Tag Archives: Israel

Nobody Protests the Military Bases in Germany

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Every year, the United States spends tens of billions of dollars protecting foreign countries. Not during wars. Not during emergencies. Every single year.

American taxpayers fund enormous military infrastructures across the globe: bases in Japan, Germany, South Korea, Qatar, Italy, and dozens of other nations. The United States maintains air bases, naval facilities, missile defenses, hospitals, schools, intelligence hubs, fuel depots, and entire support systems overseas. Hundreds of thousands of American personnel have rotated through these countries over decades.

Kadena Air Base – Okinawa, Japan
Ramstein Air Base – Germany

Those expenditures serve American interests too. America protects trade routes, deters adversaries, stabilizes key regions, and projects power abroad. The postwar security architecture benefited both the United States and its allies.

But it is still true that Americans spend staggering sums every year defending allies and preserving peace abroad.

And nobody protests it.

There are no mass encampments demanding America close bases in Germany. No demonstrations condemning the billions spent protecting Japan. No chants against the enormous costs of deterring North Korea. Few activists march through campuses denouncing America’s sprawling military infrastructure across Europe, Asia, and the Persian Gulf.

Camp Humphreys – South Korea
Yokosuka Naval Base – Japan

Which is precisely the point. Peace is expensive. Deterrence is expensive. Preventing large wars is expensive.

Estimated Annual U.S. Military Presence Costs By Country (2025)

CountryEstimated Annual CostNature of Presence
Japan$12B–$15BMassive naval, air and Marine presence
Germany$10B–$13BNATO logistics and command hub
South Korea$6B–$8BConstant deterrence against North Korea
Qatar$4B–$7BCENTCOM and Middle East air operations
Italy$3B–$5BMediterranean and Africa operations
United Kingdom$2B–$4BNATO, intelligence and airpower support
Estimated Overseas Total$60B–$80B+ annuallyHundreds of global installations

When wars erupt, the spending surges even further. The United States has already committed over $188 billion to Ukraine following Russia’s invasion because Washington understands that instability among major powers carries enormous strategic consequences, weakening Russia among them.

Yet when the discussion turns to Israel, the framework suddenly changes. Protesters and politicians often speak as though Israel represents the centerpiece of American military spending abroad – the singular foreign country siphoning money away from struggling Americans.

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has argued that America should be investing in housing, healthcare, education, and climate action — not “endless war.” Representative Rashida Tlaib has asked “Why is it that our government always has enough money for bombs, to bomb people, to kill people, but never seems to have money to provide people with healthcare, with housing, enough food for their families?”

Rep Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) and Rep Cori Bush (D-MO)

On its face, this sounds like a broad critique of American military spending but that is not how the rhetoric is actually deployed.

The slogans are overwhelmingly attached to Israel. Protest signs do not read “Housing Not Germany.” Student encampments are not organized around shutting down bases in Japan. Activists do not chant about the billions spent maintaining troops in Korea, Qatar, or Europe. The largest permanent American military expenditures abroad are treated as background noise – accepted features of the international system.

Only Israel is singled out as the foreign country supposedly taking food, housing, healthcare, and education away from Americans.

The actual numbers tell a very different story.

The United States does not maintain giant permanent bases in Israel. There are no sprawling American military cities resembling Germany, Japan, or Korea. No 50,000-troop deployments. No vast permanent occupation-sized infrastructure funded by U.S. taxpayers.

Al Udeid Air Base – Qatar

Israel largely fights its own wars with its own soldiers. Unlike many American allies, it maintains a large, technologically advanced military capable of defending itself rather than depending on permanent U.S. troop deployments for day-to-day security.

American assistance to Israel instead surges during major conflicts, particularly after attacks from Iranian-backed jihadist organizations openly committed to Israel’s destruction.

After the October 7 Hamas massacre – which included mass murder, kidnappings, sexual violence, and the burning alive of civilians – the United States accelerated weapons shipments and missile defense support to Israel as it simultaneously faced threats from Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, Shiite militias, and Iran itself. American funding has helped defang the largest state sponsor of terror in the world which has also threaten the United States.

Even including the wartime surge, total U.S. military support for Israel in the two years following the October 7 massacre was just over $20 billion, including traditional military aid, missile defense replenishment, emergency weapons transfers, naval deployments tied to regional deterrence, and supplemental wartime appropriations.

That is a large figure but it pales beside the recurring long-term costs of America’s military architecture elsewhere. The United States spends more every two years defending Japan and Germany – EACH – than it spent supporting Israel during one of the largest Middle East wars in decades.

And unlike Europe or East Asia, Israel exists in an environment where multiple armed movements and regimes openly call for its elimination.

American forces remain in Germany because Europe once descended into catastrophic war. American bases in Japan exist because Washington concluded lasting peace in Asia required permanent deterrence. Korea remains heavily militarized because North Korea still threatens annihilation.

Nobody claims those alliances make Germany, Japan, or South Korea illegitimate states. Nobody demands those countries lose American protection. Only Israel is treated as uniquely immoral for receiving defensive support while fighting organizations openly committed to genocide.

If the protests were truly about opposing American military expenditures abroad, the largest demonstrations in America would target Germany, Japan, Korea, and the vast global network of permanent U.S. bases that cost taxpayers tens of billions every year.

They do not.

Instead, the outrage fixates on the one major American ally fighting for survival without large U.S. troop deployments, without permanent American bases, and while carrying the overwhelming burden of war itself.

That contradiction reveals something important: for many activists, the issue was never primarily military spending. It was Israel.

