades. It fights insurgencies. It understands security dilemmas. Domestic politics fluctuate, but Colombia does not need Israel as a symbolic enemy to feel virtuous on the world stage.

Latvia replaces Slovenia. Latvia knows what occupation actually looks like. It is cautious with language. It aligns more naturally with Western security frameworks and is unlikely to indulge in genocide rhetoric as a form of diplomatic performance art.

Liberia and Democratic Republic of the Congo round out the new entrants. Neither is a champion of Israel. But neither is an ideological crusader. Silence, at the UN, is often an upgrade.

This is not a transformed Security Council. The structural bias remains intact. Russia and China still exploit Israel as a pressure point. France still oscillates. The General Assembly still manufactures moral majorities untethered from reality.

But something important does change: the agenda-setters.

Algeria’s absence means fewer resolutions laced with colonial mythology. Slovenia’s departure means fewer genocide accusations casually flung like slogans. Guyana’s exit means fewer history-free lectures delivered with confidence.

In their place are countries – hopefully – that calculate before they accuse. That lowers the volume. It slows the cycle and gives diplomacy—especially American diplomacy—more room to maneuver.

Conclusion

Israel does not need the UN to love it. It needs the UN to stop lying about it.
The 2026 Security Council will not be fair. But it may be less dishonest. Less theatrical. Less obsessed with turning a regional war into a morality play with a prewritten villain.

Sometimes history doesn’t turn with a speech or a vote—but with who quietly leaves the room.

Hamas and ISIS

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The headlines are the same. Another plot uncovered. Another attacker radicalized online. Another manifesto stitched together from familiar phrases about vengeance, purity, and divine obligation.

Was it ISIS-inspired?
Was it Hamas-aligned?

In practice, the distinction is collapsing.

From Manchester to Sydney and across Europe and North America, security services increasingly encounter the same ideological core animating different actors. Antisemitism framed as righteousness. Violence framed as duty. Death framed as meaning. The slogans vary, the flags change, but the belief system underneath remains remarkably consistent.

ISIS flag on the car of murderers in Sydney, Australia

These movements are not converging by accident. They are aligned by doctrine. They are the banners of jihad.

When stripped of geography, branding, and media strategy, Hamas and the Islamic State reveal the same worldview: a sanctified war against Jews, against pluralism, and against life itself.

They are branches of the same antisemitic death cult.

God Alone Rules

Both movements begin with a totalizing claim: sovereignty belongs exclusively to God. Political authority, democratic choice, civil law—all are illegitimate intrusions into divine rule. Religion is not guidance; it is command.

This theology leaves no room for coexistence. Difference becomes defiance. Dissent becomes apostasy. Submission is the only acceptable outcome.

Violence as Obedience

Violence is not an unfortunate consequence of struggle. It is the struggle. Jihad is framed as obligation, killing as faithfulness, death as fulfillment.

This is why attacks around the world feel interchangeable. Civilian targets are central because civilians matter symbolically. Children are drawn into the story because innocence amplifies impact. Suicide becomes virtue because it collapses the distance between belief and action.

When ideology outranks life, mass killing is not excess. It is alignment.

Jews as a Theological Obstacle

The conflict is often described in political or territorial terms, but the animating hostility is theological. Jews are cast as an enduring enemy embedded in sacred narrative, not as a community with whom disagreement might be resolved.

That framing explains the permanence of the war. Agreements become pauses. Ceasefires mere tactics. The goal is not compromise but eradication.

Scripture, once weaponized, does not negotiate.

Death as Currency

In societies shaped by this ideology, death is elevated and life is instrumentalized. Martyrdom replaces mourning. Sacrifice replaces survival. Civilian neighborhoods are folded deliberately into military design.

Homes, schools, mosques, hospitals become launchpads and shields. Suffering is curated for export. Images of devastation are not collateral damage; they are strategic output.

What the outside world experiences as tragedy, the ideology treats as leverage.

Power Without Freedom

The end state is always the same. Total control enforced by fear and sanctified by religion. No speech outside doctrine. No faith outside orthodoxy. No dignity outside obedience.

ISIS ruled this way openly. Hamas learned to cloak the same destination in the language of resistance and grievance. The structure beneath remains unchanged.

