Tag Archives: Israel

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.

The UN Celebrates Migrants Except Jewish Ones

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Every December, the United Nations devotes a day to praising migrants.
It insists no human is illegal, that borders shouldn’t limit dignity, that newcomers must be protected regardless of how they arrived. It speaks in sweeping universalism: every migrant deserves acceptance, integration, and respect.

Every migrant — except the Jewish ones.

Because when a Jew moves to Jerusalem’s eastern neighborhoods or the hills of Judea, the UN suddenly abandons its sermon. The same institution that blesses migration everywhere else snaps into punitive mode: label, restrict, sanction, boycott.

The world’s great defender of human mobility becomes the world’s loudest opponent of Jewish mobility.

Migrants crossing seas and borders are embraced. Their stories honored. Their identities protected. But Jewish migrants returning to the land that shaped their peoplehood are told they are criminals. The UN proclaims them a threat, inventing a special category — “illegal settlers” — that exists for no other people on earth.

This is not inconsistency. It is intentional. A universal rule with a single carve-out: Jews.

United Nations says that migrants – even illegal one’s – deserve respect and safety

The UN Doesn’t Just Oppose Policy — It Delegitimizes Jewish Presence Itself

Despite the UN protesting the importance of protecting migrants, it passes resolutions specifically delegitimizing Jewish ones. It routinely asserts that Jews must not live in the very heartland of Jewish history. It passes resolutions declaring Jewish homes illegitimate, Jewish neighborhoods unacceptable, Jewish movement intolerable.

Every other people is encouraged to preserve identity and build community. Only Jews are told their presence in their ancestral homeland is an international crime. That their businesses should be labeled in specific lists, targeted for boycott and sanction.

This Isn’t Hypocrisy. It’s Anti-Jewish Discrimination.

Hypocrisy would imply the UN is failing its principles. But the UN applies its principles perfectly — just not to Jews.

It welcomes migrants when they are African, Asian, Latin American, European. It defends them when they are persecuted or undocumented.

But when they are Jewish, the vocabulary changes instantly and the moral umbrella snaps shut.

The world’s most ancient migrant people — the “wandering Jew” expelled, dispersed, and wandering for centuries — is the only group the UN insists may not migrate back home.

That is not flawed idealism. That is targeted exclusion.

Jews praying at the Western Wall, an act considered “illegal” by the United Nations, trespassing on lands it considers “occupied Palestine.” (photo: First One Through)


Where the Eagles Still Land

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At Sinai, God tells the Israelites: “I carried you on eagles’ wings and brought you to Me” (Exodus 19:4). It is the Torah’s softest reassurance — that when the world turns crushingly heavy, something stronger will lift the Jewish people before they disappear beneath its weight.

Every generation reads the verse and wonders how such a thing could ever happen again.

The Yemenite Wings

In 1949–50, it did.

Yemenite Jews — who had kept Hebrew alive for centuries through chants in dim courtyards — found themselves suddenly gathered into airplanes they had never seen before. Operation Kanfei Nesharim lifted nearly 50,000 people from danger to home, a moment so surreal that many believed prophecy had slipped back into the world.

They came to Tel Aviv’s Kerem HaTeimanim, where the streets still hold their memory: Rechov Kanfei Nesharim, Rechov HaAliyah HaTeimanit, and alleys named after the poets and dreamers who carried Yemen’s Jewish soul through generations of exile. The neighborhood became a landing place for people who had lived so close to the dust of history that being lifted into the sky felt like God reaching down again.

A New Kind of Arrival

Today those same streets are welcoming new immigrants — Jewish artists from Paris, Berlin, Amsterdam, and London. They are not fleeing famine or forced conversion. They leave behind apartments, galleries, and studios, places where they once felt at home but now feel the room shifting beneath their feet.

They speak quietly of exhibitions canceled with careful wording, of colleagues who grow uncomfortable when they identify openly as Jews, of a cultural world that prides itself on openness yet signals, in subtle ways, that Jewish presence complicates the picture.

Or they just concluded it was time to move on.

Their departure is not dramatic. No riots, no decrees. Just a slow tightening — a sense that Europe’s warm lights are dimming for them. And so they come here, carrying sketchbooks, guitars, half-finished manuscripts, their beautiful voices, and the hope that Israel will give them what their former homes no longer can: the ability to be fully themselves.

