Tag Archives: Israel

When the Children Climbed Onto the Float

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Two years ago at New York City’s Celebrate Israel Parade, Holocaust survivors climbed down from their float and danced with the children marching beside them. This year the children climbed up onto the float and sat beside the survivors.

The change captured something unmistakable: distance in years sometimes requires an inverse relationship in physical space.

As the float moved down Fifth Avenue, Holocaust survivors waved Israeli flags toward the crowd. Around them stood students, children, grandchildren, and thousands of New Yorkers carrying American and Israeli flags. Some of those cheering were the children and grandchildren of Survivors who are no longer here.

Children of Holocaust Survivors march alongside float carrying Survivors (photo: First One Through)

They felt what we saw: how much smaller the group of survivors had become.

An elderly woman sat quietly beneath a blue hat, an Israeli flag resting beside her. Nearby, several other survivors smiled and waved to the crowd. Looking across the float, one could not help noticing who was missing.

Holocaust Survivor at Celebrate Israel Parade 2026 (photo: First One Through)

The men are disappearing.

Every year there are fewer survivors able to spend a day riding through Manhattan. Husbands, brothers, and friends who once shared these memories are no longer there. Increasingly, the survivors are women carrying stories that were once held by entire families and communities.

The Holocaust is passing from lived experience into history.

Holocaust Survivors at Celebrate Israel Parade 2026 (photo: First One Through)

The banner on the float read simply: “Holocaust Survivors Support Israel.”

For many aboard, Israel is not a political issue. They remember something most Jews today know only from books: a world in which there was no Jewish state. A world in which the doors of country after country remained closed while European Jewry was destroyed.

That reality gave the float a weight extending far beyond the parade itself.

Claims Conference float at Celebrate Israel Parade 2026 (photo: First One Through)

Yet the most moving scenes took place between the survivors and the young people gathered around them.

Some students and families from the Heschel School spent part of the afternoon alongside the survivors. Conversations unfolded between people separated by seventy or eighty years, yet connected by a common story. One survivor leaned over the railing to hand a parent a reference to a book he had written. Others stopped to speak with children standing beside the float.

The survivors can no longer carry these memories alone.

Holocaust Survivor at Celebrate Israel Parade 2026 talking to people from the Heschel School (photo: First One Through)

Others must carry them forward.

Perhaps that is why they continue to come.

Waving for hours on a hot day is not easy at ninety years old. Yet year after year they return because memory survives only when it enters public life and passes from one generation to the next.

Around them, the parade moved forward. Families lined the route waving American and Israeli flags. Children danced in the streets. Chabad volunteers helped Jewish men put on tefillin along the sidewalks. The crowd cheered as marchers passed.


Young men put tefillin on Jewish men
at Celebrate Israel Parade 2026 (photo: First One Through)

The city itself felt different than it had a few years ago.

The parade was peaceful, but the precautions were impossible to miss. Police officers lined the route. Barricades stood farther from the crowd than in years past – perhaps twelve feet this year up from eight in years past.


NY Police watching over the Celebrate Israel Parade 2026 (photo: First One Through)
Enormous twelve foot-plus separation along the Celebrate Israel Parade route on Fifth Avenue (photo: First One Through)

There was another difference as well.

Two years ago New York City’s mayor proudly marched in the parade. This year the mayor made a big show of not showing up because of his anti-Israel opinions. Support for Israel, once treated as an easy civic consensus, now feels more contested amid the ongoing Iranian proxy war on Israel.

The survivors understood such realities better than anyone. They have seen societies become less welcoming before.

Yet as the float rolled down Fifth Avenue, those tensions faded into the background. What remained was something older and more enduring.

Young people sat beside Holocaust survivors. They waved Israeli flags.

The scene compressed centuries of Jewish history. Survivors who remembered Europe before the Holocaust sat beside children growing up in America after the creation of Israel. The last witnesses shared space with those who will soon become witnesses for them.

Soon there will be no Holocaust survivors left to ride down Fifth Avenue.

The children waving beside them will inherit stories they never experienced themselves. They will become the custodians of memories that once belonged to the people sitting beside them.

Holocaust Survivor at Celebrate Israel Parade 2026 (photo: First One Through)

Two years ago the survivors climbed down from the float and danced with the children. This year the children climbed onto the float and sat beside the survivors.