The Lesson Already Learned

When ISIS surged across Iraq and Syria, the West recognized the threat clearly. It did not argue for partial containment. It did not imagine ideological evolution. It organized, committed resources, and dismantled the movement.

And it succeeded. For a while.

Israel has carried that same burden. By Israel’s own assessments, roughly 95 percent of Hamas’s fighting capacity—its leadership, battalions, tunnels, and command infrastructure—has been destroyed.

Stopping here would not stabilize anything. Allowing the group to maintain its weapons – the way the majority of the Stateless Arabs from Palestine (SAPs) want – would preserve the conditions for revival. Ideologies built on sanctified violence do not soften when wounded. They metastasize.

The remaining fragments are not a political movement in transition. They are an ideology waiting to rearm, re-export, and re-infect—far beyond Gaza.

Yet the world is rearming and financing ISIS and Hamas. It is allowing the jihadi groups to gain strength.

The world once understood this when ISIS was the name on the banner. The jihadist doctrine of Hamas is the same and has not changed. Only the branding has.

Hamas leadership promises to continue war against Israel forever

ISIS in Africa in Somalia, recruiting from around the world

Every Picture Tells a Story: The War Gazans Didn’t Start—and Aren’t Ending

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The headline asked why hundreds of Gazans have been killed. The article never answered.

In its December 24 piece, The New York Times assembled an inventory of grief—names, faces, photographs, shattered families—documenting civilian death in Gaza with intimate precision. What it did not assemble was an explanation. The question at the top functioned as decoration; the answer was assumed. Israel hovered everywhere as implication, never as argument.

What the article omitted is not marginal. It is decisive.

It did not say that Hamas still holds an Israeli hostage, in violation of the ceasefire framework. As long as that person remains captive, the war has not ended and the terms of the ceasefire have not been met.

It did not say that Hamas has refused to disarm—flatly, publicly—even though disarmament is a core requirement of the multi-point plan meant to end the fighting. The vast majority of Palestinian Arabs in both Gaza and the West bank agree. This is not procedural quibbling. A movement that keeps its weapons is declaring its intention to keep killing. Leaving that fact out does not clarify the story; it inverts it.

“a core, cross-regional [Gaza and West bank] red line remains: overwhelming opposition to disarming Hamas, complicating any post-war arrangement.” – PCPSR poll of October 28, 2025

It did not say that Hamas continues to state openly that it will pursue the war until the Jewish state is destroyed. These are not coded remarks. They are repeated commitments. When a belligerent announces genocidal intent and retains its arsenal, civilian deaths are not mysterious. They are the predictable outcome of strategy.

“The resistance is capable of continuing, and I am confident that the outcome of this conflict will be the demise of this entity [Israel].” – Senior member of the Palestinian resistance movement Hamas, Osama Hamdan on December 23, 2025

Instead, The Times presented Gaza as a place acted upon—its people rendered passive, its leadership reduced to background noise. The governing reality was blurred, that the popular, armed movement that began the war – with overwhelming local support – insists on continuing it. Palestinian Arabs appeared as if history were happening to them, rather than through institutions that still mobilize society for conflict.

The photographs – eleven in all, a remarkable number for an article, mostly featuring children – did their work. They always do. Images narrow the moral aperture. They locate causality at the edge of the frame. What lies outside—tunnels, refusals, threats, the last hostage—falls away. Repetition turns absence into innocence.

This is not empathy. It is evasion.

Civilian death is tragic and deserves coverage. But tragedy without agency becomes accusation by implication. When Arab suffering is anatomized down to the last tear while their popular elected leadership’s war-making is erased, journalism is no longer news but advocacy.

The Times did not lie. It curated. It acted as the political-terrorist group’s propaganda arm.

Readers are left asking why Israel is still fighting, when the honest question is why Hamas is still waging war—still holding the last hostage, still refusing disarmament, still promising destruction.

Every picture tells a story. This one tells a story about the author.

The New York Times’ Year in Pictures and the Architecture of Moral Inversion

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Hamas does not rule Gaza against the will of its people. It rules because large numbers of Gazans want it to. Hamas articulates aims that many in Gaza accept: “armed struggle,” permanent war, and the eradication of Israel. This is not an imposed ideology. It is a shared one.

That reality is the reason the war has not ended.

