Screenshot of Christiane Amanpour introducing her interview with the two doctors from the “American Doctor” documentary on her CNN show, Aug. 19, 2026.

by Darcie Grunblatt

(CAMERA) — Dr. Mark Perlmutter, featured alongside Dr. Thaer Ahmad and Dr. Feroze Sidhwa in the documentary American Doctor, accused the “Zionist government of Israel” of executing a “final solution” through the intentional murder of children and journalists, on Christiane Amanpour’s CNN show on Aug. 19, 2026.

“This is all part of the genocide,” Dr. Perlmutter claimed, describing it as an “orchestrated, well-planned, three-dimensional chess game… to destroy a population of people simply so they can have their land.”

Rather than directly contradicting his use of visceral Holocaust terminology and his unfounded accusation of genocide, Amanpour premised her question on his asserted Jewish identity, asking how mindful he was of using such language. Perlmutter immediately corrected her, clarifying that he is agnostic and merely possesses “Jewish heritage.”

Amanpour did not even push back when Dr. Perlmutter maligned American and Israeli militaries as “the real terrorists,” moving on to question Dr. Sidhwa. Instead, she said these doctors offered “crucial” testimony from Gaza, with “international journalists still barred by Israel from entering.”

The sole moment when Amanpour disputed Dr. Perlmutter was when he criticized legacy media, including CNN, for having “closed ears” when the doctors tried “to report the truth.”

Having previously interviewed Dr. Perlmutter and Sidhwa in July 2024, Amanpour was already familiar with their rhetoric. In that earlier appearance, Perlmutter accused Israeli snipers of purposefully targeting children. He offered no evidence regarding shooter identities, circumstances, or ballistics. In this second broadcast, he repeated the allegation, adding journalists to the target list, again without journalistic challenge from the host.

The interview was premised on reported spikes in Israeli “attacks” against healthcare workers, sourced from the NGO Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP) and the Palestinian Health Ministry in Gaza. Amanpour offered no transparency about either entity she cited. She omitted that MAP engages in anti-Israel advocacy rather than operating as an impartial medical charity, and that Hamas runs the health ministry. Amanpour’s own framing suggested that Israel intentionally targets healthcare workers, yet she failed to mention in the entire segment the volumes of evidence illustrating how Hamas exploits the hospitals’ humanitarian status for its own terror agenda, using sick, disabled, and pregnant Gazans as well as medical workers as human shields.

Failing to challenge Holocaust inversion

Amanpour failed to explain that “final solution” was the Nazi term for the systematic destruction of European Jewry, nor did she note that the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance designates this inversion of perpetrator and victim as antisemitic.

As scholars such as former U.S. Special Envoy Deborah Lipstadt observe, Holocaust inversion functions as “soft-core Holocaust denial,” weaponizing the Shoah to impose a uniquely onerous moral stricture on Jews.

This rhetorical tactic far predates Israeli state policy. As historian Robert Wistrich documented in his book “A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism From Antiquity to the Global Jihad,” British Mandate officials like Sir Harold MacMichael and Sir Edward Grigg routinely compared Zionism to Nazism during World War II while the Nazis were actively mass-murdering European Jews. In March 1945, High Commissioner Lord Gort similarly warned London that a Jewish state would mean the “rebirth of National Socialism.” This rhetoric contributed to the British policy of blocking Jewish refugees and Holocaust survivors from entering Palestine, decades before it was later weaponized as Soviet Cold War anti-Zionist propaganda after 1967, as the USSR aligned itself with the Arab league. Historically, every state that has codified anti-Zionism into official policy has ultimately targeted its own Jewish population.

Documentary tokenization

The promotional campaign for American Doctor advertises the film as following “three prominent physicians—Palestinian, Jewish, and Zoroastrian—who, despite their differences, are friends bound by a shared oath to save lives.” However, framing Dr. Perlmutter as a “Jewish doctor,” despite his explicit clarification that he is an agnostic with Jewish heritage, raises serious questions regarding editorial intent and tokenization.

While CAMERA verified his paternal Jewish lineage, public obituaries and family records document a maternal background and close relatives tied strictly to Roman Catholic institutions and non-Jewish burials. While many people can and do identify as Jewish with all these background details, he did not. Framing him as a Jewish surrogate to fit a clean marketing narrative compromises the film’s credibility.

Hamas use of hospitals

The physicians featured in the film, who have conducted an extensive media tour across MS NOW, NPR, CBS News, BBC, and Qatari-state owned Al Jazeera English, volunteered at facilities including Nasser Hospital, European Gaza Hospital, Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital, and Al-Shifa Hospital. All three doctors have denied any Hamas presence at any hospital where they worked. This blanket denial directly contradicts extensive forensic, military, and testimonial evidence.

Nasser Hospital

Released Israeli hostage Sharon Alony Cunio testified in a January 2024 Associated Press interview that at one point, Nasser Hospital held nearly 30 hostages. During a February 2024 raid on the hospital, Israeli soldiers detained about 200 suspected terrorists and found boxes of sealed medicines with the names of Israeli hostages on them and large quantities of weapons.

In February 2026, Doctors Without Borders suspended some work at the hospital due to the presence of armed, masked men. The IDF then said in August 2026 that Hamas has been using the hospital to interrogate and torture Palestinians.

European Gaza Hospital

On May 13, 2025, an Israeli strike targeted a command compound directly beneath the hospital, killing Mohammed Sinwar (head of Hamas’s military wing) and Rafah Brigade commander Mohammad Shabana. Israeli forces subsequently uncovered weapons, ammunition, cash, and subterranean infrastructure, offering international journalists tours of the tunnels beneath the medical complex.

Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital

On Oct. 14, 2024, the IDF targeted a Hamas command center that was on the premises of al-Aqsa Martyr’s Hospital. The military said terrorists had been using the command center to “plan and execute terrorist attacks” against soldiers and Israel. On July 6, 2026, Hamas officials held a press conference outside the hospital’s emergency room. Gazan political activist Amin Abed included Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital as one of the places where Hamas has been summoning people for interrogation and torture in a June 2026 interview. He also listed Al-Shifa Hospital, Nasser Hospital, and Al-Ma’amdani/Al-Ahli Hospital.

Al-Shifa Hospital

Hamas terrorists murdered Cpl. Noa Marciano at Al-Shifa Hospital in November 2023, after the terrorist group took her hostage on Oct. 7, 2023. The IDF said at the time that Hamas had also brought two other hostages to the hospital and revealed a 55 meter-long tunnel below the Shifa compound.

In early January 2024, the U.S. declassified and released intelligence assessments that it had “high confidence” that Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad used Al-Shifa Hospital for military command, weapon storage, and holding hostages. The White House referred to this intelligence publicly as early as Nov. 14, 2023.

In March 2024, the IDF conducted a two-week battle at the hospital that resulted in the capture of over 800 terrorists and suspects and the killing of nearly 200.

In footage of the IDF interrogation, the spokesperson for Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), Tariq Salami Otha Abu Shlouf, revealed that Hamas and PIJ operate out of “all of the hospitals” while discussing the terrorist organizations’ public relations strategy.

It seems highly unlikely, given all this evidence, that none of the doctors saw any indication that Hamas operated from the same hospitals where they volunteered. Oddly, Amanpour did not ask them a single question about this, even though the fact that Hamas has been operating from hospitals is central to the entire context of why the IDF raided them.

Amanpour also failed to disclose that Dr. Sidhwa has had a long history of anti-Israel activism long before the 2023-2025 war in Gaza, concealing that he is not an impartial medical worker.

The charges Dr. Perlmutter and Dr. Sidhwa leveled against Israel, both in the interview and the documentary, are the most severe accusations against a nation and therefore, should require unassailable proof to back them up. Since Amanpour never asked for evidence, she permitted them to air unvetted propaganda to her audience, marking a remarkable abdication of journalistic responsibility.

This piece was originally published by the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis.

by Jonathan Feldstein

With Israel’s national elections two months away, pollsters, reporters and pundits typically talk about the two main “blocks” of parties that are likely to make up the next coalition according to projections from regular polls. The polls vary slightly, but show an overall similar trend.

The first block is that of the current government with five political parties including the long-time dominant Likud party under Benjamin Netanyahu, the “Bibi block,” including two nationalist religious parties and two ultra-Orthodox religious parties. Many refer to this as the classical example of a “natural coalition” because it’s easier to bring together people and parties that are like minded, have common interests, or at least have not spent an entire campaign (and the term of the outgoing government) making public declarations and fighting against one another.

The second block is referred to as the “change” block which is made up of most/all of the several parties that are currently in the opposition, as well as new parties that have emerged in the last several weeks, each seeking to be part of a government that will either discard all the parties of the existing government, or at least provide enough alternatives to form a coalition that will not be identical to the current government.

The variable in this are the three Arab parties that are long time members of the Knesset. Yes, for those that think Israel is an apartheid state allow me to debunk that notion, as Arab parties typically account for 10 to 15 seats in the parliament, plus or minus 10 percent of the total. With the exception of the previous government, where the Arab Islamist party, Ra’am, joined the coalition, typically these parties become a third block of votes as neither they want to support, nor have most previous governments wanted to include specifically non-Zionist Arab parties. That glass ceiling was broken last time and technically anything could happen this time, despite polarizing declarations being made. But even if not formally part of the government, the Arab parties could find themselves “supporting” the government from “outside” in a parallel set of coalition negotiations.

But what if the “natural coalition” is not the ones that represent the two main blocks but a hybrid of these? What if the statement that the formation of a government of one or the other blocks is “what the voters wanted” is a farce, and what the voters truly want is a coalition that straddles the center and right of the spectrum (as there is virtually no party that is firmly in the left of the spectrum except one, the Democrats (no relation to U.S. politics).

In order to form a government, a coalition needs at least 61 of the Knesset’s 120 seats. Getting to 61 can be done through the traditional “natural coalitions” but it can also be done by mixing and matching other parties. Following any election there are different ways to get to 61-plus. Some are improbable, but some might surprise us.

What would have happened differently if, following the previous national election, Netanyahu went for a coalition that comprised other centrist and right-wing parties, not the reflexive “natural” coalition that he has now? What if after winning enough votes and being given the mandate to form the government, he made four phone calls to political rivals including former Prime Ministers Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid of the same political party, to Avigdor Lieberman, his once protégé and now adversary, and to Benny Gantz, the former Chief of Staff who previously entered a coalition with Netanyahu during Covid, to find himself cut out of the prime ministerial rotation agreement they had made to form the government to begin with?

What if Netanyahu offered these leaders and their parties seats at the table, to govern without relative polarizing extremists on either side? If they had said yes, the government would have been very different and probably something most Israelis could get behind. If they said no, Netanyahu would have looked like a statesman rather than a divisive figure, even if he ended up creating the same coalition as he has now and which so many Israelis want to see gone. Especially after the October 7 Hamas attack and massacre.

If polls today are accurate, Gadi Eisenkot, another former Chief of Staff and former partner with colleague Benny Gantz’s party, and his new Yashar party will win the popular vote and be given the mandate to form a government. If that happens, and the same polls show that he will still have trouble getting to the minimum 61 seats to form a majority government based on projections for the current opposition parties, what if his first call were to Netanyahu to talk about a coalition government with him and Likud, with parties that are currently part of the opposition, and one or two of the new parties that might pass the electoral threshold of 3.25% of the votes to even count?

Albeit that part of the opposition or “change” block is also known as the anti-Bibi block, what if Eisenkot were to offer Netanyahu the position of Foreign Minister, or Finance Minister (at which he excelled in the early 2000s) under Ariel Sharon’s government?

Would Netanyahu accept, or attempt to force Eisenkot into a coalition that relied on Arab parties’ support so, from day one, he could be critical of that? If he were to reject such an offer, are there enough people in Likud who would break away and form a faction of one third of Likud’s 21 to 23 seats (based on current polls) and join an Eisenkot government, leaving Netanyahu and his close Likud allies a shell of what it was, and not even necessarily the main opposition party? Would Eisenkot leap out of the gate with the impression of being a unifying statesman in a broad center-right government that mathematically is no less “natural” than a Bibi-block vs a change block? Would Israelis who are just really driven to see Netanyahu be retired celebrate such a shake up even if it meant leaving Netanyahu in power at all?

There are many ways to get to 61 seats to form a government. After years of widespread divisiveness between political parties, three years since the October 7 Hamas attack and massacre, and the ensuing war which has not ended, many Israelis are looking for a change. The vote may reflect that, but how any political party and its leadership choose to get to at least 61 seats may be even more important than the vote itself.

Join the conversation September 16 at 1 p.m. Eastern time with a panel of undecided Israeli voters to evaluate these and other factors that Israelis will consider on election day.

Advance registration is required.

Jonathan Feldstein was born and educated in the U.S. and immigrated to Israel in 2004. He is married and the father of six, and a growing number of grandchildren. He has become a respected bridge between Jews and Christians and serves as president of the Genesis 123 Foundation, www.Genesis123.co, and recently published “Israel the Miracle,” featuring 75 essays by Christian leaders around the world writing why Israel is so significant. He writes regularly on major Christian websites around the world about Israel, sharing unique experiences of living as an Orthodox Jew in Israel. He is host of the popular Inspiration from Zion podcast. He can be reached at firstpersonisrael@gmail.com.

Vatican City

by Jonathan Feldstein

In the face of rising anti-Zionism and a troubling wave of antisemitism, two Catholic theologians have issued a public appeal that should matter deeply to Jews. Father Antoine Lévy, a Dominican theologian, and Dr. André Villeneuve, a biblical scholar and founder of Catholics for Israel, recently launched “For Zion’s Sake: A Catholic Appeal in Support of Israel.”

Their initiative seeks to push back against the growing tendency among some Catholic voices to delegitimize the Jewish state and treat opposition to Israel as a moral or even theological duty.

It comes at a moment when Israel continues to face threats from Iran and its proxies, while antisemitic incidents surge globally. For many Jews, the silence or bias coming from certain Christian institutions feels painfully familiar. A disturbing pattern has taken hold: Political accusations of apartheid, colonialism and genocide are often paired with a revived form of supersessionism—the idea that the Church has replaced the Jewish people in God’s plan. This combination is both theologically flawed and dangerous.

At the heart of the two clerics’ appeal is an affirmation of the Jewish people’s ongoing covenant with God. Drawing on Scripture from Genesis through the prophets and the New Testament, the authors insist that God’s promises to the Jewish people remain irrevocable. They cite Romans 11, in which Paul describes the Jewish people as the “natural branches” who are still beloved and whose calling has not been withdrawn. For Jewish readers, this language is significant. It rejects the notion that Jewish exile or suffering somehow proves divine rejection, and it affirms that the Jewish return to the Land of Israel carries theological weight.

Lévy and Villeneuve define Zionism simply: the Jewish people’s right to self-determination in their ancestral homeland.

Catholic Zionism, as they present it, recognizes God’s faithfulness in the modern restoration of the Jewish people while treating the State of Israel as a human and fallible political entity subject to the same moral scrutiny as any other nation. They reject caricatures that portray support for Israel as blind endorsement of every Israeli policy or as an end-times obsession. Instead, they call for a balanced stance that upholds Israel’s right to exist and defend itself against existential threats while remaining concerned for the suffering of all civilians.

The authors are candid about historical baggage. They discuss the 1904 meeting between journalist Theodor Herzl, the father of modern-day Zionism, and Pope Pius X, in which the pope reportedly refused to support a Jewish homeland because the Jews had not accepted Jesus. They note that this account comes from Herzl’s diary and carries no formal authority as Catholic doctrine.

Yet anti-Israel activists frequently portray it as timeless Church teaching. The silence of the Church in never formally affirming those comments has allowed the story to live on as a symbol of rejection. For Jews, this remains a reminder of how theological attitudes once translated into political indifference.

The authors insist that God’s promises to the Jewish people remain irrevocable.

Since then, the Church has moved in a different direction. The 1965 declaration Nostra Aetate rejected collective Jewish guilt for the death of Jesus, affirmed that God does not revoke His gifts or calling, and condemned antisemitism in all its forms. In 1994, the Vatican established full diplomatic relations with Israel. These steps represented real progress. Lévy and Villeneuve argue that the current moment risks swinging the pendulum backward.

Some Catholic influencers and media figures now speak as if opposition to Zionism is a required Catholic position. Catholic figures such as political commentator and podcaster Candace Owens and others have used their platforms to criticize Israel, Zionism and “Jewish influence” in ways that recycle classic antisemitic tropes. The authors contend that the Vatican’s relative silence on the threats facing Israel and the explosion of antisemitism allows these louder voices to fill the void.

This silence carries particular weight for Jews. Memories of papal inaction during the Holocaust still shape Jewish perceptions of the Church. When prominent Catholic platforms remain muted about atrocities committed against Israelis or about the surge in antisemitic attacks worldwide, many Jews hear an echo of earlier failures.