The time distance between those moments is only two years. The physical distance between those generations has shrunk by necessity.


Holocaust Survivor at Celebrate Israel Parade 2026 (photo: First One Through)

The United Nations and International Law are Antisemitic

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The Temple Mount is the holiest site in Judaism.

For nearly two thousand years, Jews have ended prayers with the hope of returning to Jerusalem and rebuilding what once stood there. It is the location of the First and Second Temples. Jewish longing for Jerusalem is woven into daily prayers, holidays, weddings, and mourning rituals.

Yet major international bodies have passed resolutions referring to the site primarily through its Muslim names while minimizing or omitting its central place in Jewish history. Imagine a resolution discussing the Vatican without mentioning Christianity, or Mecca without mentioning Islam. The absurdity would be obvious.

The issue extends beyond language.

Official United Nations map labeling the Temple Mount as holy only to Muslims

The international community supports a protocol under which Muslims may pray freely on the Temple Mount while Jews are restricted from praying at Judaism’s holiest site. The result is extraordinary: the world’s only Jewish state is expected to enforce a policy under which Jews do not support a basic human right at their holiest location in favor of members of another faith.

The Temple Mount is not merely a religious site. It sits at the heart of a larger question: whether the Jewish people are entitled to the same rights afforded to every other people.

Around the world, international institutions celebrate indigenous peoples reconnecting with ancestral lands, reviving ancient languages, protecting sacred sites, and preserving cultural traditions. Yet only in the case of the Jewish people does a return to the place where their civilization, language, religion, and national identity were born become a form of “colonialism.“

International institutions routinely describe the Temple Mount and the Jewish Quarter as part of “occupied Palestinian territory.” Yet these are the very places where Jewish civilization was born, where the ancient Temples stood, and where Jewish communities lived for centuries.

Jordan’s capture of eastern Jerusalem in 1948 resulted in the expulsion of its Jewish population and the denial of Jewish access to the Western Wall, the Temple Mount, and the Jewish Quarter for nineteen years. It granted citizenship to residents as long as they weren’t Jewish. The UN seemingly liked this. International discussion of the Old City of Jerusalem begins after the expulsion of Jews, as though their absence were the natural condition and their return the disruption.

The same pattern appears in discussions of territory.

The Green Line was never intended to be a permanent border. The 1949 Armistice Agreements explicitly stated that the line was not a political boundary and would not prejudice future negotiations. It was a military ceasefire line drawn after a war.

Yet decades later, much of international law treats that armistice line as though it were a sacred border whose crossing transforms ordinary Jews into international criminals.

A Jew who moves across that line becomes a “settler.” An Arab who moves into the same building does not. The geography is identical. The identity of the resident is what changes.

International institutions frequently oppose changes to the “demographic character” of eastern Jerusalem. But demographic character relative to what date?

The answer is effectively 1949, the year after Jordan captured eastern Jerusalem and expelled every Jew from the Jewish Quarter and surrounding areas. Why should the demographic baseline for justice be the moment immediately following the ethnic cleansing of Jews?

Why not 1980? Why not 2000? Why not today?

Human beings move. Cities evolve. Neighborhoods change.

The only way to preserve a specific demographic snapshot forever is to decide that one particular population must be prevented from returning.

In Jerusalem, that population happens to be Jews.

Then there is the question of refugees.

The same international system that opposes Jews moving into neighborhoods beyond the Green Line frequently endorses claims that millions of Palestinian refugees and descendants should be allowed to settle inside Israel.

Movement in one direction is described as a right. Movement in the other direction is described as a violation of international law.

The asymmetry is impossible to miss.

Every era develops its own vocabulary for antisemitism. In medieval Europe it often spoke the language of theology. In the nineteenth century it spoke the language of race. Today it increasingly speaks the language of international law.

Around the world, international institutions celebrate indigenous peoples reclaiming ancestral lands, reviving ancient languages, protecting sacred sites, and restoring cultural traditions.

Jews have done all of those things.

They returned to the land where their civilization was born. They revived Hebrew from a language of prayer into a language of everyday life. They restored Jewish sovereignty to the city that has stood at the center of Jewish life for three millennia. They reestablished communities at many of their most ancient holy sites.

Yet only in the case of the Jewish people does this story become one of colonialism rather than return.