Hamas refuses to disarm. It promises to fight again. It rejects coexistence as a moral crime. And Palestinian Arabs have not rejected Hamas. There has been no uprising, no mass refusal, no turning inward to say this has destroyed us and must stop. The tunnels remain. The rockets are rebuilt. The hostages were hidden in plain sight and with complicity.

The Arab world understands this. So does the Muslim world and international community, quietly if not publicly. No money will rebuild Gaza while Hamas governs. No state will guarantee security for a territory whose leadership is openly genocidal. Even those who chant Gaza’s cause from afar refuse to absorb the cost of dismantling its rulers. Words are cheap. Responsibility is not.

And so the world fractures.

One side insists Gaza deserves unlimited sympathy—stripped of agency, frozen as a permanent victim, absolved of all consequence. The other side sees a society that has embraced a war of annihilation and asks the world whether moral condemnation is not only justified, but necessary. This divide is not about compassion versus cruelty. It is about whether moral judgment still matters.

What cannot be sustained is the fiction that Gaza is merely trapped between Hamas and Israel. Gaza is trapped— by leaders and parents who have chosen martyrdom over future, ideology over life, and war over their own children’s survival.

That is where sympathy collapses.

Because the only people in Gaza whose moral claim is uncontested are the children—and they are being sacrificed by a society willing to place guns in schools, tunnels under bedrooms, and hostages among families. A society that teaches its children that nothing is nobler than dying for the cause of destroying the Jewish State.

Sympathy cannot be demanded for that choice. It can only be extended—narrowly, painfully—to those who never had one.

That is why the ritualized outrage of the West’s most powerful institutions now feels so hollow. Each year, The New York Times publishes its Year in Pictures, and the selection itself becomes an argument. In 2025, the year with the largest spike in antisemitism including several incidents of mass murder, there were no pictures of Jewish victims. Instead, page after page of Gaza: rubble, smoke, bloodied streets, dust-covered children. Destruction, repeated until it acquires the authority of inevitability. Israel appears only as force. Gaza appears only as suffering. Context is stripped away. Agency is erased. The camera becomes a verdict.

Two-page spread in New York Times’ 2025 year in pictures showing Gaza rubble. The only other 2-page spread was the election of Zohran Mamdani, an anti-Israel member of the DSA, as mayor of New York City

But the depravity lies not only in what is shown—it lies in what is omitted.

There are no photographs of Jewish life under siege: no police guards posted outside synagogues, no concrete barriers and metal fences erected around schools, no quiet images of fear normalized into daily routine. There are no frames of mourning for Jewish victims abroad, the couple shot in Washington, D.C., the arson at the home of the Jewish governor of Pennsylvania over Passover. No recognition of the global consequences of a war whose ideology has traveled far beyond Gaza. Violence against Jews outside Israel didn’t even make a footnote.

New security fence erected outside synagogue in 2025 (photo: First One Through)

When Israeli hostages appear in the Times, they are reduced to a single visual trope: a large military helicopter, as if their captivity were a logistical problem rather than a crime. Even Jewish victims of Gazan atrocities are set against a large Israeli military. The human cost of hostage-taking is laundered into abstraction.

New York Times only picture of a Jewish victim is a tiny speck in a large Israeli military helicopter

What does receive sympathetic attention are arrests—multiple images of pro-Palestinian demonstrators detained by police, framed as moral courage meeting state power. Advocacy for Israel’s destruction is softened into dissent. The pages preen about resistance while refusing to name what that “resistance” seeks to accomplish.

This is not journalism. It is moral choreography.

The pictures ask only one question—who suffered more?—while carefully avoiding the only one that matters: who chose this war? To launch it? To continue it? They do not show Hamas leaders refusing disarmament. They do not show weapons beneath nurseries. They do not show the ideological choice to sacrifice children for permanence of war.

In this telling, Israel becomes the aggressor by existing, and Gaza becomes sympathetic by persisting in annihilation. The refusal to surrender is recast as resilience. The willingness to sacrifice children is aestheticized as tragedy rather than condemned as crime. Sympathy is manufactured by amputating responsibility. The global anti-Israel advocates are embalmed in the moral light; Jewish victims disappear off the pages.

When the world’s most influential newspaper presents destruction without causation, suffering without choice, and death without ideology, it does not advance peace. It sanctifies perpetual war. It promotes a global blood libel. And it teaches readers that moral clarity is cruelty, while moral confusion is virtue.