Lévy and Villeneuve do not claim to speak for the Church. They do claim the right, as faithful Catholics, to challenge narratives that treat the State of Israel’s existence itself as a problem.

The document is carefully structured. It begins by noting the disturbing trend of Catholics turning against Israel; moves through biblical and theological reflection on the Jewish people and the land; addresses the question of whether a Catholic can be a Zionist; and ends with a call for solidarity.

Another section invites non-Catholics to add their support as “Friends of” the appeal. The appeal has garnered numerous Catholic signatories, including priests, theologians and public figures. They’ve received encouragement from Catholics who felt isolated in their support for Israel and welcomed a theologically grounded alternative to the prevailing criticism.

For Jewish audiences, several points stand out. First, the appeal treats the Jewish connection to the Land as rooted in Scripture rather than as a colonial project. Second, it refuses to equate criticism of specific Israeli policies with denial of Israel’s right to exist. Third, it recognizes that anti-Zionism frequently functions today as an “acceptable” form of antisemitism. Fourth, it insists that genuine concern for Palestinian Arab suffering does not require the erasure of Jewish history or peoplehood.

Lévy and Villeneuve have written to the pope, urging the Vatican to engage with the theological questions their document raises. They hope for open discussion rather than polarized condemnation. In their view, the existence of the State of Israel forces the Church to confront its own identity in light of Jewish continuity. If the Jewish people remain the people of the covenant, then their return to the land cannot be dismissed as theologically irrelevant.

“For Zion’s Sake” does not resolve every tension in Catholic-Jewish relations. It does, however, offer a clear alternative to the voices that treat Jewish self-determination as inherently suspect. At a time when Jews face both physical attacks and ideological campaigns aimed at stripping legitimacy from Israel, expressions of solidarity grounded in shared Scripture and moral clarity matter.

Lévy and Villeneuve invite Catholics and people of goodwill to read and sign the document.

For Jews watching the debate inside the Church, the emergence of this appeal is a notable development: a reminder that not every Christian voice has turned away, and that some are working to recover a more faithful reading of the biblical story that binds both communities.

Jonathan Feldstein was born and educated in the U.S. and immigrated to Israel in 2004. He is married and the father of six, and a growing number of grandchildren. He has become a respected bridge between Jews and Christians and serves as president of the Genesis 123 Foundation, www.Genesis123.co, and recently published “Israel the Miracle,” featuring 75 essays by Christian leaders around the world writing why Israel is so significant. He writes regularly on major Christian websites around the world about Israel, sharing unique experiences of living as an Orthodox Jew in Israel. He is host of the popular Inspiration from Zion podcast. He can be reached at firstpersonisrael@gmail.com.

Zvi Sukkot demolishing a Palestinian monument that celebrates terrorists who have murdered Israeli civilians. X.com.

by Jonathan Feldstein

Thank you for clicking.

Full disclosure: the title is click bait. I want you to read this article so I came up with a provocative title.

Full disclosure 2: I am a “settler,” the pejorative term used to describe (or defame) Israelis who live in Jewish communities over the Green Line – the 1949 armistice between Israel and Jordan (there was no Palestine then) – which Jordan occupied and annexed, and then over which Israel restored control in the 1967 Six Day War. You may have heard the term Judea and Samaria or, also pejoratively the “West Bank.” That’s where I live. There are some 500,000 of us. Our presence here is not foreign colonialism or illegal. That’s for a separate conversation.

The thing I want you to know is that while we are all “settlers” and branded together as a group, we are not all alike by any means.

This week, another “settler” and member of Israel’s Knesset, Zvi Sukkot, catapulted himself into global headlines by destroying a monument dedicated to local terrorist “martyrs” in a Palestinian Arab village, Madama. More on that shortly. But let me say uncategorically, Sukkot does not represent me, not in my way of thinking or behavior, and not in the Knesset.

He does not represent most of the 500,000 Jewish residents of Judea and Samaria, not before the last election and certainly not now.

The provocative title here is meant to depict two parallel and contradictory realities. When right-wing violence erupts in Israel during a political campaign, it can become a kind of “settler porn” because it plays to the base instincts of a demographic that is excited by such behavior. We are in the midst of a political campaign and rather than appealing to voters outside his base, he appealed to his voters’ base (or debased) instincts.

The second kind of “settler porn” is the use of images and stories that allow outsiders to consume the most provocative, lurid, violent version of “settlers” as if it represents all of us, all Israel’s religious-nationalist community, or all of Israel. The danger is twofold: violence is rightly condemned, but sensationalizing it reinforces stereotypes, brushes over complex realities, and turns an individual action by a nutjob of a politician into voyeuristic anti-Israel spectacle.

People outside Israel may have seen the headline or 60-second news or social media clip about this, but need to know the realities. First, Israelis are having a deep conversation about this, across political boundaries, throughout the media, and over the water cooler.

Domestically, I hope this will contribute in a constructive way. I also hope that it will contribute to considering who to vote for, or who not to vote for, in the coming election just two months away.

At the same time, Israel’s detractors are using this as “proof” of repeated tropes and allegations of Israeli genocide, ethnic cleansing, and apartheid, none of which are true. I hope they will read this and realize most Israelis condemn Sukkot’s behavior for a variety of reasons, and that while it is proper to condemn specific actions and individuals, it is not proper to use this to define all of us in broad strokes, or make up claims using words whose meaning has been so watered down as to become meaningless. This is neither accurate, honest, nor constructive.

That most Israelis condemn this behavior and would never even think of doing something like this makes this case all the more glaring. It’s a one off, a perversion, not the norm and not accepted. This is the reality.

Even if there were tens or hundreds of people who would actually do this, the problem is that there are so many such monuments, public parks, schools, etc. celebrating the terrorists and inciting violence that it would literally be a never-ending battle. But the reality is that we don’t do it. And the fact that there are hundreds of such locations celebrating and inciting terror is not the reason we don’t.

The reasons we don’t do it are because it’s stupid, dangerous, not our place nationally, and certainly not our place personally to do so. Not any individual and not an elected official. It’s counter-productive for a host of reasons. Because it’s lawless, because it is not how we should behave, because it ties up military resources to enable it, because it’s terrible publicity, and because nothing in doing so changes the terror culture the Palestinian Authority embraces, glorifies and celebrates. If anything, it makes that culture more strident.

That’s the story: the reality of who our neighbors are and the fact that they glorify, celebrate, and incite violence and terror. That is the story that is lost here. It’s not a culture or theology that can be changed or rationalized with.

The crimes of the terrorists whose names were on the Madama “Martyrs Monument” should be the story. Three examples of the home-grown celebrated terrorists are: Yaman Tayeb Ali Faraj and Shadi Nassar, both affiliated with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), and Hamdan Hussein Mahmoud al-Najjar. Collectively, they are responsible for or perpetrated terror attacks against Israel that left several dead and dozens wounded. Other Madama “martyrs” were killed in the 1968 Battle of Karameh, where PLO/Fatah terrorists fought alongside Jordanian troops in a battle that left scores of Palestinian Arab terrorists and Jordanian troops dead.

Yes, the terrorists are glorified and the acts they committed are vile. Sukkot claimed he acted after the IDF did not remove the monuments despite his demands to do so, arguing they glorified murderers of Jews and would inspire future terrorism among local children. Maybe that’s true. But he had no right or authority to take private action, and certainly not under IDF escort. Israel is a robust democracy. Sukkot and his party could have demanded the monument’s removal in the Knesset, through the IDF, or via the courts.

The IDF said the visit was coordinated as a “tour of monuments” but that the destruction was done deceptively.

Because Sukkot’s actions were so debased, the incident drew proper, immediate, and widespread condemnation, including from Prime Minister Netanyahu, calling it “unacceptable,” from within his own Religious Zionist Party, as well of course from the opposition. One fellow Religious Zionist Party Knesset member, Ohad Tal, questioned whether this was somehow a campaign event. “I want to understand. Was this move coordinated with the campaign? Is there some deep strategy behind it that I am completely missing, or have we simply decided to commit political suicide once and for all? I’m genuinely asking.”

There are other problems not just with what happened but how it went down. The army should not have allowed it to begin with. Once it was clear what was happening, it should have been stopped. Whoever approved it should be fired. Allowing a military escort took soldiers away from the actual mission of the IDF – defense. This was only an offensive operation. It put Israelis in danger.

What if terrorists in Madama had opened fire, wounding or killing Sukkot and his entourage, or the soldiers protecting him? For what? By doing this and taking troops to provide the security needed, did he make anyone truly safer, or did he just put everyone at even greater risk?

Sukkot should be removed from the party, but that probably won’t happen. Even though party leader Betzalel Smotrich disagreed with the actions and chided Sukkot, he will probably not have the nerve to shake his party’s base of support and risk losing votes even over a principled stand. However, as head of the Religious Zionist party, Smotrich should realize that what happened was not only not religious, but a hilul hashem, a public desecration of God’s name.

Not only was Sukkot’s action not religious, but it was also not Zionist. The restoration of Jewish sovereignty for Jews to live as an independent nation in our ancestral land, is not to sanction lawlessness behavior against others.

There are very good reasons for Israel to oppose the existence of monuments and other public spaces celebrating terrorists and inciting terror. The PA school across from my home has a mural of PLO terrorist leader Yasser Arafat. That’s child abuse. Rather than going in to destroy the monument, why did Sukkot not go in and make a video to go viral, about who the terrorists were on the monument and make the case for its removal? Why don’t people come to my balcony to see the sick message Palestinian Arab children are taught by celebrating Arafat in any way.

The PR damage and other mistakes that were done are irreversible, but that’s not the reason why it was bad. It was bad because it is wrong.

Jonathan Feldstein was born and educated in the U.S. and immigrated to Israel in 2004. He is married and the father of six, and a growing number of grandchildren. He has become a respected bridge between Jews and Christians and serves as president of the Genesis 123 Foundation, www.Genesis123.co, and recently published “Israel the Miracle,” featuring 75 essays by Christian leaders around the world writing why Israel is so significant. He writes regularly on major Christian websites around the world about Israel, sharing unique experiences of living as an Orthodox Jew in Israel. He is host of the popular Inspiration from Zion podcast. He can be reached at firstpersonisrael@gmail.com.

by Michael Starr

(HonestReporting) — The deceased child soldiers being announced by Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) are getting younger, as the media has maintained silence about the phenomenon. Organizations such as United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) have recently decried deaths of children in Gaza. But amid the silence about the possible contributing factor to that tragedy, a second Palestinian terrorist organization has confirmed its use of child soldiers.

Three 15-year-old child soldiers were announced dead in August by PIJ, joining at least 20 deceased child soldiers confirmed by Palestinian terrorist organizations since July. The 15-year-olds were the youngest terrorists confirmed thus far by their organizations to have participated in the October 7 War.

Malik Ahmed Al-Afandi was 15 years old and part of PIJ’s Al-Quds Brigade. He was in the Al-Radwan Battalion of the Gaza Brigade. 15-year-old Mahmoud Moussa Nassir was in the Northern Brigade’s Rocket Unit. 15-year-old Qusay Kamel Washah was in the Northern Brigade’s Central Mobilization unit. Washah’s “mujahid” and “martyr” statuses were announced by PIJ on August 9, while the former two were announced on August 11.

Child Soldier Problem Continues to Unfold

PIJ had begun to release the names of slain child soldiers in July, as previously reported by HonestReporting, and continued to publish martyr notices of older boys since.

On August 9, the terrorist organization claimed 16-year-old Jumaa Khalil Ghubn as a member of the Al-Quds Brigade’s Northern Brigade Central Mobilization Unit. On July 23, 16-year-old Abdul Hadi Abdullah Al-Najjar was announced as a deceased member of the Khan Yunis Brigade’s Al-Balad Battalion. Seventeen-year-old Ashraf Abdul Karim Khattab was announced dead on August 6.

In addition to another nine child soldiers detailed by HonestReporting at the end of July, another 11 have since been confirmed by matching their faces, names, and other identifying details in martyr notices, social media posts, and casualty databases. There are others who are suspected child soldiers, but there was not enough supporting evidence to confirm their identities.

DFLP Reveals Child Soldier Use

The PIJ is not the only terrorist organization to have admitted to the use of child soldiers since July. On July 30, the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) published a martyr video for Ahmed Salem Sukkar showing him armed and uniformed. The title screen for the video detailed that Sukkar was born in 2006 and died in 2023, meaning that at most he would have been 17. Indeed, online Palestinian casualty databases listed a 17-year-old boy of the same age that died in October 2023.

The DFLP also listed 17-year-old Nabil Ismail Jarbu’ as one of the fighters in its Martyr Omar al-Qasim Forces. According to Facebook posts by deceased DFLP field commander Ismail Nabi Jarbu’ and his wife, the younger Jarbu’ appeared to be his son. On August 6, the 17-year-old was claimed by PIJ as a member of its Central Brigade’s Nuseirat Battalion. It is unclear if Jarbu’ had membership with both terrorist organizations, or was only commemorated by the DFLP due to his father’s rank in the terrorist organization.

The case is notable not only due to Jarbu’s possible dual allegiance, but also because it is representative of a wider trend with child terrorists. Israel Policy Forum senior Policy Associate Gabriel Epstein, who has also been tracking the growing evidence of the practice of Gazan groups recruiting children, noted on Aug. 10 on X a pattern in which the child soldiers were part of families with members in terrorist organizations. He noted that in some cases the child combatants were killed in the same strike as their terrorist family members, while others had familial ties to those dying elsewhere in the October 7 War or another war.

Muhammad Zuhair Al-Amsi was announced on August 5 by PIJ’s Al-Quds Brigades to be a member of its Rafah Brigade’s Al-Shaboura Battalion. According to Epstein, Al-Amsi was 16 years old at the time of his death. He was also reportedly the son of Rafah Brigade Central Intelligence Unit platoon commander Zuheir Rajab Mohammed al-Amsi.

Seventeen-year-old Abdullah Imad Al-Ajez was in the Rafah Brigade’s Military Manufacturing Unit, according to August 5 statements by PIJ. Epstein linked Al-Ajez to his father, Imad Hassan Mohammed al-Ajiz, commander of PIJ’s military manufacturing. Al-Ajez had a brother and cousin in the same unit as him, both of whom also had martyr notices issued for them.

On July 17, PIJ claimed 16-year-old Fawzi Kamel Fawzi Washah as a member of the Northern Brigade’s Martyr Hussam Abu Habl Battalion. According to Epstein, he was the son of high-ranking PIJ Central Information Unit commander Kamel Fawzi Washah. The analyst also suspected militancy from Washa’s other children.

Still No News Coverage of Child Soldiers

It has been almost a month since PIJ began to announce its use of child soldiers through martyr posters, yet news outlets have not expressed any curiosity about the matter. Gaza is a lightning rod for news coverage, with outlets covering a wide variety of related stories. Yet while several major outlets including Reuters, The Washington Post, and CNN have all published human interest stories about struggling Gazan beekeepers, the deadly phenomenon of child soldiers has not garnered comparable coverage. The death of children in Gaza has been of significant interest to journalists, with 56 articles written by 32 outlets just about the June 18 Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory (COI) report alleging that the Israeli military deliberately targeted Palestinian children.

On August 6, UNICEF issued a statement declaring that 300 Gazan children had been killed in just as many days since the October 2025 ceasefire. UNICEF didn’t blame Israeli operations for the deaths directly, but addressed an unsafe environment in which violence was unfolding.

“Families are now crowded into roughly a third of the Gaza Strip, sheltering in unsafe conditions among destroyed buildings, rubble and accumulated solid waste. Across the Strip, children continue to face acute malnutrition, disease, unsafe water and damaged sanitation systems,” said UNICEF. “UNICEF calls on all parties to comply with their obligations under international law, including international humanitarian and human rights law. They must protect children, safeguard their access to essential goods and services, including healthcare, education, safe water and food, and allow and facilitate safe, rapid and unimpeded humanitarian access to children in need.”

Yet amid the series of factors that potentially were contributing to the death of children, the problem of children being sent into combat was not raised. Ten news articles were written about the short statement, but nothing has been done to address the emerging pattern about child soldiers.

An indication that the practice is known among Gazan media workers is a 2018 Facebook post by Drop Site News guest writer Ismail Nawfal. Middle East analyst Eitan Fischberger discovered that Nawfal had posted a fawning video of a Gaza kindergarten graduation ceremony in which the children acted out combat with mock firearms.

“A people who embrace their weapon from a young age will never be defeated,” Nawfal wrote.

The comfort level of Gazan news writers and the terrorist organizations to embrace the militarization suggests that the practice is not obscure.

Amid the lack of interest by the media, not only have younger child soldiers been confirmed, but a second terrorist organization has acknowledged its participation in the recruitment of children. The developments could reflect a sense of impunity about the practice — a sense that may be bolstered by a silent media.

Originally published by HonestReporting.