They settle into Kerem HaTeimanim because it feels familiar: small homes, open doors, neighbors who still greet each other, a neighborhood built by people who also crossed deserts — literal or emotional — to find peace.

Actress and singer from London makes a new home in the “Yemenite Vineyard” section of Tel Aviv (photo: First One Through)

The Meeting of Journeys

In these narrow lanes, two different exoduses breathe the same air. Children run past synagogues founded by Yemenite families and new galleries opened by European artists. Hebrew floats from balconies in melodies that sound ancient and brand new at once.

The Yemenite grandparents who arrived barefoot on metal wings once prayed simply to reach Zion. The young European immigrants arriving today pray to belong — to a people, to a place, to their own identity without contortion.

Here, on Kanfei Nesharim Street, the verse from Sinai feels alive again. Not as a metaphor of miraculous rescue, but as a quiet truth: every Jew who finds their way home is carried by something — hope, fear, memory, longing — that lifts them just high enough to begin again.

In this little corner of Tel Aviv, you can almost feel the wings settling gently on the houses, as if history itself decided to rest for a moment before taking flight again.

Shutter catch cast an old Yemenite Jew
Graffiti of Old Yemenite Jew

Over three thousand years ago, God took the Jews of Egypt out from slavery and established the Jewish people. Nearly eighty years ago, just after the reestablishment of the Jewish State, the government of Israel rescued the Jews of Yemen from persecution and brought them to the holy land. Today, Jews from the West come on their own to the Jewish Promised Land.

We marvel at the notion of being taken to safety on “eagles’ wings.” Perhaps we should also marvel at the place to which we arrived.

The Prophetic Bird Of The Holy Land

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Israel’s national bird is not the mighty eagle or the muscular vulture which many countries select. It is not a predator circling above the desert in effortless dominance. Instead, Israelis chose a small, cinnamon-colored creature with a zebra crown — the hoopoe.

The hoopoe going for a walk in Israel (photo: FirstOneThrough)

The hoopoe is striking without being fearsome, regal without being tyrannical. Its crest rises like a tiny crown, not in arrogance but in alertness. Its quiet confidence is perhaps the most Israeli trait of all.

Ancient Jewish texts and Middle Eastern folklore saw in the hoopoe a messenger of wisdom. King Solomon, in one Midrash, learns from the bird’s insight. In Islamic tradition, it is the hoopoe who spots the Kingdom of Sheba and brings word of distant realms. Small in stature, large in perception — the bird was never the warrior; it was the one who saw.

And in that, too, there is something deeply familiar. Israel has always survived less by size than by awareness, less by brawn than by vigilance. The hoopoe does not conquer terrain; it adapts to it. It finds food in the hardest soil. It endures heat and drought. It survives because it is resourceful, not ruthless.

It is also fiercely protective through a strange biological ingenuity. When predators threaten its nest, the hoopoe emits a foul-smelling secretion that drives them away. It is a defense born of determination: My family will not be harmed.

That combination — gentle but unyielding, peaceful but protective — resonated in the public vote that crowned it Israel’s national bird in 2008. Israelis did not choose a symbol of domination. They chose one of resilience, devotion, and wisdom. They chose a creature that guards life rather than takes it.

Israel didn’t know in 2008, when it voted for the hoopoe, that Hamas would launch war after war with openly genocidal intent. It didn’t know that October skies would fill with rockets, or that invasions, massacres, and kidnappings would carve themselves into the national psyche. But the country understood something deeper — that, like the hoopoe, it would have to adapt to danger, live alert, and protect its family with whatever tools it had.

A small bird in a vast desert landscape.
A small country in a vast expanse of Arab and Muslim nations.

The hoopoe survives not by dominating its predators, but by outsmarting them, outlasting them, and never abandoning its young. Israel, too, has learned to persist in a world that often misreads its vigilance as aggression and its survival instincts as provocation.

The national bird turned out to be prophetic.

Israel may be small, but like the hoopoe, it adapts, endures, and protects its own — even when surrounded, even when threatened, even when the world insists it should fold its wings and pretend it is safe.