Gazans Own This War

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In October 2025, after two years of war and the devastation of Gaza, the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research published findings that should have dominated headlines around the world:

  • Hamas remained the most popular Palestinian political movement.
  • More than half of Palestinians continued to view October 7 as the correct decision.
  • Nearly seven in ten opposed Hamas disarmament even if disarmament would prevent another war.

After two years of destruction, support for Hamas remained strong. Support for October 7 remained widespread. Opposition to disarmament remained overwhelming.

These findings did not come from Israeli politicians or government spokesmen. They came from Palestinians speaking to Palestinian pollsters.

Yet still, the New York Times publishes lengthy articles that the Gaza war continues because of Israel.

Readers were taken inside Benjamin Netanyahu’s political calculations. They learned about coalition pressures, right-wing ministers, territorial ambitions, and supporters who view the war as unfinished business.

By the end, a clear narrative emerged: the war continues because Israelis want it to continue. Because of greed for land, for power.

There was no mention that Gazans want Hamas to remain armed and for the war to continue. That is the political reality that keeps a ceasefire from taking hold.

The omission matters because it changes the reader’s understanding of the conflict. It places blame solely on Israel when a majority of Palestinians continue to seek the destruction of Israel despite the devastation in Gaza.

Until journalists devote the same attention to Palestinian motivations that they devote to Israeli motivations, Americans will continue receiving a false explanation for why this war endures.

UK and Canada Sanction Foreign Speech and Ideology. Sometimes

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Europe spent twenty years explaining that Hamas had a “political wing.” Hezbollah too. The bomb throwers were one thing, the parliamentarians another. The rocket launchers belonged in one legal bucket, the social service offices reserved for a different one. Western diplomats performed intellectual yoga worthy of Cirque du Soleil to preserve the distinction. The “military wing” was terrorist while the “political wing” was complicated. Nuanced. An unavoidable interlocutor for peace.

Britain finally gave up the act in 2019 with Hezbollah. The distinction, it concluded, was largely fictional. Same leadership, same financing, same ideology, same organization. Europe still technically preserves some of these distinctions in various legal frameworks, but fewer people pretend anymore that the “armed wing” and “political branch” emerge from separate planets.

Which makes the growing sanctions campaign against Jewish housing rights groups so fascinating.

Because now the question flips. Suddenly Europe is no longer carefully distinguishing between ideology and violence. Advocacy for controversial positions – not for violence – can suddenly become complicity in terrorism. Entire categories of speech are treated as unlawful conduct even absent anything remotely resembling the classic terrorism that justified Hamas and Hezbollah designations in the first place.

Take Nachala. It is not Hamas. It does not have brigades. It does not launch rockets. It does not run suicide bombing cells. It is an ideological movement advocating Jewish settlement in disputed territory. One may agree with it or despise it. One may view Jews living in land the Stateless Arabs from Palestine (SAPs) want as a future Palestinian state as historic justice or catastrophic policy. But that is precisely the point. The dispute is fundamentally political and ideological.

For decades Europe insisted ideology alone was not terrorism. Supporting Palestinian “resistance” rhetorically was not enough. Calling for the destruction of Israel was grotesque but still politics. The line was violence. Actual violence. Material support for violence. Operational involvement in violence.

That was the principle.

Until suddenly the principle became inconvenient.

Now the standard appears to be evolving into something far murkier: movements may be sanctioned not necessarily for carrying out terrorism, but for contributing to environments viewed as extremist or against government foreign policy. Perhaps that standard is morally justified. Perhaps some Israeli activists have crossed legal and moral lines. But if this is the new doctrine, then the West should at least admit the doctrine changed.

Nachala’s Daniella Weiss

If ideology itself is now sanctionable, Western governments cannot apply the principle selectively.

For years crowds across London, Paris, Barcelona and university campuses have openly chanted for the elimination of the Jewish state “from the river to the sea.” Activists routinely declare that Israeli Jews should “go back to Poland,” despite the fact that millions of Israeli Jews descend from families expelled from Arab countries, Ethiopia, Iran and elsewhere. Imagine any other minority in Europe being told to leave the country and “go back” to lands where many never lived, or to where their families were annihilated. Authorities would instantly recognize the ethnic character of the demand.

If Israelis arguing that Jews should again live in Gaza constitutes sanctionable extremism, then what exactly should Britain call organizations openly advocating a “right of return” designed to flood Israel demographically out of existence? If the standard is advocacy for the removal or replacement of another national group, then the principle cannot stop with some Jewish activists in the West Bank.