The far-left media hopes that history will remember its curated selection of photographs and the modern moment will gather sympathy for the anti-Israel and anti-Jewish horde. Hopefully they are proved very wrong, and this time capsule will forever mark The New York Times for its profound antisemitism and moral depravity.

Related:

Every Picture Tells A Story: There Are No Genocidal Leaders In Iran, Just Fancy Women (November 2024)

Every Picture And Headline Tells A Story: Columbia’s Pro-Palestinian Students Are NOT Antisemitic (April 2024)

Every Picture Tells A Story: No Brutal Slaughter Of Israeli Civilians (October 2023)

Every Picture Tells A Story: Palestinian Terrorists are Victims (November 2020)

Every Picture Tells a Story: Anti-Semitism (February 2017)

The Jewish Golden Years, 1991-2016

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People tend to both forget and exaggerate. Today, many Americans speak as if antisemitism vanished for decades and only resurfaced after the October 7, 2023 massacre of Israelis by the Arabs of Gaza. The narrative goes: everything was fine, and then suddenly the world turned against Jews.

That is simply false.

Jews have always been the most targeted group for hate crimes in the United States on a per-capita basis. Jews were assaulted, synagogues were attacked, and Jewish centers were bombed long before social media existed to broadcast the hate. The 1970s alone saw a litany of terror: Jewish places targeted, flights to Israel hijacked, hostages separated by religion, and Jewish children born into a world where the UN itself declared Zionism—a core component of Jewish identity—to be racism. That infamous 1975 UN General Assembly Resolution 3379 did not merely insult Jews; it institutionalized antisemitism on a global stage.

But something remarkable happened in 1991. U.S. Ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s crusade finally came to fruition, and the UN revoked its poisonous declaration. For the first time in modern history, the Jewish story—people, land, and identity—was not officially stigmatized by the world’s central diplomatic body. Israel was no longer framed as a racist project; Zionism was permitted to exist as a normal national movement. With that reversal, Jews in the diaspora experienced something astonishing: a geopolitical tailwind.

Begin Center hosts event in Jerusalem about 50th anniversary of UNGA Resolution 3379, in December 2025 – a condemnation of the United Nations

The Jewish Golden Years had begun.

From 1991 through 2016, Jewish life flourished across the West. Israel integrated into global markets, made peace with former enemies, and became a hub of innovation admired even by countries without diplomatic ties. Antisemitic incidents did not disappear, but they lost their ideological legitimacy. The world’s leading institutions were no longer branding Jewish self-determination as a crime. Jews could breathe—never fully secure, but broadly accepted.

That period ended with a vote.

In December 2016, the Obama administration allowed UN Security Council Resolution 2334 to pass—a measure far more extreme than the 1975 resolution it resembled. The 1975 General Assembly resolution slandered Zionism; UNSC 2334 criminalized Jewish presence. It declared that Jews living anywhere east of the 1949 Armistice Lines—including the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City, the holiest ground in Judaism—are in violation of international law. Jewish prayer at the Western Wall was, according to the world’s most powerful diplomatic forum, an offense.

Hasidic Jews at the Kotel in Jerusalem’s Old City, learning, praying, and inserting wishes into cracks in the wall (photo: First One Through)

It was not merely a political resolution. It was the legalization of antisemitism.

Once the UN stamped Jewish presence in Judaism’s holiest places as illicit, the global tide shifted quickly. The Jewish Golden Years began to collapse.

By 2018, Jews were being murdered in Pittsburgh and Poway. On college campuses, BDS campaigns metastasized into doctrinal dogma. In public schools, students were taught that Jews are not indigenous to the Land of Israel but “white Europeans” with no ancestral claim—a complete inversion of historical fact. Jews were physically beaten in the streets of New York and Los Angeles during the May 2021 Gaza conflict, years before the post–October 7 mobs marched with chants to “globalize the intifada.”

By the time American cities filled with crowds celebrating Hamas’s massacre, the unraveling was already underway.

The Golden Years—the 25 years of relative acceptance—were gone.

For generations, Jews believed that Israel’s existence itself guaranteed Jewish safety. The 1970s proved that was untrue. The present moment proves it again. A Jewish state cannot protect its people if the world delegitimizes it, demonizes it, or criminalizes Jewish presence in Judaism’s holiest places.

