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This is a guest essay by Andrew Fox, a former British Army paratrooper and lecturer in war studies and behavioural science at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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The last few days have been a maelstrom of contrast and dichotomy, terror and grief and horror, all colliding in the space of a few days.

Last week, I was enjoying a cold beer on the beach in Tel Aviv, surrounded by vibrant and joyous Jewish life. The following weekend brought a chilled shot of grief, as Britain took a moment to remember our war dead on Remembrance Sunday. Then, early on Monday, I flew to Krakow for a visit to Auschwitz, in the aftermath of a murderous terror attack in that city.

My first event was a talk with my great friend, Jonny Gould, at the European Jewish Association symposium. We spoke of his family who died in the Holocaust, and of my grandfather, who was part of the U.S. military that helped liberate Europe in the Second World War.

My American-born Welsh father tells how his father could speak only in a limited way about the aftermath of Dachau, liberated by the 7th U.S. Army in 1945, and how U.S. servicemen were warned not to feed the newly liberated prisoners. Their bodies were so malnourished that American GI-issue chocolate could kill them.

At our live event in Jerusalem, Israeli journalist Haviv Rettig Gur asked me where I came from, and why I care so much about antisemitism. There is your answer: Ending the Holocaust is in my DNA. As I left the stage in Krakow, someone wished that my grandfather’s memory would be a blessing. It is.

And so to Auschwitz and Birkenau. I have visited Dachau and Theresienstadt, but only, one supposes, as an atrocity tourist. In my previous experience, these camps were experienced as one step removed: I was a dispassionate observer and a keen historian, able to observe the echoes of the horror from a distance. My only personal connection was being two generations removed from a liberator.

The scale of these places is so vast, the deaths so many, that one may elide the individuality of atrocity and simply view them as broad historical monuments from 10,000 feet, where the numbers are so vast as to be meaningless.

This time, things were different — for two reasons. Firstly, I had just returned from Israel: the living, joyous antithesis of the Holocaust. The place where, even in the aftermath of a second Holocaust attempt on October 7th, Jews can now punch back.

Secondly, this time I was visiting the camps not only with Jews, but with Jews who are my friends, and Jews who are generational victims of the Holocaust. One family had been almost completely exterminated on the very ground upon which we walked. Jonny’s great-grandparents are in the directory of the dead. Whole branches of their family trees had been broken off, cast upon the ground and scorched into ashes.

As you drive to Auschwitz, the striking thing is how close it is to the town centre of modern Oświęcim. There is a McDonald’s less than a mile from the gates. It feels inherently crass that life in 2026 continues in the shadow of humanity’s greatest monstrosity. For those unaware, over a million Jews were exterminated in Auschwitz-Birkenau. The proximity of normal life to the skeletons of these camps, where the ashes of a million Jews salt the earth, is utterly jarring.

Auschwitz itself looks like what it was originally: an army barracks, an awkward familiarity to the camps I lived in for 16 years of my life. There is a jolting disconnect between the busy groups of tourists being shown around and the scale of what those day-trippers are seeing. A Shoah Disneyland. I do not mean that especially pejoratively; it simply feels as if they should instead only let people in one at a time.

These exhibits should not be drifted past in a crowd. The tsunami of atrocity makes one feel like a man standing alone in the scorching heat of a nuclear blast of inhumanity. There are crowds, but if you take a moment to appreciate the scale of what you are observing, you will never feel so small and alone. Let the scale overwhelm you, and your knees will buckle.

The obvious and famous exhibits are obvious and famous for a reason — two tonnes of human hair, representing some 35,000 scalped corpses, a drop in the million-deep ocean of death. The Nazis took the hair of murdered Jews for textiles and their gold teeth for bullion.

There were piles of Zimmer frames, fake legs, and supportive corsets belonging to the infirm, who were ushered, deemed useless, immediately to the gas chambers to be swiftly disposed of; then the piles of suitcases, with names inscribed on the lids in the hope that their owners would one day find a use for the contents. Instead, they were heaped together as a damning testimony to the inhumanity of antisemitism, hatred, and dehumanisation.

And the piles of shoes — some utilitarian, some fancy. The shoes of women who clearly took pride in their appearance; a whole separate exhibit for the shoes of thousands of children, some so small that their owners were young enough for their parents to have had to drop to a knee to buckle them on, so they could toddle onto cattle trucks.

It is a juxtaposition of the loving care of parents for children with the inhumanity that saw them all as disposable Untermenschen (“subhumans”) to be eradicated; men and women who loved their children as much as we love ours. The Nazis dehumanised their victims. Today, they are rehumanised by the buckles on a discarded child’s shoe.

Behind every one of those shoes, suitcases, and locks of hair was a human being whose final journey followed the same monstrous process — men, women and children, transported to the camps on cattle trucks from all over Europe in their millions, guided off the trucks under the cover of SS machine guns, separated into columns of men and women; the able set to work to death, while their wives, children and elderly relatives were guided straight to gas chambers, murdered, then incinerated. No graves; ashes spread around the surrounding fields. Mechanised, industrialised slaughter.

It was in one of those gas chambers that the personal and historical dimensions of this visit collided most painfully. My friends stopped to pray Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead. I turned away. They would have been happy for me to join them, but the moment was too overwhelming, too intimate.

Happy, successful Jews of 2026 praying for their dead in the place where the Nazis tried to exterminate their people and succeeded in killing their recent ancestors. Both my friends had antecedents who were ushered to their extermination within a mile of the spot where they prayed for the unimaginable totality of the dead.

Standing there, I found myself struggling with what Auschwitz-Birkenau actually represents. Victory, defeat, or something of both? Is defeat even the right word at all? The Holocaust was not a fight. The helpless were persecuted by the strong.

I would suggest, however, that the fight was decency versus dehumanisation, and in that respect, the Holocaust was a defeat for decency. And yes, the victory lies with the Allies who won the Second World War. The ideology that caused the Holocaust was defeated, for a time. Is not the real victory, though, the fact that Jews can now walk the scene of their greatest tragedy, their Holocaust, and tell jokes and laugh amongst the skeletons of those buildings where their grandparents died, screaming?

But did the ideology that caused the Holocaust truly disappear, or did it simply dive undercover and bide its time?

Today, on the streets of Britain, America, and Europe, Jews are abused, beaten, and falsely accused of the crime of which they themselves were the victims. In the last three years, Jews have been murdered on our streets and in their places of prayer. The Gaza genocide hoax, the globalised antisemitic blood libel, is a dominant narrative in public discourse. Once again, Jews are portrayed as child-killers, as globalist string-pullers, as The Other.

We are not yet back in 1938. The anniversary of Kristallnacht was just days ago, and we do not yet fully see mobs engaging in orgies of Jewish destruction. We are not far off. When diaspora Jews cannot attend synagogue without guards, bullet-proof doors, and a fear of walking the streets whilst wearing visible signs of their Judaism, we are on a branch line to the railway tracks that lead to the gates of Birkenau.

I never before understood how humanity could reach the point where the Holocaust was possible. I do now. Our public discourse is a sewer. One of the most memorable afternoons of my life was spent talking with Holocaust survivors in London. When those who were there tell me that the atmosphere in modern Britain reminds them of Germany in 1933, I listen.

And it is precisely because I listen that I cannot regard what is happening around us as someone else’s problem. For three years, I have been doing two things: trying to let our Jewish community know that they have allies, and trying to encourage other non-Jews to follow my lead. It is to the latter audience that I speak now, because the question is no longer simply whether we recognise the danger, but what we are prepared to do about it.

Antizionism is simply a synonym for antisemitism. It is the new Juden verboten (“Jews forbidden”). Jews who do not disavow Israel must wear their Zionism as they would a numbered tattoo on their arms. Attacking Jewish businesses in London, as the organization Palestine Action did, is not striking a blow against Israel. Stabbing Jews to death in Manchester is not striking a blow for Palestinians. Demonising the world’s only Jewish state and sanctuary for imaginary crimes, after the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust, is not striking a blow for the side of righteousness.

Friends, if you do not want to see a repeat of Jews either fleeing to Israel or being trucked to gas chambers, the time to change course is now. The answer sits at two levels: the personal and the political. At the personal level, I implore you to aggressively reject Holocaust inversion in the genocide accusations against Israel, wherever you see it.

Equally important is supporting a Jewish community you may never have had contact with. These are your countrymen and women. They enrich our society. Speak up. Your words will carry more weight than you realise, especially when they come from those who have no personal connection to the Jewish community but recognise that its demonisation is intolerable.

At the political level, write to your politicians and political parties. Any true Westerner should find the demonisation of Jews intolerable. It is fundamentally un-Western. Without a groundswell of popular support, our current governments will continue kowtowing to anti-Israel obsessives and Islamists for votes. Make it clear that you will not vote for any parliamentary candidate who pushes these blood libels and who, in doing so, demonises the Jews in our societies.

I make this appeal not as someone observing the danger from a distance, but as someone who has just stood in the place where the consequences of such hatred were made horrifyingly real.

For three years, this battle has felt lonely. It never felt lonelier than standing outside the gas chamber in Auschwitz this week, as my Jewish friends inside stood and prayed on the exact spot where their ancestors died screaming as the Zyklon B hit their lungs and extinguished them. My friends prayed for the dead, while the phrase “Never Again” hooked into my navel and twisted and twisted and twisted.

One can never be the same again after visiting Auschwitz.

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This is a guest essay by Lieutenant Colonel Ariella Mazor, the IDF’s International Spokesperson.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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When we talk about Israel’s military, we often focus on operations, capabilities, and developments on the battlefield.

Today, I want to focus on the people behind the uniform, through the story of one reservist whose life changed since October 7th. It’s a personal story, but one that reflects the experiences of many Israelis who have put their lives on hold to serve their country.

Six weeks before October 7, 2023, Sergeant First Class B became a father.

He was studying biology at Hebrew University, adjusting to life with a newborn, and building a future with his wife. Like many Israelis, he was also an IDF reservist. His military service was largely behind him, apart from occasional training exercises that amounted to roughly one week a year.

Then, at approximately 10:00 a.m. on October 7th, he received the call.

Within hours, he had left his wife and six-week-old son behind and returned to uniform, he joined hundreds of thousands of Israeli reservists mobilized following Hamas’ October 7th massacre.

He had no way of knowing how long he would be gone, where he would be sent, or how profoundly the coming years would change his family’s life.

More than three years later, Sergeant First Class B has spent approximately 450 days in reserve service, serving across multiple fronts while trying to remain present as a husband, father, and student.

His experience offers a glimpse into a part of Israel’s military that is difficult to understand from the outside: the thousands of ordinary citizens who leave their civilian lives behind when called upon to serve.

Across Israel, people from all walks of life share an experience that is central to the country’s defense: reserve military service. Doctors, engineers, teachers, entrepreneurs, and university students are among those who, after completing their mandatory military service, may be called back to serve in the IDF reserves.

Known in Hebrew as miluim, reserve service is an important part of Israel’s defense system. Reservists contribute across a wide range of military roles, from combat and intelligence to medicine and logistics.

On October 7th, that system was mobilized on an extraordinary scale. As news of Hamas’ attacks spread, thousands of reservists were called up. Many reported for duty within hours, leaving behind their workplaces, studies, and families.

Sergeant First Class B was among them. He was initially deployed to northern Israel. Days later, his unit arrived at Kibbutz Kfar Aza, where IDF soldiers were still working to regain control following Hamas’ massacre. He subsequently spent approximately four months deployed in connection with operations in Gaza, including two months outside Gaza, before serving in Lebanon.

Conditions were demanding. Sleeping, eating, and maintaining basic hygiene presented daily challenges. Soldiers also needed to confront the emotional aftermath of October 7th, carrying personal experiences of loss, grief, and uncertainty. For Sergeant First Class B, however, some of the greatest difficulties awaited beyond the battlefield.

While he was serving in Gaza, his wife was at home caring for their infant son. Neither of their extended families lived in Israel, leaving her to navigate the early months of motherhood with limited family support and a husband deployed to a war zone. They were living through the same war, but experiencing two entirely different realities. He was trying to explain what life was like in Gaza. She was trying to explain what it meant to raise their newborn largely on her own.

Neither could fully understand what the other was going through. Yet both understood the importance of his service to their country’s security.

It is a challenge familiar to many reservist families. The person serving carries the physical and emotional demands of military duty. The person at home carries the responsibilities that cannot be put on hold. And when the deployment ends, those two experiences must somehow fit back into one shared life.

Today, Sergeant First Class B studies medicine at Ben-Gurion University. Balancing education with reserve duty remains difficult, as deployments are unpredictable and academic requirements, including examinations, cannot always be completed remotely.

His experiences also reflect my own life and reality. I am a career military woman, and my husband is a reservist frequently called up to duty. The challenges that poses on our family, including our four children, is immense — and has taught me to have great appreciation for our support system and loved ones.

The experiences of Sergeant First Class B are shared by reservists across Israeli society: students whose degrees are interrupted, professionals who leave their workplaces, and parents who miss irreplaceable moments with their children.

Despite the difficulties, Sergeant First Class B considers his continued service a privilege. But perhaps his greatest motivation comes from the son he leaves behind.

Sergeant First Class B hopes his service will set an example for his child, teaching him sacrifice, responsibility, and helping others. He also recognizes that his son contributes to the country through the time he spends without his father. For Sergeant First Class B, parenthood has reinforced a simple principle: He cannot expect his son to uphold values he himself is unwilling to demonstrate.

His story speaks to something larger about Israel’s reserve system. Military service is often measured in operational achievements, deployments, and days spent in uniform. But those numbers tell only part of the story. They do not capture the missed family dinners, the interrupted careers, the spouses managing households alone, or the children counting the days until a parent comes home.

When we think about military strength, we often think about fighter jets, advanced technology, intelligence capabilities, and sophisticated weapons systems. But the IDF’s reserve force depends on something far more personal: the willingness of ordinary people to step away from the lives they have built — people like Sergeant First Class B. A medical student. A husband. A father. A combat medic. Someone who, before October 7th, expected to spend only a handful of days each year in uniform. Instead, he has spent approximately 450.

His story is one among many; it is the story of the IDF over the last three years. And that is where the story of Israel’s reservists is most clearly told — not only in the places where they serve, but in the lives they leave behind, and the values they hope to pass on when they return.

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This is a guest essay by Nachum Kaplan, a longtime journalist and commentator who writes the newsletter, “Moral Clarity.”

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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There is something indecently illiberal about a campaign ostensibly devoted to combating prejudice that begins by demanding people surrender their right to criticize an ideology.

Islamophobia Awareness Month, which is this month, is the exemplar. Its premise sounds reasonable: Prejudice against Muslims is wrong, discrimination is unacceptable, and people should be free to practice their religion without intimidation or harassment. Then comes the sleight of hand.

The campaign does not just seek to combat anti-Muslim bigotry. It promotes the notion that something called “Islamophobia” is a distinct and pervasive social pathology, frequently conflating hostility towards Muslims as people with hostility towards Islam as a system of religious beliefs, doctrines, laws, and some of the worst political ideas ever conceived. That conflation is not accidental; it is the strategy and the entire problem.

And let us not mince words: A real threat of violence backs up the injunctions against criticizing Islam. People are not scared to criticize Christianity or Judaism because Christians and Jews are not going to cut your head off for it the way jihadists do.

Islamophobia, as the term is commonly deployed, is as real as my world record for the 100-meter sprint at the Olympics when I left Usain Bolt in the dust.

Muslims should not be discriminated against, denied employment, assaulted, intimidated, excluded, or treated as second-class citizens because of their religious identity. Mosques should not be vandalized; Muslim women should not be harassed for wearing hijabs; and nobody should have to endure abuse because of their name, appearance, or faith.

Yet none of this requires inventing a special category of intellectual untouchability around Islam. Christianity, Judaism, and Hinduism, can be criticized. Their scriptures, institutions, historical conduct, theological contradictions, and political manifestations are legitimate subjects of scrutiny, ridicule, and condemnation. Islam should be no different.

But somehow, in the contemporary lexicon of progressive activism, criticism of Islam is treated as evidence of hostility towards Muslims. Question the doctrine of jihad, the treatment of women under certain interpretations of Sharia, or Islamist movements’ religious justifications, and you risk being branded Islamophobic. It is an intellectually dishonest maneuver that substitutes moral accusation for argument.

The word itself is problematic. A phobia is an irrational fear. Yet what is irrational about being concerned by the political ambitions of Islamism, terrorist attacks, the persecution of religious minorities in Islamic theocracies, the repression of apostates, or the imposition of religious law?

One can distinguish between Islam, Islamism, and the conduct of particular Muslim communities, but there is nothing inherently irrational about worrying about the consequences of religious doctrines or political movements. Indeed, refusing to do so would be the irrational position.

The distinction between Muslims and Islam is not difficult to understand. Muslims are people, possessing the same individual dignity and entitlement to freedom as everyone else. Islam is a religion, and like every religion, it is an intellectual and theological construct open to examination. One deserves respect as a person. The other deserves no immunity from scrutiny.

Islamophobia awareness campaigns obscure this elementary distinction. They create an atmosphere in which people are encouraged to police their language, second-guess their opinions, and retreat from legitimate criticism for fear of being branded bigots, at best, or physically attacked or killed, at worst. This is how Islamists have managed to impose de facto blasphemy laws across Europe.