London protest against Israel in 2021, including rap song

If the line is now ideological support for demographic elimination, then governments must police the radicalism inside their own societies with equal vigor.

That means groups explicitly advocating the destruction of Israel should face the same scrutiny directed at Jewish expansionist movements. Organizations and individuals promoting the forced removal of Jews from the Middle East “from the river to the sea” should not receive a special exemption dressed up as mere “anti-Zionism,” as if Israel is a concept and not a reality. Calls for the end of the Jewish State are not sophisticated geopolitical critiques. They are ethnic slogans calling for violence. And if governments now believe rhetoric itself creates dangerous ecosystems, they cannot pretend those ecosystems exist only on one side of the conflict.

Anti-Israel protesters in Rome, Oct. 28, 2023, shortly after the October 7 massacre and abduction of Israelis by thousands of Gazans. (AP Photo/Andrew Medichini)

The irony is extraordinary. Europe once bent over backwards to separate terrorism from politics when the movements in question were Palestinian or Islamist. Now governments increasingly collapse politics into extremism to be sanctioned only when the movements are Jewish nationalist.

Europe spent decades insisting that ideas were not terrorism. If it now believes otherwise, it should say so openly and explain where the line will be drawn for everyone else.

The Great Return to Sender

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For years, the world was told the “Great March of Return” was peaceful theater. Demonstration. Symbolism. Political performance staged at Israel’s border fence. The real outrage, activists insisted, was not thousands of Gazans converging on a sovereign frontier controlled by a terrorist regime openly committed to Israel’s destruction. The outrage was that Israel refused to let them through.

Every breach attempt became a morality play. The fence itself was cast as villainous. Hamas was downgraded from genocidal jihadist organization to stage manager for a humanitarian spectacle. Foreign correspondents photographed smoke, flags, and crowds surging toward the barrier while carefully avoiding the central question: what exactly did “return” mean in practice?

A picture taken on March 30, 2018 from the southern Israeli kibbutz of Nahal Oz across the border from the Gaza strip shows tear gas grenades falling during a Palestinian tent city protest commemorating Land Day, with Israeli soldiers seen below in the foreground.
(Photo credit JACK GUEZ/AFP/Getty Images)

October 7 answered it.

The world spent years romanticizing the idea of border penetration into Israel. Then Hamas finally achieved it. The infiltrators entered and what followed was not symbolic “resistance,” not coexistence, not liberation theology with subtitles for Western consumption. It was slaughter. Torture. Kidnapping. Burning families alive. Mass rape. Entire communities transformed into killing fields within hours.

The “Great March of Return” was not a protest but a rehearsal for an invasion.

The flotilla theatrics now replay the same script at sea.

Once again, activists sail toward a Hamas-controlled enclave insisting their mission is humanitarian symbolism. Once again, cameras arrive before facts. Once again, Israel is expected to participate in a choreographed morality play where interception itself becomes the crime. The activists want confrontation because confrontation produces images, and images produce headlines, and headlines produce another cycle in which Israel defending its borders is treated as inherently suspicious.

But after October 7, Israel no longer has the luxury of indulging symbolic breaches.

A blockade around a terrorist enclave is not abstract political philosophy. It is a security perimeter. Every intercepted vessel is being measured against the memory of what happened when infiltrators were not stopped. The Israeli Navy does not have the privilege enjoyed by European activists thousands of miles away who can romanticize “breaking barriers” while knowing they will never personally absorb the consequences if those barriers collapse.

That is why the flotilla activists are ultimately engaged in theater. They know they will be intercepted. Israel knows it must intercept them. The performance depends on the interception itself. Their goal is not to deliver aid more efficiently than established channels. Their goal is to create imagery in which Israeli enforcement appears oppressive by definition.

Sumud flotilla

The irony is impossible to miss. For years, activists treated Israel’s insistence on secure borders as paranoia. Then October 7 became the bloodiest validation imaginable of exactly why those borders existed.

And so the boats are seized and returned to port. The activists call it repression. Israel calls it survival.

Perhaps the flotillas deserve a more honest name: the Great Return to Sender.