The One State Hypocrisy

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Zohran Mamdani and his chorus of activists claim that the answer to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict is simple: one state in which everyone has “full and equal rights.” They pound the table with righteous fury, insisting that borders, ethnic divisions, and national identities melt away in a utopian civic democracy.

Fine. Let’s take them at their word.

If you truly believe in a one-state solution, then you must believe that Jews, like Arabs, have the right to live anywhere in that state. Hebron, Shiloh, Beit El, Jerusalem’s Old City, Ramallah, Nablus, everywhere. That’s how equal rights work.
So why do the same people who chant “one state” turn around and scream “illegal settlers!” when Jews live or pray in places those protestors dislike?

They protested outside Park East Synagogue but deny Jews the right to live in Judea and Samaria, the Jewish homeland for 3,000 years. Either everyone gets equal rights everywhere, or you don’t believe in a one-state solution at all.

You can’t have it both ways.

The Temple Mount Test Case

If you want a perfect example of the hypocrisy, look up — literally — to the Temple Mount.

If you support one state where every citizen has equal rights, then you support Jews having the same rights as Muslims to: Visit their holiest site. Pray at their holiest site. Build a synagogue at their holiest site.
That is what equality means.

But the United Nations — which these same activists quote like scripture — demands the “status quo,” a euphemism for banning Jewish prayer on Judaism’s holiest ground. It is the only place on earth where Jews are legally prohibited from praying. The UN defends this discriminatory regime with fervor.

So which is it?
Is it a one-state democracy of full equality, or an international system that criminalizes Jewish religious rights because the Jordanian Waqf insists on it?

You cannot simultaneously denounce Jewish prayer as a provocation and claim to champion “equal rights for all.”

One State Means Equal Rights — For Jews Too

If Zohran Mamdani and his movement were intellectually honest, they would have to say:

  • Jews may live anywhere in the land
  • Jews may pray anywhere in the land
  • Jews may build synagogues anywhere in the land
  • Jews may return to their ancient homes — Hebron, Shiloh, the Old City of Jerusalem

Not one activist chanting for “full equality” will utter those words. Because their version of “one state” is equality for some and erasure for Jews.

Call it what it is.

You can’t claim a one-state solution while denying Jews the very rights you demand for others.

You can’t have it both ways.

Two Things To Do Now To Prevent October 7 From the West Bank

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For twenty years, Israel relied on a security barrier to prevent the suicide bombings and shootings of the Second Intifada. It worked. While ninety percent of that barrier was not a concrete wall, but a high-tech fence—cameras, sensors, patrol roads, and layered detection system – it still reduced terror attacks from the West Bank by over 90 percent. Israelis and the Stateless Arabs from Palestine (SAPs) rebuilt their lives believing that a fence, not a fortress, was enough.

Then came October 7.

SAPs crashing through the fence between Gaza and Israel on October 7, 2023

Hamas gunmen bulldozed, exploded, and burned their way through what was—on paper—one of the most advanced border fences in the world. They murdered, raped, tortured, and kidnapped civilians in a genocidal assault that shattered the central premise of Israel’s security doctrine: that a fence and technology could stop an army of terrorists long enough for the IDF to respond.

That assumption is gone.

If a similar surprise assault were launched from the West Bank near the country’s major population centers—Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, the coastal cities—the casualties could be catastrophic. Israel is nine miles wide at its narrowest point. One breach is not a tactical event. It is an existential one.

The Barrier Must Change Because the Threat Has Changed

A fence can be cut, rammed, or climbed. A reinforced, multi-layered wall—physical, electronic, aerial, and subterranean—is a different proposition. The lesson of Gaza is not to abandon the idea of separation, but to upgrade it to match the enemy’s capabilities and intentions.

Israel does not have the luxury of guessing whether future attackers will try to slaughter dozens or thousands. The security architecture must assume the worst case—because the worst case already happened.

In Hashmonaim, Israeli backyards are a stone’s through away from the Security Barrier (photo: First One Through)

Disarming Militias Is Not Just for Gaza

The world is focused on disarming Hamas in Gaza. It must also confront a parallel obligation: militant groups in the West Bank cannot remain armed if there is to be any political horizon, for Palestinian Arabs or Israelis.

