I like to ask people if they can name the ruling party of Japan during WWII. Almost no one can. Why? Because Japan’s politics were their own business. America’s business was defeating Japan, not picking up some random faction and fighting it.

That would have been silly, wouldn’t it? Sort of like fighting a boxing match when your enemy can punch you everywhere, while you’re only punching one of their gloves.

Wars are fought between nations, not parties. Notice how everyone is saying “Israel-Hamas war.” Why aren’t they saying “Hamas-Likud” war? Why is it okay for the Palestinians to fight against the entire nation of Israel but not the other way around?

The Palestinians claim they’re a nation, so it’s only fair we treat the as a nation, no? Nations have privileges, but they also have responsibilities. A nation doesn’t get to go to war and then claim, “it’s not us, it’s just these crazy guys with the green headbands.”

Imagine tomorrow Hamas renames itself Namas. Everyone is happy because Hamas has been defeated. Meanwhile, the same people who were Hamas yesterday rebuild their military, restock their armories, and repair their bunkers.

No one does anything because it’s not Hamas, it’s Namas.

In a decade, you have another October 7, only this time with chemical or nuclear weapons.

Even today, if you ask a Palestinian commander who attacked Israel on October 7, he won’t say “Hamas” just like you wouldn’t say that it’s Likud that’s fighting the war.

He would say (with pride) that October 7 was conducted by the Palestinian Joint Operations Room. It included militants from Hamas, PIJ, PFLP, Fatah, ISIS, a bunch of smaller organizations, and thousands of “civilians” who saw a chance to rob and rape and wanted a piece of the action.

It included Islamists, Communists, nationalists—the normal spectrum of ideologies you’d find within any Middle Eastern nation.

Hamas is just one of their political parties. That’s all. The entire Palestinian nation is committed to the violent struggle against Israel. Right now, Hamas is leading it. Tomorrow, someone else may lead it, just like right now Likud is leading Israel right now, but tomorrow it be Nikud instead. It will still be Israel.

The same is true for the Palestinians. It’s not our job to manage their internal politics.

It’s our job to defeat them.

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For the majority of this time, I used it to post about gaming and hiking as well as the occasional political rant. It never had big exposure. From time to time, a post would be removed for some stupid reason, for example, using the expression “it can hang for all I care.”

Recently, it started growing rapidly. I attracted over 10,000 followers in a couple of months, including 5,000 in one day after a video went viral. A couple of times during that period, something would get flagged as offensive or inauthentic but the flagging was removed after I appealed.

The funniest mistake was when several videos were flagged as “unoriginal” even though they were just videos of me talking, and I recorded and edited them myself. I appealed and the warning was removed.

With 15,000 followers, I went from hundreds of views per day, to 100,000 views per day, to millions of views per day. This happened over a period of a couple of months.

They offered me a free blue tick for a month for better visibility and customer service. I agreed.

It seems this was a mistake.

A couple hours ago, I got this message:

“More information” didn’t give more information, “read more about this rule” didn’t show the rule.

I clicked “Request review” and had this message ever since:

This doesn’t inspire confidence.

Somehow, my account was fine for two decades, but as soon as it started rising (and becoming profitable) suddenly it became a danger to the people of Facebook.

One wonders if this has anything to do with this…

Facebook has been known for having North Korea levels of free speech for anyone who didn’t repeat leftist propaganda, but since Trump was elected for the second time, they claimed to have become more free speech-oriented like Twitter.

However, it seems they’re going back to their bad, old ways now.

This is very disappointing.

I’ll of course fight this insane decision every way I can, but in practice there is very little I can do. If you know someone who can help or have ideas about what I can do, I’d love to hear from you.

We should not cede this territory to the enemy.

In any case, I remain here, on Instagram and on Twitter, where free speech still exists, courtesy of Elon Musk.

Also, this FB account is relevant…

In any case, as long as my fingers move, I’ll continue countering the lies of the enemy everywhere I can.

Thank you for your support!

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So I was doing guard duty in a mountain outpost on the Syrian border. It was just me and a handful of other soldiers who were randomly snatched from other assignments. At first I thought it was gonna suck, but I ended up having a good time.

No officer in sight, nice snacks, nice view, nice weather, and a ton of DVDs in the bunker. By God, we watched so much Samurai Jack we were ready to take on Aku.