Doctors Without Borders Is Coming For Israel

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Every modern humanitarian organization insists the same thing: suffering is not a business. The starving child is not a marketing asset. The bombed hospital is not a fundraising funnel. The crying mother under rubble is not a revenue generator.

Then the annual reports arrive.

Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) / Doctors Without Borders crossed roughly €2.3 billion in annual revenue in 2022. Then roughly €2.35 billion in 2023 and €2.36 billion in 2024. Three consecutive years above €2 billion. Ninety-eight percent of funding came from private donors. More than seven million donors worldwide.

The organization presents this as proof of global compassion. It is also evidence of something else: misery has become one of the most effective fundraising products on earth. Especially if loaded with charges: “Genocide.” “Starvation.” “Ethnic cleansing.”

The humanitarian industry now operates inside the same emotional attention economy that drives political campaigns, cable news, and social media outrage. The more horrifying the imagery, the more morally charged the narrative, the more emotionally shattered the audience becomes, the faster the money moves.

And nobody understands this dynamic better than MSF.

MSF’s public communications increasingly fused emotionally maximalist language with direct fundraising infrastructure. A visitor no longer encountered merely medical updates. They encountered emotional conversion architecture.

The modern humanitarian sector has discovered what every digital platform already knows: emotionally devastating content converts. A dusty child under rubble produces more engagement than a policy paper. A charge of genocide and starvation moves directly into emotional reflex.

The uglier the images and explosive the charges, the healthier the fundraising pipeline becomes.

Doctors Without Borders is very selective in its explosive terminology regarding Israel. For MSF, Israel is the cause of all the ills in Gaza, not Hamas. Israel is directly called out, not the genocidal terrorist group that launched the war and hides in tunnels without letting civilians use them for protection. No excuse proffered by Israel will satisfy.

Doctors Without Borders doesn’t do this in other conflicts. Not in Sudan nor Somalia. Not in Syria nor Haiti. In those wars, either no one is called out or “all sides” are vilified.

And MSF takes its anti-Israel campaign on the road. Wherever Israel is dragged into a defensive war against those determined to annihilate it, like Lebanon and Iran, MSF is standing guard and pointing fingers.

MSF does not limit itself to smear campaigns against Israel. It is a full lobbying shop, taking out full page ads in newspapers to rally the public against Israel. It pushes governments to stop supporting Israel in its defensive war.

So it is no surprise that MSF has officially backed the entire Iranian proxy war against Israel, telling the world that it rushes to protect “Gaza, Lebanon and Iran” from Israel.

Doctors Without Borders: 1) runs to assist jihadists in their active war against Israel; 2) raises money claiming the belligerent parties are the victims; 3) lobbies to have governments stop supporting Israel and 4) calls for the masses to protest the Jewish State. It does all of this, uniquely in Israel’s war.

Doctors Without Borders is not a humanitarian organization but an active instrument in the war to destroy Israel.

The Genocide Script Was Written by Iran in 2001

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In February 2001, long before Hamas ruled Gaza, long before Israel withdrew from Gaza, long before the security barrier, and long before the phrase “genocide in Gaza” became a campus chant, a United Nations “anti-racism” conference in Tehran was already accusing Israel of being a racist apartheid state guilty of crimes against humanity and “a form of genocide.”

The language was not improvised after October 7. It was drafted decades earlier.

Buried in the archives of the UN World Conference Against Racism sits a document that now reads like the prototype for today’s anti-Israel activism. Hosted by the Islamic Republic of Iran as the Asian preparatory meeting for the infamous Durban Conference, the 2001 declaration accused Israel of “racial discrimination,” “settler ideology,” “apartheid,” and genocide years before the events now routinely cited to justify those accusations.

The Tehran declaration described Israeli policy as “a new kind of apartheid,” “a crime against humanity,” and “a form of genocide.”  It condemned “foreign occupation founded on settlements” and portrayed Israel as a uniquely racist state. It attacked Israel’s Law of Return as “racially based” while endorsing a Palestinian “right of return,” and framed the conflict almost exclusively through the language of colonialism and racial supremacy. 

This was February 2001. Hamas would not seize Gaza for another six years. Israel had not yet disengaged from Gaza. The major Gaza wars had not occurred. There was no October 7 massacre. There were no TikTok videos, no encampments, no “Globalize the Intifada” marches winding through Western capitals.

Yet the ideological framework already existed in complete form.