Croatian MiG-21. Wikimedia by Gojanovic123456789 - commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

by Jonathan Feldstein

On August 16, 1966, an Iraqi Air Force MiG-21 touched down at an Israeli air base after a daring flight across the Middle East. The pilot, Captain Munir Redfa, an Iraqi Assyrian Christian officer frustrated by discrimination against him and being ordered to bomb Kurdish civilians, defected under the careful orchestration of the Mossad, bringing with him the MiG-21. As a Christian suffering discrimination in Moslem Iraq, Radfa also expressed admiration for Israel, the “few against so many Moslems” for standing up to its Arab neighbors.

Redfa’s legacy as well as that of the boldness of the operation became the cornerstone for a shift in important geo-political alliances, military success, and have a lasting impact still today.

Code-named “Operation Diamond,” the three-year effort delivered the Soviet Union’s most advanced fighter plane intact into Western hands for the first time. What followed was not only a triumph for Israeli intelligence but a decisive act of intelligence sharing that gave the United States critical insight into the aircraft it was fighting over Vietnam, and which it would face for decades afterward.

By the mid-1960s the Soviet supplied MiG-21 had become the backbone of Arab air forces. Egypt, Syria, and Iraq fielded growing numbers of the fast, highly maneuverable plane. Israeli military leaders understood that air superiority would decide future wars, yet they lacked detailed knowledge of the plane’s abilities: its performance limits, radar capabilities, and combat weaknesses. Mossad chief Meir Amit made acquisition of a flyable MiG-21 a top priority. Earlier attempts in Egypt failed.

Eventually the Mossad identified Redfa, offered financial security, Israeli citizenship, and safe passage for his family, and arranged the carefully coordinated escape. Redfa took off on a training flight, diverted from his formation, and flew roughly 900 kilometers to Israel, escorted on the final leg by Israeli Mirage fighters. The aircraft was promptly redesignated “007” in a nod to James Bond.

Israeli test pilots and engineers immediately put the MiG through exhaustive evaluation. They flew it against their own Mirage IIIs, mapped its strengths and vulnerabilities, and translated the technical and tactical manuals that arrived with the plane. The knowledge paid rapid dividends. On April 7, 1967, Israeli pilots shot down six threatening Syrian MiG-21s without loss. Two months later, during the Six-Day War, the Israeli Air Force destroyed the bulk of Egyptian and Syrian air power on the ground and in the air. Familiarity with the MiG-21’s performance, particularly its limitations at low altitude and its visibility challenges, contributed directly to that decisive margin of superiority.

Israel then shared its prize. In early 1968 the MiG was given to the United States and transported to a secret facility in Nevada. Under the program called “Have Doughnut,” American pilots and engineers subjected the aircraft to more than 100 flights. The MiG was flown against a variety of U.S. fighters including the F-4 Phantom, F-104, F-105, and others. Analysts discovered key exploitable flaws. Below 15,000 feet the MiG-21 could not reliably exceed roughly 0.98 Mach because of severe buffeting. Its engine response was sluggish, rear visibility poor, and gunsight limited under high-G conditions. These findings produced concrete tactical recommendations that would prove invaluable: force the engagement into the vertical, exploit energy bleed-off, and use the Phantom’s superior power and radar to control the fight at lower altitudes.

The timing could not have been more important. American aircraft were already engaged in intense combat over Vietnam, where MiG-21s flown by North Vietnamese pilots posed a serious threat to American aircraft. “Have Doughnut” data informed immediate adjustments in training and tactics. The insights helped shape the creation of the U.S. Navy’s Fighter Weapons School, popularly known as Top Gun, in 1969, and later the Air Force’s Red Flag exercises and the secret Constant Peg aggressor program that flew actual MiGs against American pilots through the 1980s. Dissimilar air combat training, once limited, became a cornerstone of U.S. readiness. Pilots who had never seen a real MiG-21 in the air suddenly trained against one, revealing how the enemy actually flew and fought.

The sharing of the MiG-21 and the intelligence that was derived from that also carried diplomatic weight. As a result of access to the MiG, the United States agreed to sell Israel the F-4 Phantom, an aircraft Washington had previously been reluctant to provide. That sale marked a turning point in the mutually beneficial strategic relationship between Israel and the United States. Israel gained a powerful US fighter that served for decades; America gained a proven partner willing to take extraordinary risks and then share the results with its ally. The pattern of intelligence cooperation that began with “Operation Diamond” continued for decades through other captured or defected Soviet systems and joint analysis of battlefield lessons, and continues still today.

“Operation Diamond” illustrated a deeper truth about the Israel-United States partnership. Israel’s geographic position and constant exposure to Soviet-supplied weapons then gave it unique opportunities to acquire and evaluate systems that the United States could study only at a distance. By transferring the MiG-21 and the knowledge derived from it, Israel accelerated American understanding of Soviet fighter technology at a time when that knowledge had direct combat relevance. The United States, in turn, supplied advanced platforms and political support that strengthened Israel’s qualitative military edge.

The adversaries have changed but sixty years later the legacy of that alliance and partnership born in “Operation Diamond” endures. The principles of realistic adversary training, detailed technical exploitation of captured equipment, and mutual trust in intelligence sharing remain central to both countries today. That’s been proven in numerous intelligence operations in the past decades, as well as the ongoing war against the Islamic Republic of Iran. “Operation Diamond” was more than a single dramatic defection and intelligence coup. It was a demonstration that intelligence cooperation between close allies can reshape the balance of power in the skies and influence the outcome of wars still to come.

While today, it may be taken for granted that Israel and the US and their respective military and intelligence agencies work closely together for one another’s mutual benefit, it cannot be understated that at the time of “Operation Diamond” and providing the Soviet MiG-21 to the US, Israel was still a new nation, less than two decades since declaring independence, and fighting every day for its survival.

The enemy has morphed but the threats remain the same. The legacy of “Operation Diamond” still plays an active part of the important relationship between the two countries. In the spirit of renaming the MiG to 007, its legacy underscores the adage of the name of another James Bond thriller, diamonds are forever.

Jonathan Feldstein was born and educated in the U.S. and immigrated to Israel in 2004. He is married and the father of six, and a growing number of grandchildren. He has become a respected bridge between Jews and Christians and serves as president of the Genesis 123 Foundation, www.Genesis123.co, and recently published “Israel the Miracle,” featuring 75 essays by Christian leaders around the world writing why Israel is so significant. He writes regularly on major Christian websites around the world about Israel, sharing unique experiences of living as an Orthodox Jew in Israel. He is host of the popular Inspiration from Zion podcast. He can be reached at firstpersonisrael@gmail.com.

by Rachel O’Donoghue

(HonestReporting) — “Everything is politics,” Thomas Mann wrote in The Magic Mountain. George Orwell later offered his own variation: “All issues are political issues.”

For the more obsessive critics of Israel, however, this seems less an aphorism than an operating principle.

Because nothing Israelis do is permitted to remain non-political. Cook dinner? Stealing Palestinian cuisine. Go dancing? Engaging in fascistic escapism. Sit in an air-conditioned shelter while rockets are intercepted overhead? Evidence of a diseased national psyche.

The activity itself is almost incidental; it could be the most mundane of everyday pursuits. The ideological meaning can always be engineered afterwards.

That tendency was on vivid display in a recent New York Magazine “Grub Street” feature, in which writer Madeline Leung Coleman set out to examine the supposedly fraught politics of eating at Middle Eastern restaurants in New York.

There is, of course, a legitimate story there. Food carries history and identity. Israeli, Palestinian, Arab and Jewish cuisines overlap in numerous, sometimes complicated ways. And since October 7, restaurants have – whether they like it or not – found themselves caught up in political arguments raging far beyond their dining rooms.

But reading Coleman’s piece, you would struggle to understand how that politicization actually came about, particularly when it comes to Israelis and Jews abroad, who have found themselves subjected to extraordinary levels of vitriol, hostility and collective blame for a war against Hamas being fought thousands of miles away.

She certainly invokes October 7. Just not to explain what happened on that dark day.

She does not tell readers how the largest single-day slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust became, almost immediately, a pretext in some quarters for targeting Jews and Israelis elsewhere, or why mass murder and hostage-taking might have profoundly altered the way Israelis and Jews experienced the months and years that followed.

Instead, October 7 becomes not an atrocity to be described but a chronological hinge: the dividing line between the period before and the period after people supposedly woke up to the truth about Israel.

And what truth might that be?

“Israel’s genocide.”

Not an accusation of genocide. Not an alleged genocide. Coleman repeatedly presents it in her own narrative voice as an established fact.

Nor is that the piece’s only revealing choice of language.

Elsewhere, Israel itself is described as “the land mass currently called Israel” – a remarkable formulation for a sovereign country, particularly when describing a map on which Israel has disappeared entirely beneath the words “Discover Palestine.”

That question of authenticity sits at the heart of Coleman’s treatment of Israeli cuisine: how much of what Americans came to know as “Israeli” was ever authentically Israeli in the first place?

Regarding its provenance, Coleman distills it thus: “The most popular dishes were Mizrahi, Arab, North African. Some were imported by Jewish immigrants. Many of the dishes were Palestinian.”

The implication is difficult to miss: Israeli cuisine was less a cuisine than an appropriation – take Palestinian and other Middle Eastern foods, add dishes brought by Jewish immigrants and rebrand the resulting mixture as Israeli.

More fundamentally, Coleman’s categories blur distinctions that are rather important. “Mizrahi” is not something separate from “Jewish”: Mizrahi Jews are Jewish communities with centuries-old roots across the Middle East and North Africa. Many of the very “Jewish immigrants” she refers to were therefore the bearers of those Mizrahi culinary traditions.

Those “Jewish immigrants” did not arrive in Israel culturally empty-handed and begin rummaging through their neighbors’ kitchens. Jews from Iraq, Yemen, Morocco, Iran, Libya, Tunisia and elsewhere brought with them deeply rooted culinary traditions developed over centuries in the Middle Eastern and North African societies of which they themselves had been a part.

Nor did they arrive in a land devoid of Jews. Jews have maintained a continuous presence there for millennia. Modern Israeli cuisine grew from the meeting of those longstanding local Jewish traditions with the cuisines brought by Jews arriving from across the Middle East, North Africa, Europe and elsewhere.

In other words, Jewish food was not some foreign ingredient suddenly introduced into an otherwise exclusively Arab culinary landscape. It was already part of the region’s history, and became still more diverse as Jewish communities from across the diaspora converged in Israel.

And that is precisely what makes the appropriation framing so strained. Many of the foods now fought over as markers of modern national identity long predate the modern national labels being imposed upon them. They developed across borders, communities and centuries, not in neatly partitioned national kitchens awaiting ownership certificates.

Curiously, Coleman’s own historical account demonstrates the problem.

She describes an earlier New York Middle Eastern food scene in which Syrian, Lebanese, Palestinian, Egyptian, Muslim, Christian and Jewish cooks, restaurateurs and musicians overlapped freely. An Egyptian chef could work at an Israeli club; a Palestinian-American woman could prepare falafel for her Lebanese husband’s business.

By Coleman’s own account, this was a shared regional culinary culture – until Israeli participation in that same inheritance becomes something requiring an appropriation analysis.

The asymmetry is revealing. Palestinian associations with regional food are treated as evidence of authentic inheritance. Jewish Middle Eastern traditions are something “imported.” And when those traditions become part of Israeli cuisine, the result is rendered suspiciously artificial – “self-fashioned” – rather than what national cuisines everywhere are: products of migration, geography, inheritance, exchange and adaptation.

Coleman even manages to enlist American foreign policy in explaining restaurant trends. Israel, readers are reminded, was “richly funded and supported by our own,” while Israeli chefs supposedly “cruised free” of the prejudices facing other Middle Eastern restaurateurs and consequently “gave themselves permission to be expensive.”

Naturally, no evidence is offered that this sweeping theory of Israeli geopolitical and cultural privilege actually explains why these particular restaurants succeeded, or why their chefs were able to charge more.

The asymmetry becomes even clearer once diners enter the picture.

Coleman treats Palestinian political expression in restaurants as an understandable assertion of identity. Palestinian flags, Palestinian wine and overt expressions of solidarity are framed through community, dignity and human rights.

Something changes when the solidarity is Israeli.

Jewish patrons supporting Israeli restaurants become objects of ridicule. Israeli establishments are described as “safe spaces for Zionism.” Pro-Israel customers allegedly create a “bloodthirsty environment.” One former employee concludes that working at an Israeli restaurant was simply “propaganda.”

Palestinian political expression is contextualized and humanized. Israeli political expression is treated as something suspicious, sinister or faintly absurd.

Ayat provides perhaps the clearest illustration of that double standard. The Palestinian restaurant’s menu displays a map on which Israel disappears entirely beneath the words “Discover Palestine.” Yet Coleman describes the gesture only as “combative.”

Readers are not told that Ayat had previously placed “From the River to the Sea” on its menu – a slogan envisioning a Palestinian state across the entire territory between the Jordan River and Mediterranean, and one long embraced by Hamas as a rallying cry for eliminating Israel and the Jews living there.

That omission is particularly striking in a feature supposedly examining how restaurants communicate political identity and ideology.

Nor does the documented targeting of Israeli restaurants receive anything like the narrative weight afforded to supposedly objectionable Zionist diners.

The article does acknowledge that Israeli restaurants have been vandalized, but remarkably little is made of it. Miriam in Park Slope was daubed with “GENOCIDE CUISINE” and “ISRAEL STEALS CULTURE.” Effy’s Cafe was splashed with paint and targeted with messages accusing its customers of supporting genocide. Other Israeli establishments have faced harassment, graffiti and organized efforts to drive them out of business.

The piece even notices that some Israeli restaurateurs have begun describing their food more generically as “Mediterranean.” Coleman briefly entertains one rather obvious explanation: “Perhaps there’s a fear of being targeted.”

Given the vandalism she has already acknowledged, one might imagine that possibility deserved serious consideration.

Instead, Coleman gives the final word to Palestinian restaurateur Jumana Bishara, who supplies an explanation rather more congenial to the article’s thesis: Israeli chefs are distancing themselves from their national identity because “their state is genocidal.”

“That says it all,” Bishara concludes.

It certainly says something. Just perhaps not what Coleman intended.

She saves one final vignette for the conclusion of the article.

At Huda, servers were placing GAZA stickers with customers’ checks. Coleman describes watching one diner receive his, recoil and say: “I don’t want this!”

There are several conceivable explanations for such a reaction. Perhaps he disagreed politically. Perhaps he had some personal connection to October 7. Perhaps – radical thought – he simply did not want unsolicited political material served alongside the bill.

But Coleman closes instead with the restaurant’s interpretation: that such diners have “othered” Arabs and “freak out” when they discover the restaurant they entered is not Israeli.

And there the article ends.

It is an oddly perfect conclusion to a piece supposedly examining the politicization of food.

But Coleman’s feature belongs to a much broader tendency: a growing genre of commentary in which Israeli identity itself is treated as morally suspect, and therefore even the most inconspicuous acts of everyday life cease to be ordinary.

The Pathologizing of Israeli Identity

The subject can be food, music, housing, air conditioning or even the direction someone happens to face in a photograph. The method remains remarkably consistent. Begin with the assumption that something is fundamentally wrong with Israelis, then interpret whatever they happen to be doing as evidence of it.

Haaretz writer Ori Morad recently managed this with air conditioning. A/C, Israel’s defensive Iron Dome, reinforced rooms and even protective netting over children’s playgrounds are, he argues, symptoms of a “bubble-boy country” retreating into a national “cocoon.” Rockets simply come “from Gaza”; deadly drones “from Lebanon.” The terrorists firing them are irrelevant.

That absence is what makes the inversion possible. Israelis protecting themselves and their children from incoming explosives are transformed from civilians responding to attack into evidence of a defective national psychology. Morad eventually dispenses with subtlety altogether and declares that “Most Israelis” simply want to remain comfortable while “Gaza is wiped off the map” and southern Lebanon is destroyed.

Current Affairs found pathology in something still more innocuous: electronic dance music. Its treatment of the Nova festival dwelled on drugs, tattoos, decadence and supposed cultural appropriation; Hamas terrorists became “fedayeen,” the massacre “crossfire,” and Israeli electronic music eventually acquired a supposed “fascistic utility” before being compared with culture in Nazi Germany.

The Guardian’s Arwa Mahdawi achieved something similar with an advertisement for luxury apartments in Herzliya. Gwyneth Paltrow’s participation was “Gwynocide.” A development featuring swimming pools, Pilates and wine rooms was rhetorically marched through Gaza until Mahdawi arrived at “The Zone of Interest” and Auschwitz, before imagining future Israeli resorts “built on mass graves.”

Online arts magazine Hyperallergic perhaps offered the purest distillation. Israeli soldiers photographed with their backs to the camera were said to be making a “tacit admission of guilt.” In the same article, concealing one’s face from facial-recognition technology was described as potentially “paramount” to protecting civil rights.