Not a bad deal at all!

One night, a mist so thick you couldn’t see your feet rose from the valley. Wind started blowing through antennas, playing an eerie melody.

In the darkest hour of the night, a crackling voice on the radio informed me that someone penetrated the border fence and that all forces in the area were advised to keep an eye open. I shrugged and went back to reading my Steven Brust novel.

Because fuck Syria, I needed to know if the elf survived.

After a few more pages of brilliant, sarcastic fantasy I heard movement outside the gate. I looked up and saw nothing but swirling mist. Seriously, it was like being on a submarine sailing through a sea of milk.

I put down my novel. “Who’s there?”

No reply.

The fence rattled. I cocked my rifle.

“Stop or I shoot.”

More rattling. This time, the noise was right beside me. Still, I couldn’t see anything.

“Wakef walla ana batuchak!”

No reply. Just the sounds of straining metal and the antennae singing their mournful dirge.

I slowly approached the gate, my finger on the trigger guard. I swallowed. Was tonight the night I was going to shoot a person? God, I hope not...

Still, no reply.

I reached the gate. The rattling was right in front of me and I still couldn’t see anything!

My heart was pounding. I don’t believe in ghosts, but if I did, it would have been the perfect setting to meet one.

Something dark was moving in my peripheral vision!

I looked down and what did I see? A huge porcupine standing on its hind feet and shaking the gate. It growled at me, like it was angry at me for keeping it away from an important appointment.

I sighed in relief. This was silly again, just like I like it.

Feeling the need to be courteous to my thorny guest, I opened the gate to let it through. We had a vulture for dinner a few days prior to that encounter, why not have a porcupine as well? All life forms are welcome as long as they’re not trying to make us their dinner…

However, this was not to be.

As soon as I opened the gate for the prickly fellow, he huffed and ambled back into the mist...

Like an oversized cat, he was just annoyed that the gate was closed.

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As you can see, it’s just sand and seashells. So how did it become a city?

During the 1880s, Jews started founding new neighborhoods outside of Jaffa due to overcrowding in the city. This was still under Ottoman rule, when Jews faced many limitation from the Muslim rulers of the land.

The first was Neve Tzedek, founded in 1887 by Mizrahi Jews on lands purchased by Aharon Chelouche, an Algerian Jew who moved to the Land of Israel in 1840, and made a fortune trading in gold and silver. He purchased the land from local Arabs.

In 1890 Neve Shalom was founded by Zerah Barnett, a wealthy Lithuanian Jew, who purchased the land with his own money in the same way. Other neighborhoods have similar stories. Notice that they were all founded under Muslim rule on land bought from Muslims.

So when did these neighborhoods become Tel Aviv?

In 1906, Jewish families purchased 60 plots near Jaffa and registered them under the name of Jacobus Kann, a Dutch citizen, since Ottoman law didn’t allow them to register the land under their own names. The funding came from the Jewish families themselves, who were aided by a generous loan from the Jewish National Fund, which itself was funded by donations.

The town was originally named Ahuzat Bayit but was renamed Tel Aviv in 1910. In 1917, the Ottoman authorities expelled the residents of Jaffa and Tel Aviv as a wartime measure. The Jews returned to the area after the British defeated the Ottomans.

After the war, Tel Aviv became an attraction to immigrants because it offered the comforts they were used to in Europe: electric light, water, cinema, opera, theatre, restaurants, and so forth.

It received township in 1921, under British rule and was granted the status of an independent municipality in 1934, after its population swelled due to riots against Jews in Jaffa, forcing many to flee to Tel Aviv, as well as Jews fleeing the rise of Nazism in Europe.

Speaking of the British, they did actually displace people from an area that would later become Tel Aviv. However, these people were not Arab, but German Templars.

Not many people know this, but there were several German Templar colonies established in Palestine starting from 1860. These are not the Templars you know from the Crusades or the guys you fight in Assassin Creed, but a Radical Pietist movement that wished to live a Christian life in the Land of Israel.

One of these colonies was Sarona, which was established in 1871 on land bought from a Greek monastery north of Jaffa. With the increase of Jewish immigration, the German settlement began to prosper as it began to trade with the newcomers.