The Polls Tell a Very Different Story About Israeli Arabs

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For years, one of the most common accusations leveled against Israel has been the charge of “apartheid.” International NGOs invoke it routinely and campus activists repeat it endlessly. Much of the Western conversation now treats the claim not as an argument to be debated, but as an established fact.

The accusation carries a very specific implication: that Arab citizens of Israel are a permanently segregated and oppressed population fundamentally excluded from the society around them, and that Israel is a racist illiberal regime.

But the polling data emerging from inside Israel tells a profoundly different story. Not a simplistic story. Not a utopian story. But a far more human and complicated one.

For decades, much of the world has spoken about Arab Israelis without ever seriously listening to them. Western activists speak in the language of revolution. International NGOs speak in the language of permanent oppression. Campus protesters speak in the language of “decolonization,” “resistance,” and “right of return.” The underlying assumption is always the same: Israeli Arabs are presumed to be a permanently alienated population waiting for the eventual dismantling of the Jewish state.

Yet the actual polling of Arab Israelis increasingly points somewhere else entirely.

The newest evidence comes from a May 2026 study by the Konrad Adenauer Program for Jewish-Arab Cooperation at Tel Aviv University. The survey found that 75.8% of Israeli Arab 12th graders support volunteering for non-security national service. Even more striking, 77.2% supported Arab political parties joining Israeli governing coalitions, while substantial numbers supported joining coalitions across the political spectrum rather than only left-wing alliances. More than half reported a strong sense of belonging to the State of Israel.

This is not the polling profile of a population preparing for insurrection. It is the polling profile of a population increasingly interested in civic participation, integration, and practical coexistence.

The trajectory matters even more than the raw numbers. In 2010, support for national service among Arab youth stood at only 43%. In fifteen years, support nearly doubled. That is not statistical fluctuation. It is societal evolution.

Then came October 7.

If the fashionable revolutionary narrative were true, one might have expected Arab citizens of Israel to radicalize after the Hamas massacre and the Gaza war that followed. Yet a 2024 survey from Tel Aviv University found that 57.8% of Arab Israelis said the war had actually strengthened feelings of “shared destiny” between Arab and Jewish citizens of Israel.

That may be the single most important polling result of the post-October 7 era.

Because it directly collides with the apartheid framework so dominant in Western discourse. Apartheid systems do not typically produce growing feelings of shared civic destiny during wartime. Whatever tensions and inequities exist inside Israel, the polling increasingly suggests Arab Israelis themselves do not see their future primarily through the lens of permanent separation.

The polls also tell a subtler story about the so-called “right of return,” perhaps the most emotionally charged issue in the entire conflict. Western activists frequently present the demand for millions of Palestinian descendants to move into Israel proper as though it were universally embraced by all Palestinian Arabs and Israeli Arabs alike.

The polling suggests otherwise.

A September 2024 joint survey by Tel Aviv University and the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research found that 72% of Israeli Arabs supported a two-state solution. That number was substantially higher than among Israeli Jews and even higher than among Palestinians living in the territories.

That finding matters enormously because a genuine two-state framework implicitly rejects the maximalist interpretation of “right of return” that would demographically dissolve Israel as a Jewish-majority state. The same survey found only small minorities supporting one-state frameworks built around domination or elimination of the other side.

In other words, the polling increasingly suggests Israeli Arabs distinguish between support for Palestinian national aspirations and support for eliminating Israel altogether.

That distinction is almost entirely absent from Western activist discourse.

Arab Israelis clearly continue to identify deeply with Palestinians culturally and emotionally. They remain sharply critical of many Israeli government policies. A March 2025 survey by the Institute for National Security Studies found extremely low trust among Arab Israelis in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government.

But dissatisfaction with the government has not translated into broad support for Hamas or revolutionary confrontation. Quite the opposite. Poll after poll since October 7 has shown far greater fear of instability, communal violence, and economic disruption than enthusiasm for armed struggle. The dominant priorities emerging from repeated surveys are public safety, economic opportunity, education, housing, infrastructure, and reducing violent crime inside Arab communities.

Communities preparing for revolution do not consistently rank municipal policing, school quality, infrastructure investment, and economic mobility among their highest priorities. Citizens do.

The polling increasingly shows Arab Israelis sounding less like Western campus radicals and more like citizens trying to improve daily life for their families.

This is why the rise of pragmatic Arab political participation inside Israel matters so much. Figures like Mansour Abbas represent something many outsiders still struggle to understand: a growing willingness among Arab Israelis to work within Israeli political institutions rather than reject them outright.

Then Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett (L) shakes hands with the leader of the United Arab List Mansour Abbas during a Knesset session in Jerusalem, Israel, June 13, 2021. — AP/File

That does not mean tensions have disappeared. The 2025 Israeli Democracy Index from the Israel Democracy Institute found Arab Israelis continue to report significant discrimination and identify Jewish-Arab relations as the country’s deepest social divide.

But here again, the crucial issue is what Arab Israelis increasingly appear to want done about those grievances. The polls suggest the overwhelming preference is not dismantling Israel, but improving their place within it.

That is a transformative distinction.

The divergence becomes even clearer when comparing Israeli Arab polling with polling from Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank conducted by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research.

IssueIsraeli ArabsPalestinians in Gaza/West Bank
Support for joining Israeli governing coalitionsStrong majority supportGenerally reject Israeli political framework
Support for non-military national service75.8% among Arab Israeli 12th gradersNot applicable
Feeling of “shared destiny” with Jewish Israelis after Oct. 757.8% said war strengthened itPolling shows sharply increased hostility after war
Preferred prioritiesCrime reduction, housing, education, infrastructure, jobsConflict, statehood, war recovery, resistance politics
Support for two-state solution72%Lower and declining in recent polling
Participation in Israeli institutionsIncreasingly normalizedGenerally viewed as illegitimate
Attitudes toward Hamas after Oct. 7Little evidence of broad supportSignificantly higher support in multiple polls

The table reveals a profound disconnect between Israeli Arabs and Palestinian Arabs, as well as in the ideological activism abroad and lived reality inside Israel itself.