Taken together, these pieces reveal something more corrosive than hostility toward a particular Israeli government.

They turn Israeliness into an explanatory category of guilt.

The mundane becomes sinister by association. Normal life becomes evidence of callousness. Self-preservation becomes pathology. Culture becomes propaganda. Privacy becomes culpability.

And once that framework is adopted, it becomes virtually impossible to falsify.

The Israeli is placed in an impossible position because innocence itself has effectively been removed as an available category. Whatever he does can be reinterpreted as proof of the accusation that preceded it.

This rhetoric performs a broader delegitimizing function. A government can be voted out. A policy can be reversed. A war can end. But if the defect resides in Israeli identity itself, no change in policy can cure it.

And the boundary between “Israeli” and “Jew” is hardly impermeable. The same framework readily migrates to Jews abroad who eat at Israeli restaurants, express solidarity with Israelis or simply refuse to repudiate the Jewish state. What begins as criticism of government policy becomes an indictment of a society, and from there an indictment of identity.

That is the more disturbing pattern behind these otherwise absurd examples.

Israelis are not merely accused of doing wrong. They are increasingly depicted as uniquely incapable of doing anything innocently: their culture is stolen, their pleasures decadent, their homes obscene, their self-defense pathological.

First comes the verdict.

Then comes the search for the falafel, rave, air conditioner, apartment or photograph that can be made to prove it.

At that point, guilt attaches not to what Israelis do, but to what they are. That is pathologization – and ultimately, delegitimization.

Born in London, England, Rachel O’Donoghue moved to Israel in April 2021 after spending five years working at various national newspaper titles in the UK. She studied law at the University of Law, London, and gained a master’s degree in multimedia journalism at the University of Kent.

Originally published by HonestReporting.

Clarissa Ward. Screenshot.

by Darcie Grunblatt

(CAMERA) — In “The quiet erosion of Christian life in the Holy Land,” CNN special, Clarissa Ward crossed the line from reporter to activist.

Rather than exploring why Christians have been leaving Jerusalem and the West Bank, Ward selectively curated her interviews and background to promote a singular narrative that Israel is pushing Christians out, ignoring a far more complex reality.

Ward’s Bias and Manufactured Narratives

Ward’s bias was evident from the moment the clips started rolling. Driving to Bethlehem, she abandoned standard journalistic detachment to shout at an Israeli shepherd on the border of Areas B and C, “This is not your land!”

Passing the security barrier in Bethlehem, Ward described it as a “brutal structure” without explaining that Israelis built the wall to stop the suicide bombings during the Second Intifada.

When the cameras panned to reveal “Free Marwan” graffitied on the wall, Ward failed to note that Israeli courts convicted Marwan Barghouti for directing terror attacks that killed four Israeli civilians and a Greek monk. Uncritically airing this graffiti obscured Palestinian society’s idolization of anti-Christian violence in favor of an undisrupted singular narrative.

In Jerusalem, where Ward began the segment, she used a subtle interviewing tactic to immediately cast suspicion on Israeli society. She opened with footage of an Israeli pushing a nun to the ground in the Old City, noting in her own voiceover that the Israeli government had swiftly condemned the attack. She also showed footage of police arresting the suspect, explicitly stating they suspected a nationalist motive.

Despite this clear condemnation and official transparency, Ward posed a leading question to Father Anthony Giambrone, a scholar who teaches at the victim’s school, floating unsourced speculation that the attacker was merely mentally ill, forcing a priest to refute an unverified claim and creating the unsupported impression that Israelis were sweeping a hate crime under the rug.

Ward’s interview choices further exposed this editorial bias. For example, she featured Rev. Munther Isaac, who attributed declining Christian populations to the ‘Nakba,’ but ignored his October 8, 2023, sermon justifying the Hamas massacres as a natural response to the Gaza “siege.” Of the two Palestinian Christians Ward interviewed, both were part of the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem, seemingly the sole source of Christians in the West Bank for international news media.

Palestinian and Islamic Pressure

To understand the reality Ward ignored, CAMERA attempted, through extensive international Christian networks, to speak with other Christians in the same places she visited. In the end, only one Christian in the West Bank would go on the record.

Philos Project Director and ordained Southern Baptist Minister Luke Moon told CAMERA that while he has a good relationship with some pastors in Bethlehem, their relationship with him could hurt them since anyone he meets with will be seen as a potential “collaborator with Zionists”.

Explaining the dynamic, Minister Moon said, “When Palestinian Christians are in a group, they will never tell you how things really are. When you get them alone and talking, they will tell you horror stories about how they’re treated by Muslims, people around them, discrimination, fear, their daughters being forced to marry a Muslim…”

He compared the situation for Christians under Palestinian Authority rule to the relationship between an abused spouse and the abusive partner: “The spouse will tell you how amazing the relationship is, but you can see the black eye under the make-up.”

Reinforcing this climate of fear, Minister Moon recalled a striking conversation from a year earlier with Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem. When Moon suggested evacuating Christians from Gaza for their safety, the Cardinal candidly warned him that if church leadership were seen as favoring Christians, “all the churches in the Middle East would burn.” CAMERA reached out to the Latin Patriarch to corroborate the statement.

This underlying pressure was evident when CAMERA asked Elias Baboun, a politically active Catholic from Bethlehem, about his relationship to Palestinian society at large. He alluded to experiencing pressure to convert to Islam, saying, “Most of the radical Muslims think they have to make other people Muslims. They try to advise you to bring you back to Islam.”

While a 2020 survey by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PCPSR) found that a minority (23 percent) of West Bank Christians have been directly urged to convert by Muslim acquaintances, 70 percent of Christian respondents reported hearing Muslims assert that Christians are bound for hellfire.

According to Moon, about 20 percent of Palestinian Christians are involved in terrorism, specifically noting that the founder of the PFLP was a Christian. Another 50 percent are Palestinian nationalists who are Christian “in name only.” This means, he explained, that in the Middle East, being Christian is more tribal and tied to family lineage than a set of beliefs. He said that Ward’s interviewees – Rev. Munther and Taybeh’s Father Bashar Fawadleh – fall into the Palestinian nationalist bucket.

The Situation in Taybeh

Screenshot of the CNN segment outside of Taybeh in which Clarissa Ward shouts at an Israeli “This is not your land!”

While ignoring this Palestinian intimidation, in a voiceover, Ward accused Israel of enabling Israeli violence against Christians while driving to Taybeh after speaking with the new Israeli envoy to the Christian world, Ambassador George Deek.

Her accusation of Israeli inaction in Taybeh is demonstrably false. On July 23, 2026, Maj.-Gen. Avi Bluth signed a year-long military order barring Israelis and all non-residents from entering Taybeh without permission to stop both Jewish and Muslim attackers. The order grants permission to soldiers and police to remove unauthorized persons by force.

Furthering efforts to address local friction, Ambassador Deek met on August 5 with local Christian activist Elias Zarina to navigate pressures facing Taybeh. Addressing settler friction, Minister Moon attributed attacks on Taybeh to Israeli youth at an at-risk farm center near Rimonim. While CAMERA could not identify such a facility, a July 2026 Ministry document cited by The Times of Israel showed that roughly 225 Israeli youths, often school dropouts living in illegal outposts in the Benjamin region near Rimonim, frequently and deliberately clash with local Palestinians. Furthermore, it is possible that this group has not been targeting Christian Palestinians specifically. The Detroit Catholic reported on July 15, 2025 that a separate incident involving these youth began “when Palestinians threw stones at Israelis near the village,” citing the Israeli military.

Cherry-Picking and Distorting Data

Beyond anecdotal omissions, Ward and other outlets have relied on selective data to paint a misleading picture of systemic Israeli hostility. After dismissing Jewish volunteers working against anti-Christian ignorance with the vague assertion that it “will take more than good intentions,” Ward cites a 2025 Rossing Center for Education and Dialogue (RCED) survey showing roughly half of Israeli Christians under 45 are considering emigration.

In actuality, a 2025 Israel Democracy Institute survey reveals emigration desires are a broad trend across all demographics, affecting 28 percent of Arab Israelis and 36 percent of Israeli Jews aged 18–34. Furthermore, RCED’s own report notes that Arab Christian emigration is primarily driven by foreign opportunities and existing diaspora family ties, not Israeli hostility. As CAMERA analyst AJ Rodriquez pointed out, the RCED report misleads by grouping incidents of vastly different severity into a single narrative while ignoring official state responses.

The Wall Street Journal mirrored this flawed approach in an August 2 report (“Spitting Attacks Show Rise of Anti-Christian Hate in Israel”) claiming “around half of Israelis believed that entering a church is forbidden, up from 10 percent in 2008.” This misquotes the RCED report, which noted a 10-percentage point increase, not a leap from 10 to 50 percent, and mischaracterizes standard Halachah (Jewish law) as bigotry. This increase reflects demographic growth in Israel’s religious population (rising from 25.5 percent to over 33 percent) and Halachic literacy, not a surge in anti-Christian prejudice.

Christian Emigration

Ultimately, the narrative of Christian emigration is far more complex than Ward presents. While Baboun did note that part of the reason Palestinian Christians are emigrating is due to a lack of economic opportunity as a result of restrictions on entering Israel, Moon argued Israel is within its rights to secure its borders, especially after the October 7 attacks when Palestinians used intelligence they had obtained while working in Israel with permits.

Minister Moon summarized that the Muslim world uses stories of Israeli settler attacks to use Christians as pawns, noting that Christians in sovereign Israel are fully integrated and successful (a claim that official data backs up). CAMERA has already written extensively about this repeated media narrative.

In terms of emigration, Moon concluded, “Christians are stuck. They don’t have a lot of good options. The constant discrimination and prejudice and lack of safety… Everyone treats them with suspicion.”

The fundamental failure of Ward’s report is one that plagues much of the international press: a failure to recognize the coercive environment in which Middle Eastern minorities exist, like Christians in the West Bank. Journalists must be fiercely wary when interviewing vulnerable populations in areas devoid of free speech. As Minister Moon noted, survival often requires these communities to mask their reality.

Likewise, reporters must be equally wary of institutional voices who have chosen to align with local radical powers to protect themselves or advance a political agenda.

Good reporting means holding radical voices accountable on camera while understanding why average people may be too terrified to speak even when the cameras are not rolling.

By failing on both counts, CNN simply broadcast the acceptable West Bank Christian narrative while burying the side of reality hardly anyone is willing to voice out loud.

Originally published by the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis.

Anti-Israel encampment in Victoria Square, Montreal, July 2024. Israel InSight file photo.

by Ari Sacher

There is a television commercial that seems to play every fifteen minutes on North American sports channels. A man bites into an Old El Paso taco. The crunch is so powerful that it creates a visible shock wave. Buildings shake. Windows rattle. Facades crumble. It is meant to be funny.

I have not found it funny.

For nearly three years, my family and I have been living in a country at war. During that time, two rockets landed roughly one hundred feet from my home. Debris from an Iranian missile landed on my next-door neighbor’s back porch. Both of my sons have done about 500 days of reserve duty. Like many Israelis, I have become intimately familiar with the sound of sirens, the sprint to shelter, and the uneasy silence that follows an explosion. I have even mastered the art of discerning between the sound of an intercept and a ground impact. What advertisers imagine as comedy now resembles a memory. When the taco crunch sends shock waves through the neighborhood, my instinct is not to laugh. My instinct is to look for the nearest protected space.

The uncomfortable truth is that Israel has developed a national form of PTSD. October 7 changed us. We continue to function. We go to work. We send our children to school. We argue about politics. We complain about traffic. Israelis are remarkably resilient. But resilience should not be confused with normalcy. Something fundamental has changed in the national psyche. The Jewish communities of North America understand this. Everywhere I travel, people ask how we are doing. Synagogues recite special prayers on our behalf daily. Just this past week, I sat in a Canadian synagogue and listened as the rabbi struggled to maintain his composure while speaking about Israel. At one point, he openly wept. I was deeply moved.

Yet as I listened, another thought crept into my mind. I appreciate the prayers, but I am far from convinced that Israel is the only country that should be worried. I am writing these words from Montreal. Before leaving Israel, I received the standard security briefing. The instructions were blunt. Do not display obvious signs of being Israeli or Jewish. No kippah. No Hebrew in public places. Remove identifying stickers from luggage. Keep a low profile.

Think about that for a moment. I live in a country under constant threat from rockets and missiles. Yet when I travel to one of the world’s great Western democracies, I am instructed to conceal my identity. Something is wrong with that picture.

The concerns are not theoretical. Since October 7, Montreal Jewish schools and synagogues have been repeatedly targeted. Incidents that would once have been unimaginable have become distressingly common. Last Friday night, a well-known kosher restaurant was consumed by a fire. Security cameras reportedly captured an individual pouring on the flames what appeared to be an accelerant. To an outside observer, the conclusion seems obvious. Occam’s Razor teaches that the simplest explanation is usually the correct one. And yet there appears to be an extraordinary reluctance to say what many people are thinking. Perhaps it was vandalism. Perhaps it was random. Perhaps it was something else entirely. In conversations in a synagogue the following day, I even heard suggestions that Jews themselves might somehow be responsible. I was stunned. When evidence points in one direction, inventing increasingly complicated alternatives does not demonstrate sophistication. It demonstrates denial.

Israelis know something about denial.

For years, many of us convinced ourselves that our enemies did not really mean what they said. We viewed explicit threats through the reassuring lens of our own assumptions. We told ourselves that economic incentives, international pressure, and common sense would prevail. October 7 shattered those illusions in a single day. The massacre forced us to recognize that reality does not conform to our preferences.

The lesson extends beyond Israel. Canada remains a free, prosperous, and welcoming country. The overwhelming majority of Canadians reject hatred. But societies rarely decline all at once. The warning signs emerge gradually. People normalize what would once have shocked them. Institutions become reluctant to acknowledge uncomfortable truths. Citizens convince themselves that obvious dangers are somehow temporary, isolated, or misunderstood.

I am grateful for the prayers offered on Israel’s behalf. We certainly do need them. But as I walk through Old Montreal wearing a baseball cap, trying not to look Israeli, I cannot escape a troubling conclusion: perhaps the prayers should also be for Canada. Israel learned the cost of living in a dream world of its own making. The question facing Canadian Jews today is whether they are willing to wake up before reality does it for them.

Ari Sacher is chief systems engineer of Iron Dome, and a senior policy advisor to U.S. Israel Education Association (USIEA), a nonprofit organization based in Birmingham that advances important dialogue and cooperation between bipartisan senior government leaders in the United States and Israel by filling existing information gaps and enhancing understanding of issues critical to a mutually beneficial partnership. Founded in 2011, USIEA empowers U.S. leaders with innovative initiatives on the path to Middle East peace, connects Members of Congress with direct access to West Bank visits, and educates as thought leaders in the media and through strategic global partnerships.

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by A.J. Caschetta

(Investigative Project on Terrorism) — Among the distinguishing features of culture are art, architecture, literature, film, education, music, entertainment and language. In each of these categories, Palestinianism depends entirely on the dream of destroying Israel. No other Arab sub-culture is so monomaniacal.

The PLO’s Creation

Under Yasser Arafat’s leadership, the PLO actively produced Palestinian culture through the Unified Information Office’s Plastic Arts Section and its Department of Arts and National Culture which, according to Kristine Khouri and Rasha Salti at The Markaz Review, “were mandated to commission, fund, and promote the production of posters, art, film, theater, dance, music, and publications; to preserve folklore and cultural traditions; and to galvanize support for the Palestinian struggle internationally, in the arena of art and culture.”

In 1978, the Plastic Arts Section organized the “International Art Exhibit for Palestine“ in Beirut, confidently announcing that, “Beside armed resistance in extremely difficult conditions, our people is carrying out a political and cultural struggle.”

It continues, “This exhibition will be a starting point for a militant cultural front that enables us, through art expression, to convey our cause and voice to all peoples and enable these peoples to participate in our struggle.”

Palestinian Art and Architecture

Art and architecture have always been considered important indicators of cultural achievement, and there is a well-documented body of Palestinian art in the Twentieth Century.

By claiming that Palestinian art begins in the Byzantine era, partisan historians show that their agenda takes precedence over logic. Referring to the Al-Aqsa mosque as an example of Palestinian architecture misrepresents the work of the Byzantine period, which was entirely alien to anything having to do with “Palestine” or the people who today call themselves “Palestinians.”

There was never was a distinctively “Palestinian” art unconnected to violence and war.

As Palestinian artist and art critic Samia Halaby pointed out in 2012, Palestinian art is liberation art. Aesthetics are subsumed by agenda, and the agenda is to fight against Israel.