At the start of World War II, the Templars were rounded up by the British and sent to internment camps similar to the ones the Americans sent the Japanese to. In 1941, the majority were deported to Australia. During the war the British government brokered the exchange of about 1,000 Templers for 550 Jews under German control.

Finally, the small amount of Germans who’ve somehow remained near Tel Aviv were kicked out by Israel. Their former colony is now now a fancy neighborhood of Tel Aviv called Sarona.

To quote a certain toad-like bastard, this didn’t happen in a vacuum. About 17% of the Templars were card-carrying Nazis and many of their young men volunteered in the Germany military.

Their last mayor Gotthilf Wagner was a passionate Nazi who instructed the few remaining Germans not to sell land to the Jews. The Jewish Resistance Movement changed his mind by shooting him in the head.

In 1962, the State of Israel paid DM54 million to the property owners whose assets were nationalized, so even they got compensated for the land they’ve lost.

So you see?

No stolen homes, no stolen land, no stolen city.

Just hardworking people turning desert into prosperity with their own wealth and effort.

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I’ll explain.

Islamists, Marxists, and neo-Nazis, have logical and internally-consist reasons for opposing Israel as part of a radical global agenda they’re promoting. Genuine humanitarians wish to end the suffering caused by the war and are critical of Israel since they perceive it as the stronger side. The hostility off these movements is logically consistent with their other beliefs.

As a result, these groups don’t view Israel as uniquely evil or the only “problem” in the world. For example,

• Islamists wish to defeat all the enemies of Islam all over the world, not just Israel.

• Marxists wants to overturn all states they view as colonial, not just Israel.

• Neo-Nazis views Jews as the source of all evil, not just Israel.

The majority of Israel-haters are not members of these movements but otherwise normal Americans and Europeans. Their hate is inconsistent with their otherwise moderate views.

The fact their focus on Israel contradicts their own values can be shown by demonstrating that every accusation they raise against the Jewish state can be applied equally to a number of other states they ignore.

I like to call this “the consistency test.”

If you are critical of Israel, are you equally critical of other countries based on the same criteria? If yes, why don’t you give them the same attention? If no, then explain what makes Israel unique?

For example: Turkey engages in greater massacres and ethnic cleansing, Afghanistan is more oppressive towards women and minorities, the coalition war against ISIS displaced more people, Palestinians are kept stateless in Lebanon as well unlike Israeli Arabs, etc…

In most cases, there is nothing that makes Israel unique according to their own values. Thus, they fail the consistency test. Their hate is not the result of a logical and internally-consistent ideology but rather the experience their hate provides.

This includes:

• A sense of moral purpose and participation in historic events.

• Belonging to an international community.

• An outlet for frustration and anger.

• A socially approved form of aggression.

Crucially, it offers these benefits at zero personal cost.

For such people, Israel hate is a form of fandom. They adopt its aesthetics, language, and community due to the sense of satisfaction it gives them. Another way to look at it is like a drug. If the militant ideologies described above are the dealers, then these haters are the junkies. The relationship here is one of supply and demand.

But why Israel?

Why not Turkey, Afghanistan, North Korea, South Africa, or the UK?

It is tempting to simply shout “Jew hate!” but this oversimplifies a complex issue and prevents taking effective measures to solve it.

So far, I have observed several overlapping factors that form a spectrum of hate:

1. Small Size and High Visibility

Israel is a small country and Jews constitute a tiny minority of the world’s population. Nevertheless, Jewish communities and Israeli tourists are highly visible all over the world. This creates the combustive combination of a small population associated with a country that receives extraordinary attention. Thus, Jews are at the same time always available to harass while rarely being in large enough group to constitute an immediate threat.

2. The Enemy is Too Big To Fail

Israel faces movements and states with vastly larger populations and enormous wealth and resources. State-sponsored influence campaigns and activist networks amplify anti-Israel narratives far beyond what can be achieved by Israel’s direct enemies on their own. To put it bluntly, this is a battle of 15 million people against 2 billion.

3. Scale Bias

People infer importance from visibility. A conflict that dominates news coverage, social media, university activism, and celebrity discourse gives the impression of being the world’s defining humanitarian crisis even when other conflicts are causing greater suffering. Basically, the Gaza war is the most discussed conflict in the world because it’s the most discussed conflict in the world.