The real guarantor of Jewish safety is not Israel’s strength, but the world’s willingness to accept the basic history and human rights of Jews. That legitimacy existed only in a narrow window: from the UN’s repudiation of its Zionism-is-racism libel in 1991 to Obama’s decision to let UNSC Resolution 2334 pass in final days of 2016.

Those twenty-five years were an intermission in a much longer historical pattern. A rare pause in which Jews were not told by the world that their existence—national, historical, spiritual—was a crime.

Since 2016, the message has returned with force: Jews may live, but not there. Jews may pray, but not here. Jews may exist, but only on someone else’s terms.

The Golden Years did not end because Israel faltered, but because the world revoked its permission. Without it, the old hatreds rushed back as if they had never left.

Jews are not witnessing a sudden outbreak of antisemitism. They are living through the collapse of the only era in modern history when the world briefly pretended to accept the Jewish story.

The Little Drummer Boys of Terror

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President Obama once derided those who warned of Iran’s nuclear ambitions as promoting a “drumbeat of war.” It was a curious charge, especially as his negotiated JCPOA deal paved Iran’s legal pathway to nuclear weapons within a decade—despite Tehran’s unabashed calls to utterly destroy an American ally, and referred to the United States as “Satan.”

The phrase “drumbeat of war” is worth pausing over, because its imagery is meant to point a damning finger at generals and war profiteers, when in fact it refers to a beating passion that comes from a variety of sources.

Music itself teaches us the power of the drumbeat. Maurice Ravel’s “Bolero” begins as a whisper—a single snare tapping a faint rhythm—but its relentless pattern swells, layer by layer, into a rapturous explosion. Nothing changes except the intensity. It is a master class in how a simple beat, repeated without interruption, can inflame emotion, tighten resolve, and propel an entire orchestra toward an inevitable climax. Passion grows not from complexity but from persistence.

Cinema took that lesson to the battlefield. Ennio Morricone’s “L’Arena,” born from spaghetti-western duels and later carried into modern war films, shows how percussion can elevate tension into confrontation. Its pounding drums accompanied by trumpets push characters toward conflict; the beat does not merely accompany battle—it summons it. Morricone understood that rhythm can be a weapon, a psychological drumroll that makes violence feel fated long before the first shot is fired.

In American history, drummers were not symbolic ornaments—they were battlefield communicators. The famous “Spirit of ’76” painting captures a young boy and an old man beating time through the fog of revolution. In both the Revolutionary War and the Civil War, the drummer corps relayed commands, kept formation, and lifted morale. Soldiers needed to be adults to enlist, but drummer boys could be barely in their teens. They were not the policymakers of war; they were the ones whose youthful energy pushed men forward into battle.

“The Spirit of ’76” (1875) by Archibald Willard (1836-1918)

It is an uncomfortable truth: the drumbeat of war is often carried not by governments or generals but by the young.

We like to imagine youth as the innocent bystanders of conflict—swept up, exploited, or victimized by forces beyond their control. That is often tragically correct. But not always. In the Middle East, teenage Palestinian Arabs have repeatedly been at the center of anti-Jewish violence. During the knife intifada of 2015–2016, most of the attackers were adolescents. Arabic media even gave them a romanticized nickname: Ashbāl al-Quds—the lion cubs of Jerusalem.

On October 12, 2015, two Palestinian boys, 15-year-old Hassan Khalid Manasra and his cousin 13-year-old Ahmad Manasra, stabbed two Israeli civilians in Jerusalem

They were not pawns in someone else’s narrative. They were active participants in it.

While they were stabbing Israelis in the streets, new legions of drummer boys was forming. The Lions’ Den was inaugurated in the West Bank to unleash dozens of attacks. The United Arab Emirates named a school for children for these young murderers. In the United States, a group calling itself the Palestinian Youth Movement openly glorifies the murderers of October 7 and calls for an intifada on American soil. They harass Jews at universities, shut down bridges, disrupt traffic, and chant for “uprisings”—all under the pretext of activism, and often shielded by tax-exempt organizations like WESPAC.

In the immediate aftermath of the October 7, 2023 massacre by Gazans of Israelis, Cornel West marches with PYM calling for an “Intifada revolution”. West has taught at Princeton, Harvard and Yale, indoctrinating the next generation of American leaders on intifada.

The drumbeat is steady. It is disciplined. And it is aimed squarely at Jews.