The core vocabulary was already there:

  • apartheid
  • settler colonialism
  • genocide
  • racial supremacy
  • alien domination
  • decolonization

The slogans were set. The distribution system under the framework of “anti-racism” needed time to become global.

Iran understood this battlefield earlier than much of the West did.

The Islamic Republic did not wage war against Israel on only one front. It developed a multi-front strategy: terror proxies, missile programs, regional encirclement, propaganda networks, diplomatic campaigns, university activism, NGO penetration and information warfare. The battlefield extended from southern Lebanon to UN conference halls.

Iran understood something many Western governments failed to grasp: narratives can outlive battlefields. Terror attacks shock people temporarily. Moral frameworks reshape generations.

The achievement of the campaign was not inventing new hatred. It was laundering their own very old anti-Jew hatred through the moral vocabulary of human rights.

The regime in Tehran openly sought the destruction of the Jewish state while simultaneously helping construct an international framework portraying the Jewish state itself as the great racist evil of the modern world. The inversion was deliberate. A regime animated by antisemitism and eliminationist rhetoric repositioned itself as an anti-racist moral authority while recasting Israel as a global pariah.

Reality itself had to be inverted for the framework to function:

  • The Jewish people had to be stripped of indigenous identity despite Judaism being born in the Land of Israel and the core of the Hebrew Bible.
  • Jerusalem had to be detached from Jewish history despite being the holiest city in Judaism for three thousand years, and the direction of daily Jewish prayer.
  • Hebrew had to become the language of “colonizers” despite originating in the same soil activists insist Jews have no connection to.

And Israel had to be recast as uniquely illegitimate despite being the most liberal, democratic and pluralistic society for a thousand miles in any direction.

The objective was to transform the Jewish state from a country that could be criticized into a moral obscenity that could not legitimately exist.

The Tehran document placed Israel into the moral category occupied by apartheid South Africa, colonial domination and crimes against humanity.  Once a country is assigned that status, compromise becomes collaboration and coexistence becomes moral surrender.

Iran supplied the ideological fuel. Large parts of the Western activist ecosystem supplied the distribution network. The result was one of the most successful political rebranding campaigns of the modern era.

NGOs, academics, journalists, activist groups and eventually corporate and educational institutions absorbed the vocabulary and repackaged it as the language of progressive morality. Traditional antisemitism had become morally discredited after the Holocaust, so hostility toward the Jewish state was translated into the vocabulary of anti-racism, anti-colonialism and social justice.

The old image of the malevolent Jew became the malevolent Zionist.

Ancient hatreds were repackaged as the language of anti-racism and liberation.

The old demand that Jews disappear became “decolonization.”

And because the rhetoric arrived wrapped in the language of human rights, millions of educated Westerners could participate while imagining themselves enlightened rather than radicalized.

The asymmetry inside the Tehran declaration is particularly revealing. The document devoted extraordinary attention to portraying Israel as the embodiment of racism while saying nothing about antisemitism in the Arab world, terrorism against Israeli civilians, the expulsion of Jews from Arab countries, or the openly eliminationist ideologies as the bedrock of Hamas and Hezbollah.

The imbalance was not accidental.

The conference was not constructing a universal anti-racism framework. It was constructing a hierarchy of permissible outrage in which Jewish sovereignty itself could increasingly be reframed as a moral offense.

The Durban process that followed later became notorious for antisemitic incidents, anti-Israel propaganda and efforts to revive the old “Zionism is racism” framework using newer terminology. Western democracies eventually began boycotting later Durban conferences because they viewed them as platforms for anti-Israel demonization masquerading as anti-racism initiatives.

But by then the political grammar had already escaped containment.

Over time, phrases first drafted in Iran migrated into university syllabi, NGO reports, newsroom style guides, faculty petitions, diversity trainings and street protests. Students who have never heard of the Tehran conference now repeat its vocabulary almost word for word, unaware they are echoing a political script written decades earlier by regimes that openly sought Israel’s destruction.

Long before October 7, the architecture had been built, the slogans drafted, and the moral categories assigned. More powerful than even the 1975 UN resolution equating Zionism with racism, the new format for the 21st century is anti-Zionism is anti-racism.

For twenty years the distribution system slowly penetrated the world, and reframed Jew-hatred as morally acceptable under willing and unwilling eyes.

October 7 did not write the script. It activated one that had been waiting since 2001.

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.