4. Historical Jew Hate

Jew Hate has a deep infrastructure with a history of almost 2,000 years. Political movements can access it without presenting their hostility in explicitly anti-Jewish terms because its already engraved into Western culture, sometimes literally. If you’re interested, you can read an article I wrote about this particular subject.

5. Prestige Bias

If academics, journalists, artists, celebrities, and other prestigious figures appear to agree about something, people will sense that by agreeing with them they will elevate their own status, just like fans who dress in a similar style to their idols. Hating Israel is what all the cool kids do so if you hate Israel you’ll be a cool kid too.

6. Community Bias

People often acquire their politics socially rather than intellectually. Once a position takes root in a social group, disagreeing with it, or even just being indifferent to it, carries a social cost. The belief becomes socially self-reinforcing. In practice, what this means is that expressing hate towards Israel offers rewards. Failing to express hate towards Israel may be punished.

7. Moral Escapism

Narratives with recognizable heroes, victims, and villains offer an escape from the complexities of daily life. Once that framework becomes dominant, every new event can be interpreted through it. This creates a situation in which anything Israel does is perceived as villainous while anything Palestinians do is perceived as heroic, regardless of context or nuance. A complex, multifaceted war is reduced to the level of a children’s cartoon.

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At the end of every school year, I have a little ritual of taking out all the board games I use in my work out of my car and stashing them inside my house until the start of the next school year. It’s nice to drive an empty car for a couple of months, leaves more room for wood when you want to start a little bonfire in the desert.

Last year, I removed layer after layer of games until I reached the blankets at the bottom of my trunk. These blankets remained there since 2023, when we tried to deliver them to a base in the Gaza Envelope but failed to reach it because a tank blocked our way.

We waited, and we waited, and we waited, then we turned around and drove back. We returned to the Gaza Envelope many times during the early weeks of the war, but somehow we never got to deliver these blankets. Today, these blankets benefit several cats across the country.

This peeling away of layers, brought back memories.

Oddly, I was awake when October 7 started.

I heard sounds like a thunderstorm and went outside to see what was going on. I live on a hill, so a big part of the country is always spread in front of me.

Dani, a childhood friend from Holon, was woken up by the sirens so we started chatting. Sirens are nothing unusual in Israel—Gaza has been intermittently bombing Israel for most of my adult life—but such an intense and relentless bombardment was unusual.

The sky was streaked with white lines painted by interceptors. The air shook with the frequency of the explosions. Wispy smoke dissipated in the breeze.

It was clear that this was the most massive barrage in our lifetime However, we learned not to worry about rockets. The Iron Dome system wasn’t perfect, but it was good enough to stop the majority of attacks. In our insane reality, we came to treat rockets from Gaza like the weather.

Then I checked my phone. The small screen told a different story. One I found impossible to believe at first.

There were videos of ISIS-style trucks inside Israeli cities, of collapsed border fences and hordes of screaming barbarians wielding knives, rifles, and rocket launchers pouring into the country. These were sights we’re used to seeing in African civil wars, not in our backyard.

The scale of it was unimaginable. This wasn’t an infiltration but a full-scale invasion of thousands of well-armed militants followed by bloodthirsty opportunists who came to loot, rape, and murder.

As I thumbed through the videos, I noticed the surprise in the eyes of the terrorists as they rolled through the border unopposed. They were prepared to be martyred within minutes. Even they didn’t expect this level of success.

Perhaps on some level they’d already realized the price they’ll pay for this success.

In the following days, people were glued to screens that inundated them with atrocities every waking hour. Piles of bullet-ridden corpses of elderly women in a bus stop, beautiful young people hunted down in the fields around a music festival, terrified women and children dragged through cheering masses that snapped at them like a pack of hyanas, Arab children beating and humiliating terrified Jewish children, blood-crazed mobs mutilating the bodies of the slain.

The count of the dead kept increasing: 60, 100, 300, 600, 1,000…

There were moments of light too; dozens of hostages held in Be’eri rescued by the Yamam. Inbal, Israel’s first ever female security coordinator, who managed to organize a quick response and saved her community from the invaders, killing and injuring dozens of heavily-armed terrorists without a single civilian in her town being hurt. A Bedouin minibus driver named Youssef Ziadna who drove through bullets and rockets to save 30 people by cramming them into his 14-seat vehicle and driving through dirt roads.