The activists chanting “globalize the intifada” imagine permanent struggle. Yet the polling increasingly points toward coexistence mixed with frustration, and integration mixed with cultural distinctiveness.

Which is why another recent trend in Western media coverage increasingly looks detached from reality: the insistence on replacing the term “Israeli Arabs” with “Palestinian citizens of Israel” as though the latter fully captures how this population sees itself.

These citizens are clearly Arab. Clearly connected culturally and emotionally to the broader Palestinian story. But the surveys increasingly show they also see themselves as participants in Israeli civic life, Israeli institutions, Israeli politics, Israeli education systems, and the Israeli economy. They vote in Israeli elections and increasingly support joining Israeli governing coalitions. Increasingly support national service and increasingly express a sense of belonging to the state itself.

Western activists speak the language of permanent revolution and endless “resistance.” The polling shows Arab Israelis speaking the language of citizenship, coexistence, opportunity, safety, and practical reality.

Israeli Arabs make up 21% of the Israeli population. Their numbers have grown faster than Israeli Jews since 1948. And they increasingly feel at home inside the Jewish State.

Israeli Arabs enjoying the beach in Tel Aviv, Israel (photo: First One Through)

Stop Marching for 1948. Start Building 2048.

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Every May, “Nakba Day” protests erupt across Western cities under the claimed banner of justice and liberation. Organizers describe them as commemorations of displacement and suffering. Yet listen carefully to the chants, read the signs, and study the ideology driving many of these demonstrations, and a darker reality emerges.

Nakba Day events are not about building a future alongside a Jewish state. They are about keeping alive the dream that the Jewish state should never have existed at all, and must be destroyed.

That is why the rhetoric so often revolves around “resistance until liberation,” “from the river to the sea,” and “globalize the intifada.” The message is unmistakable. The war of 1948 is not viewed as tragic history. It is viewed as unfinished business.

For 78 years, generations of the Stateless Arabs from Palestine (SAPs) and their supporters have been taught that the central injustice was not war itself, nor the suffering that war inevitably unleashed on all sides, but Jewish sovereignty. The catastrophe, in this telling, was that Jews regained independence anywhere in their ancestral homeland.

That poisonous premise has trapped both Palestinian Arabs and Israelis inside an endless cycle of bloodshed.

A movement built around the belief that Israel must someday disappear cannot produce coexistence. A political culture that teaches Jews are foreign colonial invaders rather than an indigenous Middle Eastern people returning to the land where Jewish civilization was born cannot produce peace. A worldview that refuses to acknowledge Jewish history in Jerusalem, Jewish ties to Hebron, or the sanctity of the Temple Mount to Judaism is rooted in antisemitism, not “anti-Zionism.” It is a deep “deformity” in Palestinian culture.

And so Nakba Day has increasingly become less a memorial to suffering than a ritual of perpetual war.

There is nothing wrong with mourning loss. Every nation remembers tragedy. The problem begins when remembrance becomes a doctrine that denies another people’s right to exist. To basic human rights. No peace movement can emerge from teaching generation after generation that coexistence itself is betrayal.

It is time to break that cycle.

Replace Nakba Day with Two State Day. A day dedicated not to reversing 1948, but to building 2048.

Imagine a new annual movement where Palestinian Arabs openly recognize that Jews are indigenous to the Land of Israel. One where activists acknowledge that Jewish attachment to Jerusalem did not begin in 1967 or 1948, but stretches back thousands of years. One where the Temple Mount is recognized not merely as a Muslim site built atop forgotten ruins, but as the spiritual center of Jewish civilization.

Imagine a Two State Day where Palestinian leaders finally say openly that Jews are not crusaders, not European interlopers, not temporary occupiers, but a people who originated in the very land they returned to.

And imagine Israeli Jews responding not with suspicion, but with an outstretched hand.

Imagine Israeli Independence Day celebrations where Muslim neighbors, Arab citizens, and Palestinians willing to embrace coexistence are invited to participate. Imagine Jewish speakers recognizing Palestinian suffering and aspirations, while Muslim speakers recognize Jewish indigenousness, Jewish history, and Israel’s permanence. Imagine both peoples publicly declaring that neither side is leaving and neither side’s history will be erased.

That would not erase either people’s narrative. It would humanize both.

The current version of Nakba politics freezes Palestinians psychologically in 1948, teaching generation after generation that justice means reversing history rather than building a future. It glorifies “resistance-violence” while discouraging reconciliation. It romanticizes intifada while Palestinians themselves continue paying the price in blood, corruption, isolation, and failed leadership.

This ideology has harmed Palestinians no less than Israelis.

Every year spent teaching children that Haifa, Jaffa, and Tel Aviv must someday be “liberated” is another year not spent building functioning institutions, economic opportunity, civil society, or genuine pathways to coexistence. Every rally that denies Jewish legitimacy hardens Israelis further against compromise and strengthens extremists on all sides.

The world has already seen where this road leads. October 7 was not born in a vacuum. It emerged from decades of indoctrination insisting that Jewish sovereignty itself is intolerable “in any part of Palestine” and that violence against it is inherently righteous “resistance.” The cheering crowds in Western capitals after the massacre exposed how deeply this toxic worldview has spread far beyond Gaza, chumming for the anti-Jewish horde.