In a long passage worth quoting in its entirety, Halaby demonstrates the single mindedness of Palestinian art: “The horse came to mean revolution. The flute came to mean the tune of the ongoing resistance. The wedding came to mean the entire Palestinian cause. The key came to mean the right of return. The sun came to mean freedom. The gun with a dove came to mean that peace would come after the struggle for liberation. Artists used the colors of the flag, patterns from embroidery, chains, etc. Village scenes, village dress, the prisoner, prison bars. There were special themes regarding the martyr. First there were generalized pictures of the martyr as well as pictures of specific individuals who had been killed by the Israelis. The second form was based on a popular practice of framing a collage of symbols representing the deceased’s life then hanging it at their home or grave.”

As for architecture, the greatest Palestinian achievements are underground. Surely the most impressive Palestinian engineering has never been seen by most of the world since it is hidden beneath the Earth. Like everything else in Palestinian culture, Subterranean Gaza was built to wage war against Israel, allowing Hamas fighters to penetrate Israel’s borders and fabricate weapons shielded from watchful eyes overhead.

Palestinian Literature

Another important marker of culture is literature.

There is a long history of Arab narrative and lyric poetry on many topics. Sincere and satirical stories about love, nature, and heroism pre-date Islam. But Palestinian poetry is exclusively about “resistance.” It consists of angry, self-pitying victim narratives and revenge fantasies.

The New York Times says, “For a Raw Portrait of War, Look to Palestinian Poets.” A writer for the Culture section at The Atlantic advises that “Everyone Should be Reading Palestinian Poetry,” enthusing that “although reading about violence in Palestine does little more than cause me pain and frustration, poetry allows me to access the place’s wonder and complexity.” The problem is that most Palestinian poetry is about violence. Even the annual Palestine Writes Literature Festival is obsessed with violence.

The most famous Palestinian poet was Mahmoud Darwish, who was also a member of the PLO. His most famous poem, “Identity Card,” is about killing Israelis. The poem concludes with these six lines:

But if I become hungry
The usurper’s flesh will be my food
Beware ...
Beware ...
Of my hunger
And my anger!

Fittingly, Darwish is buried in Ramallah, across from the Palace of Culture. His gravesite was later expanded into the Mahoud Darwish Memorial Cultural Center and Park.

Palestinian Film

Palestinian film is also dominated by violence. Beginning with the PLO’s Information Department’s propaganda films, like With Soul and Blood (1971) and We Are the Palestinian People (1973), to this day, Palestinian cinema is dominated by violence.

Palestinian film series have titles like “Palestinian Revolution Cinema“ and “Cinema of Palestinian Return.” As the blurb to Hamid Dabashi’s book, Dreams of a Nation: On Palestinian Cinema (2006), has it, “Deeply rooted in the historic struggles for national self-determination, this cinema is the single most important artistic expression of a much-maligned people.”

Palestinian Education

Children’s entertainment is even worse. Generations of children have been brain-washed by the education-entertainment combination produced by the PLO, the PA, and Hamas. Pierre Rehov’s eye-opening documentaries and Palestinian Media Watch analyses illustrate what Palestinian culture has brought to child rearing and education.

Hamas has weaponized the simple, innocent fun of flying a kite, turning it into Kite Jihad. The PLO turned Disney’s beloved Mickey Mouse into the murderous rat Farfour. Even summer camps for children have been transformed into jihad training grounds. If the entire Palestinian educational system were changed immediately, it would likely take another eight decades to erase all the hatred inculcated over the previous eight.

Palestinian Music

Music is no different. Traditional Arab music types (the ataaba, mawwal, taktouka) are popular among Palestinians, Syrians, and Jordanians alike, but what distinguishes Palestinian music from Arab music is, again, the concept of “resistance.”

Most sources differentiate between “Palestinian” music prior to, and after, 1948. The Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestinian Question takes it a step further: “Palestinian musical output changed significantly after 1967, when... A new kind of music emerged in opposition to the new occupation, and what became known as ‘committed songs’ gained prominence alongside the national anthems that had been popular before.”

The first Intifada marked another turning point, leading to the establishment of the National Conservatory of Music in 1993 at Birzeit University, eventually renamed the Edward Said National Conservatory of Music, celebrating the leading anti-Zionist intellectual. The latest iteration of Palestinian music is protest rap music. The popular music streaming service Spotify has a “Palestine Solidarity Protest Playlist.” Since February 17, 2024, the number one song has been “From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will Be Free.”

Palestinian Language

Like the rest of the Arab world, the language of Palestinian culture is Arabic, but Palestinian culture has actually added to the language, introducing a word that hadn’t existed in the entire 2,000-year (give or take) history of the language. It came on January 27, 2002, as Yasser Arafat spoke to a crowd of over one thousand women outside of his Ramallah compound. It was his famous “feminism” speech where he told the women that they would become his “Army of Roses that will crush Israeli tanks.”

What Arafat did next changed the language. He shouted “Shaheeda all the way to Jerusalem,” and the crowd chanted back knowingly “Shaheeda, Shaheeda, Shaheeda.” What made it unique is that the Arabic word for martyr (shaheed) had previously existed exclusively as a masculine noun with no feminine counterpart. Arafat “coin[ed] on the spot the feminized version of the Arab word,” as Barbara Victor puts it in her book Army of Roses (2003). Later that day, Wafa Idris would become the first of many female Palestinian suicide bombers.

It was a shift for Arafat, who prior to 2002 restricted women’s role in Palestinian society to child-bearers, often boasting that “the womb of the Arab woman is my strongest weapon.” In the notion of Shaheeda, he had found a new way to weaponize them.

Unique in History

Never before in recorded history has a culture been defined exclusively by its desire to wipe out a people. The closest analogue to the Palestinians’ all-consuming desire to destroy Israel is the Roman Republic’s obsession with destroying the Empire of Carthage.

Rome’s Punic Wars lasted over a century. Like the wars between Israel and Palestinians, there were periods of relative calm punctuated by intense conflict. Eventually, the Romans dedicated themselves to the destruction of Carthage. Cato the Elder and other Roman orators closed their speeches with the phrase “Carthago delenda est“ or “Carthage must fall,” signifying their commitment to the cause.

Like Palestinians, Romans were capable of a single-minded drive to wipe out their enemy, and eventually they did. In 146 B.C., the victorious general Scipio Aemilianus ordered the city of Carthage destroyed and, according to legend, ordered the ground salted so nothing would grow for years. But Rome also gave the world useful things like roads, massive beautiful buildings, and indoor plumbing. Rome gave the world artists, physicians and philosophers. Palestinian culture has given the world airplane hijacking and Intifada.

Palestinian culture has all the fanatical monomania of Rome’s quest to destroy Carthage but none of Rome’s advancements and contributions to humanity, all of the anger and vengeance but none of the beauty and truth.

Conclusion

In “Why there Should Not Be a Palestine,” Hussein Aboubakr Mansour explains that until recently he was an advocate for a Palestinian state but changed his mind on February 20, 2025, after witnessing the “cultural glorification of martyrdom” in Hamas’s video showing its release of the remains of four Israeli hostages.

Mansour was referring to the bizarre ceremony at a cemetery in Khan Younis when 4 coffins with the bodies of Odeh Lipshitz and the Bibas family were paraded for cheering crowds in front of a stage and handed over to the Red Cross.

Sky News called it “a scene of a very sick culture.”

Mansour agreed.

In the images of “children encouraged to revel in the spectacle... children paraded around corpses in broad daylight,” Mansour found “a deep... moral and cultural collapse.”

The depraved ceremony shattered Mansour’s optimism that Palestinians “could somehow find a new identity built on pragmatic coexistence or even form a civic ethos of their own, unshackled from the destructive impulses that have repeatedly manifested in violence.”

Palestinian culture is incapable, currently, of creating such an identity.

Chief IPT Political Correspondent A.J. Caschetta is a principal lecturer at the Rochester Institute of Technology and a fellow at Campus Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum where he is also a Milstein fellow. Reprinted with permission.

Former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett unveiling a National Accessibility and Inclusion Plan in Bnei Brak, April 16, 2026. Credit: Bennett 2026.

by Jonathan Feldstein

In June, I attended a campaign event in Jerusalem featuring former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett. As Israel’s Oct. 27 national elections approach amid ongoing security challenges, political division and economic pressures, the gathering highlighted the growing intensity of the race. Organized in English for the Anglo community, the well-structured evening included heavy security, and a looping TV interview with English subtitles showcasing Bennett speaking extemporaneously and engaging in thoughtful dialogue.

Bennett’s presentation was personable, interactive, and often spontaneous, especially during the lively Q&A session. Though he used a teleprompter to stay on message, his delivery felt authentic. As a native Hebrew speaker whose English carries the natural cadence of someone raised in a bilingual home, his fluency stood out, a notable asset in a campaign where competent English has itself become an issue. He diagnosed Israel’s core problems: internal fragmentation, economic burdens, security vulnerabilities, and educational disparities. While light on implementation details, his vision was clear, optimistic, and rooted in practical experience. It’s up to the voters to assess whether these issues are the primary issues, and if Bennett can deliver.

Bennett, who previously served as Minister of Education, Defense, and Israel’s 13th prime minister, is now leading the Beyachad party, an alliance with former Prime Minister and his former coalition partner Yair Lapid. This partnership recreates their earlier collaboration that achieved a surprise victory, while also qualifying them for state campaign funding. That’s no small thing where several or more other new parties are emerging and compete for votes but will not have state funding. Bennett’s remarks draw from his diverse background as a successful tech entrepreneur, IDF commander and public servant, to position himself as a pragmatic Zionist leader capable of delivering results.

He opened by sharing his personal family story. The son of American immigrants who arrived in Haifa shortly after the 1967 Six-Day War, Bennett described how his left-leaning, secular parents from San Francisco became deeply connected to Israel. Their decision to immigrate gave him the “best gift” of being born in Israel, serving in its army, building startups, raising a family, and eventually leading the nation. He used this narrative to underscore themes of unity, resilience and potential.

Bennett framed the 2026 election as one of the most critical in Israel’s history, the third period of Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel. Referencing the First and Second Temple periods, which ended due to internal hatred and division, he warned: “This is it. We’re not going to have another chance.” He rejected defeatist attitudes (“There’s nothing we can do about world opinion, the draft, prices, or crime”) as fundamentally un-Zionist. “Zionism is about making the impossible possible,” he declared, calling on this generation to unite and repair the country after years of war and dysfunction.

The audience responded with the loudest applause to his firm stance on ultra-Orthodox draft exemptions, and the need for a formal constitution. Israel currently relies on a collection of Basic Laws that function in that role. Bennett promised decisive action from day one. At the first government meeting after inauguration, he would establish a state commission of inquiry into the catastrophic failures of October 7. “After such a colossal failure, the bereaved families and all the State of Israel deserve answers to ensure this will never happen again.”

He also pledged an eight-year term limit for prime ministers, citing biblical and historical examples like Gideon, George Washington and Cincinnatus, who voluntarily stepped away from power. “Am Yisrael – the People of Israel – is stronger than any one leader,” he stated, aiming to prevent personality cults and promote democratic renewal.

Ending the ultra-Orthodox draft exemption is a cornerstone of Bennett’s platform. He argued there is no historical Jewish precedent for large-scale Torah study replacing military duty or productive work. Abraham, Joshua, David and great rabbis like Rashi all combined learning with engagement in the real world. Bennett proposed canceling benefits for draft evaders and redirecting billions of shekels to those who serve. Creative solutions include combined yeshiva-IDF programs. This would ease the unsustainable burden on many reservists struggling to build careers and families, and make national service equitable, encouraging massive new immigration.

Bennett called for dismantling Israel’s fragmented, tribal education system, where different communities operate parallel networks. His reform envisions one national public education framework with a mandatory 60 percent common core curriculum for every child: Hebrew, English, Math, Civics, Democracy, Zionism, and Tanakh (Bible) with appropriate adaptations for Arab students. The remaining 40 percent would allow communities flexibility for deeper religious studies, arts, technology, or other electives. State funding would be tied to teaching this shared foundation. Drawing on his success as education minister, where he doubled participation in advanced level math, Bennett vowed that every child whether “in Dimona, Jerusalem, or Kiryat Shmona” would gain the skills needed for 21st-century success. “We can’t have a state within a state.”

Bennett noted high prices in Israel result from insufficient competition rather than geography or necessity. Citing past achievements, such as opening markets to reduce cheese prices by approximately 50 percent, and cutting murder rates by over 20 percent through focused law-and-order policies. He promised aggressive removal of thousands of non-tariff barriers, bureaucratic obstacles, and regulatory capture by special interests. He illustrated the problem with an arcane “soy drink” labeling rule that blocked imports to protect local monopolies. Future priorities include bold antitrust measures, and positioning Israel as a global leader in AI, targeting a top-three ranking worldwide as a strategic national asset. “The next global race is AI. We need to be at the forefront.”

Additional priorities include urgent rebuilding of the North (Galilee), where many displaced residents have not returned, ensuring independent Israeli arms and ammunition production, maintaining zero tolerance for terrorism, and firmly rejecting a Palestinian state. Bennett stressed assembling a “dream team” of proven CEOs and effective managers rather than career politicians. Ministers would be expected to actually work, a “novel concept” that defined his previous government. He acknowledged ideological differences with Lapid, but emphasized their shared commitment to fixing Israel and restoring its status as “a light unto the nations.”

Bennett closed on a hopeful note rooted in Jewish history and his family’s journey. He urged attendees to become advocates. “Four years from now, we will look back and say… back in 2026, we chose hope. Together, we wrote the next chapter of Israel.”

Whether Bennett and Beyachad prevail in October remains uncertain in Israel’s complex coalition-based system. Since June, they have slipped in the polls to a new party under the auspices of former IDF Chief of Staff Gadi Eisenkot. Implementation of any ambitious agenda and the coalition building itself will require negotiation and compromise, and a broad-based coalition that can agree on the main points to get there. Yet his ideas, even those that seem less realistic, are practical, results-focused, and grounded in both tradition and modernity. They offer a substantive contribution to the national conversation at a pivotal time.

This is not an endorsement of Bennett, Lapid or Beyachad. I went into the evening undecided, and left even more so.

Bennett’s full presentation is available online and well worth watching. A dialogue about his policies and polls will be held with undecided Israeli voters on August 12 at 1 p.m. Eastern time (US). Registration is free.

Jonathan Feldstein was born and educated in the U.S. and immigrated to Israel in 2004. He is married and the father of six, and a growing number of grandchildren. He has become a respected bridge between Jews and Christians and serves as president of the Genesis 123 Foundation, www.Genesis123.co, and recently published “Israel the Miracle,” featuring 75 essays by Christian leaders around the world writing why Israel is so significant. He writes regularly on major Christian websites around the world about Israel, sharing unique experiences of living as an Orthodox Jew in Israel. He is host of the popular Inspiration from Zion podcast. He can be reached at firstpersonisrael@gmail.com.

by A.J. Caschetta

(Investigative Project on Terrorism) — In March 2023, Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich claimed at a conference in France that, “there is no such thing as a Palestinian people.” News outlets quoted him saying “There is no such thing as a Palestinian nation. There is no Palestinian history. There is no Palestinian language,” and asking rhetorically “Is there a Palestinian history or culture? There is none.”

Smotrich was correct in many respects. There is no nation called “Palestine” and no “Palestinian” language, but there is a Palestinian culture. It was forged mostly by Yasser Arafat, the PLO’s leader for five decades, and is singularly defined by violence. Unique among all other Arab cultures and national identities, Palestinian culture and the Palestinian identity are predicated on a single political goal – the unceasing desire to destroy an existing country, in this case Israel.

Take away the resistance, and there’s nothing left of a distinctly Palestinian culture.

Origins of the Palestinian Identity

Cultures take centuries or millennia to form organically, but Palestinian culture, or “Palestinianism,” sprang into being quickly and artificially.

Historians might not agree on the precise date of the new Palestinian identity and its concomitant culture, but no serious scholar claims it to be much more than a century old. The designation “Palestinian” only became applicable to the inhabitants of the region because the British named it the Palestinian Mandate after acquiring it following World War I.

Daniel Pipes dates the origin of the Palestinian identity at 1920 when the British created the Palestine Mandate which all Muslims in the Middle East universally rejected because they perceived it as “a victory for Zionism.” So instead, they decided to form their own independent state, a project taken up by Amin al-Husseini, Mufti of Jerusalem.

Even Rashid Khalidi, once a PLO spokesman and later a Columbia University professor, concedes in his book Palestinian Identity (1997) that only after the first World War did “Palestinian” become “a new and powerful category of identity that was simply nonexistent a generation or two before, and was still novel and limited in its diffusion before World War I ... result[ing] in the emergence of a Palestinian national identity where a few decades before no such thing had existed.”

In 1958, Mike Wallace interviewed Israel’s Ambassador to the U.S., Abba Eban, for the CBS news show 60 Minutes. In the 22-minute segment, neither Eban nor Wallace utters the word “Palestinian” even once. Rather, both men refer to the people who today call themselves Palestinians as the “Arab refugees.”