This is particularly pernicious when discussing Islamism, the ideological movement that seeks to organize political and social life according to a particular interpretation of Islam. Its vision for the world is seventh century Arabia.

The distinction between ordinary Muslims and Islamists matters enormously. Millions of Muslims reject political extremism, authoritarian religious rule, and terrorism. They are commonly among its victims. That makes it all the more important that the ideology itself can be discussed openly.

And there are consequences for getting this wrong. How are we supposed to discuss the persecution of Christians in Pakistan, the treatment of women under the Taliban, the murder of apostates, the suppression of dissent in Iran, or the vile antisemitism that Islamist organizations propagate if criticism of the religious and ideological frameworks involved can be dismissed as prejudice?

And what of the Jews?

The obsession with Islamophobia has developed alongside a deep reluctance in “progressive” circles to confront antisemitism within Islamist movements and Muslim-majority societies. The same people who demand sensitivity towards religious minorities often display astonishing indifference towards Jewish vulnerability. The same activists who insist that religious identity must never be stigmatized routinely excuse, rationalize, or minimize hostility towards Jews when it comes wrapped in the language of anti-Zionism.

Then there is the fact that always gets you in trouble for stating it. Muslims are often behind antisemitic attacks but Jews are rarely behind anti-Muslim bigotry. The irony is grotesque. Jews understand better than most the dangers of being collectively blamed for the actions, beliefs, or conduct of others. Precisely for that reason, we should reject collective hostility towards Muslims. Yet we should also reject the proposition that protecting Muslims requires protecting Islam from criticism. It does not.

Another problem with the entire awareness industry is its assumption that the answer to social prejudice is awareness. Awareness is as interesting as choosing paint colors when the choices are cream, white, ivory, off-white or beige.

We have developed an unhealthy appetite for commemorative months, awareness days, educational slogans, and institutional declarations. The more complex the problem, the more likely someone is to reduce it to a poster.

And awareness of what, exactly? That Muslims are people? That they should not be assaulted or discriminated against? These are elementary principles, not revolutionary discoveries requiring an annual campaign. Or is the real objective to establish a cultural convention in which criticizing Islam is socially unacceptable? If it is the former, the campaign is unnecessary. If it is the latter, it is dangerous.

A genuinely liberal society does not protect people by placing their beliefs beyond criticism. It protects their freedom to hold those beliefs, practice their religion, change their religion, or abandon religion altogether. That freedom must extend equally to those who wish to challenge, reject, or ridicule religious doctrines.

Freedom of religion necessarily includes freedom from religion. Freedom of belief necessarily includes freedom to criticize belief. And freedom of expression means nothing if it evaporates whenever somebody states an opinion deemed offensive.

The answer to anti-Muslim bigotry is not Islamophobia Awareness Month. It is a consistent defense of individual liberty, equal treatment, and the right to live without intimidation or discrimination. These principles need no religious qualification and no fashionable terminology.

We must be able to condemn an attack on a Muslim without endorsing Islam, and defend a Muslim woman’s freedom to wear a hijab — or not to do so. We must be able to oppose discrimination against Muslims while insisting that religious doctrines, including Islamic doctrines, remain open to uncompromising scrutiny. This is the foundation of liberalism.

The stupidity of Islamophobia Awareness Month is that it takes a perfectly legitimate objective (combating prejudice against Muslims) and attaches it to a deeply problematic concept that risks confusing protection of people with protection of ideas. There is no need to manufacture a new category of prejudice to explain why Muslims deserve the same rights as everyone else, or to make Islam a special case, or to pretend that criticism of a religion constitutes hatred of its adherents.

Islam is not a protected species of thought. It is a religion, not a person. It has no entitlement to immunity from criticism, no exemption from historical examination, and no special dispensation from the principles of free expression. Perhaps what we really need is not Islamophobia Awareness Month, but a little more awareness of what liberalism actually means.

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You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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Yesterday, in Philadelphia, a group of anti-Zionist activists attempted to intimidate Jewish business owners by organizing a boycott of their restaurants. They wanted to make an example of these businesses, encouraging the public to stop patronizing them because of their owners’ support for Israel.

Instead, something extraordinary happened.

Hundreds of Jews, Zionists, and their allies showed up to support the targeted restaurants. They waved Israeli flags, stood proudly in the streets, and formed long lines outside the businesses. What was supposed to be an exercise in intimidation became a remarkable demonstration of Jewish pride, solidarity, and resilience.

And the timing could hardly have been more significant. Today, November 9th, marks the 88th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the Nazi-orchestrated pogrom against Jews in Germany and Austria in 1938.

Most people know Kristallnacht as the “Night of Broken Glass,” when Nazi mobs smashed the windows of Jewish businesses, burned synagogues, and terrorized Jewish communities. But there is much more to this story than shattered windows. And some of its lesser-known details offer surprisingly relevant lessons for Jews confronting antisemitism in 2026.

Kristallnacht did not begin with broken glass.

One of the most misunderstood aspects of Kristallnacht is that it was not the beginning of Nazi Germany’s persecution of Jews. Hitler had already been in power for nearly six years. By November 1938, German Jews had endured systematic discrimination, professional exclusion, economic persecution, and the gradual destruction of their civil rights.

In fact, the Nazis had organized a nationwide boycott of Jewish businesses on April 1, 1933, just two months after Hitler became chancellor. Nazi storm troopers stationed themselves outside Jewish-owned shops and professional offices, intimidating potential customers and displaying signs urging Germans not to buy from Jews.

Long before Jews were systematically murdered, Germans were encouraged to stop doing business with them. Ordinary commercial relationships were politicized. Buying something from a Jewish merchant became an expression of disloyalty to the nation. The Jewish shopkeeper was no longer merely a businessman trying to support his family; he was portrayed as a threat to society.

And this is one of the lesser-known details: Some non-Jewish Germans deliberately defied the boycott. They continued shopping at Jewish businesses, sometimes specifically to demonstrate solidarity with their Jewish neighbors. Others ignored the boycott or objected to the intimidation. Their actions did not stop what followed. But they remind us that even in Nazi Germany, individuals had choices about whether to participate in, accommodate, or resist antisemitism.

The Nazis understood something important: If you could convince people that patronizing a Jewish business was morally or politically unacceptable, you could begin removing Jews from public life without initially resorting to mass violence.

By November 1938, years of this propaganda and exclusion had helped prepare the ground for something far more sinister. The Nazis made the Jews pay for the violence committed against them. Kristallnacht itself was presented to the German public as a spontaneous expression of anger over the death of German diplomat Ernst vom Rath, who had been shot in Paris by 17-year-old Herschel Grynszpan. What is frequently left out of the story is why Grynszpan acted.

Just days earlier, Nazi authorities had expelled more than 17,000 Jews with Polish citizenship from Germany. Among them were Grynszpan’s parents and siblings, who had lived in Germany for decades before being forcibly deported toward Poland. After learning what had happened to his family, Grynszpan shot the diplomat. The Nazis seized upon this individual act to justify collective punishment against an entire Jewish population.

But Kristallnacht was not spontaneous. It was coordinated by Nazi leaders, with Joseph Goebbels helping orchestrate the violence. During November 9th and 10th, more than 1,400 synagogues were destroyed, thousands of Jewish businesses were vandalized, and Jewish homes were invaded. Hundreds of Jews died during the violence and its aftermath, while approximately 26,000 Jewish men were imprisoned in concentration camps.

And then came one of the most outrageous parts of the story: On November 12th, the Nazi government announced that Germany’s Jews would have to pay a collective fine of one billion Reichsmarks as punishment for what the regime described as Jewish hostility toward Germany. Yes, you read that correctly. The Nazis attacked Jewish businesses, burned Jewish synagogues, destroyed Jewish property, and then forced the Jewish victims to pay for the damage.

Jewish property owners were also ordered to cover repair costs, while insurance payments that would otherwise have gone to them were confiscated by the German government. The victims were financially punished for being victims. It was a calculated effort to destroy Jewish economic independence, making it increasingly impossible for Jews to remain part of German society.

Within weeks, the Nazis introduced additional restrictions barring Jews from operating retail businesses and attending public schools. The goal was to make Jewish life in Germany untenable. The people who were supposed to protect Jews were ordered not to.

Another lesser-known detail of Kristallnacht concerns the German police and firefighters. As synagogues burned throughout Germany, firefighters often stood nearby, watching the flames consume the buildings. They had been instructed to prevent fires from spreading to neighboring properties, not to save the synagogues themselves. Police officers were likewise directed not to interfere with the anti-Jewish violence, provided that non-Jewish lives and property were not endangered.

Jewish property was not worth protecting. Jewish places of worship were not worth saving. The authorities responsible for maintaining public order were effectively telling the perpetrators that Jews were outside the protection of the law. And ordinary Germans witnessed this. Some participated enthusiastically. Others watched. Some disapproved but did little. A minority intervened or expressed solidarity.

The broader lesson is unmistakable: Antisemitism becomes infinitely more dangerous when institutions stop protecting Jews and society begins treating their mistreatment as normal. That is why Jewish communities today must demand more than sympathetic statements from political leaders, universities, employers, and law enforcement. We must demand action. The world condemned Kristallnacht. That was not enough.

Perhaps the most revealing lesson of Kristallnacht concerns the international response. Contrary to the popular notion that the world simply ignored what happened, the pogrom received enormous international attention. Newspapers across the United States reported extensively on the atrocities. Americans expressed widespread disgust at Nazi persecution of Jews.

A November 1938 public opinion survey found that 94 percent of Americans disapproved of the Nazis’ treatment of Jews. But the same polling revealed something astonishing: When asked whether the United States should allow more Jewish refugees from Germany to enter the country, 71 percent of Americans said no. In other words, Americans overwhelmingly condemned the persecution of Jews while overwhelmingly opposing one of the most meaningful ways to help them escape it.

Sympathy is not the same as solidarity. Condemning antisemitism is not the same as standing up to it. And expressing outrage over Jewish suffering is not necessarily the same as doing something to prevent it. It is relatively easy to say that Jews should not be persecuted. It is considerably harder to inconvenience yourself, confront your own community, risk social disapproval, or take meaningful action on their behalf.

This is why Jewish communities cannot afford to measure their security by how many people express sympathy after something terrible happens. The more important question is how many people are prepared to act before it happens.

What happened in Philadelphia yesterday was the response Jews need. On Sunday, November 8, an anti-Zionist cycling group called “Philly Bike On Your Left” organized a demonstration targeting six Jewish-owned Philadelphia eateries: Goldie, Dizengoff, K’Far Cafe, Huda, Mac Mart, and Schlesinger’s Deli. The group’s promotional material declared: “These Zionist Establishments Must Go! Not in Our City!” Several of the targeted establishments belong to the restaurant group co-owned by celebrated Israeli-American chef Michael Solomonov.

The organizers maintained that the demonstration was motivated by the business owners’ support for Israel, not their Jewish identity. They also denied deliberately scheduling it on the eve of Kristallnacht.

There is something deeply disturbing about organizing a campaign to drive Jewish-owned businesses out of an American neighborhood because their owners support the existence of Israel, raise money for Israeli causes, or express solidarity with fellow Jews.

One of the targeted restaurant owners, Yehuda Sichel of Huda, said he believed his business was singled out partly because he had raised money to help Israeli children traumatized or injured by the October 7th massacre. His grandfather, remarkably, had survived the Holocaust and witnessed Kristallnacht. Imagine being the grandson of a man who lived through the Nazi persecution of Jewish businesses, only to find your own restaurant targeted by a campaign demanding that Zionist establishments disappear from your city.

Of course, Philadelphia in 2026 is not Nazi Germany in 1938. The former involved a protest and boycott campaign in a democracy; the latter was a state-organized campaign of violent persecution. But we should still recognize the disturbing resemblance between the language of economic exclusion then and now. In both cases, Jewish business owners were being portrayed as people whose political identity made them unacceptable participants in ordinary commercial life. And this time, the response was inspiring.

Hundreds of supporters lined up outside the targeted restaurants. Some waved Israeli flags and confronted the boycotters. Others simply bought food, turning an attempted boycott into an extraordinary day of business. Approximately 300 people participated in the anti-Israel demonstration, while about 200 participated in the direct counterprotest. Hundreds more showed their solidarity by patronizing the restaurants.

At Huda and Schlesinger’s Deli, lines stretched around city blocks. Mac Mart, which would ordinarily have been closed on Sunday, opened to welcome the influx of supporters. The restaurant’s owner, Marti Lieberman, described the result beautifully: “Everything turned into a massive pot of positivity.”

That is how Jews should respond to antisemitism — by showing up, standing together, and demonstrating that attempts to isolate Jews will instead produce even greater Jewish solidarity.

And importantly, Jews were not alone. Non-Jewish supporters, faith leaders, ordinary Philadelphia residents, and elected officials joined the effort. Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle Parker condemned the targeting of Jewish-owned businesses, and Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro praised the community’s response. This matters enormously, because defeating antisemitism cannot be the responsibility of Jews alone.

Across the world, antisemitism has reached levels that should alarm every Jewish community. Jews increasingly find themselves pressured to explain their relationship with Israel, defend their Jewish identity, or demonstrate that they are sufficiently distant from Zionism to be accepted in certain social, academic, cultural, or professional environments.

This is a particularly insidious form of antisemitism because it encourages Jews to participate in their own marginalization. The message is often implicit: You are welcome here, provided you are the “right” kind of Jew; provided you do not make people uncomfortable with your connection to Israel; provided your Jewish identity remains private, politically acceptable, and subordinate to whatever ideological expectations the surrounding community imposes.

Jews should reject that bargain. Being Jewish should never require an apology. Supporting Israel should never require an apology. And nobody should have to renounce Zionism as the price of participating in any society.

Every November, Jews around the world commemorate Kristallnacht. We share photographs of burning synagogues, listen to Holocaust survivors, and promise that such horrors must never happen again. These commemorations are important, but remembrance without action is incomplete. Jewish communities should be doing what Philadelphia did yesterday, and much more.

When Jewish businesses are targeted, patronize them. When Jewish students are harassed, mobilize parents, alumni, donors, and legal advocates. When synagogues are threatened, organize security, demand accountability, and make sure their congregations know they are not alone. When antisemitism is normalized by politicians or institutions, make that normalization carry reputational, political, and financial consequences. And when Jews are pressured to hide their identity, respond by making Jewish life more visible.

Most importantly, Jews must stop behaving as though every public expression of Jewish pride needs to be balanced by an apology to people who resent it. There is a difference between being respectful of others and being ashamed of ourselves. And if recent years have taught us anything, it is that making Jewish identity less visible does not make antisemitism disappear. The antisemite does not become more tolerant simply because Jews become more accommodating.

There is one final detail about Kristallnacht that deserves greater attention. The Nazi persecution of Jews did not happen because Jews failed to condemn antisemitism loudly enough. German Jews had built extraordinary cultural, educational, charitable, religious, and professional institutions. Many were deeply patriotic Germans. They had served their country, contributed to its economy, and believed they belonged. None of that protected them when the state turned against them.

But Jews in today’s democracies do have opportunities that German Jews in 1938 increasingly did not.

We can organize openly. We can challenge discrimination in court. We can mobilize political allies. We can defend our institutions. We can use our economic and collective influence. We can celebrate our identity in public. And, of course, we live in a world in which the State of Israel exists.

That last difference is not incidental. In 1938, European Jews had no sovereign Jewish state capable of offering them refuge and defending Jewish national interests. Today, whatever one thinks of its government, Israel exists as the living expression of Jewish self-determination.

It is therefore especially striking that the people who showed up in Philadelphia yesterday did not feel compelled to choose between their American identity and their connection to Israel. They waved Israeli flags on American streets. They supported American businesses owned by Jews. They stood alongside non-Jewish neighbors. They exercised their rights in a free society without surrendering their Jewish pride.

And they demonstrated something that too many Jewish communities seem to have forgotten amid the constant barrage of antisemitism: We do not have to accept intimidation as a permanent condition of Jewish life.

Eighty-eight years ago, the streets of Germany were littered with shattered glass from Jewish businesses while authorities allowed the destruction to continue. Yesterday, the streets of Philadelphia were filled with people determined to keep Jewish businesses open.

The circumstances could hardly be more different. But that difference is precisely the point.

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This is a guest essay by Vanessa Berg, who writes about Judaism and Israel.

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In a country of more than 340 million people, spanning 50 states, thousands of communities, and countless religions, cultures, ethnicities, and economic interests, Americans are effectively given two political choices: Democrats or Republicans.

That’s it.

You can be a liberal who believes in free markets, a conservative who supports abortion rights, a socialist who opposes illegal immigration, a religious voter who supports universal healthcare, or a libertarian who wants nothing to do with either political establishment.

But when Election Day arrives, the overwhelming majority of Americans face the same dilemma: red or blue. And if neither party represents your beliefs particularly well? Too bad. Pick the one you dislike less.

Americans call this democracy. But there’s a significant difference between having the freedom to vote and having meaningful choices about whom to vote for.

Last week’s U.S. midterm elections exposed that difference rather spectacularly. On Tuesday, November 3rd, Democrats swept back into power in Congress, riding a wave of dissatisfaction with President Donald Trump and/or the Republican Party. But underneath the headlines about the Democratic Party victory was a much more interesting story about what actually motivated Americans to vote.

Many weren’t voting for Democrats so much as they were voting against Donald Trump. According to a Marist poll from September, 80 percent of Democratic Party voters described their congressional vote as a vote against Trump. And exit polling from Tuesday’s election found that one in five voters who supported Democratic Party candidates actually had an unfavorable opinion of the Democratic Party itself.