But history is not destiny.

Two State Day could become something profoundly different. A day not of denial, but of mutual recognition. A day where SAPs mourn losses without denying Jewish legitimacy. A day where Jews acknowledge Palestinian Arab suffering without questioning Israel’s basic right to exist. A day where both peoples reject the poison of perpetual grievance and choose coexistence over endless war.

The future cannot belong to people still marching psychologically toward 1948. It must belong to those willing to build 2048.

A future where Palestinian children are not taught that Jews are foreign usurpers, but neighbors with ancient roots in the same land. A future where Jewish children no longer grow up expecting every concession to be answered with more violence. A future where the Temple Mount is not a symbol of exclusion, but proof that the land carries the sacred history of multiple peoples.

Real peace will never emerge from chants demanding the disappearance of one side or the other. It begins only when both peoples recognize each other’s humanity, legitimacy, and permanence.

Mamdani’s False Charge And the Echo of the Soviet Union

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New York City Mayor and Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani accused a synagogue hosting a West Bank real estate expo of facilitating “illegal land sales” and “displacing Palestinians.” It was an explosive accusation, wrapped in the language of international law, designed to sound precise and morally settled. But the facts—and the law—are far more complicated than that charge suggests.

The first fact Mamdani skips is the most important one: the buyers are Americans.

Not Israelis being relocated by the State of Israel. Not civilians transferred by military order. Not part of a government-directed demographic campaign. Americans, acting on their own, voluntarily exploring whether to buy homes.

That distinction is the legal center of the argument.

The international legal objection to “settlements” rests largely on Article 49(6) of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which prohibits an occupying power from transferring parts of its own civilian population into occupied territory. The theory is about state conduct: a government moving its own people into disputed land.

That is not what is happening here.

Whatever one thinks of “Israeli settlements,” an American family independently choosing to buy an apartment is not the same legal act as a state transferring its civilian population. It is a private decision, made voluntarily, by people acting on their own behalf.

Brochure from Great Real Estate Event at Park Avenue Synagogue in New York City in May 2026

The second problem with Mamdani’s accusation is historical.

Much of the outrage centers on homes in the West Bank neighborhood of Gush Etzion, as though it were simply land taken from Palestinian Arabs after 1967. That telling requires erasing inconvenient history.

Jews legally purchased land in Gush Etzion in the 1920s and 1930s. Jewish communities were established there before the State of Israel existed. In 1948, those communities were attacked, destroyed, and their survivors expelled. These neighborhoods were not owned privately by Palestinian Arabs.

Even more, almost every single presenter at the event was marketing real estate inside Israel. As the event advertised on its opening page “from Jerusalem to Netanya, from Haifa to Eilat,” this was an event showcasing homes inside of Israel.

This event was not about “displacing Palestinians” as Mamdani charged. This was selling homes in the Jewish homeland to American Jews.

That 3,300-year old bond is at the heart of antisemites loathing Israel, much like Mamdani’s mentors in the Soviet Union attacking Zionists decades ago.

Which Arab Murders Count?

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Some murders become international incidents. Others become statistics.

That is what makes the numbers in Israel and the West Bank so revealing.

As of early May 2026, roughly 98 Israeli Arabs have been murdered this year, overwhelmingly by fellow Arabs in gang violence, organized crime, and clan feuds. In that same period, about 16 Stateless Arabs from Palestine (SAPs) in the West Bank were killed by West Bank Jews.

The deaths are a tragedy. In each location.

Among the dead in Israel were a young Arab man and his fiancée in Yarka, shot dead together just weeks before their wedding. They were building a home, planning a life, and in a moment both were gone.

Their murders did not trigger an emergency session at the United Nations Human Rights Council. No international campaign formed around their names. No protests filled campuses demanding justice.

But the ratio matters.

For every SAP killed by a West Bank Jew this year, more than six Israeli Arabs have been killed by fellow Arabs.

Yet only one category reliably commands international attention.

When Jews kill Arabs, the broader human rights ecosystem reacts swiftly. The UN warns of “ethnic cleansing.” Condemnations follow. Activists mobilize.

Francesca Albanese, UN special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories, attends a side event during the Human Rights Council at the United Nations in Geneva on March 26, 2024.
Photo: Reuters / Denis Balibouse

When Arabs kill Arabs, the deaths rarely travel beyond the local crime blotter.

If Arab life matters, it should matter regardless of who pulls the trigger.

Israelis protest in Haifa, Israel, against the crime wave impacting their community, on August 31, 2025. An estimated 252 Israeli Arabs were killed by fellow Arabs in 2025. (photo: Kareem Khadder/CNN)

A human rights system that treats one dead Arab as an international crisis and six dead Arabs as a local inconvenience is not organized around human dignity.

It is organized around narrative.

Somewhere in Yarka, two families are mourning a wedding that will never happen.

And the world moved on because no Jew could be blamed.

Trauma in Present Tense

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There was something fitting about Lior Raz standing in Chappaqua, New York last night raising money for Magen David Adom. Raz built his career dramatizing the hunt for terrorists. Magen David Adom exists for the moments after the hunt fails.

Lior Raz being interviewed at a fundraiser for Magen David Adom in Chappaqua, NY April 29, 2026 (photo: First One Through)

For those unfamiliar with Raz, he is more than an actor. Before becoming one of Israel’s most recognizable cultural figures, he served in an undercover Israeli military unit operating inside Arab communities, gathering intelligence and carrying out operations in hostile environments. He grew up with Iraqi and Algerian parents speaking Arabic, making him deeply bi-cultural in Jewish and Arab worlds. That experience and background became the foundation for Fauda, the global hit he co-created and stars in, a drama centered on Israeli undercover units hunting terrorists in the West Bank and Gaza.