Nasser and Arafat 1970
via Wikimedia Commons (AI enhanced)

According to Sha’I Ben-Tekoa, on March 29, 1959, Gamal Abdel Nasser announced to the Arab League meeting in Cairo that he “wanted to replace ‘Arab refugees’ with kiyan falastini (a Palestinian entity) in imitation of Algeria’s FLN.”

In 1964, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was founded and declared the existence of a “Palestinian” people. In 1967 Arafat took over the PLO and used it to shape Palestinian identity and culture into what they are today.

In a candid moment in 1977, Zuheir Mohsen, leader of the Ba’athist As-Saiqa faction of the PLO acknowledged, “The Palestinian people do not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel ... the existence of a separate Palestinian identity exists only for tactical reasons.”

Anti-Zionism Culture

Whatever date one prefers, the Palestinian identity was formulated to counter the Zionist identity, and it did so by imitation. Daniel Pipes calls this phenomenon “Islamic Zionism,” pointing out that “Palestinians have modeled ideas, institutions, and practices – nearly everything – on the Jewish model.” From their newfound veneration of Jerusalem, their posturing as victims of a Holocaust and appropriation of the word “genocide,” even their demand for a “right of return,” nearly every facet of Palestinian identity is a distorted mirror image of the Israeli Jewish identity.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the history of Jerusalem. Ignored by the Ottoman Caliphate and in ruins throughout the Nineteenth Century and early Twentieth Century, Jerusalem only became politically important after Britain took control in 1917. When Jordan controlled it from 1948 until 1967, it was again neglected and mostly ignored. But once it was conquered by Israel in the Six-Day War, Jerusalem became central to the new Palestinian identity.

Jordanian, Syrian, or Palestinian?

It is often observed that the people of Jordan (a nation that did not exist prior to 1921) are ethnically and genetically indistinguishable from “Palestinian” Arabs. The same could be said of the people of Syria.

In fact, Syrian dictator Hafez al Assad believed Palestine was simply southern Syria, part of “Greater Syria.” A June 1980 Damascus Radio broadcast asserted that “Syria views Palestine – according to historic, cultural, and geographic factors – as its own southern province.” Even the Palestinian nationalist leader Ahmed Shukairy, the first leader of the PLO, believed this, as he told the U.N. Security Council on May 31, 1956, “It is common knowledge that Palestine is nothing but southern Syria.”

What differentiates these three Arab peoples is largely political. Any linguistic differences are as inconsequential as variations in American English as spoken in the Northeast, the Midwest, and the deep South. The same is true of most other indicators of culture among Syrians, Jordanians, and Palestinians.

But the cultures differ in their approach to Israel. This is not to say that many Syrians and Jordanians would not celebrate the destruction of Israel, but the Syrian and Jordanian identities are not predicated entirely upon the dream of destroying it.

What distinguishes Palestinian culture and identity from all other Arab cultures and identities is that single goal.

So what are the distinguishing features of culture, and how have Palestinians expressed their individualism within a sea of Arab culture?

Part 2 of this series examines how, in every category of culture, Palestinianism depends entirely on war, violence, and the dream of destroying Israel.

Chief IPT Political Correspondent A.J. Caschetta is a principal lecturer at the Rochester Institute of Technology and a fellow at Campus Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum where he is also a Milstein fellow. Reprinted with permission.

Malki Roth

by Jonathan Feldstein

This week is the 25^th anniversary of one of the most horrific terror attacks in Israel during what is referred to as the Second Intifada. During the period from late 2000 through the first half of 2005, more than 1000 Israelis were killed and several thousand wounded as a result of countless Palestinian Arab suicide bombings, shootings, stabbings, and more. While hardly a week went by without some such terror attack, the August 9, 2001 bombing of the Sbarro pizza restaurant in central Jerusalem remains one of the most vivid and vulgar, still today.

Among the dozens killed and injured, 15-year-old Malki Roth was one of the victims for whom justice has yet to be served. Since then, her father, Arnold Roth, has worked tirelessly to bring the mastermind of his daughter’s murder to justice. Roth discussed this in a powerful and emotionally charged conversation on “Inspiration from Zion,” marking the anniversary of his daughter’s murder, and his continued efforts to bring the terrorist mastermind to justice. The conversation reveals not only the enduring pain of a grieving father but also a scathing critique of international inaction, Jordanian defiance, and American reluctance to enforce its own laws.

On August 9, 2001, Hamas terrorist Ahlam Tamimi, then a 21-year-old Jordanian journalism student, deliberately targeted the Sbarro pizzeria because it was filled with Jewish children. Tamimi was not the bomber, but the one who selected the site and guided the Hamas suicide bomber there carrying a guitar case filled with explosives and shrapnel to maximize the carnage. Fifteen people were killed immediately, including Malki, an American-Israeli citizen. 130 were wounded. Roth described the period leading up to the attack as tense but not yet at the peak of the Second Intifada violence. “Had we known that Malki and her best friend… were going… into the center of town to take a quick lunch,” he said, his wife Frimet “would have said, don’t go.”

Tamimi was arrested, and tried in an Israeli military court, where she proudly confessed to the crime. Roth noted chillingly: “She admitted joyously, with a smile on her face that chilled the three judges.” Yet in 2011, as part of the Gilad Shalit prisoner exchange, Israel released 1,027 terrorists, including Tamimi. The Roths were only informed of her impending release by a phone call from an Israeli official the morning after the deal was announced.

Since her release, Tamimi has lived openly in Jordan as a celebrity, hosting a television program that glorified terrorism and incited violence against Jews. Roth described her transformation: “She became a phenomenal performer for the promotion of the redemptive value of killing Jews… This is a compelling story.”

Other than the unthinkable loss of his daughter, the core of Roth’s frustration lies in the failure of the United States to secure Tamimi’s extradition and bring her to justice. Malki was an American citizen, and the U.S. has both an extradition treaty with Jordan and domestic law allowing prosecution of terrorists who murder Americans abroad. Charges were filed against Tamimi in 2013 and unsealed in 2017. Despite this, Jordan has refused to comply, citing a technicality in the treaty that Roth and legal experts dismiss as a self-invented loophole. And the U.S. has failed to insist of Jordan’s compliance.

Roth expressed deep disillusionment with the U.S. response. In a recent letter from a senior U.S. official, he was told the administration was doing more than any other to bring Tamimi to justice. His reaction was blunt: “I’m flabbergasted… They’re telling me things that I know that I tell them.” He added, “No Attorney General, no senior figure… has ever responded to us… The United States has betrayed its own values.”

Roth emphasized that the issue transcends personal grief. “If we fail to act in the face of grotesquely open and provocative actions by individuals and countries who twist terrorism… then we’re all lost.” He rejected pity as a motivator, instead calling for a defense of core principles: “Hug your children… remember what we can do… We’re different, and if we’re different, we’ve got to guard that difference.”

The conversation also addressed media complicity. Roth criticized BBC Arabic for platforming Tamimi and promoting narratives that glorify her actions. He has worked with media watchdog CAMERA to expose these issues and highlight the broadcaster’s willful failures if not compliance.

At the 25th anniversary of Malki’s murder, the Roths have launched a petition urging the U.S. Secretary of State to enforce the extradition treaty and bring Tamimi to justice in America. Roth stressed: “This is really an effort by my wife and me… We need as many [signatures] as we can get.”

Roth’s message is both personal and universal. The failure to extradite Tamimi represents more than bureaucratic inertia. It signals a troubling willingness to subordinate justice to political convenience. For Roth, this is not merely about one terrorist or one family. It is about whether the United States and the international community will uphold the values of accountability, truth, and the protection of innocent life.

The 25^th anniversary of the Sbarro bombing and Malki Roth’s murder come a month before the 25^th anniversary of the September 11 terror attack on U.S. soil killing 3000. The attacks took place thousands of miles apart, but the same Islamic terrorist ideology is the perpetrator. For justice and in memory of the victims, we cannot sit by and allow those who carried out these acts to walk free, especially where there is law in place to bring them to justice.

As Israel and the Jewish world prepare to commemorate the anniversary of the Sbarro attack on August 9, there have been hopeful developments, but Roth knows better than to get his hopes up too much after all these years of justice denied. But it’s not just about Israel and the Jewish world. Bringing terrorists who murder Americans to justice is a global issue.

Roth’s words serve as a sobering reminder: true justice remains elusive, but the fight for it must continue. He refuses to let his daughter’s memory be erased or her murderer celebrated. Their call is clear: sign the petition, demand action, and reject the normalization of terror.

Follow the full conversation with Arnold Roth on Inspiration from Zion by video or by audio.

Jonathan Feldstein was born and educated in the U.S. and immigrated to Israel in 2004. He is married and the father of six, and a growing number of grandchildren. He has become a respected bridge between Jews and Christians and serves as president of the Genesis 123 Foundation, www.Genesis123.co, and recently published “Israel the Miracle,” featuring 75 essays by Christian leaders around the world writing why Israel is so significant. He writes regularly on major Christian websites around the world about Israel, sharing unique experiences of living as an Orthodox Jew in Israel. He is host of the popular Inspiration from Zion podcast. He can be reached at firstpersonisrael@gmail.com.

by David Litman

(CAMERA) — In the small local newspaper, The News-Gazette (Lexington, Va.), a university professor is spewing big lies. In a July 15 op-ed titled, “Gaza And Genocide,” the words “Facts Matter” appear before the author’s name, Chris Gavaler, a professor at Washington and Lee University. We couldn’t agree more. That’s why it is so alarming to see so many inaccuracies in Gavaler’s op-ed, which accuses Israel of committing genocide.

Though CAMERA reached out to the paper with a correction request, the article remains available on its website.

Consider several of Gavaler’s errors The News-Gazette has chosen to stand by.

Indiscriminate Bombing?

Many of Gavaler’s allegations unravel with the slightest bit of commonsense analysis of his own claims.

For example, he accuses Israel of “indiscriminate” bombing in Gaza. He also tries to contrast Israel’s campaign with the German bombing of London in WWII, writing: “Where Germany dropped 18,000 tons of explosives on London during World War II, Israel had dropped 100,000 tons on the Gaza Strip – an area less than a quarter of London’s size.”

The comparison defeats his own argument.

The Imperial War Museum estimates that the Germans dropped 12,000 tons of explosives on London, killing 30,000. That’s 2.5 deaths per ton of explosives. Even accepting Gavaler’s figure of 18,000 tons of explosives, that’s still 1.7 deaths per ton of explosives.

Gavaler asserts that Israel dropped 100,000 tons of explosives in Gaza that killed 60,000 Gazans. That’s 0.6 deaths per ton of explosives. Put another way, the German bombs were 3 to 4 times deadlier than the Israeli ones.

The disparity is even more notable when taking other key factors into account. Gavaler himself acknowledges that Gaza is more densely populated. And while Londoners were able to take shelter in the London Underground network, Hamas built their tunnels underneath civilians to shelter its terrorists, using Gazans as human shields.

These factors suggest the deaths per ton of explosives should’ve been substantially higher in Gaza, not significantly lower.

If Israel truly was engaged in indiscriminate bombing, it had another critical advantage over the Germans. Whereas London had the Royal Air Force and anti-air weapons to defend its skies, the Israeli Air Force faces no comparable impediment toward executing its goals.

Other World War II urban bombing campaigns show even more starkly what an indiscriminate bombing campaign looks like. Using commonly cited figures, the deaths per ton of explosives amounted to approximately 4 in Hamburg, 8-9 in Dresden, and over 50 in Tokyo.

Put together, these figures don’t suggest indiscriminate bombing on the part of Israel. In fact, they suggest precisely the opposite.

Israeli Intent?

Perhaps the most confusing part of Gavaler’s article is when he recites the legal definition of genocide, which requires acts “committed with intent to destroy” an ethnic group as such, only to then accuse Israel of having the intent to grow the population of Gaza too much:

The 141-square-mile area [of Gaza] is less than a quarter the size of Rockbridge. Including Lexington and Buena Vista, our population is about 36,000. Gaza has over 2 million people, almost half children. The Gaza population was only 80,000 in 1948. The civilian concentration is the direct and intended result of decades of forced displacements and blockades. (Emphasis added)

Does Israel want a lot of Palestinians in Gaza, or does it want to kill them all? Gavaler seemingly can’t decide.

Aid for Gaza

A July 20, 2026 infographic from Israel’s COGAT detailing the amount of food that has entered Gaza since the start of the ceasefire in October 2025.

Another straightforward lie in Gavaler’s piece: “Israel continues to block humanitarian aid.” But since October 2025, “approximately 1.78 million tons of food” has entered Gaza. That’s approximately three times the World Food Programme’s benchmark to meet humanitarian needs in the territory. Gavaler doesn’t need to take Israel’s word for it either; the U.N. itself is tracking how much aid it is delivering into Gaza (notably, the U.N. cannot and does not track all sources of aid, making its data partial).

Is Gaza “Leveled”?

Gavaler claims that “90% of the Gaza Strip has been leveled by bombing.” This, too, is flatly false. The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), an already questionable source for data, has claimed that the air campaign has damaged 92% of housing units to some extent, but it has destroyed less than 37% of them. According to most recent estimates by the U.N. Satellite Centre, “approximately 81% of all structures in the Gaza Strip are damaged,” but again, the figure for “destroyed” is substantially less. The rest of the figure includes tens of thousands of “possibly damaged” structures.

Gavaler is counting any amount of damage to a building, no matter how minor and perhaps even nonexistent, as equivalent to being “leveled.” That is dishonest.

Antisemitism & Gavaler’s Sources

Finally, it’s worth noting the “authorities” the author appeals to for the proposition that there is a “genocide.” They amount to a U.N. commission of inquiry (COI) and a statement by a handful of U.N. special rapporteurs.

Gavaler implies that the Israeli government is cynically referring to their reports as antisemitic libel, “like it calls all condemnations of its military actions in Gaza.”

But once again, Gavaler picked unfortunate examples. Israel isn’t the only one to have accused the COI of antisemitism. Dozens of countries have condemned the COI’s members for antisemitism. One commissioner once suggested that Jews control social media. Another pushed the antisemitic dual loyalty trope, accusing Jewish organizations of being agents of Israel. The lead “U.N. expert” in the statement cited by Gavaler has, among her many other outrageous remarks, claimed that the “Jewish lobby” has “subjugated” the United States.

Those with histories of indisputably antisemitic rhetoric are not reliable sources when it comes to leveling accusations against the Jewish state.

When the facts don’t fit, but the allegation is made anyway, that’s a libel.

Gavaler is right that facts matter. It’s a shame that he chose not to deal with them in leveling his own anti-Israel libel.

Originally published by the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) meets with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem on Dec. 21, 2025. Photo by Amos Ben Gershom/GPO.

by Yael Eckstein

(The International Fellowship of Christians and Jews) — There is a verse in Ecclesiastes that has echoed in my heart in recent days: “Two are better than one. ... If either of them falls down, one can help the other up” (Ecclesiastes 4:9-10).

Throughout history, the Jewish people have known what it means to stand alone. We have also known the extraordinary blessing of discovering friends who choose to stand with us—not because they must, but because they believe it is the right thing to do.

The passing of Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina is an opportunity to reflect on that kind of friendship. I did not know him personally. Like many people, I knew him through his public service and his unwavering commitment to the State of Israel and the security of the Jewish people. Across decades of public life, he remained steadfast in his belief that America’s friendship with Israel was not simply a matter of politics, but of shared values, shared history and shared purpose.

My father, Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein, dedicated his life’s work to an idea that many once thought impossible: that Christians and Jews could move beyond centuries of misunderstanding and become true partners. He believed that when people of faith recognize one another’s humanity and shared biblical heritage, remarkable things become possible.

Today, millions of Christians around the world pray for Israel, give generously to support vulnerable Jewish people and stand against antisemitism. That movement did not happen by accident. It was built through relationships—one conversation, one act of trust, one expression of solidarity at a time. Graham represented that same spirit of partnership.

In a world that often encourages division, he consistently affirmed that the Jewish people should never have to face threats alone. During times of conflict or uncertainty, he understood that friendship is measured not only by words spoken in moments of celebration but by presence during moments of trial.

The Bible is filled with stories of unlikely friendships. Ruth chose Naomi. King Hiram partnered with Solomon. Cyrus, a Persian king, became an instrument in God’s plan for the Jewish people. Again and again, Scripture reminds us that God often works through those who decide to stand alongside His people with courage and conviction. That lesson remains just as relevant today.

The relationship between Christians and Jews is one of the great stories of hope in our generation. Where suspicion once existed, there is now respect. Where silence once prevailed, there are now millions of voices speaking out against hatred. Where history was once marked by distance, it is increasingly marked by friendship.

Those relationships are precious because they cannot be taken for granted. They must be nurtured by humility, honesty and a willingness to stand together, even when doing so is difficult.

As we remember the senator, we can honor not only a public servant but also the enduring principle that genuine friendship matters. Jewish tradition teaches that those who strengthen others help repair the world. Every act of solidarity, every word of encouragement, every decision to stand with those who are vulnerable becomes part of something far greater than ourselves.