Millions of Americans went to the polls and supported a political party they didn’t necessarily admire, agree with, or even appreciate. Their primary motivation was stopping the other side. That’s not exactly an inspiring advertisement for representative democracy. And it raises an uncomfortable question: What is the point of having the right to vote if the political system makes it nearly impossible to vote for what you actually believe?

The inconvenient truth about America’s two-party system is that it gradually transforms political participation from an expression of conviction into an exercise in fear. Instead of asking, “Which political party best represents my values?” Americans increasingly ask, “Which political party poses the greatest threat to my values?”

Those are two very different questions. One encourages citizens to think about the future they want to build. The other encourages them to think about the future they want to prevent. And once politics becomes primarily about prevention, political parties no longer need to earn voters’ loyalty through compelling ideas or effective governance. They just need to convince voters that the alternative is worse.

For Democrats, that alternative is Donald Trump and the Republican Party. For Republicans, it is a Democratic Party they portray as increasingly radical, socialist, or detached from traditional American values. Both sides have a powerful incentive to make the other appear as frightening as possible. The more terrified voters become of the opposition, the less accountable their preferred party has to be.

A Democrat who believes their party has abandoned them on immigration, taxation, foreign policy, or cultural issues may nevertheless vote Democrat because they cannot stomach Trump. A Republican who disagrees with Trump’s tariffs, economic interventionism, or approach to America’s allies may nevertheless vote Republican because they fear what Democrats would do in power. In both cases, the voter is effectively trapped.

And being trapped can lead people to vote against their own interests. Think about the liberal women who voted for Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan’s Senate election. El-Sayed is a devout Muslim whose wife wears a hijab — both of which run completely contrary to liberal values. But many liberal women supported him primarily because he was the Democrat running against a Republican.

That’s the danger of a two-party system: Political identity can become more important than scrutinizing the actual candidate. When defeating the other party becomes the overriding priority, voters may stop asking whether the person they’re electing genuinely represents their values.

A system that repeatedly forces people to sacrifice one set of convictions to defend another has a serious representation problem.

Under the American system, voters are constantly told they must compromise their principles to avoid something worse. Eventually, that compromise stops being an unfortunate necessity and becomes the entire basis of political participation.

Other democracies have similarly entrenched two-party systems, but none comes close to matching the United States in global influence, economic power, or geopolitical significance. I am talking about Malta, Jamaica, and Ghana. Yet even these countries have other legally recognized political parties. That is an important distinction. America doesn’t legally prohibit third parties, either. The problem is that its electoral system makes it extraordinarily difficult for them to become viable.

In fact, political scientists have described the United States as exceptionally unusual among democracies using winner-take-all elections because the same two parties dominate competition so thoroughly, across nearly every region and level of national government.

Countries such as Britain and Canada also have two dominant parties, but smaller parties regularly win seats in their national legislatures. Germany, the Netherlands, and many other European democracies take multi-party representation even further.

The American system is particularly unforgiving because most congressional elections are decided in individual districts, where only the candidate with the most votes wins. Imagine a political party that receives 15 percent of the vote in every congressional district across America. That’s a substantial number of people. Tens of millions of citizens could potentially support its platform.

And yet, that party could finish Election Day with exactly zero seats in Congress. Its voters would have participated in democracy without gaining a single representative from the party they preferred.

Political scientists associate this tendency with Duverger’s Law, named after French political scientist Maurice Duverger, who observed that winner-take-all electoral systems tend to produce two dominant parties. Voters quickly recognize that supporting smaller parties may be futile, or worse, might help elect the major party they oppose most.

So they abandon their preferred candidates and vote strategically. And the two-party system becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Then there is Israel, where 38 political parties competed in the last election. Thirty-eight. Eleven of them won parliamentary representation in the election two weeks ago, since parties must obtain at least 3.25 percent of the valid vote to qualify for seats. Some of those 11 lists themselves represent alliances between multiple parties.

Still, compare that to the United States. In a country with a fraction of America’s population, Israelis can choose between parties representing dramatically different political and ideological visions. There are secular parties, religious parties, ultra-Orthodox parties, Arab-led parties, nationalist parties, centrist parties, social-democratic parties, and parties that position themselves somewhere between these categories.

An Israeli who supports strong national security policies but opposes religious influence over the state has options. An Israeli who wants a more economically liberal government but also values traditional Jewish institutions has options. So does an Arab Israeli who wants greater integration into Israeli society, or one who prefers a more confrontational political approach.

These differences are not academic. They are reflected in actual political parties competing for actual parliamentary representation. The result is that Israeli voters can often find a party considerably closer to their worldview than the two enormous ideological coalitions presented to Americans.

Of course, Israelis also vote strategically. Parties below the electoral threshold win no seats, so voters may abandon their first choice to avoid wasting their vote. But there is still a fundamental difference between a system that pressures voters to choose between two giant political camps and one that gives them meaningful choices within and across those camps.

In America, a liberal who dislikes the Democratic Party may have little practical alternative to voting Democratic. In Israel, a Left-wing voter unhappy with one political party may have other parties available that represent their beliefs more closely. A conservative Israeli who dislikes Benjamin Netanyahu doesn’t necessarily have to abandon the political Right to vote against him, either.

In Israel, you can reject a politician without necessarily rejecting your entire political identity. In America, that is far more difficult.

There is a legitimate argument that Israel has too many political parties. The country’s multiparty system can produce political instability, coalition gridlock, and governments dependent on relatively small factions that wield disproportionate influence.

Between 2019 and 2022, Israel held five national elections in less than four years. Political negotiations became an exhausting national ritual, and even minor political disagreements could threaten entire governments.

Smaller parties sometimes receive ministerial positions or policy concessions that appear disproportionate to their electoral support because larger parties need their votes to form a parliamentary majority.

And Israel’s most recent election has demonstrated the challenges of political fragmentation again. The largest party, Likud, won just 27 of the 120 seats in the Knesset (the Israeli parliament). No major bloc emerged with an outright majority, leaving the country’s political future dependent on negotiations among parties with considerable ideological differences.

The drawbacks are obvious, but consider the alternative. In Israel, political parties must frequently negotiate their differences openly after an election to build a governing coalition. In America, much of that coalition-building happens inside the Democratic and Republican parties before voters ever reach the ballot box.

The Democratic Party has to accommodate everyone from democratic socialists to business-friendly centrists. The Republican Party must somehow reconcile traditional conservatives, libertarians, religious voters, populists, and an increasingly powerful nationalist wing. These are not coherent political movements. They are collections of competing movements forced to operate under two labels because the electoral system rewards consolidation, which creates its own dysfunction.

A voter who supports a Democratic Party candidate may be helping empower a broader political coalition containing factions they strongly oppose. The same is true for a Republican voter. In Israel, those internal disagreements are more likely to be represented by separate parties that must negotiate with each other. In America, voters frequently don’t know which faction of their own party will prevail until after they have helped elect it.

One system produces complicated coalition negotiations between parties. The other produces complicated power struggles within parties. Neither eliminates political bargaining. Israel simply makes more of the bargaining visible.

The irony is that Americans frequently mock Israel’s coalition politics as chaotic while accepting a political system in which an enormous ideological range of citizens is squeezed into two political organizations that increasingly struggle to coexist internally.

Is Israeli politics messy? Absolutely. But why should the appearance of simplicity be considered more important than the substance of representation?

There is another consequence that deserves considerably more attention: accountability. Imagine you are a lifelong Democrat who believes your party has become too extreme on certain issues. You don’t support the Republicans, but you are frustrated with Democratic leadership, policies, and priorities. What exactly are you supposed to do?

You can vote Republican, which may contradict even more of your beliefs. You can vote for a third party, knowing that candidate has virtually no chance of winning. Or you can stay home, effectively surrendering whatever influence your vote might have had. The most likely outcome? You vote for the Democratic Party candidate(s) again. And the Democratic Party learns that it can count on your support even when you are unhappy.

Now reverse the parties. A lifelong Republican can be deeply dissatisfied with Republican leadership, the party’s relationship with Trump, its approach to federal spending, or its foreign-policy direction. But if that voter considers the Democratic Party alternative unacceptable, the Republican Party can still reasonably expect their vote. This is an extraordinary political advantage.

Imagine operating a business where customers had only two realistic choices, switching to your competitor was emotionally and financially costly, and your customers believed the competitor posed an existential threat to their future. How much pressure would you feel to improve your product?

Certainly, political competition is not identical to commercial competition, but the underlying incentive problem is real: When voters feel they cannot leave, political parties become less responsive to their dissatisfaction.

A multiparty system creates an additional mechanism for accountability. If a political party repeatedly disappoints its voters, those voters can shift to a competing party that represents similar broad values but offers different leadership, policies, or priorities. In Israel, that possibility is not theoretical. Parties rise, decline, merge, split, and disappear. New political movements emerge to represent constituencies dissatisfied with the existing options.

That instability can be frustrating, but it also reflects something healthy: Political parties do not have an automatic entitlement to their voters. And no political party should.

Perhaps the most corrosive consequence of America’s two-party system is what it does to political culture. When only two parties can realistically govern, nearly every disagreement becomes a contest between two opposing tribes. Political opinions that should be independent judgments get bundled together into identities.

Your views on immigration somehow become associated with your views on climate change. Your position on abortion supposedly predicts your position on corporate taxation. Your opinion of Donald Trump becomes a proxy for what you believe about everything from international trade to America’s relationship with Israel.

But human beings do not think in two neat ideological categories. A person can support capitalism and stronger environmental protections. A person can believe in traditional family values and support gay marriage. A person can favor strict immigration enforcement and comprehensive healthcare reform. A person can support Israel and oppose Trump. A person can support Trump and disagree with his foreign policy.

There is nothing inherently contradictory about holding opinions that cross conventional partisan boundaries.

Yet America’s political structure encourages voters to treat these combinations as anomalies that must somehow be explained or justified. And because political identity has become so closely tied to party identity, disagreement over one political issue can be interpreted as betrayal of an entire community. This is especially destructive when politics becomes centered on personalities rather than policies.

Trump is a particularly powerful example. His presence dominates American political discourse to such an extraordinary extent that millions of voters organize their political identities around supporting or opposing him.

Last week’s elections demonstrated that dynamic again. ABC News voter polling found that 43 percent of Americans who voted in the House of Representatives races described their vote as an expression of opposition to Trump, compared with 16 percent who described it as an expression of support for him.

Think about what is missing from this equation: healthcare, housing, education, taxation, infrastructure, energy, foreign policy, economic mobility. All these issues matter enormously to people’s lives. And yet, the organizing principle for a huge portion of the electorate was a single individual who wasn’t even on the ballot.

That is not entirely the fault of the two-party system. Trump himself is an unconventional political figure. But the two-party system magnifies this dynamic by turning every election, including thousands of contests for offices with distinct responsibilities, into another opportunity to vote for or against the same national political identity.

Instead of producing more political diversity, American democracy increasingly produces more intense political uniformity.

Two parties may be easier to understand. They may produce clearer governing majorities. They may even make certain aspects of government more stable. But convenience is not the highest purpose of democracy; representation is.

And if the price of having more meaningful political representation is occasionally having to endure complicated coalition negotiations, that seems like a price worth paying.

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This is a guest essay by Shane Shmuel, an opinion and political writer.

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At a recent launch in Melbourne of the book “Bondi Terror: The Tragedy, the Courage, the Aftermath,” written by investigative journalist Sharri Markson and Alex Ryvchin (co-chief executive officer of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry), Markson posed two questions weighing heavily on Jewish Australians:

“Is there something worse still to come? Have the lessons of Bondi truly been learned, especially by our political leaders and law enforcement?”

These questions capture the fear, anger, and uncertainty gripping Australia’s Jewish community.

Since the December 2025 terrorist massacre at Bondi Beach, where 15 innocent people were murdered celebrating Chanukah, Jewish Australians have confronted an unimaginable reality. Are we safe in our homes, schools, and synagogues? Can we trust those responsible for protecting us?

A government’s most fundamental responsibility is the safety and security of its citizens. Yet Bondi has left many Jewish Australians questioning whether political considerations have taken precedence over that duty.

Could something worse still happen? Tragically, we cannot dismiss that possibility. Bondi demonstrated what can happen when hatred is allowed to escalate into violence. Until Jewish Australians see evidence that the threats identified before the massacre are being confronted decisively, the fear of another attack will remain.

For more than two years, our community warned about escalating antisemitism and attacks on Jewish institutions. What matters now is whether Australia has learned anything.

Since Bondi, our community has experienced profound grief, exhaustion, anger, and betrayal. Jewish organizations have supported victims and strengthened security. Thousands gathered in solidarity, determined not to allow terrorism to extinguish Jewish life. But behind that resilience lies a devastating question: Are we still safe in our own country?

Why must we enter synagogues through security fences, past armed guards and surveillance cameras simply to practise our faith? Why do our children require armed guards, security fences, and cameras to enter the same school campuses we attended without such precautions? When did being visibly Jewish become a security risk in Australia?

These threats should never be accepted as normal. Jewish Australians have not merely enjoyed Australia’s freedoms. We have helped defend and build this nation.

General Sir John Monash, the Australian-born son of Jewish immigrants, commanded the Australian Corps during decisive Allied victories in World War I, becoming one of Australia’s greatest military leaders.

For generations, Jewish Australians have contributed to virtually every facet of Australian life: business, medicine, scientific research, law, education, the arts, journalism, philanthropy, and countless other professions. They have created businesses, supported hospitals, enriched our culture, and strengthened Australian institutions.

How can a country which Jewish Australians helped build and defend accept that their grandchildren need armed protection simply to attend school or synagogue? No Australian child should believe armed guards are the price of being Jewish.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese initially resisted demands for a federal royal commission following Bondi, announcing one only after sustained pressure from victims’ families, Jewish leaders, and prominent Australians. Why did grieving families have to fight for an inquiry into such a devastating terrorist attack?

Controversies surrounding taxpayer grants to organizations accused of spreading antisemitic rhetoric have compounded concerns about government oversight. Jewish Australians need more than condolences. We need confidence that authorities will confront threats before another tragedy.

Some leading Islamic organizations condemned Bondi. But a bigger question must be asked: What do those condemnations mean when further examples of antisemitic preaching in mosques continue to emerge? Words of sympathy ring hollow if they are not accompanied by a willingness to confront hatred within one’s own institutions.

Equally troubling are questions surrounding substantial taxpayer-funded grants awarded in the name of “social cohesion,” including scrutiny of organizations accused of promoting or tolerating antisemitic rhetoric. Where is the social cohesion? What safeguards ensure public money is strengthening mutual respect rather than reaching organizations whose conduct undermines it? It seems more about buying votes.

Jewish organizations pursued legal action against preacher Wisam Haddad, whose sermons were found to breach Australia’s racial discrimination laws. In November 2023, Haddad quoted a religious passage describing Jews hiding behind trees and stones, ending: “There is a Yahudi [Jew] behind me, come and kill him.” Why should Jewish organizations bear the burden of challenging such rhetoric? Why aren’t existing laws being enforced more effectively?

Some Muslim leaders have condemned incitement. Muslim Australian Ahmed al-Ahmed demonstrated extraordinary courage confronting an armed terrorist at Bondi. The issue is extremist Islamic ideology and whether religious institutions and authorities are confronting it effectively. The Holocaust did not begin with gas chambers. It began with propaganda, boycotts, exclusion, and discriminatory laws before escalating into genocide.

Australia is not Nazi Germany, but history warns against normalizing antisemitism. The Albanese government’s response deserves scrutiny over whether it has done enough to prevent that normalization.

And where is the rest of Australia? Many non-Jewish Australians showed extraordinary compassion since Bondi. Yet we need widespread outrage when synagogues are attacked, schools vandalized, and Jewish students intimidated. There is a difference between mourning Jews after they have been murdered and defending them while they face threats.

And why do protests continue following the Gaza ceasefire? Peaceful protest is a democratic right. But antisemitic intimidation, glorification of terrorism, and threats of violence cross the line and demand a response. This concerns more than Israel or Gaza. It raises questions about defending Western democratic values: freedom, tolerance, and equality before the law.

It begins with the Jews, but it never ends with the Jews. A society tolerating hatred against one minority risks endangering everyone’s freedoms.

Perhaps most heartbreaking is that I find myself grateful my Holocaust survivor grandparents are no longer here to witness what is happening in Australia. My grandfather recorded his Holocaust testimony for Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation in the 1990s. He concluded:

“You are lucky to grow up in a country like Australia, a country free of the antisemitism we grew up with in Poland. Don’t let anyone make you feel second class. Always be kind to all mankind, but importantly, always be a proud Jew.”

What would he think of firebombed synagogues, Jewish children requiring armed security, and families murdered celebrating Chanukah?

I am thankful he never witnessed Bondi. But I know his message: Stand tall, remain kind, never feel second class, always be a proud Jew. I carry those words whenever I write or speak publicly.

As we await December’s final report, the Royal Commission is expected to recommend improvements to intelligence, policing, and security. But will it also examine political decisions, failures of enforcement, and institutional tolerance that may have allowed antisemitism to become entrenched?

Questions remain about the extent to which senior government ministers and extremist preachers have faced public questioning. Will there be accountability for government failures, scrutiny of social cohesion funding, and meaningful consequences for those unlawfully promoting hatred? Or merely another set of security recommendations?