What made Fauda different was never simply its action but its realism. Israelis and Palestinian Arabs were not rendered as symbols, but as human beings moving through an intimate, brutal conflict where ideology, family, fear, and violence occupy the same space. For international audiences it was compelling fiction. For Israelis and Stateless Arabs from Palestine (SAPs) it often felt closer to lived reality.

Then October 7 collapsed whatever distance remained between fiction and reality.

At the fundraiser, Raz put words to what that rupture did to Israel.

Israel, he said, is living in trauma, not PTSD. It was not an echo of horror but the continuation of it.

It was the most important thing said all night because it captured something essential about the country after October 7. PTSD belongs to memory. Trauma belongs to the present. PTSD is what remains after danger has passed. Trauma is what happens when danger tears through your assumptions and reorganizes how you live.

That is Israel now.

Lior Raz being interviewed at a fundraiser for Magen David Adom in Chappaqua, NY April 29, 2026 (photo: First One Through)

The hostages are home or accounted for. The war has shifted phases. But the rupture remains embedded in Israeli life. The confidence that catastrophe could be anticipated and contained has been broken. Every family understands more intimately how quickly ordinary life can split into irreversible loss. The danger may have changed form, but the nervous system of the country remains altered.

That is where Magen David Adom enters the story.

If Fauda is about the front edge of violence—the raid, the chase, the interception—Magen David Adom lives on the back edge: the ambulance, the paramedic, the trauma room, the blood bank, the race to preserve life after violence has already landed. Security exists to stop attacks. Emergency medicine exists for when stopping fails.

Raz spoke with particular pride about what Magen David Adom represents: Jews, Christians, Druze, and Muslims working side by side to save lives. In a region where identity so often organizes conflict, MDA operates at the level beneath identity, at the essence of humanity. No politics, no theology, no tribal sorting. Just the oldest civilizational imperative there is: preserve life.

It is one of Israel’s deepest strengths that even under permanent security pressure, its emergency institutions remain organized around life itself.

Raz also looked forward. The next season of Fauda which will come out in a few months, he said, will directly reflect October 7 and the years after, with half of it set in Marseille, France. That choice is revealing. Marseille is one of Europe’s great pressure-point cities, where migration, communal fragmentation, criminality, radicalization, and fractured civic identity collide. It is a city where many of the tensions Israel has lived with for decades are becoming visible in European form.

The movement of Fauda into Europe suggests something larger. The Israeli condition is no longer entirely Israeli. The fractures Israel has lived with for decades—terror, divided loyalties, imported ideological battles, fear in public life—are increasingly visible across Western democracies. Israel was simply earlier, home to 45% of global Jewry. The anti-Jewish attacks and growing anti-Western attacks are everywhere.

When Raz was pressed on American politics, he declined to engage. He understood the trap of America’s partisan machinery and would have no part of it. He was there to fight violence from wherever it came from, not from a single ideology.

At an event raising money for ambulances, blood banks, and emergency responders, it became clear that this too belongs to the same mission.

Raz is known for Fauda, for portraying the hunt for terrorists, the intelligence work, the raids, the violence used to stop violence. But that is only the outer layer. Beneath it lies something older and deeper.

The mission is to save lives.

To save lives in Israel when violence breaks through. To protect Jewish life abroad when antisemitism rises. To defend the perimeter and preserve the people. These are not separate missions. They are one.

For most of Jewish history, Jews endured violence dependent on the mercy or restraint of others. Now there is a Jewish state with power, intelligence capabilities, and institutions of rescue, carrying with it not only sovereignty but obligation. That obligation no longer ends at Israel’s borders. A Jew threatened in Paris, attacked in New York, harassed in London, or targeted in Melbourne enters the same moral universe.

The perimeter has widened.

Fauda may be about counterterrorism and Magen David Adom may be about emergency medicine. Together, they represent the fight against antisemitism which lies in the same ancient Jewish imperative: protect life, preserve the people, continue.

That may define the ever-present trauma among Jewry today: the need to constantly think about personal and communal safety, without the calm to simply sit at a cafe or send one’s kids to school and purely enjoy life’s moments.

When Jews Come Home from India and Are Called Colonizers

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There is something almost miraculous about Operation Wings of Dawn.

This week, Israel began bringing the first members of the Bnei Menashe community from northeast India to Israel, the latest chapter in one of the most improbable stories in Jewish history. These are Jews who have long understood themselves as descendants of the Tribe of Manasseh, one of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, exiled by the Assyrian Empire nearly 2,700 years ago. Across centuries, empires, languages, and continents, they preserved fragments of ritual, memory, and identity tied to ancient Israel. In modern times, after study, rabbinic engagement, and formal recognition, thousands have made aliyah. Hundreds more are now on their way. For the Jewish world, it is an extraordinary scene: a people scattered to the farthest reaches of the earth still finding their way home.

That is the Jewish story in miniature.

Exile was never meant to be permanent. The Jewish calendar, Jewish prayer, and Jewish memory are saturated with return. From The Hebrew Bible to the modern Zionist movement, the idea of ingathering has been the central thread of Jewish continuity. Operation Wings of Dawn is not an immigration program in the ordinary sense. It is the continuation of that ancient civilizational arc.

It is also a reminder that Jewish peoplehood never fit modern racial categories. Jews came back to Israel from Ethiopia, from Iraq, from Yemen, from Russia, from France, and now again from India. Different languages. Different appearances. Different histories of exile. One people.

That should be a remarkable human story.

And yet, in some corners of the media world, it became something else.