My father often reminded me that bridges are not built from one side alone. They require people willing to meet in the middle with faith, courage and goodwill.

That work continues.

May Graham’s memory be a reminder that alliances rooted in shared values can endure beyond politics, beyond headlines and beyond a single lifetime.

And may we all continue building the kinds of friendships that reflect the biblical vision of neighbors caring for one another, standing together in times of need and choosing faithfulness over fear.

Because in the end, that is how lasting peace is built: one friendship at a time.

The International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, founded by the late Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein, is the largest philanthropic social aid organization in Israel, working to strengthen Israeli citizens and Jews in the Diaspora. In the past 40 years, it has raised $3.1 billion to provide assistance and support to vulnerable communities. The Fellowship’s activities are made possible through the support and generosity of hundreds of thousands of supporters of Israel worldwide. The organization has offices in Jerusalem, Chicago, Toronto and Seoul.

Tens of thousands of Muslim worshippers pray at the Al-Aqsa mosque compound on Qadr Night (Laylat al-Qadr) during the month of Ramadan in Jerusalem’s Old City, April 27, 2022. Photo by Jamal Awad/Flash90.

by Jennifer Kouzi

(CAMERA) — Richard Engel and Gabe Joselow’s June 26, 2026, video and article about the Temple Mount (which did not completely overlap), “Simmering tensions over ancient Jerusalem site nearing a boil,” purported to present the history of holy Jewish and Muslim sites in Jerusalem and the current tensions between the two groups. The report’s partisan nomenclature, omission of critical context, and unverified narrative-spinning served to create and exacerbate tensions rather than explain them.

In addition, NBC sprinkled the history of the Temple Mount in a non-linear fashion, obscuring the timeline. Readers were told in the third paragraph that Muslims had control over the Temple Mount for 1,300 years. By contrast, readers had to reach the 28^th paragraph to learn that the first Jewish Temple was believed to have been built 3,000 years ago.

NBC’s language was decisive and narrative-focused, barely using the term Temple Mount and opting for the Arabic name, Al-Aqsa, instead. The nearly ten-minute video was captioned the bulk of the time with one of two headings: “MUSLIMS IN JERUSALEM WARN AL-AQSA UNDER SIEGE AS SOME GROUPS TRY TO BUILD TEMPLE IN ITS PLACE” or “INSIDE LOOK AT THE CHRISTIAN AND JEWISH GROUPS TRYING TO BUILD A TEMPLE AT AL-AQSA COMPOUND.”

The choice to label it the Al-Aqsa Compound and not the Temple Mount is a biased one. Moreover, NBC did not actually “look” at any groups trying to build a temple there, so the labeling was misleading and gratuitously provocative.

NBC’s aggressive, hyper-partisan linguistic choices – mimicking the Palestinian Authority’s propaganda – continued. In the video, Yehuda Glick, pictured below, told Engel that 70,000 Jews visited the Temple Mount last year. But the article labeled them “activists” and their presence “incursions” – suggesting, as the PA does when it uses that term, that any Jew visiting the holiest site in Judaism is making either a political or aggressive statement. To compound the offensive verbiage, in neither the video nor the article did NBC explain to its audience that millions of Muslims visit each year, making 70,000 a drop in the bucket of total visitors.

This dangerous framing of Jewish presence as provocation was further reinforced when NBC parroted more PA propaganda, the long-debunked narrative that Ariel Sharon’s 2000 visit to the site single-handedly “triggered” the five-year Second Intifada. In doing so, NBC completely ignored the well-documented historical consensus, including admissions from Palestinian leadership, that the deadly intifada was orchestrated well in advance of Sharon’s visit, following the collapse of the Camp David peace talks. NBC sacrificed historical nuance to establish a false timeline, suggesting that Jewish visibility was the sole catalyst for extreme, murderous violence.

If NBC wanted to report on a Jewish group seeking to build a temple, perhaps it picked the wrong group? Despite taking Glick’s tour, with camera people, there was no footage either during the tour, or when Engel interviewed Glick one-on-one, about the goal of building a temple. Glick said one of their major battles was to change things so that tourists are allowed to sing on the Temple Mount, as they are presently not allowed to.

While Glick was featured throughout the video, only in the last minute did Engel reveal Glick had been shot four times by a “Palestinian gunman” in 2014 after speaking at a Temple Mount conference. The written article made no mention of the assassination attempt on Glick, which occurred because he advocated for Jews to have the same rights as Muslims to pray at the Temple Mount.

NBC wrongly conflated Glick’s desire for equal Jewish civil rights with a movement to build a third temple and then compounded the error by interviewing NGO Ir Amim researcher Aviv Tatarsky to provide counterbalance – to a group and ideology NBC never profiled. Tatarsky expanded the idea to claim this was all part of a larger campaign to expel Palestinians wherever possible. Of course, NBC did not acknowledge that Ir Amim has a political agenda (and is not geared to promote coexistence) or that it frequently accuses the Israeli government of trying to “Judaize” the ancient Jewish city of Jerusalem.

NBC’s hostile language did not abate. In the video, without defining what he meant by the word, Engel proclaimed the “encroachment” on the mosque was part of a larger pattern of Jewish occupation of Palestinian spaces. And without a shred of evidence, NBC declared that Palestinian families were being increasingly displaced in the Old City of Jerusalem, and that the Israeli flags NBC captured on video hung from homes “taken over by settlers.” This is a salacious, political narrative which both ignores historical Jewish ownership of property in Jerusalem prior to 1948 and legal purchases of properties.

Finally, NBC relied on a sensationalized trope rather than empirical data in its discussion of Christian Zionism and the Temple Mount. Engel said many evangelical Christians support Jewish extremist efforts to destroy Al Aqsa mosque and build a third Temple in its place out of an apocalyptic desire to fulfill a prophecy triggering the Second Coming and the End of Days. But scholars Motti Inbari and Kirill Bumin systematically dismantled this assumption in their study Christian Zionism in the Twenty-First Century: American Evangelical Public Opinion on Israel, published in 2023. The specific belief expecting a reconstructed Temple prior to Jesus’ return is not a statistically significant predictor of evangelical support for Israel – in fact, it ranks dead last.

Instead of providing a balanced overview and reporting responsibly on a geopolitical flashpoint like the Temple Mount, Engel and Joselow churned out a piece of propaganda that would make former PLO leader Yasir Arafat blush – demonizing and minimizing (as he did) Jewish ties to Jerusalem. Their reporting actively distorted reality through deliberate, hyper-partisan language and narratives at every turn, asymmetric chronology, pretenses and a mischaracterization of Christian Zionism. By weaponizing PA propagandist language like “incursion” and “activists” to define Jewish visitors, while omitting the context of millions of Muslim worshippers, NBC did not inform its audience about simmering tensions. Instead, through reckless reporting and a blatant disregard for data, it contributed to them while giving free PR to the PA.

Originally published by the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis.

The Diaspora Affairs Ministry’s Media Watch site revealed that dozens of “journalists” killed by Israel since Oct. 7, 2023, were terrorists. Credit: Amichai Chikli/X.

(CAMERA) — The Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA) is calling on major news outlets to revisit past reporting of claims by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), after mourning notices by Hamas and Islamic Jihad confirmed that CPJ misrepresented terror operatives as innocent journalists. Following intense public criticism and investigative reports exposing these ties, CPJ announced on June 25 that it is conducting a full review of its database of media workers killed in the Gaza Strip.

Multiple leading media outlets had featured, often without qualification or challenge, CPJ’s now-discredited data on 2025 fatalities, which described terrorists as journalists killed on assignment.

Among the media outlets that devoted space last February to CPJ’s tainted tally are CBS, which further inflated CPJ’s inaccurate figures; the BBC, which CAMERA has repeatedly called on to amend outdated CPJ-sourced tallies; Reuters, which gave CPJ a platform to accuse those citing links between supposed journalists and Hamas of “deadly smears”; and The Washington Post.

Since then, media outlets have repeatedly relied on the organization’s dubious allegations and blatant libels. In April, MS Now’s Antonio Hylton failed to challenge CPJ CEO Jodie Ginsberg when she insisted on “The Weekend Primetime” that “Israel has deliberately targeted journalists” and that “hundreds of journalists have been killed by Israel since the genocide in Gaza.” The same month, PBS’ Nick Shifrin likewise neglected to challenge CPJ regional director Sara Qudah, who alleged that Israel targets journalists.

CPJ is a favorite in The New York Times’ proverbial rolodex. It loomed large, for example, in an August 2025 article that alleged “the deadly risks of reporting in Gaza could further stifle the amount of information coming out of the war,” but that entirely ignored Hamas’ total control of Gaza’s media landscape — including its successful casting of its terror operatives as journalists.

The list goes on. CNN uncritically cited CPJ data on individuals it claims are journalists imprisoned in Israeli jails and the Associated Press regularly parrots the organization’s data.

In February 2024, more than 100 media leaders (including senior figures from ABC News, Associated Press, CNN, The Guardian, Financial Times, Washington Post, Agence France Presse, Haaretz and The New Yorker) signed a CPJ letter charging Israel with “attacks on journalists” while uncritically accepting the group’s figures.

“It is the CPJ that has long put journalists at personal risk by enabling terrorists to masquerade as journalists,” said Tamar Sternthal, director of CAMERA’s Research and Analysis Media Department. “More than a dozen years ago, CAMERA raised the red flag on CPJ extending credence to operatives of terror groups operating under the guise of the holy work of journalism. In November 2023, we suggested for CPJ the name ‘Committee for the Protection of the Murderers of Journalists’ for its refusal to describe Israelis massacred in their homes as having been ‘murdered,’ a term it freely uses elsewhere.

“Notably, CPJ’s board is composed of a veritable who’s-who of leading journalists including Julie Pace (Associated Press), Sally Buzbee (Reuters), Lydia Polgreen (New York Times), Rebecca Blumenstein (NBC News), Phil Chetwynd (Agence France Presse), and David Remnick (New Yorker), among others. Perhaps media outlets that have withheld scrutiny from CPJ are incapable of overcoming the inherent conflict of interest created by their affiliation with the group,” Sternthal noted.

“If so, these media giants should step down from journalism. Journalists have no business forsaking their profession by failing to critically report about an organization that has effectively covered for terrorists in press vests who endanger actual journalists,” Sternthal added. “Will the leadership of the Western press corps belatedly stand on the right side of this issue?”

Originally published by the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis.

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio joins working-level peace talks with Israeli Ambassador to the United States Yechiel Leiter and Lebanese Ambassador to the United States Nada Hamadeh Moawad at the Department of State in Washington, D.C., April 14, 2026. Credit: Freddie Everett/U.S. State Department.

by Ari Sacher

“The United States, Israel, and Lebanon Sign the Trilateral Framework.” “Israel, Lebanon sign initial agreement after US-mediated talks.” It was a great way to turn on my phone on Saturday night after 25 hours without hearing any news.

There is something deeply appealing about a clean agreement. A tripartite framework. Clear responsibilities. A sense that, this time, the pieces might align. The emerging arrangement with Lebanon has all of those qualities. It also carries with it the weight of experience, and experience is far less forgiving than hope.

At its core, the agreement rests on a bold, even transformative premise. Lebanon commits to disarming Hezbollah. On paper, that single sentence redraws the map of the region. Hezbollah is not merely a militia operating in Lebanon. It is embedded in the Lebanese state, politically and militarily. Asking Lebanon to disarm Hezbollah is, in effect, asking a government to dismantle one of its own organs. That is not impossible. But it is extraordinarily difficult.

There are other strategic advantages. A Lebanon that asserts sovereignty over all armed groups is, almost by definition, a Lebanon less tethered to Iran. Hezbollah has long served as Tehran’s forward operating arm. Indeed, it was created for precisely this purpose. If it is weakened or dismantled, Iran’s reach into the eastern Mediterranean shrinks accordingly. For Israel, this would not only reduce an immediate military threat but would also shift the broader regional balance.

The mechanism is equally important. The Lebanese Army is tasked with disarming Hezbollah. This is meant to anchor the process in Lebanese legitimacy rather than impose it from outside. In theory, it offers a path to internal stability without the stigma of foreign occupation or coercion.

In theory.

We do not operate in theory. We operate in history. And history is unambiguous. This has been tried before. After the Second Lebanon War in 2005, United Nations Security Council Resolution 1701 established a framework in which the Lebanese Army, supported by international forces, would assert control in the south and prevent Hezbollah from rearming. It did not happen. More recently, after the November 2024 ceasefire, similar expectations were placed on the Lebanese state, with similarly disappointing results.

The reason is not difficult to identify. The Lebanese Army is not a neutral instrument. It is, to varying degrees, penetrated by Hezbollah. This is not a criticism of individual soldiers, many of whom serve honorably. It is a structural reality of a country where sectarian identities and political affiliations blur the lines between state and non-state actors. Expecting such an institution to “defang” Hezbollah is not just optimistic. It borders on wishful thinking.

There is an old saying, often attributed to Stephen King: Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. By the time we reach a third attempt, responsibility is shared. The agreement with Lebanon risks becoming that third attempt.

None of this means that the effort is misguided. On the contrary, it may be the best available option. Diplomacy often involves choosing the least imperfect path. But choosing that path does not absolve us of the responsibility to prepare for its likely failure.

And here is where the current discourse is lacking. Much of the public conversation focuses on whether the Lebanese Army will succeed. That is the wrong question. The right question is what happens when it does not.

This is not cynicism. It is planning.

The Israel Defense Forces have reportedly begun repositioning in limited “pilot” areas, creating space for the Lebanese Army to operate while maintaining the ability to reengage if necessary. This is a sensible first step. It tests capability without relinquishing control entirely. But a pilot is not a strategy. It is an experiment. Experiments are useful only if there is a plan for what comes next.

That plan must be defined now, not improvised later. It must be communicated clearly, not only within Israel but also to international partners. It does not have to default to a full-scale Israeli military takeover of southern Lebanon. There are other options. Intensive Israeli support from the air. Training and equipping Lebanese units that prove reliable. Coordinated American involvement to bolster credibility and capacity. Each of these carries risks and costs. All of them, however, are preferable to strategic ambiguity.

Because ambiguity, in this context, is not neutral. It is destabilizing. If Hezbollah believes that failure by the Lebanese Army will not trigger a decisive response, it has every incentive to wait out the process. If international partners are uncertain about Israel’s endgame, their support will be tentative at best. And if Israeli citizens – especially those that live on the Northern Border – are left without a clear sense of the plan, their confidence will erode accordingly.

Agreements are not judged by their intentions. They are judged by their outcomes. The tripartite framework with Lebanon may yet produce a positive outcome. But hope is not a strategy, and optimism is not a plan.

The real test is not whether we can imagine success. It is whether we are prepared for failure.

Ari Sacher is chief systems engineer of Iron Dome, and a senior policy advisor to U.S. Israel Education Association (USIEA), a nonprofit organization based in Birmingham that advances important dialogue and cooperation between bipartisan senior government leaders in the United States and Israel by filling existing information gaps and enhancing understanding of issues critical to a mutually beneficial partnership. Founded in 2011, USIEA empowers U.S. leaders with innovative initiatives on the path to Middle East peace, connects Members of Congress with direct access to West Bank visits, and educates as thought leaders in the media and through strategic global partnerships.

At a June 25 press conference at the National Press Club in Washington, Pastor Dumisani Washington and Pastor Michael Stevens announce the Black Christian Leadership Council for Israel Relations, and the upcoming “Unfinished Business” pastors’ trip to Israel. Photo by James Henry Brook.

With the Jewish community looking for allies in the face of surging antisemitism and anti-Israel activism, a group of Black pastors with long track records in Israel advocacy and Black-Jewish relations has joined forces to establish the Black Christian Leaders Council on Israel Relations.

A major part of the announcement on June 25 at the National Press Club in Washington focused on a planned Israel trip in November involving 500 Black pastors and Christian leaders, “Unfinished Business.” In 1966, Martin Luther King Jr. was working with former Israeli Prime Minister David Ben Gurion to bring several thousand Black pastors to Israel in November 1967. The Six Day War led to a postponement to 1968, but with King’s assassination in April 1968, the trip never happened.

It was another trip to Israel by a group of pastors that led to the formation of this new organization. Pastor Michael Stevens explained that he and Pastor Dumisani Washington, founder of the Institute for Black Solidarity with Israel, were part of last December’s delegation of 1100 pastors organized by Friends of Zion founder Mike Evans. Stevens said that trip was “beautiful, it’s historic,” but only 40 of the 1100 pastors were Black.

Back home, Stevens and Washington coordinated with Pastors Roger Cheeks, senior director of outreach at the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews; Valerie Washington of IBSI; and Pastors Reginald and Brandy Gibson of Birmingham, to establish the Council “to help ensure that the essential Black American voice defending Israel and the Jewish people is clearly heard.”