Where does this beat begin? It is not in the Israeli cabinet rooms the media delights in blaming. It begins at UNRWA schools, where generations of children are taught that Jews are colonial invaders with no history in their homeland. It echoes through activist teacher unions in the United States, where “decolonization” rhetoric is repackaged into lesson plans that erase Jewish indigeneity. It thunders at the United Nations, where Muslim-majority blocs and their allies advance resolutions asserting that Jews must be removed from Judea, Samaria, and even parts of Jerusalem “by any means necessary.” The young Palestinian Arab terrorist are then shielded from blame and prosecution by the poorly named “UN Coordinator for Middle East Peace.” Laughable if not such a tragedy.

The young listen. And they march.

At Christmastime, the world hears “The Little Drummer Boy”—a melody of humility. A child with nothing to give but a simple rhythm of devotion for a newborn Jewish baby in Bethlehem. A beat based on innocence and purity.

But the modern Middle East and its Western echo chambers have perverted that image.

Today’s little drummer boys are not offering gentle hymns. They are being raised, trained, and celebrated for a beat of hatred—an indoctrinated cadence that valorizes “martyrs,” delegitimizes Jews, romanticizes violence, and promises glory for those who shed blood.

The world should hear the drumbeat. And it should finally ask: Who handed these children the drums? Who taught them that murder is heroism, that Jews are prey, that violence is virtue?

These teenagers did not invent the rhythm—they are marching to a score composed by UN agencies, radicalized teachers, political opportunists, and ideological arsonists who hide behind the language of “justice” while grooming minors for war.

UN Watch’s Hillel Neuer presents new report, “Schools in the Grip of Terror: How UNRWA Allowed Hamas Chiefs to Control its Education System,” to the Italian Senate in September 2025

At Christmas, we think of a young drummer offering a humble gift to a Jewish child in Bethlehem. Alas, today too many young drummers are taught to offer not devotion, but destruction—and the world nods along as if the rhythm were unavoidable. It isn’t.

The beat continues only because we refuse to silence the conductors who train the next generation of drummers to hate.

Thailand, and Israel’s Pull On the Global South

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When the last Thai hostage’s body was returned from Gaza, it barely made headlines outside of Israel and Thailand. His name — Sudthisak Rinthalak — was recited in both countries and memorials were held. But soon the world reverted into the endless ledger of loss and statistics.

The story of this single Thai agricultural worker is not a footnote. It is a reminder that the emerging bridge between Israel and Thailand is not diplomatic, not ideological, and certainly not written into UN resolutions.

It is a bridge made of people.

Sudthisak had come to Israel to pick fruit, send money home, and build a future for his family. Like tens of thousands of other Thais, he believed Israel offered something the Thai countryside could not: a ladder out of poverty. He became part of the massive human engine that powers Israeli agriculture — an engine so essential that nearly 40,000 Thais now work in Israel’s fields, orchards, farms, and increasingly, construction sites.

If you want to understand the future of the non-Muslim Global South, start with his story.

Thailand Votes One Way at the UN — But Lives Another Way in Israel

Look at Thailand from the perspective of international politics, and one picture emerges:

  • Thailand consistently votes with the pro-Palestinian bloc at the UN.
  • It has supported resolutions pushing for Palestinian statehood.
  • It aligns with the moral vocabulary of the Global South — anti-colonial solidarity, sympathy for the oppressed, skepticism of Western-aligned states.

This makes Thailand look like part of the same coalition as Malaysia, Indonesia, Pakistan, and other Muslim-majority defenders of the Palestinian cause. And in the formal, air-conditioned world of the UN General Assembly, that is true.

But look at Thailand from the ground level and a completely different picture emerges. There, Thailand looks more like India, not Indonesia.

The Monolithic Old Global South – the Muslim Global South – is where identity politics and Islamic solidarity define votes. The New Non-Muslim Global South is where development, technology, and people-to-people ties define futures.

Thailand still sits in both worlds — but one of them is getting stronger.

Thailand Is Quietly Becoming a “New India” in Israel’s Orbit

India once voted against Israel at the UN almost reflexively. Its elite identified with the Non-Aligned Movement, its public embraced the Palestinian Arab narrative, and its diplomats guarded that orthodoxy. But on the ground, something different was happening:

  • Indian engineers worked with Israeli tech.
  • Indian farmers adopted Israeli irrigation.
  • Indian tourists filled Israeli markets.
  • Defense ties deepened.
  • Human capital flowed both ways.