Quds News Network ran a story framing the arrival as a “settlement push” of “new colonizers” in northern “Occupied Palestine”, reducing the Bnei Menashe to instruments of a political project rather than recognizing them as Jews returning to join the Jewish people in the Jewish state. The framing is familiar: Jewish return is recoded as colonial expansion.

This is not an isolated habit of language. Across anti-Israel activist media and parts of the NGO ecosystem, Jewish presence in Israel is increasingly interpreted through a “settler-colonial” framework in “Occupied Palestine,” meaning anywhere in Israel. Amnesty International’s apartheid framework leans heavily on this vocabulary, turning Jewish sovereignty itself into a structural offense rather than a legitimate act of national self-determination. That language then migrates outward, shaping how journalists, activists, and political movements speak about Jews in Israel. The result is a moral inversion in which Jewish return becomes aggression by definition.

And this is where the word colonizer collapses under its own weight.

Colonialism has an actual meaning. It is when an imperial center sends its people outward to dominate foreign land for extraction and rule. Britain in India. Spain in the Americas. France in Algeria.

Operation Wings of Dawn is the reverse movement: A dispersed people carrying an ancient memory of Israel, choosing to gather into the one Jewish homeland.

Calling that colonialism empties the word of meaning.

And the asymmetry is impossible to ignore.

When Palestinian Arabs preserve the memory of villages lost 77 years ago, the world treats it as sacred inheritance, a claim passed from generation to generation. Even when those same Arabs live just a few miles away from their grandparents’ homes, in the same land, with the same people, language and culture, people advocate for their relocation.

Yet when Jews preserve the memory of exile in distant lands and act on it, the same world increasingly calls it colonization.

That difference tells you everything.

The issue has never been whether Jews are European or Middle Eastern, white or brown, indigenous or diasporic. The Bnei Menashe expose how flimsy those categories always were. Indian Jews arriving in Israel should shatter the lazy caricature of Zionism as European implantation.

Instead, the caricature simply repeats the mantra:

A Jew from Poland returns as a colonizer.
A Jew from Iraq returns as a colonizer.
A Jew from Ethiopia returns as a colonizer.
A Jew from India returns as a colonizer.

For those committed to denying Jewish belonging, even a homecoming from India must be rewritten as invasion.

Understanding Israel’s Latest Population and Demographic Numbers

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When Israel declared independence in 1948, it had roughly 717,000 Jews and roughly 156,000 Arab citizens and residents. Those numbers were small, but what they carried was enormous: the ambition to reverse two thousand years of Jewish dispersion and gather a scattered people back into sovereignty.

Yet the first demographic fact that emerges from Israel’s modern history cuts against so much of the political mythology surrounding it. Since 1948, Israel’s Arab minority expanded at a faster proportional rate than its Jewish majority. The Jewish population grew from 717,000 to nearly 8 million, roughly elevenfold. Israel’s Arab population grew from 156,000 to more than 2.1 million, more than thirteenfold.

That fact strips away one of the central distortions in the debate over Israel. The rise of the Jewish state did not require the disappearance of its Arab minority. Quite the opposite. Israel’s Arab population expanded dramatically under Israeli sovereignty. Two populations grew inside the same state, but through entirely different engines. The Jewish story was one of ingathering, especially during the early years.

Today, Israel stands at more than 10.2 million people, nearly 8 million Jews and more than 2.1 million Arabs. A state born in scarcity became a fully formed society. But the road from 1948 to 2026 can best be understood through four distinct demographic phases: ingathering, expansion, retention, and preservation.

The first phase was ingathering. At first, Israel was an immigration state, and its earliest years were powered by catastrophe. The survivors of Europe came first, the broken remnant of the Holocaust arriving in a country still fighting its first war. Then came the collapse of Jewish life across the Arab world. Ancient Jewish communities in Iraq, Yemen, Morocco, Egypt, and Libya emptied under expulsion, violence, and state pressure. More than 800,000 Jews left the Arab world, many rebuilding their lives in Israel.

Then came the Soviet opening. The collapse of the Soviet Union released nearly one million Jews into the largest migration wave since the founding of the state. Europe’s destruction, the Arab world’s expulsion, and the Soviet opening formed the three great waves of Jewish ingathering. Three different historical ruptures, one destination. That is how Jewish Israel was built.

Population Growth, 1948–2026

Jews
1948    ████ 0.72m
1970    █████████ 2.6m
1990    ███████████████ 4.8m
2000    ███████████████████ 5.2m
2026    ███████████████████████████ 7.97m
Arabs
1948    █ 0.16m
1970    ██ 0.47m
1990    ████ 0.95m
2000    █████ 1.2m
2026    █████████ 2.15m

While Jewish Israel was growing through migration, Israel’s Arab population was growing through birth. Higher fertility and falling mortality created uninterrupted expansion over decades. That is why the proportional growth of Israel’s Arab population exceeded the proportional growth of the Jewish population.

Then the second phase began: expansion. At first, Jewish growth depended on aliyah. Over time, it depended increasingly on birth. The immigrants became citizens, the citizens became parents, and the children of refugees became the country itself. The engine of Jewish demographic growth shifted from the airport to the maternity ward. That is the deepest demographic transition in Israel’s history.

In 2025, Israel recorded approximately 177,000 births. Immigration that year stood at roughly 24,600. Births now outnumber immigration by more than seven to one. What would have been unimaginable in 1948 has become ordinary in 2026. Israel began as a refuge. It now reproduces itself.

Annual drivers of growth, 2025
Births        ███████████████████████
Immigration   ███
Deaths        ██████

That changes the meaning of the state. Political Israel started as the answer to Jewish vulnerability, a place Jews could flee to when the world closed. That remains true. But demographically, it is no longer Israel’s primary function. Israel is no longer merely where Jews go when exile fails. It is where Jewish continuity principally lives.