A Royal Commission cannot itself impose criminal penalties, but it can expose failures and recommend action.

My grandfather believed Australia would protect his descendants from the hatred he endured in Poland. I want future generations to believe that too. If things don’t change fundamentally, don’t be surprised when another Bondi happens. Because “Never Again” cannot simply be something we say after Jews have been murdered. It must be something we defend while they are still alive.

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As Democrats celebrated their sweeping victories across America this week, one word kept appearing in the speeches, statements, and celebrations of some of the party’s most energized candidates and supporters.

That word is Palestine — some make-believe place thousands of miles away, whose conflict with Israel (i.e., the Jews) has somehow become one of the defining political causes of America’s emerging Left.

In Michigan, chants of “Free Palestine” erupted as Abdul El-Sayed celebrated becoming the first Muslim elected to the United States Senate. He denounced American support for Israel, attacked AIPAC, and declared that Michigan’s tax dollars should be spent on domestic priorities rather than what he called “apartheid or genocide or war.”

In New York, Brad Lander, the Jewish Democrat elected to represent the state’s 10th Congressional District, promised to become “the Jewish member of Congress who is boldest in support of Palestinian freedom.”

Another New York winner, Darializa Avila Chevalier, demanded a complete arms embargo against Israel and the Palestinian “right of return.” During her June primary victory celebration, supporters had erupted into chants of “Free Palestine.” She was a Columbia University protest organizer before becoming a congressional candidate, and opposition to Israel is central to her political identity.

And these were hardly isolated figures.

Claire Valdez, another newly elected New York congresswoman, declared after winning her Democratic primary in June that she would continue calling for Palestinian liberation. She connected that commitment directly to domestic spending, arguing that Americans should use their money to improve lives at home rather than destroy them abroad.

In Colorado, Melat Kiros, another victorious democratic socialist, had similarly promised during her primary victory speech to stop what she called the “genocide in Palestine.” Following her November victory, she again called for accountability over what she described as American complicity in the conflict.

The same political movement helped propel Chris Rabb in Pennsylvania and Donavan McKinney in Michigan to congressional victories. Palestinian-American organizer Aber Kawas also won a New York State Senate seat after explicitly making Palestinian advocacy part of her challenge to the Democratic Party establishment.

These victories represent a meaningful political development, even if they do not mean that every Democrat, or even most of their voters, shares the same views. But here is what Americans need to understand: “Palestine” is not really about Palestinians. It has become a political symbol, an organizing principle, and an exceptionally useful instrument for a much broader anti-American ideological project.

That project is about who holds power in American society, who controls its wealth, which institutions deserve legitimacy, how history should be understood, and whether the political and economic order that made the modern West possible should be preserved or fundamentally transformed.

In fact, “Palestine” has become something of a password within this movement. Say it loudly enough, and you immediately communicate where you stand on a whole range of issues that have absolutely nothing to do with Palestinians.

You are against billionaires, corporations, capitalism, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), American imperialism, and just about every established institution that supposedly perpetuates inequality and oppression. You support redistributing wealth, fundamentally restructuring American society, and replacing existing power structures with something entirely different.

And you can communicate all of that with just two words: Free Palestine. It is not simply a foreign-policy position, but an all-encompassing political identity.

The easiest way to understand this phenomenon is to examine what the Democratic Socialists of America, the organization behind several of these politicians, actually believes. Alongside demands to “Free Palestine,” they advocate aggressive wealth taxes, public ownership of major corporations and essential industries, abolishing ICE, and dramatically restructuring American political institutions.

They are not interested in reasonable reforms and continuous improvements, but in burning many of the existing systems down to the ground. Their ambitions extend well beyond ordinary changes. They propose abolishing the United States Senate, replacing the president and Supreme Court with institutions subordinate to Congress, and creating an entirely different political and economic system.

What does any of this have to do with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? What does nationalizing major industries have to do with Palestinian self-determination? What does restructuring the American judiciary have to do with Gaza?

Nothing inherently, yet they have been packaged together as parts of one unified moral and political struggle. To support one increasingly means being expected to support the others. “Palestine” has become the gateway through which a much broader ideological revolution is being sold to American voters.

And there is another dimension to this phenomenon that deserves considerably more attention: the Left’s remarkable ability to reinvent itself around whichever cause happens to dominate the cultural conversation.

A few years ago, Black Lives Matter was omnipresent. Politicians took knees, corporations issued statements, celebrities posted black squares on Instagram, and Americans were encouraged to demonstrate their moral virtue by publicly embracing the movement.

Before and alongside that, climate change became the defining moral emergency for an entire generation of activists. Greta Thunberg became an international celebrity. Politicians warned that civilization was running out of time. Young people marched in the streets and demanded that governments fundamentally restructure the global economy.

Climate change did not disappear. Racial issues did not disappear. What changed was the intensity of the cultural attention. The political spotlight moved on to October 7, 2023, Israel’s subsequent war against Hamas in Gaza, and the flood of images, videos, protests, and online campaigns that followed. Suddenly, “Palestine” became the defining moral cause of the moment. The slogans changed. The flags changed. The hashtags changed. But the underlying political psychology remained remarkably familiar.

Here was another opportunity to identify an “oppressed” population, accuse established institutions of perpetuating “injustice,” and demand that society reorganize itself around a moral emergency.

For activists who had previously built their public identities around other causes, “Palestine” offered a fresh opportunity to demonstrate their righteousness. It was the latest cause around which to rally, the latest opportunity to feel morally superior, and the latest way to distinguish the enlightened from the supposedly ignorant, indifferent, or evil.

This is the politics of feeling good about being good. And it is much easier than the politics of actually governing.

The great advantage of declaring yourself an ally to an “oppressed” people is that you do not necessarily have to explain how you intend to solve their problems. You can simply announce that you stand with them, identify their supposed “oppressors,” and demand that everyone else do the same. The political applause is immediate. The political responsibility can be postponed indefinitely.

And a politician who declares that they stand “against genocide” can instantly claim a kind of moral authority that politicians discussing healthcare financing, housing construction, or infrastructure spending cannot. Who wants to argue about the details of an insurance reimbursement system when someone else is claiming to “fight genocide”?

Show me the emerging American Left’s detailed policy proposals. I cannot recall one. Having a list of sweeping demands is not the same thing as having serious, workable governing strategies. “Free Palestine” is not governance. The same applies to many of the movement’s domestic ambitions like “abolish ICE,” “tax the rich,” “Medicare for All,” and “end capitalism.”

Announcing an outcome does not resolve the difficult questions of cost, implementation, incentives, public support, or unintended consequences.

It is easy to promise affordable housing. It is considerably harder to explain how to construct enough homes, reform zoning, lower building costs, and overcome local opposition.

It is easy to promise that billionaires will pay for everything. It is considerably harder to demonstrate precisely how much revenue a proposed tax will generate, how businesses and investors will respond, and whether the resulting system can sustainably finance the promises being made.

It is easy to condemn war. It is considerably harder to explain how a democracy should respond when a terrorist organization massacres its citizens, takes hostages, and promises to repeat the attack.

That is the difference between political performance and political competence.

It is also why the movement increasingly resembles what political theorists call Third Worldism: a worldview that interprets global affairs principally through the struggle between an exploitative Western world and supposedly “oppressed” peoples fighting for “liberation.”

Just look at the “rising stars” of the Democratic Party. Ilhan Omar was born in Somalia. El-Sayed’s parents are Egyptian. Mamdani was born in Uganda. Rashida Tlaib’s parents are from the West Bank. These politicians and others have literally imported Third Worldism into the Democratic Party.

Under this worldview, national conflicts are rarely examined on their own historical terms. Instead, they are inserted into a larger story about colonialism, capitalism, racial hierarchy, and Western domination. Israel is reduced to an outpost of Western imperialism, and “Palestine” becomes the symbolic representative of everyone supposedly “oppressed” by the system.

And once one accepts this framework abroad, it becomes remarkably easy to apply it at home.

If Israel represents settler colonialism, America can be condemned through the same lens. If Israeli soldiers represent occupation, American police and immigration agents can be portrayed as instruments of an analogous system. If wealth is understood principally as the product of exploitation, redistribution becomes a moral obligation rather than an economic proposition to be evaluated on its merits. And if established institutions are inherently “oppressive,” replacing the people who control them becomes an act of “liberation.”

This is how an argument ostensibly about “Palestine” can become an argument about who should control America’s wealth, institutions, and government. It is also how “Palestine” becomes a weapon in the Democratic Party’s internal struggle for power. Defeating a “pro-Israel” (really, a pro-Western) Democratic incumbent can therefore be presented as simultaneously defeating the donor class, confronting American imperialism, and advancing social justice. One electoral victory becomes a triumph over multiple supposed systems of “oppression.”

There is no need to persuade voters that a longstanding incumbent has failed on housing, healthcare, or education if that incumbent can instead be portrayed as “supporting Israel genocide.” It is a shortcut to moral disqualification. Nobody has explained the underlying strategy more clearly than Aber Kawas, the newly elected Palestinian-American state senator from New York.

After winning her Democratic primary in June, Kawas openly discussed how “Palestine” was being used to redefine progressive regressive politics. She argued that politicians who champion affordability or oppose immigration enforcement must also speak out about “Palestine” to demonstrate ideological consistency. A politician can support universal healthcare, higher taxes on wealthy Americans, workers’ rights, affordable housing, and virtually every other major liberal policy.

But if that politician supports Israel’s existence as a Jewish state and rejects the movement’s characterization of Israel as inherently “oppressive,” their liberal credentials can suddenly become suspect. That is not ordinary foreign-policy debate. It is an attempt to redefine the ideological boundaries of an American political movement. And once those boundaries are established, enforcing them becomes a powerful instrument of political control.

This is how relatively small but highly organized ideological factions can transform much larger political parties. They need not immediately convince every voter. They need only establish the rules by which politicians, donors, activists, and institutions are judged.

This is why Americans should be careful not to confuse the popularity of a political cause with the seriousness of the movement advocating it. For all their grandstanding about Palestinian “liberation,” what are these politicians actually doing to improve Palestinians’ lives?

Sanctioning Israel, demanding arms embargoes, berating AIPAC, threatening to arrest Benjamin Netanyahu, and calling for an end to American military aid might generate applause at campaign rallies, but none of it constitutes a serious plan for Palestinian prosperity, security, or self-government.

You know what would actually make a difference? Removing Hamas from power in Gaza, holding Mahmoud Abbas and his inner circle accountable for corruption and self-enrichment, building functioning Palestinian institutions, and creating an economy that offers Palestinians something more promising than perpetual conflict.

And even then, why has this particular issue become such an obsession within the Democratic Party? The U.S. faces enormous challenges involving the strength of the dollar, global supply chains, access to critical minerals and rare earths, economic competitiveness, and the rise of China. Those issues have far greater implications for America’s long-term prosperity and global influence than the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Yet you would never know it from listening to the “Free Palestine” crowd, whose political priorities seem to revolve around condemning America’s allies, attacking its institutions, and championing causes thousands of miles from home. For all their talk about “liberation,” one question remains conspicuously unanswered: What, exactly, is their vision for making America better?

A serious movement should welcome those questions. A movement built around political performance prefers to condemn the people asking them.

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This is a guest essay by Nachum Kaplan, a longtime journalist and commentator who writes the newsletter, “Moral Clarity.”

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The machinery is formidable: antisemitism commissioners and special envoys, monitoring centers and research institutes, parliamentary inquiries and university task forces, Holocaust-education programs, interfaith initiatives and government strategies.

Conferences convene experts to discuss the findings of previous conferences. Working groups establish frameworks for future working groups. Organizations publish annual reports showing antisemitism has again reached alarming levels, whereupon governments announce initiatives ensuring that next year’s report has an even longer section describing everything being done about it.

The latest challenge to this elaborate edifice arrived on Tuesday, courtesy of the American electorate in the midterm elections.

In Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed won a U.S. Senate seat, becoming the first Muslim elected to the chamber. His victory came despite his blatant antisemitism and criticism of his response to an attack on a Michigan synagogue. A year earlier, Zohran Mamdani was elected mayor of New York City, home to the largest Jewish population outside Israel, despite being strongly anti-Zionist, which is a form of antisemitism.

The uncomfortable question is why antisemitic politicians are proving electorally popular. What happens when ideas the fighting antisemitism industry has spent decades trying to discredit cease to be politically disqualifying and become electorally advantageous? What, exactly, do we have to show for all this?

This is not an argument against organizations fighting antisemitism. Some perform indispensable work protecting synagogues, assisting victims, training police, documenting incidents, challenging discrimination, and maintaining expertise that governments lack.

In Britain, for example, the Community Security Trust (a charity that protects British Jews from antisemitism, hate crimes, and terrorism) does more than publish reports. It provides security, investigates incidents, supports victims, and works with police.

Yet useful work does not exempt institutions from scrutiny. If antisemitism is serious enough to command enormous amounts of communal money, government expenditure, philanthropic capital, and human effort, it is serious enough to ask whether it the methods used against it work.

The results hardly scream victory. Britain recorded 3,700 antisemitic incidents in 2025, the second-highest annual total ever reported to Community Security Trust. In the United States, the Anti-Defamation League recorded 6,274 incidents, down from 2024 but still far higher than a decade earlier, while assaults reached a record level. Data from France, Canada and Australia tell the same story.

Meanwhile, surveys show many Jews have changed their behavior because of fear, including avoiding wearing visible Jewish symbols or situations where their identity might make them vulnerable. If the purpose is to reduce antisemitism, these are awkward numbers.

Electoral evidence introduces another disturbing dimension: the failure to prevent antisemitic ideas, imagery, and rationalizations from becoming politically respectable.

In New York City, Zohran Mamdani entered City Hall after a campaign marked by controversy over his views on Israel. He resisted condemning the slogan “globalize the intifada.” He has questioned the legitimacy of Israel’s specifically Jewish national character. Once in office, he revoked his predecessor’s adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism. Mamdani even rejects a relationship between anti-Israel demonstrations and attacks on Jews in New York, a patently absurd position that only a nasty antisemitic piece of work would advance.

In September, he then unveiled a strategy against Jew-hatred, including security funding, education, and assistance for Jewish institutions. The irony is too exquisite for satire. New York City’s mayor was announcing an elaborate strategy against the very antisemitism his own rhetoric had helped stoke.

In Michigan, after the March attack on Temple Israel near Detroit, El-Sayed said “hurt people hurt people,” explaining the attack in terms of a wider cycle of violence. Critics heard it clearly for what it was: an attempt to contextualize, and potentially excuse, an assault directed against a Jewish religious institution.

His election cannot reasonably be attributed to antisemitism. Voters were preoccupied with inflation, the Iran war, and dissatisfaction with the Trump Administration. Nevertheless, his victory shows that despite decades of work, the fighting antisemitism industry has failed to make holding antisemitic views politically consequential.

Across the pond in Britain, several independents defeated Labour Party opponents in 2024 after campaigning against Israel’s war in Gaza. One was Shockat Adam, who unseated a senior Labour figure in Leicester South and declared, “This is for the people of Gaza” — despite having no power to do anything about Gaza.

In September 2025, Adam described the Israeli military’s “blood-soaked tentacles” extending toward Qatar during a parliamentary debate in a clear throwback to the old antisemitic visual vocabulary depicting Jewish power as a monstrous, grasping octopus.

Another Gaza-focused independent, Adnan Hussain, won Blackburn in 2024. The campaign revived attention to a 2014 speech in which he declared, “Now let’s make Israel burn.” Hussain said that the remarks had been made in intense emotion and that his speech, considered as a whole, conveyed a positive and inclusive message.

Britain has Holocaust education, parliamentary scrutiny, antisemitism monitors, government strategies, and specialist organizations. Yet politicians can enter Parliament on intensely anti-Israel platforms, using plainly antisemitic language and imagery.

Australia supplies another variation. Senator Fatima Payman was elected for the Australian Labor Party in 2022, broke with the party over Palestinian statehood, and established Australia’s Voice, seemingly to provide representation for Muslim views. She attracted intense criticism in 2024 for using the slogan “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free” — which anybody smarter than a jellyfish recognizes as a call for Israel’s destruction and the displacement, if not genocide, of its Jews.

The antisemitism industry has spent years warning about the dangers of political language that denies Jewish rights while presenting itself as emancipatory. Its warnings have not obviously been successful.

Antisemitism survives by adapting to the prevailing moral vocabulary. It has been religious, racial, nationalist, socialist, conspiratorial, and revolutionary. Today it adopts the language of human rights and anti-colonial liberation, presenting hostility toward Jewish national self-determination as a uniquely enlightened position.

That is where the professional apparatus should demonstrate clarity and persuasive effectiveness. Instead, much of its energy is spent debating terminology while political movements develop alternative vocabularies in which objections from Jewish institutions can themselves be dismissed as attempts to suppress debate. The results expose a neglected outcome measure: whether the wider society has absorbed enough historical and moral knowledge to recognize antisemitism when it arrives dressed as contemporary political virtue.

That question belongs in any assessment of the billions spent fighting Jew-hatred.

This does not mean that the organizations involved are useless. Antisemitism responds to wars, extremism, social media, economic upheaval, and forces beyond Jewish institutions’ control. Without their efforts, it is entirely possible that matters could be worse.