By the time India’s voting patterns began to soften, the relationship had already become irreversible. Reality had outrun rhetoric.

Thailand is following the same trajectory — but starting from a place even closer to Israel.

Consider the facts:

  • Tens of thousands of Thais live and work in Israel, forming one of the most intimate foreign labor communities in the country.
  • Israel is exploring Thai labor not just for agriculture but also construction, infrastructure, and caregiving.
  • Thai workers return home with Israeli skills in greenhouse technology and agri-tech, reshaping villages thousands of miles away.
  • Israeli tourism to Thailand is exploding — over a quarter million Israelis per year, with forecasts surpassing 350,000.
  • Thai cuisine, Thai workers, Thai–Israeli families, and Thai cultural presence are now woven into Israeli life.
“Little Thailand” emerging in the Carmel Market in Tel Aviv (photo: First One Through)

This is the Global South as a development engine, not an ideological bloc.

And Thailand is starting to discover what India and Malawi discovered earlier: countries that connect themselves to Israel’s people and know-how grow stronger for it.

Two Global Souths Are Emerging — and Thailand Is Crossing the Bridge

The term “Global South” used to describe one political posture. It no longer does. There is now a Muslim-majority Global South, loyal to the Stateless Arabs from Palestine (SAPs) and anchored in religious, cultural, and historical solidarity. And there is a development-driven non-Muslim Global South that sees its future in innovation, mobility, technology, worker migration, and agricultural modernization — where Israel is not a pariah but a partner.

Thailand is starting the migration between these worlds. For the moment, it votes with its Muslim neighbors at the UN but it increasingly lives with Israel. Works with Israel. Eats with Israel. Builds families with Israel.

In this sense, Thailand is part of the Global South’s next chapter: a world where alliances are formed through direct human interactions, not speeches.

Dozens of Thai food options in Tel Aviv (photo: First One Through)

And So the Hostages Return — to Two Countries Bound by People

When Sudthisak’s body finally left Gaza, diplomats issued statements and reporters filed their stories. But the people who understood the meaning of his return were not governments. They were Thai parents who send their sons to Israel to build a future. Israeli farmers who rely on Thai workers not as strangers but as partners. And both Thai and Israeli families stitched together by marriage, food, labor, and shared vulnerability.

Sudthisak’s journey — though tragic — tells the story of two countries whose relationship cannot be measured by UN votes. It is told by a deep human bond.

If the Global South is dividing into two futures, Thailand is already stepping across the bridge into the one defined by partnership, opportunity, and human connection.

Vatican II – and the New Jew

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On December 8, 1965, a crowd of 100,000 spectators assembled in St. Peter’s Square to mark the closing ceremony of Vatican II. The three years of work was orchestrated to bring about Christian unity, hoping to bring non-Catholics and Catholics together in a joint mission. The sixteen documents that the council enacted were designed on the theme of aggiornamento (Italian for bringing up to date) the Catholic church, which had started to be viewed by many as fading in relevance.

Pope Paul VI greets the faithful during the closure of the Second Vatican Council in St. Peter’s Square at the Vatican Dec. 8, 1965. (CNS/Catholic Press Photo)

The Second Vatican Council did not emerge in a Christian vacuum. It unfolded in the long shadow of Auschwitz, under the moral weight of a truth that could no longer be hidden: Christian Europe had stood by, silent or complicit, as the Jewish people were hunted, deported, and incinerated. The murderers were not pagan invaders; many were baptized Christians. The trains did not run through lands hostile to Christianity; they passed churches, crossed Catholic villages, glided along tracks laid in the heart of Christendom.

In 1961, the world could no longer avert its eyes. The Eichmann trial in Jerusalem forced every nation, every church, every conscience to watch. Survivors spoke in court with the clarity of witnesses resurrected from the grave: the collaborators, the bystanders, the bureaucrats, the bishops who said nothing, the priests who closed doors, the institutions that rationalized their silence. The trial tore away the last veil protecting Christian moral innocence. It was a moment when the Church had to confront not only the sins of individual Christians but the theological soil in which hatred had grown.