And here, another old assumption collapsed. For decades, Israeli politics was shaped by demographic anxiety: would Arab fertility permanently outpace Jewish fertility? Would a demographic clock eventually run down the Jewish majority? That fear shaped strategy, borders, and diplomacy. For years, the numbers seemed to support it.

Then the numbers changed. Arab fertility declined as Arab society modernized. Jewish fertility remained unusually strong for an advanced economy. Today, Jewish fertility has reached parity with, and in some years slightly exceeded, Arab fertility. The demographic trajectory shifted. A generation of political strategy was shaped by a demographic clock that slowed while everyone kept hearing it tick.

Fertility Shift

1990
Arab     █████
Jewish   ███
2026
Arab     ███
Jewish   ████

But demographic success creates its own new challenge.

For most of Israeli history, migration remained positive. Even when aliyah slowed, more Jews came than left. That changed in the last two years. In 2022, Israel absorbed more than 74,000 immigrants, driven heavily by war in Ukraine and departures from Russia. That surge faded quickly. By 2024 and 2025, net migration turned negative – more Israelis left than new immigrants arrived.

This is not a demographic crisis. Births still overwhelm migration losses, and Israel continues to grow. But the Zionist test has changed. For decades, the question was how many Jews Israel could gather. Now the question is how many it can keep.

Net Migration Trend
2022     +++++++++++++++++++++++
2023     +++++++
2024     ----------
2025     --------

The founding generations came because they had to. Future generations stay because they choose to. That is a different kind of national test. And the retention question is not merely numerical. If those leaving are disproportionately engineers, doctors, founders, investors, and elite military talent, the demographic issue changes shape. A state can absorb numerical loss. It feels the loss of capability much faster.

Above all these numbers sits the larger civilizational shift. In 1948, around six percent of world Jewry lived in Israel. Today, around 45% does. Soon it may be the majority.

Share of World Jewry Living in Israel
1948    ██ 6%
1970    ████ 18%
1990    ███████ 30%
2010    ██████████ 42%
2026    ████████████ 45%

There is one more demographic question hanging over Israel in 2026, larger than fertility, migration, or retention. It sits beneath almost every diplomatic formula and every argument about the future of the conflict.

The question is the scale and meaning of the Stateless Arabs from Palestine (SAPs) having a “right of return.”

For decades, the Palestinian Authority and the United Nations have insisted on a “right of return” for Palestinian “refugees” and their descendants. The number most commonly cited is roughly 5.9 million. That number matters because it clarifies what the argument actually means in demographic terms.

Israel today has roughly 10.2 million people. Add 5.9 million Palestinian Arabs to that number and the demographic map changes overnight. Israel would become a country of more than 16 million people. Its Arab population would jump from 2.1 million to more than 8 million. Its Jewish population would remain just under 8 million. The Jewish majority would collapse into parity or slightly minority status.

That is not a marginal adjustment. It is a structural transformation of the state itself.

Put into historical perspective, the scale becomes even sharper. In 1948, Israel’s Arab population stood at roughly 156,000. By 2026, it had already grown to more than 2.1 million, more than thirteenfold growth, already exceeding Jewish proportional growth over the same period. Add 5.9 million more, and that Arab population would stand at more than 8 million, representing more than fiftyfold growth since the founding of the state.

A “right of return” on this scale is not simply an immigration proposal, already stripping Israel a basic right of sovereignty to determine who to admit into the country. It further demands that the Jewish State cease to be one.

That is why this issue forms the fourth demographic challenge: preservation. Preservation of the demographic framework that allowed Jewish self-determination to return after two thousand years of dispersion and discrimination.

For most of Jewish history, survival meant enduring dispersion. In Israel, survival became concentration, then continuity, and now choice. The next phase may determine whether it remains preservation.

Very few countries have grown by over 10 times since 1948, and none in the developed “Global North”, with Australia and Canada leading the group at 2.5x and 1.9x, respectively (no European country even doubled its population). In the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region which saw explosive growth due to the discovery of oil, no country has had the minority populations grow faster than the majority.

Israel is a true anomaly, a developed country with explosive growth, sitting in the MENA region which suppresses the growth of minority groups but the Jewish State still saw oversaw a faster growth of non-Jews. Despite the basic facts, the world still pressures the country to admit even more people adding to the population density, and with minorities who never lived in the country, in particular, undermining the demographic status quo.

As Israel considers its plans for the years ahead, retaining educated talent and ending the so-called SAP “right of return” rank as the leading causes to maintain a thriving democracy.

NYC, Now It’s at Your Front Door

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It looked like a technical vote. In New York City, a proposed buffer zone around houses of worship. A few feet of space so people could enter synagogues, churches, and mosques without confrontation.

And the Democratic Socialists of America bloc on the City Council voted no.

Shahana Hanif (District 39), Alexa Avilés (District 38), Tiffany Cabán (District 22), Chi Ossé (District 36), and Kayla Santosuosso (District 47) held the same line. Protect protest at all costs. Treat any restriction as a threat to speech. Keep the sidewalks open, no matter what is happening on them.

Shahana Hanif (District 39)

On paper, that sounds principled. In practice, it lands somewhere else entirely.

Because in this city, right now, protests are not showing up randomly. They are showing up outside synagogues in growing numbers. The line between Israel and the Jew has been erased, and the synagogue has become a stand-in.

This is where ideology stops being abstract.