Yet “it would have been worse without us” cannot become an all-purpose institutional get-out-of-jail-free card. If that is the claim, demonstrate it. If an intervention protects Jews without reducing prejudice, say so. If a program is educational, define success. If it is intended to reduce incidents, show whether incidents fell among the populations reached. Any institution allowed to define every possible outcome as evidence of its own necessity has escaped accountability. That is how causes become industries.

An industry does not require cynical people sitting around hoping the problem continues. The people working in this field are sincere. Institutional incentives require no villains — just salaries, departments, reputations, budgets, and a desire to survive.

The problem is structural. Institutions have little incentive to announce that their methods do not work. Programs acquire constituencies. Conferences acquire sponsors. Departments acquire directors. Educational packages acquire trainers. Reports acquire annual release dates. Eventually, the machinery takes on a life of its own. Antisemitism then becomes simultaneously the enemy and the business model. That formulation will anger people, which is why it deserves examination.

The nonprofit and governmental ecosystem rewards activity more reliably than effectiveness. A foundation can count students attending a seminar. A government can count teachers completing training. An organization can count meetings with ministers, reports downloaded, social-media impressions, incidents documented, and people reached.

Measuring whether anybody became less antisemitic is much harder; so is determining whether a workshop altered behavior six months later, whether a Holocaust lesson changed attitudes rather than just transmitted historical knowledge, whether another ministerial declaration deterred anyone from harassing a Jew, or whether a university antisemitism strategy made Jewish students safer rather than simply proving that the university has an antisemitism strategy.

So the easiest things to count become the things institutions celebrate. Activity impersonates achievement.

This is obvious in official descriptions of progress. Governments announce strategies, coordinators, working groups and action points. These are administrative milestones that tell us nothing about whether people have become less hostile toward Jews. Security spending exposes the distinction even more starkly. Governments are spending more to protect Jewish schools, synagogues, and community centers. That money is justified. If Jews face elevated threats, protecting them is among the state’s most fundamental duties.

Yet there is something damning about measuring progress against antisemitism by the thickness of the security arrangements required for Jews to attend synagogue. A guard outside a Jewish school may be highly effective while representing a catastrophic social failure. The security cameras can work perfectly. The barrier can stop the vehicle. The police officer can deter the attacker. Society has become better at protecting Jews, not necessarily less antisemitic.

Much of what passes for combating antisemitism is managing it. One branch documents it, another teaches about it, another secures buildings, another advises government, another supports victims and another defines it. All may be necessary; none should be confused automatically with reducing the underlying phenomenon.

Education deserves especially close scrutiny. Holocaust education has expanded across the West as antisemitism has returned in new ideological forms. Britain has an extensive Holocaust-education infrastructure, yet its Jewish population continues to face extraordinary hostility. This suggests that teaching people about Auschwitz and inoculating them against contemporary Jew-hatred are different tasks.

Students can know Nazis were evil while believing Jews possess sinister political power. They can condemn racial antisemitism while adopting political forms of demonization they regard as virtuous. They can absorb the lesson that genocide is evil without learning how conspiratorial thinking, scapegoating, and collective blame work.

Holocaust education is often most comfortable when antisemitism is presented as a historical pathology committed by recognizably monstrous people in black-and-white photographs. The harder antisemitism is the version that believes itself righteous. How much education addresses that problem? More importantly, how much of it is tested?

Any pharmaceutical company announcing that its medicine had been administered to millions while the disease continued spreading would eventually be asked for clinical outcomes. Nobody would be satisfied by hearing how many brochures had been distributed. Jewish organizations should demand the same discipline of themselves.

That means being willing to discover that cherished programs achieve little, comparing interventions rather than assuming all awareness is useful, and distinguishing between committed antisemites, persuadable people, institutional leaders, and ordinary citizens who know almost nothing about Jews. Those are not the same audiences, so it should not be a given that they require the same remedy.

Jewish organizations should welcome scrutiny if it brings about better results. If a program works, prove it and expand it. If policing reduces repeat offending, demonstrate it. If educational interventions shift attitudes durably, replicate them. Compare university policies where Jewish students feel safe identifying openly with those where conditions deteriorated. If social media campaigns produce only satisfying engagement among people already onside, admit that too.

None of this will eradicate antisemitism. The perfect seminar will not defeat a hatred that has survived Christianity, Islam, nationalism, communism, fascism, capitalism, monarchy, democracy, prosperity, depression, Jewish weakness, and Jewish sovereignty.

Ironically, many organizations monitoring antisemitism already have the machinery required for such an audit. They already collect data about the problem. They should turn that apparatus inward. Institutions prefer auditing antisemitism to auditing themselves. One produces urgency, funding, and moral authority. The other may discover that a beloved initiative has underperformed.

Antisemitism is too serious to become a permanent professional ecosystem whose principal metric of success is how much everyone is doing to fight it. If statistics worsen as the apparatus grows and threatening rhetoric becomes politically ordinary, the answer cannot forever be another summit, coordinator, glossy strategy, or declaration that this time society really means it.

Sooner or later, somebody has to ask: Is it actually working?

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This is a guest essay by Bob Goldberg, who writes the newsletter, “The New Zionist Times.”

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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Michigan’s U.S. Senator-elect Abdul El-Sayed says he has no ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, and he has disavowed it sort of and after the fact.

Very well.

Set the words aside and look at who writes the checks, who hosts the speeches, and who endorsed his campaign. The answer is a three-decade institutional project, and it did not begin with modern “progressive” activism.

It began in October 1993, in a Philadelphia Courtyard Marriott. The FBI had the room wired. Gathered there were senior members of the Muslim Brotherhood’s “Palestine Committee,” and they faced a problem: The Oslo Accords1 threatened to marginalize Hamas. Their solution was not to abandon the mission but to sanitize it. According to the transcripts, the organizers discussed, with striking candor, how to conceal their allegiance, adopt the vocabulary of American civil rights, and build new public-advocacy fronts that could pass in the American mainstream.

The people in that room understood perfectly well that a message carried by a respectable messenger travels farther than one carried by a known one.

At the center of that ecosystem stood the Islamic Association for Palestine. A future Hamas political bureau chief, Khaled Meshal, directed it, and Mousa Abu Marzook financed it. Through the 1980s and early 1990s, it served as Hamas’ mouthpiece in North America: distributing its communiqués, promoting its charter, circulating tapes celebrating suicide bombings.

Then came the rebranding. Within months of the Philadelphia meeting, the Islamic Association for Palestine’s president, Omar Ahmad, and its public relations director, Nihad Awad, helped found the Council on American-Islamic Relations. A decade later, a federal court entered a $156 million judgment against the Islamic Association for Palestine for its civil liability in the Hamas murder of an American teenager, David Boim.

The Islamic Association for Palestine closed its doors. The Boim family’s lawyers allege that it did not go out of business so much as change its name, and that the old organization’s people, conferences, and messaging reappeared as American Muslims for Palestine, which denies it. A jury will decide in February.

Now fast-forward to the present. That network has mobilized behind a viable candidate for the United States Senate.

Follow the money, as the saying goes. A Fox News Digital review of campaign-finance records found that El-Sayed’s campaign took in more than $115,000 from at least 41 current or former employees and leaders of the Council on American–Islamic Relations. These were individual contributions, not checks from the Council itself, and that distinction matters legally. Politically, 41 associated donors make a constituency. You do not need a conspiracy board and red string. A spreadsheet will do.

The outside money is larger still. His father-in-law, Tayeb Jukaku, gave $300,000 to Fighting for Michigan PAC, the super political action committee supporting El-Sayed, making him its largest individual donor, according to the Washington Free Beacon. Jukaku once served as president of the Council on American–Islamic Relations’ Michigan branch and sat on the founding committee of the Islamic Society of North America.

When Americans for Justice in Palestine Action, which grew out of the American Muslims for Palestine ecosystem, endorsed El-Sayed, he said he was “deeply grateful.” At the Islamic Society of North America’s September convention in Detroit, his campaign was reportedly given an exhibitor booth to hand out political literature to thousands of attendees.

Then there is Life for Relief and Development, a Michigan charity. El-Sayed’s father, Mohammed El-Sayed, sits on its board, and reporting indicates Jukaku recently did too. Its chief executive, Hany Saqr, and other board members have given to the campaign. In government exhibits from the Holy Land Foundation prosecution (a U.S. terrorism-financing scheme attributed to Hamas)2, Saqr appears in a historical directory of American Muslim Brotherhood figures.

The charity has its own federal record. In 2015, it agreed to pay $780,000 to settle potential civil liability with the Treasury Department for apparent violations of Iraq sanctions. Treasury identified $236,000 in transfers routed through Jordan and called the case egregious, noting that the charity’s president directed the transactions despite prior warnings.

$780,000 is a lot of money to settle a matter the campaign’s defenders consider irrelevant. And two outside researchers go further. A 2019 Meir Amit Center investigation reproduced photographs of Life for Relief and Development-branded supplies distributed in Gaza through a group whose leadership it linked to the Popular Resistance Committees, and a November 2023 Middle East Forum investigation documented Life for Relief and Development funding directed to the Hamas-associated Unlimited Friends Association.

Then there is El-Sayed’s family, which demands precision, so let us be precise.

His birth mother, Fatten Fathy Elkomy, worked for the Missouri-based Islamic American Relief Agency from 1999 to at least 2004. In October 2004, the Treasury designated the Islamic American Relief Agency’s worldwide network for supporting terrorism, alleging it funneled money to Hamas.

Government exhibits show Elkomy handled orphan-support correspondence, including a December 2000 request for $24,607.34 for the Islamic American Relief Agency’s Iraq office. This paper trail proves no criminal wrongdoing, and a transfer to Iraq is not a payment to Hamas. It does, however, place his family within an organization under federal scrutiny.

His half-sister, Eman Abdelhadi, has written about their mother’s activism in the Muslim Brotherhood while in college in Egypt. When asked on the TV show “Meet the Press” whether he or his family had any ties to the Brotherhood, El-Sayed answered flatly, “No.” Later, he told NBC he had never discussed the subject with his mother and that she had not raised him; his parents divorced when he was 3, and his father and stepmother raised him. “I never discussed it with my mother” and “my family has no ties” are two different answers.

A child does not inherit culpability. An adult candidate answers for his own paper trail. On November 25, 2012, three days after Egypt’s Brotherhood president, Mohamed Morsi, issued a constitutional declaration placing his decrees beyond judicial review, the Cairo daily newspaper Al-Ahram published a public statement signed by 46 Egyptian community leaders in the United States. The statement backed Morsi’s power grab and urged him to “purge the media and the police as quickly as possible.” The 33rd signature reads “Dr. Abdul Rahman El-Sayed” of New York, where the future Senator-elect was then at Columbia University.

And there are the allies whose records require no excursion into Egyptian history. Amani Barakat, chair of the anti-Zionist group Al-Awda, gave El-Sayed $7,000. On October 7, 2023, she shared a video of the Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh justifying the atrocities, while her organization issued statements saluting the “Palestinian resistance.”

El-Sayed’s campaign later directed at least $40,000 in consulting fees to a firm co-founded by her son, Jamal Barakat. And weeks after the massacre, at an American Muslims for Palestine convention, the Council on American-Islamic Relations executive director, Nihad Awad, said he was “happy to see people breaking the siege” on October 7th. Mr. Awad, as it happens, appears among the donors.

Pressed on these matters, El-Sayed has likened the scrutiny to the anti-Catholic prejudice John F. Kennedy faced in 1960. The comparison falls apart under the slightest scrutiny.

Kennedy was not embracing the endorsement of a political arm of an organization accused in federal court of succeeding a Hamas-linked group. He was not paying consulting fees to vendors tied to Hamas apologists, nor raising tens of thousands of dollars from leaders of organizations descended from a group founded under a Hamas leader’s direction. Kennedy was asked whom he would obey. El-Sayed is being asked whom he chooses to keep close.

A candidate for national office should be able to say what conduct disqualifies a person or an organization from his political circle. Celebrating the massacre of October 7th would seem a natural place to begin. The standard need not be demanding: Try not to sound pleased about the day of a massacre. It ought to be manageable.

Every candidate builds a coalition, and every coalition exacts its price. Voters are entitled to examine the network that supplies the checks, the vendors, the institutional endorsements and the surrogate megaphones before they decide whether to send that coalition’s candidate to the United States Senate.

El-Sayed has disavowed the Muslim Brotherhood in words. Words are cheap. Now he must account for the relationships. And so must his supporters, particularly those who are Jewish.

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This is a guest essay by Vanessa Berg, who writes about Judaism and Israel.

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Apparently, when an American political party loses an American election, there is still a way to blame Israel.

Just ask U.S. Vice President JD Vance.

On Tuesday, Republicans suffered a devastating defeat in the U.S. midterm elections, losing control of both the House of Representatives and the Senate. Democrats made historic gains, including in states and districts that Donald Trump carried comfortably just two years earlier.

Naturally, the following day, Vance found a way to bring Israel into the conversation.

In a lengthy post on X, the vice president declared: “The reason we lost is the war.”

How convenient.

By elevating America’s relationship with the Jewish state into one of the defining explanations for the election results, he reinforced an increasingly fashionable narrative: America’s problems are somehow tied to its relationship with Israel, and distancing itself from the Jewish state is part of the solution.

This is hardly the first time Jews have been made convenient explanations for problems that are considerably more complicated than their accusers care to acknowledge.

Throughout history, we have been blamed for economic crises, military defeats, political instability, social unrest, and just about every other misfortune imaginable. Different centuries, different countries, different circumstances, but a remarkably familiar habit of reducing complex failures to a Jewish problem. And we do not even have to look very far back to find another example.

Remember the 2024 U.S. presidential election?

When Donald Trump defeated Kamala Harris, countless commentators, activists, and Democratic Party figures pointed to the Biden Administration’s support for Israel following the Hamas attacks of October 7th as one of the reasons Democrats lost the White House. The main argument was that Biden’s so-called “support” for Israel’s military campaign in Gaza had cost Democrats the support of young voters and so-called “progressives.”

Even if the war in Gaza (unquestionably provoked by Hamas, of course) did influence some voters, there is an enormous difference between acknowledging that a foreign policy issue affected certain voters and suggesting that it explains a nationwide electoral defeat.

Americans were frustrated with inflation, immigration, the cost of living, and the direction of their country. Biden’s age had become a major political liability, forcing Democrats into an extraordinarily late change of presidential candidate. Harris struggled to campaign effectively. Trump made gains with multiple demographic groups. The Democrats had a whole collection of problems, all of which had absolutely nothing to do with Israel.

Yet somehow, Israel became one of the explanations for why Democrats lost. And now, just two years later, Republicans suffer a major electoral defeat, and the vice president of the United States is pointing to America’s relationship with Israel as a core reason.

In 2024, Democrats supposedly lost because their administration was too supportive of Israel. In 2026, Republicans supposedly lost because their administration was too supportive of Israel. Two different political parties, two different elections, two different sets of circumstances, but somehow the same Jewish state keeps finding its way into the explanation.

Apparently, Israel is responsible for American electoral defeats regardless of which party suffers them.

The willingness to elevate Israel into an explanation for nearly every political disappointment should raise some uncomfortable questions.

Why are American politicians so quick to look thousands of miles away when searching for explanations for their own failures? Why is the American relationship with Israel so frequently treated as a political liability, rather than one of countless foreign policy relationships that American governments must manage? And why does the Jewish state keep becoming a convenient subject of debate whenever an American political party needs to explain why voters rejected it?

Maybe the problem isn’t Israel. Maybe the problem is that American politicians find it considerably easier to blame Israel than to take responsibility for their own decisions.

Now, to be fair, Americans have every right to question their country’s foreign policy. But there is something particularly troubling about the speed with which Israel becomes part of the explanation for an American political failure, especially when the people offering that explanation have their own responsibilities to account for. And JD Vance has plenty.

For starters, let’s examine the actual election.

According to the Associated Press’s voter research, Americans were deeply frustrated with inflation, the cost of living, the direction of the country, and Trump’s performance as president. Many were concerned about corruption and the administration’s priorities. They were dissatisfied with their government, their economic circumstances, and the Republican Party’s leadership. In other words, Americans were upset about American problems.

The war with Iran certainly contributed to that frustration, particularly through rising energy prices and economic uncertainty. But to reduce a historic electoral defeat to the war, and then include Israel among the principal explanations, is a remarkable oversimplification.

Did Republicans lose because Americans suddenly decided their relationship with Israel needed to change? Or did they lose because millions of voters were dissatisfied with the people running their country? There is a rather significant difference. And that brings us to the war with Iran itself, because Vance seems remarkably eager to discuss its political consequences without fully accounting for his own involvement.

Before the United States and Israel launched their military campaign against Iran on February 28th, Vance reportedly opposed the operation privately. He had long positioned himself as a skeptic of American military intervention abroad, and his disagreements with Trump over Iran were made public just days into the war. To his credit, both he and Trump made campaign promises to refrain from starting any new wars.

There is nothing inherently wrong with that. A vice president should be willing to challenge a president privately, particularly when the stakes involve American lives and a potential regional war.

But once the administration chose its course, Vance was no longer simply an outside commentator expressing philosophical reservations. He was the vice president of the United States, a senior member of the administration responsible for executing its policies and helping achieve its objectives. And when Trump subsequently entrusted him with negotiating an end to the conflict, Vance became directly involved in determining its outcome.