Trial of Adolph Eichmann in Jerusalem, Israel in 1961 (Photo: Bettmann / Getty)

Against this storm of reckoning, another seismic event had already taken place: the re-establishment of the Jewish state in 1948. For nearly two thousand years, Christianity had preserved an image of the Jew as the wandering witness, condemned by God to homelessness so Christians could inherit the promise. But suddenly, the wandering stopped. The Jewish people returned to their ancient homeland. Hebrew was resurrected from liturgy into daily speech. Jewish sovereignty reappeared as if history itself had refused to obey the theological script.

Israel’s rebirth shattered the Christian narrative of Jewish exile more forcefully than any sermon ever could. It reopened questions buried since the early Church Fathers: What does it mean if God’s covenant with the Jews never ended? What does it mean if the Jewish people still live, still dream, still return? What does it mean when prophecy looks suspiciously like news?

Israel declares itself a new country on May 14, 1948, to take place officially the following day May 15, which was Shabbat, coinciding with Britain ending its mandate.

By the time the Vatican convened, the Church was wrestling with two cataclysms: the moral collapse of Christian Europe during the Holocaust and the miraculous revival of the Jewish nation that Christian theology had relegated to the margins of history. These two realities — failure and fulfillment — created an impossible tension.

One of the sixteen Vatican II documents, Nostra Aetate (October 26, 1965) was not merely a doctrinal correction. It was a confession, an apology, a theological revolution. It declared the Jews not rejected but beloved, not guilty but enduring, not a fossil but a living partner in covenant. It rejected antisemitism “at any time and by anyone.” For Christians, it was liberation from a poisoned inheritance. For Jews, it was an unexpected invitation to be seen — perhaps for the first time — not as shadows in another people’s story, but as a people with a story of their own.

And something else began in the wake of Vatican II, something few would have predicted: the rise of Christian Zionism in its modern form. Many Christians, freed from the contempt of supersessionism, looked upon the Jewish state not as an accident of geopolitics but as a fulfillment of ancient promise. Some of Israel’s strongest supporters today come from Christian communities shaped by the theological revolution Vatican II inaugurated. They see Jewish sovereignty as evidence not of colonialism but of covenant, not of power but of destiny. They stand with Israel not out of political calculation but out of spiritual gratitude — an act of repentance and solidarity woven together.

Christian leaders assemble at the Western Wall in Jerusalem, observing Jewish prayer in November 2025 (photo: First One Through)

For Jews, this support has been both a blessing and a riddle. After centuries of persecution in Christian lands, how does one accept the embrace of former adversaries? How does a people long defined by suspicion learn to trust a hand that once struck but now extends in friendship? The Jewish story, once shaped by surviving Christian hostility, must now grapple with receiving Christian loyalty. The sting of history meets the strange balm of reconciliation.

These questions unfold in a nation — the United States — whose own identity has been shaped by Judeo-Christian roots from its earliest days. As the country approaches its 250th birthday, Americans are rediscovering that its foundational ideas — human dignity, moral law, liberty of conscience — flowed from a biblical inheritance shared by Jews and Christians alike. The Founders read the Hebrew Bible not as relic but as roadmap. The Exodus shaped the imagination of revolutionaries and abolitionists. The prophets shaped the conscience of Lincoln and King. The Jewish story is woven into the American one, even when America failed to honor it.

Rabbi Meir Soloviechik leads a tour of Christians and Jews at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, discussing the Judeo-Christian roots of America through art, in September 2025 (photo: First One Through)

Now, as antisemitism again rises and institutions fray, the old alliance becomes newly urgent. Jews and Christians are bound not by accident but by destiny: two peoples who share scripture, share moral vocabulary, and share responsibility for sustaining a civilization built on covenant rather than empire. Vatican II made it possible for this bond to be spoken aloud again, freed from the hostility that had once obscured it.

December 8, 1965 created a new Christian. But it also created a new Jew: a Jew who could stand in relationship not only to Jewish history but to Christian history, not only in resistance but in dialogue, not only as survivor but as partner. A Jew whose identity could be affirmed by the very institutions that once erased it.

And perhaps, as America steps toward its 250th year, this renewed bond is not merely theological or historical. It is a reminder that the future of Western freedom may depend on the same truth Vatican II finally proclaimed: that the Jewish people are not a footnote in someone else’s story, but the root from which so much of our shared moral world has grown.