Washington felt that “There needs to be a more concerted effort in the black community, and we decide to take on that mantle,” and this is their “hineni moment” to say “here I am.”

Stevens said “we’re not new to this, we’re true to this,” averaging 25 years of experience in Black-Jewish relations.

Stevens said the goal is to be “a firewall” and “a very visible friend” to the Jewish community. He has a rapid response initiative, Shoulder to Shoulder, that is part of the new organization. Its goal is to have a network of Black pastors who can be “boots on the ground” whenever there is an antisemitic incident, being “in that Jewish community, standing with that rabbi, standing with that Jewish Federation” not just to offer prayers, but “what tangibly, what materialistically can we do to stand in a minute of crisis?”

Stevens was the first African American Outreach Director for Christians United for Israel, and Washington was his successor. While Stevens said he loves the leaders of the Christian Zionist movement and owes “a debt of gratitude” to CUFI founder Pastor John Hagee, over the past eight or so years among white evangelicals, the movement has seemed increasingly polarized and been identified with a more patriotic and nationalistic tone. “We love our country, we love Israel, we love the Lord,” he said. But the tone doesn’t resonate with the typical Black pastor, and the Council is a place that they can identify with and express their support for Israel in their own way.

One of the best ways to bolster that support is by visiting Israel, but there is more to it than just going on a trip. Stevens said that he and Washington have probably brought 600 to 700 Black pastors to Israel over the years, and they have a “phenomenal time,” especially with rabbis they encounter, “and they said, wow, I want this back home,” but there were no relationships with the Jewish community to build upon. He said there is already interest from about 75 rabbis who want to join the November trip, so that by the time they get back to the U.S., relationships are already being built.

The Council is working with the Israeli Embassy in Washington and the Jewish Federations of North America, especially Rabbi Joshua Stanton, associate vice president for Interfaith and Intergroup Initiatives at JFNA.

Washington asked “how would history possibly been different, had thousands of Black Americans been making a pilgrimage to Israel in the late 1960s? There was no such thing as mass pilgrimages to Israel, especially from the United States. The black community was getting ready to start something that no one else was doing.”

Another bit of “unfinished business” they plan to address involves a group of Ethiopian pastors on the trip. Sigd, a major festival for Ethiopian Jews, falls during the trip, so an event is in the works for the pastors to apologize to the Ethiopian Jewish community for their mistreatment over the centuries.

Israeli Embassy Minister of Public Diplomacy Sawsan Hassan said when the Council leaders first met with Israeli Ambassador Yechiel Leiter to discuss the trip, “he called me after that to his office, and he said this is history… we need to do everything to support their initiative.”

Hassan said “the friendship between the Black American community and the Jewish people is not new… It’s old. It’s deep. And it was forged in some of the hardest chapters both our peoples have known.”

In November, “you will not come as strangers, you will come as family. Israel welcomes you with open hands and arms.”

Chara McMichael, JFNA senior director of political affairs and government relations, “has been very instrumental in hoping give us a kosher understanding of how we might serve the Jewish community in a very real and meaningful way,” Stevens said.

McMichael said “this partnership is an extraordinary opportunity, and this initiative presents an opportunity to strengthen bonds between the Black and Jewish communities” and continue King’s vision of building together.

“The future of black Jewish relations will not be defined by our differences, but by what we can achieve,” McMichael said. “And the beauty of this partnership is that it’s not just about going to Israel. It’s about joining forces with the Jews that stand here in America and supporting one another as we move forward. Together we will stand shoulder to shoulder in the fight against racism and antisemitism.”

Black-Jewish Relations for 3,000 years

Washington said the first Africa-Israel summit “was when the Queen of Sheba traveled from Ethiopia to Jerusalem, 3,000 years ago, stood in Jerusalem and told the world God loves Israel forever.”

He added, “No other region can boast of a 3,000-year relationship with Israel, other than Africa,” and Black Americans and Africans are reclaiming their heritage of standing with Israel and the Jewish people.

The Council will also have a strong presence in Africa, Washington said. After October 7, they were among the founders of the African Jewish Alliance, established with Jewish friends including Charles Jacobs. The group was a way for Christians in places like Nigeria and Sudan to express support for Israel, because “Israelis and Africans have this real time issue that’s going on in terms of security” against radical Islam.

Washington said that when members in Nigeria saw the videos of the October 7 attacks, their reaction was “that happens to us every week, too,” saying “Hamas is Boko Haram, is Al-Shabbab, is al-Qaeda. They have different jerseys, but the same league” in terms of killing Christians, Jews, Druze and even other Muslims.

He said some will argue that the massacres of Christians in Nigeria is not a genocide because Muslims are also being killed. But Washington pointed out it is Muslims killing fellow Muslims who are “standing with their Christian brothers and sisters… imams who were hiding Christians in their mosques, who got killed because the extremists wanted them dead.”

The Council also cites “over a century of partnership” between the Black and Jewish communities, including heavy Jewish involvement in the founding of the NAACP, the joint effort of Booker T. Washington and Julius Rosenwald to build 5,300 Black schools throughout the South from 1912 to the 1930s, and partnerships in the civil rights movement, such as the close friendship between King and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel.

The council’s launch was a few days after the anniversary of the 1964 murder of three civil rights workers in Mississippi. Stevens said “I grew up thinking it was two white guys and a black guy. No one ever told me it was two Jewish guys who came from the North, down to be with James Cheney, and they were murdered.”

In 1975, Bayard Rustin and A. Philip Randolph, “two lions of the civil rights movement,” formed the Black Americans to Support Israel Committee (BASIC). Washington reminded that this was the year the United Nations passed the Soviet-backed initiative to label Zionism as a form of racism. “When almost all other voices were silent in the West, it was the Black community that stood out, formed, and organized” in opposition to the resolution, Washington said.

Despite that, Stevens said, the relationship between the Black and Jewish communities “lost traction” in the 1970s and 1980s. “Somewhere, we lost communication… and don’t have a plan.”

Stevens said “the Al Sharptons, the Jesse Jacksons and the Louis Farrakhans, that’s what the last 60 years was. The Crown Heights Riots. That’s where the conversation was when it came to Blacks and Jews.”

Washington noted that the outsized attention given to “the negative mouthpieces in the black community are like someone telling my Jewish friends Jewish Voice for Peace speaks for you.”

He noted that in his book, “Zionism and the Black Church,” not only did he quote King’s Israel advocacy, but the “vast majority of the civil right movement” leaders, who were also pro-Israel.

In recent years, “the anti-Israel narrative, particularly the one that has been fueling of the pro-Palestinian narrative, has always exploited the black community… There was always the goal for those people to use our community as a bludgeon against Israel,” such as equating Ferguson or George Floyd with Palestinian liberation.

Stevens said, “There is a black Zionism, Christian Zionism, that is a mountain and the base of a movement that’s untapped right now,” and their goal is to give it a voice.

Stevens added, “if anyone gets the Jewish conversation, it’s Black folk. If anybody understands slavery, if anyone understands oppression, if anyone understands being outcast from their own country, and the things that were experienced with the Holocaust and the slave trade, if anyone understands civil rights.”

Recruitment is underway for Unfinished Business. In addition to pastors, participants will be music ministers and recording artists, professional athletes and coaches, co-pastors and spouses, social media influencers, and heads of para-church organizations. The pastors will be selected based on several criteria gathered from a survey. Sponsored participants are responsible only for getting to New York City, and for some lunches during the trip, as the other expenses are being covered by the Council and its partners.

There will also be a parallel track at a competitive rate, available for others who want to be associated with the trip, participating in many of the same events.

Washington said “in honor of that pilgrimage that never happened, we are going to begin by God’s grace… by next year it won’t be 500, it’ll be 5,000” going to Israel.

A billboard sponsored by the Zionist Organization of America on Michigan’s I-275 highway, placed from April 8-29, 2024. Credit: Courtesy of the ZOA.

by A.J. Caschetta

(Investigative Project on Terrorism) — Two years after they attacked the University of Michigan administration and regents, eight members of the Ann Arbor “Student Intifada” have finally been indicted on various conspiracy and property destruction charges. They face hefty fines and years in prison.

Predictably, most of the media is siding with them.

During the spring 2024 semester, students at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, set up an “encampment” at the so-called Diag—a nickname for the diagonal intersections at the heart of the campus. Like other students across the country, they called themselves the “Student Intifada,” and the area they briefly controlled was dubbed the “Gaza Free University.” As the academic year ended, university president Santa Ono ordered the encampment cleared on May 21, 2024.

This much is well known. But until recently, few knew about how the University of Michigan’s Student Intifada group viciously and personally struck back. On June 10, the U.S. Department of Justice unsealed charges against eight students who were the ringleaders of the group and led its violent campaign.

The media are coming to their rescue.

Hundreds of outlets have published articles that misrepresent the perpetrators, the charges against them and the victims of their alleged crimes. Most were aping The Washington Post and The New York Times.

The Post struck first on June 10, 2026, with an article by Katie Mettler and Danielle Douglas-Gabriel titled, “DOJ charges pro-Palestinian activists with threatening U. of Michigan officials.” Then came the Times’ June 13 article by Mitch Smith titled, “Threats, Free Speech and the Case Against U. of Michigan Activists.”

National Students for Justice in Palestine — the leader of the nationwide “Student Intifada” — went further in its promotion of the defendants. Whenever SJP types get caught, arrested or suspended, NSJP jumps to their defense, dubbing them the “Stanford 11,” the “Swarthmore 9” and, in the case of the eight mentioned above, the “Michigan 8” or just the “MU8.”

NSJP wrote on its Instagram page that the MU8 indictment is nothing more than “a case of targeting Palestine activism” and proof of rampant “repression against Palestine activism.” It promises, “We will not be apologetic for our actions to protest genocide.”

Much of the media and the entire intifada group portray the kind of “resistance” that got the MU8 into trouble as “pro-Palestinian.” In fact, as I wrote in 2023, there is nothing “pro-Palestinian” about the post-Oct. 7 protest phenomenon. These protesters do not want a “two-state solution” any more than Hamas does. They want a single state Arab state “from the river to the sea.”

Like Hamas, the “Student Intifada” longs for intimidated, captive, and ultimately, dead Jews, both in “48” (as they sometimes call Israel) and throughout the world, which is what their slogan “Globalize the Intifada” means.

Nevertheless, the Post writers (it required two of them) soft-pedaled both the intentions and the violence of the defendants, characterizing them as mere “pro-Palestinian activism.” The Times refers to the defendants as “activists” in the title and “pro-Palestinian activists” in the subtitle. They repeat the misnomer five times in the article.

To understand the bad faith of such a description, it’s worth looking into the targets of the defendants’ “activism.”

The 63-page criminal indictment lists six victims, describing them without naming them.

Victims 1 and 2 (“V-1” and “V-2” as they are referred to in the indictment) are members of the University of Michigan Board of Regents. “V-3” is the Chief Investment Officer at the university. “V-4” is Santa Ono, the aforementioned president of the university from 2022-2025. “V-5” is a member of the University of Michigan Department of Public Safety Services (DPSS). The last victim, “V-6,” is a student whom the defendants feared would “snitch” on them and was thus threatened into silence.

Many of the individual victims were not only intimidated and harassed, but their homes and, in some cases, their businesses were also targeted.

After the Michigan headquarters of Rolls-Royce Solutions America, Inc. was vandalized because of its alleged role in “colonial genocide” on June 30, 2024, the Student Intifada boasted in a social media post: “As beneficiaries of this imperial system, our duty to Palestine is to damage, disrupt and destroy the colonizers’ operations by any means necessary.”

The defendants also vandalized the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Detroit’s Max M. Fisher Building on Oct. 7, 2024. Targeting a Jewish center proves that the defendants’ “anti-Zionism” was mere cover for their antisemitism.

Like NSJP, the Times and the Post portrayed the indicted students as free-speech warriors. The papers further deflected attention away from the students’ crimes via cheap anti-Trump bromides.

The Post stated, “The Trump administration has taken a hard line against pro-Palestinian protesters on campuses,” adding that “Wednesday’s federal charges amounted to an escalation of that campaign.”

The Times concurred, claiming that the decision to indict “reflected an escalation of the Trump administration’s efforts to crack down on pro-Palestinian activism.” It even repeated a defense lawyer’s description of his clients as “high-achieving students with no criminal records,” who were not accused of “physically hurting anyone.”

The Times called defendant Jonathan Zou “an award-winning engineering student.” He doesn’t mention that Zou is alleged to have thrown glass jars filled with butyric acid through the windows of the provost’s house.

The paper further describes defendant Zainab Hakim as “a National Merit Scholar.” There are dozens of stories from 2023 and 2024 featuring photos of her protesting and hectoring passing students with her megaphone. It’s a wonder she found time to study.

Defendant Colin Weger, who looks like the first runner-up in a Hunter S. Thompson look-alike contest, apparently isn’t a National Merit Scholar. The Times notes only that Weger “had a job and was planning to resume his studies at a community college in the fall.”

Of all the defendants, Paige Feyock is the star of the indictment. She was seemingly in on all the “autonomous actions” and the author of some very quotable lines. Unfortunately, the Times and the Post weren’t all that interested in quoting her.

The Times wrote that Feyock “worked as a doula” and “was planning to move to Illinois for medical school.” It is true that, as a 2022 graduate of Wellesley College (with a double major in sociology and Africana studies), Feyock worked at something called the Mother Lab. Her bio pages indicate her intent to go to medical school and specialize in obstetrics and gynecology.

Feyock and her alleged co-conspirators communicated with each other over encrypted platforms like Signal and CryptPad.fr to plan illegal activities. They posted photos of their vandalism on websites like Unity of Fields (a.k.a. “Pal Action”), Unsalted Counter Info and the Tahrir Coalition.

The messages quoted in the indictment make for some chilling reading.

Feyock’s future patients might be interested to know about her message that President Ono has “gotta die” and his “entire family is now on my hit list.” They might also want to know about her May 21, 2024 chat with defendant Ahmet Korkaya, who was in medical school at the time. As Korkaya and Feyock discussed killing Ono, UM Regent V-2, and the Chief Investment Officer V-3, Feyock suddenly interjected, “Let’s get [Ono’s] kids bruh and [V-2’s] too.”

Korkaya responded, “Wallah [by Allah] I’m gonna be the dirtiest f**king doctor ever, I’m gonna be [V-1’s] doctor, poison her ass slowly.” Feyock remarked, “We need people following [V-1], get into that house, then burn it down.”

The defendants allegedly spread nails on the driveway of the university’s Chief Investment Officer’s home and threw butyric acid through the windows of its president and provost.

The New York Times and The Washington Post would have their readers believe that this case is about “free speech,” when it is clearly about violence and threats of violence.

It is also about vandalism. The defendants are accused of spray-painting profanities on private homes and businesses. They were especially fond of the f-word, leaving messages like “F**k Maersk,” “F**k RR [Rolls Royce],” “F**k the IDF,” “F**k DPSS” and, of course, “F**k Israel.”

Freedom to swear is one thing, but the First Amendment doesn’t permit one to paint messages on other people’s property. Among those messages were many inverted red triangles, which are a Hamas symbol, and red handprints, which represent a symbol of terrorist violence.

In addition to the spray-painted messages, the defendants allegedly spread nails on the driveway at the home of the university’s chief investment officer, and as mentioned, threw mason jars filled with butyric acid through the windows of the university’s president and provost. None of this comes close to First Amendment-protected speech.

Despite all the mainstream media blathering about free speech, the defendants seemed to acknowledge their guilt. The indictment cites Paige Feyock telling Zainab Hakim on July 16, 2024, that she worried the student “snitch” (V-6) was “going to send us to federal prison.” On Oct. 9, 2024, as Feyock and Hakim discussed the problems they would face if discovered, Feyock assured Hakim not to worry because law enforcement “was not smart enough” to catch them.

On Nov. 21, 2024, Feyock changed her tune, telling Hakim that she had, in fact, been identified: “It’s definitely over for me in the future tho bc [V-5] and [another UMDPSS officer] got a very good look at me were arguing with me while I was in the building.”

These are not the comments of people exercising free speech.

Curiously, neither the Washington Post nor the New York Times writers questioned why these “pro-Palestine activists” were so obsessed with hurting people and damaging property thousands of miles away from “Palestine.”

The two most important news sources in the nation either do not understand the dangers posed by the Student Intifada or they are actively working to assist it by portraying its violent activity as free speech. I lean towards the latter explanation.

I expect that, whatever the motives, The New York Times and The Washington Post, as well as their followers throughout the media, will continue misrepresenting the “Student Intifada,” its violence, the victims of that violence and the perpetrators of that violence on every level.

Originally published by the Investigative Project on Terrorism.

A.J. Caschetta is a principal lecturer at the Rochester Institute of Technology and a fellow at Campus Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum, where he is a Ginsburg-Ingerman fellow.