The United States and Iran reached a ceasefire in April and signed a memorandum of understanding in June intended to end the fighting and establish a broader settlement. That arrangement subsequently collapsed. By September, the two countries were again exchanging limited military strikes.

So perhaps the vice president should answer a few questions of his own. If ending the war was so important, why did the diplomatic arrangement fail? If diplomacy was the solution, why did negotiations not produce a durable agreement? And if Vance was responsible for helping negotiate peace, why should he be exempt from responsibility when that peace proved elusive?

Instead, Vance praised conservative television personality Rachel Campos-Duffy, who had urged the administration to pursue a diplomatic resolution rather than further military confrontation. “It turns out her political advice was sound,” he wrote.

Really?

Diplomacy is always preferable when it can achieve the desired outcome. But diplomacy is a means to an end, not an end in itself. Negotiating with a regime does not automatically make that regime more trustworthy, nor does signing an agreement guarantee that the underlying threat has disappeared.

The West has been negotiating with Iran over its nuclear ambitions for more than two decades. The 2015 nuclear agreement imposed restrictions on Iran’s nuclear activities, but it did not resolve the broader conflict over Tehran’s missile program, regional aggression, or long-term nuclear ambitions. The United States subsequently withdrew from the agreement in 2018, and the diplomatic framework eventually unraveled.

The Iranian regime is not a normal government with ordinary geopolitical disagreements. It is a revolutionary Islamist regime that has spent decades supporting militant organizations across the Middle East, threatening its neighbors, repressing its own population, and challenging American interests. And this is precisely why Vance’s approach deserves greater scrutiny.

It is entirely possible that a more decisive American military strategy earlier in the conflict could have altered Tehran’s calculations and brought the fighting to an end sooner. It is also possible that further escalation would have created additional risks. Nobody can know with certainty which course would have produced the better outcome.

But the administration’s internal divisions, led by Vance, presented an obvious strategic concern: When an adversary sees senior American officials divided over the desirability of a war, it has reason to question Washington’s willingness to sustain that war. Why make painful concessions today if political pressure might produce a more favorable outcome tomorrow?

I don’t know about you, but it seems foolish to me to send mixed signals to an adversary whose survival and negotiating strategy depend, in large part, on outlasting its opponents.

The irony is that Vance now treats the war’s duration as evidence that those favoring military pressure were wrong, without seriously considering whether the absence of a unified and credible strategy helped produce the very stalemate he condemns.

Perhaps the problem was not simply that America went to war. Perhaps the problem was that America failed to establish a coherent strategy for winning the war, ending it, and ensuring the Iranian regime could not simply survive. And Vance, as vice president and a central figure in the negotiations, cannot pretend he had nothing to do with that.

Then there is his increasingly peculiar rhetoric toward Israel.

In July, during an appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast, Vance accused elements of the Israeli government of attempting to manipulate American public opinion to prolong the war with Iran. He said there were people within Israel’s political system who were trying to change American public opinion to keep the war going indefinitely. That is a serious accusation, and any specific allegations of covert or improper influence deserve scrutiny.

But foreign governments attempt to shape American policy and public opinion all the time. It is hardly a uniquely Israeli phenomenon. According to a 2025 report by the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, Qatar had spent nearly $250 million on American lobbying and public relations firms registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act since Trump’s first election in 2016. That is an extraordinary investment in American political influence by a tiny country in the Persian Gulf.

Qatar has also cultivated extensive relationships with American political figures, universities, think tanks, and other influential institutions. Yet its activities rarely inspire the same sweeping arguments about whether America’s entire relationship with the country needs to change.

Interestingly, Vance himself acknowledged Qatar’s influence efforts during the Rogan interview. He said he was not particularly bothered by foreign governments attempting to influence Washington, including Qatar, because countries naturally pursue their interests. Fair enough.

But why, then, has Israeli influence become such a recurring theme in his public commentary? Why does Israel receive such particular scrutiny when America’s relationships with numerous other countries involve competing interests, lobbying, diplomatic pressure, and attempts to shape public opinion?

There is a legitimate discussion to be had about foreign influence in American politics. There is also a legitimate discussion to be had about the proper boundaries of the U.S.-Israel relationship. But those discussions should be conducted consistently, not selectively.

In September, Vance declared that Washington could not allow its Middle Eastern foreign policy to become “subservient” to Israel. What an extraordinary choice of words. The United States is the most powerful country in the world. It possesses the world’s most formidable military, an enormous diplomatic apparatus, and the ability to make decisions that affect virtually every country on Earth. It is not subservient to Israel.

American presidents have disagreed with Israeli prime ministers for decades. Washington has pressured Israel, restricted certain policies, pursued diplomatic initiatives opposed by Israeli governments, and repeatedly made decisions based on its own assessment of American interests. The idea that the United States needs JD Vance to liberate it from Israeli control is not serious foreign policy analysis. It is political theater.

And it ignores something rather important: American and Israeli interests frequently overlap. Preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon is not merely an Israeli objective. It is an American objective, a Western objective, and an objective shared by numerous countries throughout the Middle East that have their own reasons to fear Iranian power.

Israel is not the reason Iran threatens American interests. Israel is one of the countries most directly threatened by a regime whose ambitions extend considerably beyond the Jewish state.

Of course, America should put its own interests first. Every government should. But when two countries share important interests, cooperation is not subservience. It is common sense. And saying “America First” does not magically make every policy that benefits Israel contrary to American interests.

Which raises another question: Why is Vance so determined to distinguish his approach toward Israel from Trump’s?

Just last month, Trump publicly endorsed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ahead of Israel’s national election. Vance notably declined to follow his lead, insisting that he did not want to involve himself in Israeli politics. That would be a perfectly reasonable position, except that Vance had previously traveled to Hungary to support Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s reelection campaign. Apparently, involving himself in another country’s elections is objectionable only under certain circumstances.

There is a more obvious explanation for Vance’s increasingly independent posture: the 2028 presidential election. Vance is widely considered a leading contender for the Republican presidential nomination. He has spent years cultivating his standing within the America First movement, including among voters deeply skeptical of foreign military commitments and increasingly critical of Israel. His political incentives are not difficult to understand.

Distancing himself from the Iran war allows him to appeal to voters who opposed it. Questioning America’s relationship with Israel allows him to distinguish himself from Trump’s traditionally strong support for the Jewish state. And presenting himself as the voice of restraint allows him to claim credit for opposing decisions whose consequences he now condemns.

The timing of his comments, the selectivity of his criticism, and his eagerness to separate himself from the Trump Administration’s issues all raise legitimate questions about what is driving his public posture. Is JD Vance explaining what happened in the 2026 elections, or positioning himself for the 2028 election? Because those are two very different exercises.

And that is the most revealing part of this entire episode.

Vance wants Americans to examine the consequences of the Iran war, but not necessarily his responsibility for the administration’s efforts to end it. He wants Americans to question their relationship with Israel, but not necessarily their relationships with other countries that influence Washington. He wants Americans to put their own interests first, but seems remarkably comfortable presenting himself as the politician best suited to define those interests. All while occupying one of the two most powerful offices in the American government.

American voters are entitled to demand accountability from their leaders. They are entitled to question the costs of war, the consequences of foreign policy, and whether their government has delivered on its promises. But accountability must begin with the people actually governing America.

JD Vance is not an independent political analyst observing the Trump Administration from a safe distance. He is not an opposition politician whose warnings went unheeded while someone else governed. He is the vice president of the United States, a central participant in the very administration whose failures he now describes. He helped shape its policies. He participated in its diplomacy. He carries responsibility for its decisions and their consequences.

And if American voters are unhappy with the direction of their country, the vice president should perhaps spend less time explaining how America’s relationship with Israel contributed to the problem and more time examining his own administration’s performance.

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This is a guest essay by Chico Muya, a writer, political communicator, and YouTuber.

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The Left has opened the door to deep antisemitism, Islamism and support for terrorism in our politics and societies, all under the banner of “pro-Palestine.”

But a story that recently emerged from Germany reveals something even more disturbing: what happens when the very politicians who have embraced these movements become afraid of the people operating within them. And the only reason we know about it is because of an extraordinary mistake.

Elif Eralp is a politician in Die Linke, a radical Far-Left party in Germany. As of this writing, she’s seeking to become the mayor of Berlin. She has accidentally revealed that she’s terrified of extremist pro-Palestinian activists operating in her party’s political circles, including people with alleged links to Hamas.

Here’s what happened. In late October, Eralp gave an interview to the German magazine Der Spiegel, during which she was questioned about repeated incidents of antisemitism within her party — a problem that has become increasingly visible in other Left-wing political movements across the West. She claimed not to know the true extent of the problem but acknowledged that some members of her party were acting on behalf of Palestinians.

The journalist then asked whether she was referring to Ibrahim Ibrahim.

For context, Ibrahim is an extremist pro-Palestinian activist associated with a network of Hamas and Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine supporters. He has publicly supported the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, another Palestinian terrorist organisation, and reportedly praised Yahya Sinwar, the mastermind behind October 7th, as a martyr and a hero.

Although Ibrahim is not himself a member of Die Linke, he has operated within political circles connected to the party, including attending one of its election celebrations in Berlin. Eralp confirmed that he was one of the people she was referring to.

But here’s where things get crazy. After the interview, Der Spiegel sent Eralp the transcript for approval. Her team deleted the entire section mentioning Ibrahim. When they returned the document, they made one enormous mistake: They forgot to remove the internal comments.

And what those comments revealed was extraordinary. In them, Eralp admitted that both she and her husband were afraid of these people. She explained that she could not risk her family’s safety by publicly naming them, even though some members of her own party were associating with them. She was so concerned, in fact, that she even asked whether the entire interview could be cancelled.

And here’s where it gets even more disturbing. Eralp compared her fears to dealing with organised crime, explaining that Berlin’s criminal police had previously advised her against publicly naming certain individuals. But now, she said, she was dealing with people connected to Hamas.

Here is a European politician, someone who wants to govern the German capital, privately admitting that she is afraid to even name extremist activists operating in her own party’s political circles. Not merely because of political embarrassment, but because she fears for the safety of her family. This is the insanity of what people on the radical Left have allowed into their own political circles. They’ve become victims of their own ideology.

I would be astonished if this were an isolated case — because this is no longer just about demonstrations in the streets. These people are pushing for policies that will change our societies, and it’s becoming increasingly clear to me that some of the politicians aligning themselves with these movements are compromised by their own political alliances. They’ve embraced a movement containing elements that are deeply hostile to the West and its interests.

How is someone supposed to lead the capital of a major European country when she is afraid to publicly name an extremist activist associated with her own political circles?

Following these revelations, Eralp publicly insisted that she would stand against organised crime and terrorism and would not allow anyone to intimidate her. But how much confidence are we supposed to place in those assurances when, behind closed doors, she was so afraid of naming one extremist activist that she wanted the entire interview cancelled?

And this concern extends far beyond Germany. Across the Western world, the “Palestinian cause” has become central to the identity of significant parts of the radical Left. In America, the Democratic Socialists of America and other similar movements have made opposition to Israel a defining political issue, while the wider Democratic Party is facing growing internal divisions over Israel and Gaza.

In some of these circles, the distinction between opposing Israeli government policies and hostility toward Zionism itself has all but disappeared. Jews are often told that the problem is not Jews, but “Zionists.”

Yet for many Jews, Zionism simply means believing that Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish state. When Jewish identity or participation in political movements becomes conditional on rejecting that belief, we are dealing with something far more troubling than ordinary criticism of Israeli policy.

Of course, the radical Left views the world through a simple division: “oppressed” and “oppressor.” People are placed into these categories according to race, ethnicity, sex, historical grievances, and perceived power. Within this framework, the more “oppressed” someone is believed to be, the less responsibility they are expected to bear for their actions in resisting that “oppression.”

And in the pro-Palestinian movement, we’ve found what might be the ultimate expression of this worldview. The Palestinians have become the undisputed winners of the oppression Olympics. Their cause has acquired an almost sacred status in certain political circles. Anyone who stands with them can claim some of that moral authority, depending on their activism, their associations or their proximity to Palestinians themselves.

The result is that behaviour which would normally be condemned can suddenly be explained away, minimised, or even celebrated. Once you’ve convinced yourself that you’re witnessing the greatest injustice on the planet, almost anything can be justified in the name of ending it. Accusations of genocide, apartheid, and ethnic cleansing have been turned up to a fever pitch. For many activists, this has become the defining moral struggle of our time, against which almost every other issue must be measured.

Israel, meanwhile, has become the embodiment of Western “oppression” in their eyes: a powerful, Western-aligned state standing against a supposedly powerless population. This combination has helped produce one of the most radicalised political movements in recent memory.

It’s why the movement can sometimes take on an almost cult-like energy, with people who would normally condemn terrorism finding themselves defending or rationalising atrocities when they’re committed in the name of Palestinian resistance. It’s also why politicians, celebrities, and organisations are willing to bend the knee.

Within this moral framework, the question of who deserves sympathy and who deserves condemnation has already been answered. The actions themselves become secondary. Consider how some activists responded to October 7th. Even as Hamas terrorists massacred civilians, there were people in the West describing the attacks as resistance or liberation. The supposed moral righteousness of the cause had become more important than the brutality of the methods used to advance it.

Many of these leftists, some of whom know very little about the history or complexity of the conflict, genuinely believed they were standing on the side of humanity. They threw their hearts and minds into the cause, convinced that they were defending the “oppressed” against the powerful. Instead, they’ve helped open the door to a corrosive Islamist ideology that threatens not only their own political movements, but the very societies they want to govern.

And this is what makes the story of Elif Eralp so frightening. Her political environment has embraced a movement in which some of the most extreme activists openly celebrate terrorist leaders. Yet she now privately acknowledges being afraid of people operating within that same environment.

Within the hierarchy of “oppression,” someone like Ibrahim Ibrahim occupies a position of considerable moral authority. His activism is associated with a cause that many on the radical Left regard as the ultimate struggle for liberation. Eralp, meanwhile, is a politician seeking power within a movement whose activist base includes people sympathetic to precisely these ideas.

Speaking out against their extremist rhetoric could carry serious political consequences, particularly if the audience she depends upon has come to regard such activists as representatives of a righteous cause. And on top of those political considerations, she is, in her own words, afraid for her safety.

Within this worldview, violence can become morally justified when committed by those considered “oppressed,” especially when it is framed as “resistance” against their “oppressors.”

But what happens when someone like Eralp suddenly finds herself on the wrong side of that equation? What happens when speaking out against the very people her political circles have embraced risks turning her into an enemy of their cause?

The threat of violence is no longer something she can simply dismiss, because the ideological framework that has excused it is already present in the political environment around her. And remember, we only discovered her private fears because someone accidentally sent the wrong document to a newspaper. Which raises a much bigger question: How widespread is this?

How many other politicians among the West’s Left-wing parties are privately afraid of the extremist activists operating within or alongside their political movements? How many feel unable to confront them because doing so could cost them their political careers? And how many are not afraid at all, because they genuinely share the radical beliefs of the people they’re associating with?

The problem isn’t simply that extremist individuals attend demonstrations or make inflammatory speeches. It’s what happens when their ideology begins to influence established political movements, when politicians become dependent upon their support, and when policies affecting millions of people are shaped by these relationships. The consequences will not be confined to the radical Left. They will affect the societies these people aspire to govern.

And this is why the whole “pro-Palestine” movement has become a Trojan horse. Under the language of human rights and liberation, it has created political space for Islamist extremism, antisemitism, and the glorification of terrorism. The very people who helped legitimise these forces may now find themselves unable to confront them.

To acknowledge the danger would mean questioning their ideological worldview, confronting the choices they’ve made, and admitting that people they embraced in the name of humanity may actually represent a threat to the societies they claim to defend. For some, that is an admission they are unwilling to make. And so the warning signs are ignored, the extremists are excused, and the public is told there’s nothing to worry about.

In Berlin, one politician’s private fears became public only because of a mistake. I cannot help wondering how many more conversations like this are taking place behind closed doors, in political parties across the Western world.

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This is a guest essay by Michael Oren, former Israeli ambassador to the U.S. and founder of the Israel Advocacy Group.

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Contrary to the iconic Saul Steinberg map, published on The New Yorker’s cover in 1976, America does not end at the Hudson River.

“In fact,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu once told me, “America begins 70 miles west of New York and ends 70 miles east of Los Angeles.”

And in the middle of that vast expanse sits the verdant, generally prosperous, and usually stable state of Michigan.

“That’s why I wish again that I was in Michigan,” wrote the great American Jewish composer Irving Berlin back in 1914. One wonders if today, 112 years later, Berlin would express the same yearning. For it is in Michigan — improbably but plausibly — that the future of American Jewry will be decided.

It’s in Michigan that an amply documented antisemite was just elected to the U.S. Senate.

On paper, Abdul El-Sayed is the fulfillment of the American dream. Educated at Michigan University, Columbia University, and the University of Oxford, a former Rhodes Scholar with both an MD and a Ph.D., director of major Michigan health departments, charismatic and articulate. At 42, he seems bound for national prominence.

But El-Sayed, a protégée of Bernie Sanders and other Far-Left politicians, has espoused many of the positions familiar to followers of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and members of the Democratic Socialists of America. And born to Egyptian immigrant parents, El-Sayed was raised on a hatred of Israel so visceral it easily melds into antisemitism.