For years, the DSA has defined itself through opposition to Israel. That posture has moved from foreign policy into local reality. When Zionism is framed as uniquely illegitimate, and most Jews see it as part of who they are, the translation is inevitable. The target shifts.

No manifesto is needed. The pattern speaks for itself.

Vote against a resolution recognizing hatred against Jews. Argue about the sponsors instead of the substance. Reject a minimal buffer around houses of worship at a moment when Jewish institutions in New York are under visible pressure.

That movement is no longer adjacent to power in New York City; it has the power. With Zohran Mamdani as the city’s new mayor, the worldview is moving from activist circles into the city’s governing core.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is a member of the DSA

And the expansion is already underway.

On Tuesday April 28’s special primary day, Mamdani has backed Lindsey Boylan, a member of the DSA to take another seat on the City Council. Jewish City Council Speaker Julie Menin has endorsed Carl Wilson in an effort to stop the radical left gaining even more power in New York.

In the June primaries, NYC-DSA is backing a coordinated slate:

  • Darializa Avila Chevalier (Upper Manhattan/Bronx)
  • Claire Valdez (Brooklyn/Queens)
  • David Orkin (Queens)
  • Diana Moreno

—alongside a broader Assembly slate backed by the same network.

Endorsements from figures like Jamaal Bowman and Mamdani for radical anti-capitalists, anti-west, anti-Israel DSA members like Aber Kawas reinforce the same ideological through-line—where opposition to Israel is no longer one issue among many, but a defining filter.

Aber Kawas has long supported the dismantling of the Jewish State, now running as part of the DSA to gain a seat in the New York State Senate. She is backed by Zohran Mamdani and Jamaal Bowman

This is how local elections stop being local.

When protests move from slogans to synagogue doors in Brooklyn, Queens, and Manhattan, who holds the line?

Will NYPD treat intimidation outside Jewish institutions as a line to be enforced—or a situation to be managed?

Power shapes behavior. When activists see their worldview reflected in City Hall and Albany, boundaries loosen. What once felt marginal begins to feel sanctioned. The distance between protest and confrontation narrows.

The question is no longer what DSA believes about Israel where they believe every man, woman and child is a fair target for violence. The question for New York voters is what they are comfortable normalizing here.

On sidewalks outside synagogues. At the doors of people trying to pray. In the space between protest and intimidation.

The City Council vote on buffer zones answered part of that question.

The rest will be answered this coming Tuesday and in June—at the ballot box, and on the sidewalks outside your door.

ACTION ITEM

Support Carl Wilson in the primary on April 28.

Support opponents to the DSA candidates in the June elections.

Related:

Protecting Synagogues Like Abortion Clinics

The Thomas Friedman Theory of Everything

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A video shows officers from the New York City Police Department attack an unarmed man. That kind of footage demands scrutiny—what happened, what justified it, and what didn’t.

The video is clear; the surrounding facts with each side’s narrative needs to be heard, filtered and assessed.

But such steps are not needed if someone is so sure of his sense of right-and-wrong, and smarter than everyone else. Able to discern motivation, backdrop and situation even sitting comfortably and smugly many miles away.

Especially if named Thomas Friedman.

You see, Thomas Friedman is so so so much smarter than all of you. He knows that everything bad in the world stems from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Maybe occasionally Donald Trump, but his beat is the Middle East so he prefers to haul Netanyahu’s name before his reader base more frequently.

You see, “Israel Lost its Way,” according to the Great Sage Friedman, because Netanyahu has infiltrated Israeli society so deeply. Bibi’s love of Jews and hatred of non-Jews in Friedman’s worldview, has permeated everything in Israel today. So much so, that a soldier fighting in Lebanon who never met Netanyahu in his life, knows that the right thing to do is assert Jewish superiority, even outside of Israeli borders.

Thomas Friedman points to Israeli soldier destroying a statue as attributable to Netanyahu’s “geopolitical strategy.”

Somehow, a rogue soldier – one of thousands exhausted by a multiyear, multifront war – who destroys a religious icon is a perfect encapsulation of Netanyahu’s “geopolitical strategy.” It’s such an absurd comment, that only someone so full of himself would have the chutzpah to place it in the opening paragraph of an opinion piece in The New York Times.

Would Friedman argue that the two NYPD officers were acting under the political strategy of NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani? Of course not. Friedman would write that the officers were rogue and acted against Mamdani’s wishes. But Friedman is convinced that Israelis under Netanyahu have all become lunatics. They are not fighting defensive wars that they never wanted; they are engaged in ethnic cleansing in a raw campaign of Jewish superiority.

Friedman mentioned another picture from the anti-Netanyahu Israeli paper Haaretz, the Israeli version of the NY Times. He referred to “right-wing Israeli ministers” celebrating a new community being built that allows Jews – counter to the stated goal of the Palestinian Authority and the United Nations – to live in the area east of the 1949 Armistice Lines.

To add a little punch to the piece, Friedman added that this was “just another day of the Netanyahu government playing President Trump for a fool” to rile up Americans against Israel.

Friedman has been telling readers this for years: Netanyahu is an evil puppet-master. If that sounds like an antisemitic trope, he won’t apologize. He will double-down.

Cartoon in the international edition of The New York Times shows Netanyahu leading a blind Donald Trump around

Because this is the theory that explains everything. Jews are now the jihadists.

Now, every action is merely an expression of someone else’s “climate.” Responsibility floats upward until it becomes untethered from behavior itself. The soldier, the new “settlers”, the police officers no longer matter. Only the chosen author of the “atmosphere” matters.

The New York Times has inverted victim and villain in the Middle East, and Thomas Friedman is all too eager to say “I told you so,” with whatever irrelevant recent media he can find.