If Gaza is demilitarized but the West Bank is not, the threat simply shifts geography. The barrier is not a substitute for disarmament. It is a second line of defense, not the first.

Lasting security requires:

1️⃣ Complete disarmament of organized militant groups seeking Israel’s destruction.
2️⃣ Security control capable of preventing re-armament.
3️⃣ A barrier strong enough to make a surprise attack militarily unachievable.

Without those three components, diplomatic talk of a “future Palestinian state” is not a peace process—it is a gamble with tens of thousands of civilian lives.

A wall is not a symbol of failure. It is the price of survival when the alternative is the erasure of towns near the 1949 Armistice Lines with Jordan.

A move towards coexistence between Israelis and Palestinian Arabs cannot be limited to the threat from Gazans but from West Bank Arabs as well. Disarmament of West Bank Arabs and an upgrade of the security fence must happen now as well.

Peace requires trust. Trust requires time. Time requires security that cannot be breached in seven minutes by men with bulldozers and grenades and genocidal jihadi rage.

Until a day comes when coexistence is real—not chanted, not theorized, not negotiated—Israel must ensure that no armed faction can cross its border. The time to implement that plan is now.

Palestine 2.0

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The world keeps pretending we’re about to build something new when we talk about a “future Palestinian state.” As if Palestine 1.0 never happened. As if the first real test of Palestinian self-rule didn’t already give us a precise answer.

Because when Palestinians were first allowed to govern themselves, they told us exactly who they were politically:

  • They elected a Holocaust denier, Mahmoud Abbas, to be president.
  • They handed 58% of their parliament to Hamas — a terror group that doesn’t hide behind euphemisms. Hamas says openly that its mission is killing Jews and destroying the Jewish state, and Palestinians rewarded that platform with victory.
  • Then Hamas seized Gaza, and the public celebrated.
  • Then they launched war after war — 2008, 2012, 2014, 2021 — and Palestinians cheered again.
  • They spent their time and energy building a terrorist infrastructure under homes, mosques, schools and hospitals.
  • And then came the last two years, the worst carnage of all, and PCPSR polls showed overwhelming support in both Gaza and the West Bank.
Gazans celebrate the parade of dead Israeli Jews through the streets

This was Palestine 1.0. It wasn’t Israel running the show. It wasn’t occupation controlling the ballot box. This was Palestinian society expressing its political will.

And the result was catastrophic: a corrupt leadership, a terror government, zero investment in coexistence, zero preparation for statehood, and a culture built not on governance but on grievance.

Palestine 1.0 didn’t collapse because of logistics. It collapsed because of values.

Yet the world now wants to release Palestine 2.0 — a supposedly “upgraded” version where terrorists are kept out, Hamas is disarmed, and nicer leaders are installed. As if changing the packaging changes the product.

So the question becomes unavoidable: Was Palestine 1.0 a failure of government or a failure of the people?

If it was the government’s failure, then why did Europe rush to recognize it as a state? How do you crown a political project as a nation when its first attempt at self-rule ended in a terror dictatorship?

And if the failure was the people — if majorities truly wanted leaders who promised Israel’s destruction — then what confidence should anyone have that Palestine 2.0 will be any different?

You can replace leaders.
You can write new constitutions.
You can disarm militias.
But you cannot create a peaceful state when the foundational political culture rejects the existence of the neighbor it must live beside, one that even Palestinian advocates acknowledge is a profound “deformity.“

The majority of Gazans have always supported killing Jewish civilians inside of Israel

Palestine 2.0 is being sold like a software update: “Bug fixes. Improved performance. No terrorism this time.” But the core virus — the ideology that Jewish sovereignty is unacceptable — has never been removed.

And until it is, every version will crash.

The world can fantasize about Palestine 2.0, but if the Stateless Arabs from Palestine (SAPs) still believe the destruction of Israel is their national purpose, then all we’re doing is reinstalling the same system and acting surprised when the outcome doesn’t change.

You don’t upgrade a failure by renaming it. You upgrade a failure by changing the values that made it fail.

And until that happens, no one should pretend Palestine 2.0 is a new future.
It’s the same code with the same flaws — and the same predictable ending.