He is far from the first Democratic Party politician to call for the cessation of U.S. military aid to Israel, or to accuse the Jewish state of apartheid and genocide. “We want our taxes spent here, for schools here, and healthcare here, and infrastructure here. We don’t want our money sent to do apartheid, or genocide, or war,” he said during his victory speech last night to cheering supporters.

But El-Sayed is the first candidate for national office to justify an attempted mass murder of Jews.

On March 12th of this year, Lebanese-American Ayman Mohamad Ghazali drove a fuel- and fireworks-laden pickup truck into Temple Israel outside of Detroit. At the time, the synagogue was crowded with children and teachers. Fortunately, the truck became wedged in a hallway and Ghazali shot himself before the cargo could explode.

Yet rather than express relief for the many innocent lives saved or unequivocally condemn a flagrantly racist act of terrorism, El-Sayed noted that Ghazali had lost close family members in Israel’s battle with Hezbollah in Lebanon. “Hurt people hurt people,” the aspiring senator explained.

In June, federal prosecutors indicted 24-year-old Mariam Odeh and others for a campaign of intimidation, threats, and vandalism targeting University of Michigan officials and members of the Jewish community to press the university to divest from Israel. Odeh also worked for El-Sayed’s senatorial campaign.

More recently, an advertisement released by a pro-El-Sayed political organization shows a working-class couple unable to buy eggs and bananas for their children. The mother says, “We have to set that $7 aside for killing Palestinians.” The commercial not only accuses Israel of genocide, but of taking billions out of Americans’ pockets to pay for its universal healthcare. El-Sayed repeatedly refused to condemn it.

“The ad did not invent its argument,” said El-Sayed’s former Democratic Party challenger, Representative Haley Stevens. “It dramatized one Dr. El-Sayed has made in his own words throughout this campaign: that Israel is the reason Michigan cannot afford schools, healthcare, and childcare.”

He has since tried to walk back his comments about the Temple Israel attack and tried to disassociate himself from the antisemitic ad. He insists that he’s not Michigan’s Mamdani or a secret member of Democratic Socialists of America. He similarly distances himself from his family’s longstanding connections to the terrorist Muslim Brotherhood (more on this below), denounces antisemitism, and proclaims his commitment to protecting the state’s 129,000 Jews.

But no one doubts (nor does he deny) that his hatred of the homeland of half of the world’s Jews and sympathy for those sworn to destroy it remain undiminished.

“They try to call you hateful if you believe that Palestinian kids should get to grow up in the land of their forefathers without being murdered by our tax dollars,” he said during his victory speech.

Now that he has been elected, El-Sayed will not only vote against systems development and intelligence sharing with Israel, but also for sanctions against the Jewish state. He will favor boycotts and sanctions. No one doubts that El-Sayed’s election will not sound a dog whistle, but a clarion call, to Jew-haters nationwide.

Which brings me back to Michigan — not the land of the farms and streams longed for in the Berlin ballad, but the state that epitomizes midwestern America, a down-to-earth land of basically clear-sighted and tolerant people who have been traditionally welcoming to Jews.

Michigan is not New York, a politically raucous city filled with the disgruntled and indebted humanities majors who are just maddened enough to elect a Mamdani and other fanatics from the Democratic Socialists of America. Michigan is a bellwether, a standard-bearer, for much of America.

For American Jews, El-Sayed’s victory may well be a turning point from which there is no return. Jew-hatred has officially come to the Senate.

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This is a guest essay by Rachel Wahba, an Egyptian-Iraqi Jew born in India.

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From Jesus to bagels, from Einstein to Jonas Salk to Hollywood, we Jews have been fine with “cultural appropriation.”

The Yiddish of Ashkenazi Jews is now part of Americana: klutz, schmooze, oy vey, schlep, chutzpah, shlemiel, and shlimazel. If there were more Sephardic, Mizrahi, and Arab Jews like me in the United States, we’d have some doozies from Judeo-Arabic and Ladino, too.

But there is a line we have to draw. Our Holocaust, our genocide, and October 7th are not up for appropriation.

The cries that Israel is committing “genocide” the day after October 7th are not only twisted but pure appropriation of Jewish suffering and trauma.

Appropriation of our culture and religion has gone on for millennia, and it has been used against us. Take our Torah and rename it the Old Testament? Fine. But demanding that we give it up for a “New” Testament? Not fine. Take a cool Jewish rabbi from the Galilee, a Jew who kept Shabbat, turn his Passover seder into his Last Supper and his Jewishness into his death knell, and then blame the Jews? That lie was a terrible line to cross.

The Church pointed at us, Judean Jews living under Roman occupation, when the Romans had changed the name of our land to Syria-Palestina to distance us from our identity. We hardly had the power to conduct the cruel, Roman-style crucifixion of Jesus, who had become too popular among the Jews flocking to him, making the Romans uncomfortable.

Were Jews unhappy with Roman rule priming him for resistance against the Empire? I imagine this upstart rabbi was a political threat. We don’t know. What we do know is that Jews were in no position to crucify anyone.

But we paid for it. We paid for it terribly in the Spanish Inquisition. Even converting from Judaism to Catholicism did not save everyone from gruesome deaths and eventual expulsion.

We hid, and we ran when we could, from one country to another. The Land of Israel was no longer ours. After the Romans, the Ottoman Empire conquered the land and ignored it. Jews on every continent we wandered into prayed daily, facing Jerusalem, to return.

Expulsion after expulsion, from adopted homes in Christian and Muslim lands, under demeaning laws and normalized Jew hatred, we lived with the demand that we convert to what had been appropriated, or face pogroms and persecution.

I know this history in every cell of my body. I grew up politically powerless, a stateless Egyptian-Iraqi Jewish girl in a Catholic school in Japan.

The nuns of the Franciscan Missionaries of Mary taught us in every classroom that the Jews killed Christ, the Son of God. After I gave my oral book report on the Holocaust, they told us that Hitler would go to heaven “because he was a baptized Christian.”

Mother Roberts was clear: I, the intransigent Jew, would “never see the face of God.” She lectured us that Jews would continue to be persecuted with “more Holocausts until Jews accept Jesus Christ as (our) Lord and Savior.” Not one classmate spoke up. That was in seventh grade.

Earlier, in third grade, my teacher Mother Joan of Arc, lovingly took my hand in hers and placed me in front of the life-size statue of Jesus dying in torment on the cross. I still feel the pain. Who could not? But I knew Jesus was not my god.

“Look, Racheline,” she said. “See above his crown of thorns, it is written, ‘Jesus, King of the Jews.’ He was a Jew, just like you.” I looked at her warm eyes and asked, “But if he was a Jew, then why must I convert?” Everything in a missionary school is about conversion, and at the time I had no choice but to go to this school.

Islam did its own version. It took parts of our Torah into the Quran. It took Abraham, Moses, and Jerusalem. It built mosques over our holiest places and forbade us entry. It took our prophets and our stories. It decided that Jews had corrupted our own scriptures and that the real versions belonged to Islam.

How many “River to the Sea” marchers know that Jews lived in the Middle East and North Africa for centuries before Muhammad was even born? And how many know about our lives as despised second-class citizens (known in Arabic as dhimmis) for refusing to convert or accept Islam’s version of us?

My family, from a long line of Egyptian and Iraqi Jews whose ancestors were in those lands before Islam, lived that arrangement as despised “dirty” Jews. We were legally second-class citizens, forced to pay a special tax, tolerated when it was convenient, and punished with no recourse when it wasn’t.

We, the Jews of the Middle East and North Africa, lived precariously. Coexistence was a fantasy, and life was too frequently marred by horror. Both my parents’ native lands are Jew-free now. Ask why. Have you heard about the Farhud in 1941? The expulsions from Egypt in 1956?

Nearly a million Jews were pauperized and forced out of Arab lands within a generation in the 1950s. Our property was stolen, our nationalities and passports confiscated, and our communities of twenty-five hundred years erased. We were humiliated and told never to return.

Today a new museum has opened in Baghdad in what used to be a Jewish school. It houses everyday objects along with religious artifacts, appropriated when Iraq forced its Jewish population to leave with only one suitcase of clothing. Our belongings feed the curious. As author Dara Horn painted the picture for us in her book, “People Love Dead Jews,” Iraq is Jew-free.

Most of us Jews from what became Arab lands are now in Israel. Most of us had nowhere else open to us, even if what was open was cramped tent cities (known as maabarot in Hebrew), in the dirt-poor Israel of the 1950s.

The world ignored us. It ignored our ethnic cleansing all over the Arab world. No one asks, “Where are your Jews?” We survived the Holocaust, the pogroms, the Farhud, the terrible toll of war in 1948, then 1967, then 1973, and the slaughters of October 7th.

And now we are committing “genocide”? The charge is obscene.

The word genocide was coined by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jew whose dozens of family members were murdered in the Holocaust.

Now “genocide” gets shouted at us on campuses and spray-painted on synagogues. “Ethnic cleansing” is spouted by people who have never once heard the word Farhud, who never saw what my mother witnessed in Baghdad in 1941. I heard those blood-curdling screams through her memories, and through Granny’s stories of the rape, pillage, and slaughter.

Recently I saw Israeli journalist Haviv Rettig Gur in San Francisco. He said, “You know who Israeli Jews are? The Jews who didn’t get into America.” They are the Jews who survived the Holocaust and had nowhere to go; the Jews who survived pogroms in the Middle East and North Africa and had nowhere to go; the Jews who were kicked out or forced out of Arab lands in the 1950s and had nowhere to go. And by the way, Middle Eastern Jews (Mizrahim in Hebrew), make up more than half of Israel’s Jewish population.

Instead of shutting down the Qatar & Co. enterprise, the charismatic Islamists play the “genocide” game against us, appropriating our genocide. Figures like Zohran Mamdani and ridiculous ones like Greta Thunberg echo Islamist propaganda and claim Israel should not exist.

Wars are a hell no one should have to experience: no Israeli, no Gazan, no one. The Gaza war brought on accusations of genocide manufactured by Hamas. Hamas started a terrible war, and Hamas refuses to surrender. Hamas depends on as many of its own people dying as possible for its ultimate cause: to destroy Israel.

I grew up in postwar Japan. I met survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I saw their burns and disfigurement, the war-weary amputees, and the beggars and their children picking lice off their bodies on the streets. I saw a small bit of the hell that wars are. I remember hearing Japanese adults talk about the war and admit, “Hai, sensō maketa kara, ganbarō” (“Yes, we lost the war, now we courageously rebuild”). They surrendered. They rebuilt. They gave up war. Hamas does the opposite.

Genocide is the intent to destroy, to exterminate, a people. The word has a meaning, and that meaning matters precisely because it was built out of what happened to us. That Hamas wants every Jew in Israel slaughtered is genocide. Appropriating our history by claiming “genocide” while Hamas forces its own people to suffer horribly is its long game for getting rid of the Jewish state.

Genocide? What army bent on destroying a people warns them first? The IDF drops leaflets, sends text messages, and makes phone calls telling Gazans where it is about to strike so they can get out. It’s not rocket science. If Israelis wanted genocide, it would have happened.

On October 13, 2023, the IDF warned about 1.1 million people in northern Gaza to move south, out of harm’s way. Did Egypt open its doors? And who forced Gazan women, men, and children not to go anywhere? Who caged them in? Hamas. “There will be no ‘displacement,’” Hamas euphemistically, cruelly decreed. Hamas set up roadblocks on the main road south to stop people from escaping.

Hamas needs its people stuck where the bombs fall. Hamas needs children killed for world support. Hamas has told us it is willing to have as many of its own people killed as it takes to win world opinion, in order to annihilate the Jews and get rid of Israel.

Hamas proudly recorded the beheadings and rapes of October 7th on body cams for all to see — a barbaric attack on men, women, children, and babies. Yet instead of outrage and horror at Hamas, the mass “protests” against Israel’s supposed “genocide” began the very next day, October 8th.

The Hamas charter vows death to Israel, death to the Jew. They carry out the vow in their actions, on their body cams, in their every move. That is what intent to commit genocide looks like. They refuse coexistence. They want one state.

Israel has tried several times for a two-state solution. I shouldn’t have to repeat this, but it’s so easily “forgotten.” We want a country, no matter how small, so we will share, and we have partitioned. We tried to give up more and were met with resounding no’s each time. Under Islamic doctrine, once a land has been Islamized, as the Ottoman Empire did in the Land of Israel, it can never revert to its original owners.

Every version of Jew-hatred says the same thing: The Jew is the source of the world’s evil, and the world will be redeemed when the Jew is punished.

Two-thousand years ago, a Jew was hung on a cross so he could carry the sins of the world. Today it is Israel, the Jew among nations, carrying the sins of the world: all the colonialism, racism, every war and every injustice the West feels guilty about, all of it hung on one Jewish state the size of New Jersey.

The word genocide will not be appropriated to twist our suffering, our Holocaust, into ostracizing and killing Jews. Genocide will not be appropriated and handed back to us as an indictment. They don’t get to nail us to the cross again.

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On Tuesday morning, as Americans headed to the polls for their midterm elections, President Donald Trump made a massive announcement: The United States would stop providing nearly $4 billion in annual military aid to the Jewish state by the end of 2026.

For decades, such an announcement would have been treated as a diplomatic catastrophe. Israeli politicians would have rushed to Washington, American Jewish organizations would have mobilized, and commentators would have warned that the future of the Jewish state was suddenly in jeopardy.

But President Trump just did Israel an enormous favor.

Certainly, $4 billion is not an insignificant amount of money. American military assistance has been incredibly important to Israel’s security. And the United States and Israel should not become less friendly. But the end of American military aid could be one of the most important steps toward completing the promise of Israeli independence.

For nearly 80 years, the Jewish state has been building toward a moment when it could finally look the world’s greatest superpower in the eye and say something that Jews, for most of their history, were rarely in a position to say to anyone: Thank you. We can take care of ourselves.

Under the existing agreement, Israel receives approximately $3.8 billion annually, including $3.3 billion in Foreign Military Financing and $500 million for cooperative missile defense. The foreign military financing is overwhelmingly directed toward purchasing American-made military equipment. By 2028, the special provision allowing Israel to spend some of that financing on its own defense industry is scheduled to disappear entirely.

In other words, much of the money Americans supposedly “give” Israel is money Israel must spend in America.

It supports American manufacturers, American workers, American military production, and American technological capabilities. The United States also benefits from intelligence cooperation, joint research, access to Israeli innovation, and military technologies refined under conditions that American forces do not ordinarily experience.

There is Trophy, the Israeli-developed active protection system adopted by the U.S. Army for its Abrams tanks; or the Israeli expertise incorporated into the F-35’s advanced helmet-mounted display system.

The relationship has never been simply one country giving and another receiving. Both sides have gained enormously. And yet, every American election cycle, Israel finds itself portrayed as a helpless foreign dependent draining the American treasury.

That perception is not only misleading. It has become strategically and politically damaging.

Some Americans wonder why they should continue financing another country’s military. But Israelis should be asking an equally important question: What exactly are we sacrificing in exchange for that money?

Because the assistance has never been free.

When a country becomes accustomed to having another government finance a significant portion of its military procurement, the arrangement inevitably shapes its decisions. It influences which weapons it purchases, where those weapons are manufactured, which technologies receive investment, and how much of its defense infrastructure it can build at home.

The current agreement, negotiated under President Barack Obama in 2016, committed $38 billion over 10 years. It also accelerated the phasing out of Israel’s ability to spend American military financing on products manufactured in Israel.

Think about the implications. A country that has developed some of the most sophisticated military technology on Earth has been operating under a system that increasingly directs its military purchasing power toward foreign manufacturers rather than its own.

To be fair, American financing has also freed Israeli resources for indigenous research and development, helping Israel build capabilities that benefit both nations. But that advantage comes alongside a genuine cost: a procurement system that reinforces dependence on foreign production.

And manufacturing dependence is only part of the problem. Military assistance gives Washington considerable leverage over Israeli decision-making. A delayed shipment, a threatened restriction, or a disagreement over how Israel conducts a military operation can suddenly become a question of national security.

American presidents, both Democratic and Republican, have understandably used that leverage to advance American interests. They are elected to serve the United States, not Israel. But Israel’s leaders are elected to serve Israel. Those interests frequently overlap, but they are not identical. What Washington considers prudent may be dangerous from Jerusalem’s perspective. What Americans can afford to postpone for another six months may be something Israelis believe they must confront tomorrow.

Israel should listen carefully to its allies, especially the United States. But there is an enormous difference between listening to a friend and being dependent on that friend’s approval. A country responsible for the survival of its own people cannot afford to confuse the two.

To understand why this matters so much, we have to remember what Zionism was actually meant to accomplish.

For centuries, Jews lived at the mercy of rulers, governments, empires, and societies over which they had little control. Their security often depended on whether the people in power were friendly, indifferent, or hostile to them. Sometimes Jews prospered. Sometimes they enjoyed remarkable freedom. Sometimes they were welcomed, protected, and even celebrated. And sometimes everything changed.

The lesson of Jewish history is not that every non-Jewish government will betray us. It is that a people who cannot ultimately provide for their own security are always vulnerable to the decisions of others. That was one of Zionism’s most fundamental insights.

The Jewish People did not spend generations struggling to reestablish sovereignty in our ancestral homeland simply to replace dependence on European kings and foreign governments with dependence on American congressional appropriations. We wanted something far more meaningful than a powerful benefactor. We wanted the ability to determine our own future.

And remarkably, Israel’s history demonstrates that this was possible long before American military assistance became central to its defense establishment. In 1948, when the newly declared State of Israel faced invasion, the United States did not rush to supply it with advanced weapons. Washington maintained an arms embargo, and Israel had to find equipment wherever it could.

In the years that followed, France became one of Israel’s most important military suppliers. Then, just before the Six-Day War in 1967, French President Charles de Gaulle imposed an arms embargo of his own. Israel won that war anyway. And it is worth remembering that Israel’s greatest achievements did not come from the luxury of having every resource it needed. They came from a national determination to survive, regardless of whether the outside world was willing to help.

That determination helped produce an extraordinary military, a sophisticated intelligence community, a world-class technology sector, and one of the most innovative societies on Earth. Why should a country built on that spirit continue to organize so much of its national security around foreign assistance?

The Israel of 2026 is not the Israel of 1948.

In 1948, Israel was an impoverished newborn state absorbing Holocaust survivors and Jewish refugees from across the world, surrounded by enemies and desperately trying to acquire the basic tools of national survival.

Today, Israel is a country of more than 10 million people, with a highly developed economy, globally competitive technology companies, sophisticated universities, major financial institutions, and defense industries whose products are purchased around the world.

The Israeli economy is approaching $720 billion in 2026. The annual $3.8 billion assistance package represents only about half of one percent of that total, although it remains a meaningful sum within Israel’s defense budget.

More revealingly, Israel’s defense exports reached a record $19.2 billion in new agreements in 2025, nearly 30 percent higher than the previous year. The same country that American politicians routinely describe as a recipient of roughly $4 billion in military aid is signing almost five times that amount in annual defense export agreements.

Countries across Europe and Asia are purchasing Israeli missile defense systems, surveillance technology, radar, electronic warfare capabilities, and other advanced equipment because they recognize that Israel has developed technologies their own militaries need.

And beyond defense, American companies are investing staggering sums in Israeli innovation. Just this year, eight Israeli companies have been acquired for a combined $22 billion. In 2025, the combined value of several high-profile Israeli exits was $72 billion, including Google’s $29.5-billion acquisition of Wiz and Palo Alto Networks’ $25-billion acquisition of CyberArk.

An economy capable of producing that kind of value should have the confidence to rethink a military assistance arrangement designed for a much poorer and more vulnerable country. Israel is no longer merely a country that needs advanced military technology. It is one of the countries the world turns to for advanced military technology.

That is an extraordinary transformation, and Israel’s relationship with the United States should reflect it.

There is another reason why ending military aid should not be confused with abandoning the American-Israeli alliance: The United States has compelling reasons to maintain that alliance even without annual assistance.

Israel provides intelligence, technological innovation, military expertise, and a capable regional partner in one of the most strategically important parts of the world. The United States benefits from Israeli capabilities developed under the pressure of real-world threats. Israel benefits from American technology, military production, diplomatic cooperation, and access to the world’s largest economy.

Neither country needs to pretend that this relationship is a charitable enterprise. In fact, replacing military assistance with a more conventional commercial and strategic partnership could make the relationship healthier.

Israel can purchase American aircraft, ammunition, and other military equipment because those products serve its interests. American companies can purchase Israeli defense technology because those products serve theirs. Both governments can invest in joint research and development, cooperate on missile defense, share intelligence, and establish long-term industrial agreements.

The key is that each side should clearly understand what it contributes and what it receives.

Of course, paying for American weapons would not eliminate every form of dependence. Export approvals, production bottlenecks, and access to replacement parts would still matter. Israel will continuously need to develop domestic manufacturing, stockpiles, and alternative supply chains to achieve greater strategic autonomy. But those are arguments for a responsible transition, not permanent dependence.

An alliance becomes stronger when each country is respected for what it brings to the table, rather than defined by what one gives the other. The United States should want an Israel that is economically prosperous, militarily powerful, technologically advanced, and capable of defending itself. And Israel should want exactly the same thing.

For American Jews, there is another important benefit to ending the aid arrangement. They have watched Israel become a convenient political punching bag in debates that often have very little to do with Israel.

Whenever American politicians want to demonstrate their opposition to foreign spending, Israel’s aid package becomes an easy target. Whenever activists want to portray the United States as complicit in everything Israel does, the same $4 billion becomes their favorite talking point. And whenever conspiracy theorists want to claim that Jews somehow control American foreign policy, the aid package becomes their supposed evidence.

The fact that American interests benefit from the arrangement is rarely mentioned. Neither is the fact that much of the military financing is spent in the United States. Instead, the public is offered a deeply distorted image: The American taxpayer works, the Jewish state collects, and American politicians supposedly have little choice in the matter.

Ending the assistance would not end antisemitism. People determined to hate Jews have always found reasons, and they will undoubtedly find new ones. But it would remove one of the most convenient political instruments used to portray Israel as a burden on American society. More importantly, it would change the conversation about what supporting Israel actually means.

For too long, many American Jewish organizations have treated preserving the annual assistance package as one of the defining objectives of pro-Israel advocacy. But support for Israel should not be measured by how much money American taxpayers send to Jerusalem. It should be measured by whether Israel is becoming safer, stronger, more prosperous, more independent, and better positioned to secure the Jewish future. If ending military assistance advances those objectives over the long term, American Jews should welcome it.

There is something liberating about imagining a future in which Jewish communities in America no longer have to organize political campaigns around persuading their fellow citizens to finance another country’s defense. They can advocate for strong diplomatic relations, expanded economic cooperation, technological partnerships, and the shared interests that make the American-Israeli relationship valuable.

And, perhaps most importantly, they can return more of their attention to building vibrant Jewish communities, strengthening Jewish education, and deepening the connection between Jews in America and Israel.

The Jewish People have a history that stretches back thousands of years. Their relationship with the State of Israel should be considerably more meaningful than an annual debate over a line item in the American federal budget.

America has been an extraordinary friend to Israel, and American military support has contributed meaningfully to Israel’s security. Israelis should never forget the American leaders, soldiers, defense workers, and ordinary citizens who have stood with them.

Gratitude, however, is not the same as permanent dependence. In fact, the greatest compliment Israel can pay the United States is to demonstrate that decades of partnership helped create a country strong enough to stand increasingly on its own. And the greatest compliment America can pay Israel is to recognize that it has become that kind of country.

This is what makes Trump’s announcement so significant, regardless of the political calculations behind it. Less than eight decades after the establishment of a Jewish state in the aftermath of the Holocaust, the president of the world’s most powerful country is saying that the Jewish People have built a nation capable of taking responsibility for its own military purchases. That should be a tremendous source of Jewish pride.

It is easy to forget just how miraculous the existence of Israel really is. In the span of a few generations, a people who had been scattered across the world, repeatedly expelled, persecuted, and massacred built a sovereign country capable of defending itself, absorbing millions of immigrants, producing globally important technologies, and contributing to the security of other nations.

And now that country has the opportunity to take another meaningful step toward genuine independence. Independence means having friends without needing their permission to exist. It means making decisions based on the interests of your own citizens. It means building the capabilities to defend your country even when the international political environment turns against you. Above all, it means understanding that the ultimate responsibility for the survival of the Jewish state belongs to the Jewish state itself.

For generations, Jews dreamed of the day when their destiny would no longer be decided in foreign capitals. The establishment of Israel in 1948 made that dream a political reality. The extraordinary development of the country over the following decades made it an increasingly powerful reality. Now Israel has an opportunity to make it more complete.

The greatest gift America can give Israel is not another $4 billion. It is the chance for Israel to demonstrate that it no longer needs it. And a great achievement of the Jewish state would be to prove that President Trump is right.

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This is a guest essay by Vanessa Berg, who writes about Judaism and Israel.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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If you have ever seen a Palestinian leader appear in public, you may have noticed something peculiar: Oftentimes, they are holding a child in their arms.

Why?

A child can make an Israeli assassination attempt far more difficult.

But you don’t have to be a Palestinian leader to understand the power of putting a child between yourself and someone who opposes you. In the West, there is a particularly effective way to win an argument without ever having to make one: Bring up the children.

The principle is remarkably similar. When you put a child between yourself and your opponent, suddenly your opponent is put in a difficult position.

It doesn’t matter what the argument is about — war, politics, immigration, education, religion, public safety, or virtually anything else. Simply invoke the suffering of children, frame yourself as the person who cares about them, and the implication does the rest: Anyone who disagrees with you must not care about children.

Now, the conversation is no longer about the issue itself. It’s about whether you’re a decent human being. And who wants to be on the side that’s supposedly against children?

Consider a statement that has circulated in countless variations throughout the Israel-Hamas war: “Wanting kids to live isn’t antisemitic.” So says “Ms. Rachel,” a famous YouTuber who somehow thinks that having a take on Gaza is related to her original songs and classic children’s music videos.

Of course, “wanting kids to live” is not antisemitic.” That’s precisely what makes the statement so manipulative. It takes something virtually everyone agrees with, presents it as though it were a controversial position, and insinuates that the people on the other side of the debate must believe the opposite.

The implication is obvious: I want children to live. You disagree with me. Therefore, you must not want children to live. It’s a clever rhetorical trick, and an intellectually dishonest one.

Nobody needs to be persuaded that children deserve to live. Nobody needs to be convinced that children should not suffer. These are among the most universally shared moral convictions in human civilization.

But agreeing that children should live tells us virtually nothing about how to resolve a war, defeat a terrorist organization, negotiate a peace agreement, protect civilians, or respond to an armed attack. Those are the actual questions. And they are considerably harder than declaring that children shouldn’t die.

The problem with invoking children this way is that their suffering is being used to avoid the very conversations necessary to address it. For example, when someone raises concerns about Hamas, the October 7th massacre, Israeli hostages, or Israel’s security, another person might respond by asking, “What about the children in Gaza?” It’s a way to shut down the original conversation. Instead of addressing the argument about Hamas or Israeli security, the person redirects the discussion toward something emotionally devastating and morally indisputable.

If you continue discussing Hamas, you’re accused of ignoring dead children. If you discuss Israel’s security concerns, you’re accused of valuing Israeli lives over Palestinian ones. If you point out the complexity of urban warfare, you’re told that nothing could possibly justify the death of a child.

And just like that, the original argument disappears. It’s replaced by a moral loyalty test. The person invoking the children gets to occupy the moral high ground without having to explain what they actually believe should happen next.

Should Israel have responded militarily to October 7th? If so, how? What should happen to Hamas? What arrangements could prevent another massacre? How can civilians be protected while armed groups operate in densely populated areas? What obligations does Israel have when civilian casualties are foreseeable? What responsibilities do Palestinian armed groups bear toward the people living around them?

These questions matter. Some are deeply uncomfortable. Some have no easy answers. But they cannot be resolved by repeating, “Children are dying.” That statement describes an awful reality. It does not, by itself, establish a policy.

And yet, in modern political discourse, describing an awful reality is increasingly treated as a substitute for thinking about what to do about it. This phenomenon extends far beyond Gaza. Imagine a politician arguing that a particular immigration policy needs to be enforced. Rather than debate whether the policy is fair, effective, or necessary, an opponent responds, “How can you do this to innocent children?”

Perhaps there are children who would be harmed by the policy. That deserves serious consideration. But their existence does not automatically answer every question about immigration law.

Or think about education. A parent raises concerns about what is being taught in a classroom, and someone responds, “Why do you want to hurt vulnerable children?” Again, the conversation shifts. The original question was about educational content, parental rights, and the responsibilities of schools. Now the parent is defending themselves against an accusation of cruelty.

The same tactic appears in arguments about criminal justice, public spending, healthcare, and national security. Somewhere in the discussion, somebody discovers that invoking children is easier than defending a position. And the reason is simple: Children are the closest thing society has to an unquestionable moral trump card. They are innocent and vulnerable, and they depend on adults for protection. Their suffering evokes an instinctive emotional response that transcends social and political beliefs, nationality, and religion.

Precisely because of that, they are extraordinarily useful to people who want to manipulate an argument.

Nobody wants to be accused of not caring about children. So when someone frames a disagreement around that accusation, the other person is immediately placed on the defensive. Instead of explaining why a particular policy might be necessary, they must first establish that they are not a monster. This is not a fair debate. It’s emotional blackmail disguised as compassion.

And here’s something else worth considering: The people who invoke children most aggressively are not necessarily the people who care about them most. Compassion is not measured by how frequently someone mentions children. Nor is it measured by how dramatically someone expresses outrage at their suffering. It is measured, at least in part, by whether someone is willing to think seriously about how that suffering can actually be prevented.

That requires more than slogans. It requires examining causes and consequences. It requires distinguishing between intentions and outcomes. It requires acknowledging that policies designed to protect people can sometimes produce unintended harm, and that refusing to act can also have devastating consequences.

In the case of Gaza, it requires taking Palestinian children’s suffering seriously without pretending that Hamas, Israeli security, hostages, civilian protection, and the future of Gaza are irrelevant distractions.

There is another uncomfortable truth that gets lost whenever children are invoked to end an argument: Children have parents, and parents have responsibilities.

For example, let’s say a parent enters a country illegally with their children, or enters illegally and subsequently has children there. When the government attempts to enforce its immigration laws, critics sometimes point to the children and ask how anyone could be so heartless as to disrupt their lives. But who made the original decision?

The children did not choose to cross a border illegally. They did not choose where to live or what laws their parents would follow. Those decisions were made by adults. And while the children should not be blamed for their parents’ decisions, other parents cannot be held responsible for the decisions of another child’s parents.

And the same distinction matters when we talk about Gaza. Israeli parents cannot be asked to spare their own children at the expense of Palestinian children. This becomes all the more true when we understand the stark differences in Israeli and Palestinian cultures, and how they view their own children.

In much of mainstream Palestinian culture, sacrificing one’s life for a greater cause (martyrdom) is presented as an extraordinary honor. Children grow up hearing stories that celebrate those who died for Islam and “Palestine.” They are taught that killing Jews is virtuous. This makes up significant parts of school curricula, media, and political discourse.

When Hamas glorifies martyrdom, celebrates armed struggle, or exposes civilian populations to the dangers of warfare, we should not automatically assume that its leaders share the same priorities or moral framework as the people criticizing Israel from comfortable homes in the United States or Europe. And, sadly, there are no universal standards regarding the protection of children.

But if we genuinely want to understand why children suffer in conflicts, we have to examine not only what their enemies do to them, but also what the adults responsible for their welfare expect of them. Saying that children deserve to live is easy. The far more revealing question is what the adults around them are willing to do to ensure that they actually can.

Children do not exist in a vacuum. They live in families, communities, cultures, and societies governed by adults who make decisions on their behalf. Those adults, whether parents, political leaders, or military commanders, have responsibilities that cannot simply disappear the moment a child becomes the subject of a heartbreaking photograph.

And this brings us back to the larger problem with using children to win arguments: When someone points to a suffering child, our first instinct should be compassion. But compassion should not prevent us from asking who made the decisions that contributed to that suffering, what responsibilities each party bears, and what could realistically prevent it from happening again.

Children’s innocence does not mean adults are innocent. And recognizing adults’ responsibility does not mean children deserve to suffer. Both truths can exist at the same time.

And this is where the manipulation becomes especially insidious. A person who says, “Wanting children to live isn’t antisemitic,” is making a statement that is literally true. Wanting children to live is not antisemitic. Criticizing Israeli government policy is not inherently antisemitic either.

But if the statement is being used to suggest that accusations of antisemitism are simply attempts to silence people who care about children, it becomes something else entirely: a straw man.

The actual debate about antisemitism concerns things like demonizing Jews, holding Jews collectively responsible for Israel’s actions, applying discriminatory standards, glorifying violence against Jews, and recycling longstanding antisemitic ideas under contemporary political language. Those accusations cannot be dismissed simply by announcing that you care about children.

That’s how serious conversations work: We evaluate what people actually say, not the moral identities they claim for themselves. Yet modern society has created an entire culture in which people seem to believe that claiming the most compassionate position automatically makes them right. “I care about children.” “I believe in human rights.” “I don’t want innocent people to suffer.”

Wonderful. So do most people. Now what? What are you proposing? What are the consequences? What are the trade-offs? What happens if your preferred solution fails? What would you tell people whose safety depends on a different outcome?

Two people can love children equally and disagree passionately about education policy. Two people can care about public safety equally and disagree about policing. Two people can be equally horrified by war and disagree about whether military force is sometimes necessary to prevent even greater violence. Disagreement is not evidence of indifference.

In fact, one of the most troubling developments in contemporary discourse is the growing belief that the more emotionally devastating an argument sounds, the less scrutiny it deserves. Mention a dead child, and suddenly everyone is expected to stop asking questions.

But children are not arguments. Their suffering is not a logical shortcut. Their innocence does not transform every political demand made in their name into a morally correct one. And their lives are far too important to be reduced to rhetorical ammunition.

Of course we should care about children in Gaza. And in Israel. And in Ukraine, Sudan, Yemen, and everywhere else children suffer because of decisions made by adults. We should care enough to demand serious answers rather than satisfying slogans. We should care enough to distinguish genuine humanitarian concerns from attempts to manipulate emotions. And we should care enough to understand that sometimes two people can want exactly the same good outcome while disagreeing profoundly about how to achieve it.

The moment someone tells you that disagreeing with their position means you don’t care about children, they’ve stopped making an argument. They’re trying to make you feel guilty for asking questions. So the most important question we should ask in return is this: If your position is so morally compelling, why do you need to hide behind children to defend it?