After the fugue state passed, Dani and I decided to meet for a walk, away from the merciless screens. As I drove through the woods, I saw an amazing thing. Normally, you rarely see another car going down that road. If someone is parked, it’s because their car has broken down or they’re answering a call of nature.

This time, there were thousands of cars parked along the road. Countless soldiers were hugging their wives, moms, children, picking up sandwiches and travel bags, slapping each other on the back, and walking to a nearby base. It reminded me of the scene in Game of Thrones when the Northmen march South. It was a humbling sight.

Dani and I decided that we wanted to help, but because we were furious at the government, we wanted to help on our own terms.

The following day provided us with an opportunity.

Everyone wanted to pitch in after Black Saturday. Osnat, a director of a Pilates school in Ramat Gan organized a donation for the troops, converting her school into a warehouse. People brought donations and her students packaged them into boxes addressed to various bases in the South. However, they didn’t have anyone eager to drive into a combat zone to deliver the goods.

Dani’s wife happened to be walking by and noticed the piled boxes. The girls told her about their problem and she told them she knew two idiots who’d jump on this opportunity.

She wasn’t wrong.

The following morning, Dani and I arrived at the Pilates school, filled my humble Toyota with boxes like it was a Tetris game, and made our first trip to the Gaza Envelope. My car was crammed with snacks, flip-flops, coffee, tea, mattresses, blankets (yes, those blankets), kosher muffins, veggie proteins, gluten-free food, and several mystery boxes.

We have such a hippie army.

The situation in the Gaza Envelope was surreal; hundreds of tanks, APCs, and fuel trucks standing in fields. This was the largest amassed force I’ve seen in my life.

Cops, soldiers, Hasidim, and border guards all mixed together. Huge smoke columns rose on the horizon. Flares, rockets, and warplanes roared above us. Explosions shook the air. At one point a flock of thousands of crows crossed the sky in the direction of Gaza. The air smelled of fire and rot.

We drove past a bullet-ridden car that had been pushed off the road and met a group of reservists riding in a jeep. They were lost because GPS services were jammed in the region (resulting in some very amusing cross-border Tinder matches). We followed them for safety, making every wrong turn imaginable until we reached our first destination.

The officer who came to meet us arrived all the way from England to volunteer as soon as he heard the news. As we spoke, we heard a Red Color alarm and ran for shelter. This close to Gaza, you only have 15 seconds to get to safety. The British officer and his soldiers called us heroes for coming to bring them goodies, which was amusing because they were the ones about to storm the bastion of the enemy. We just brought snacks.

After the shelling ended, we drove to our next destination. The madness intensified. We were stuck in traffic behind a tank. I observed a curious weather formation only for Dani to scoff and say these were mortar explosions a couple hundred meters away. Several times, cops told us to go against traffic or run red lights.

Between tanks and fuel trucks, we passed by BBQs organized by civilians for the troops. The mood was like a festival. Such a classic Jewish trait; to go from sorrow to joy in an eye blink.

“They tried to kill us. They failed. Let’s eat!”

Dani described the mood like, “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas meets Apocalypse Now.”

The next location was the temporary HQ of the Rotem battalion of the Givati brigade. The atmosphere there was somber. The troopers we met were among the first responders on October 7. They saw atrocities and lost friends just days before.

Their staff sergeant had told us: “we’re like feral dogs. We’re waiting for our leashes to be removed.”

It was his birthday. Coincidentally, this was also Dani’s birthday.

I insisted we had a little party. So we had a cup of coffee and tasted a few of the endless cakes forced upon us.

This was the strangest and most memorable birthday party I’ve ever attended.

On the way to our next destination, we were stopped in the middle of the road by an army patrol and told to wait. While we waited, more and more cars stopped behind us, their colorful occupants spilling onto the road since Israelis are people with thorns in their bottom.

There were Breslov Hasidim dancing on van roofs to mind-numbingly loud music, journalists trying to report through the noise, volunteers from various organizations that only a few days ago were at each other’s throats due to the judicial reform protests, and reservists going to their bases.

After some time we heard an explosion and told we could continue.

Later we learned that a tank blew up three terrorists down the road.

A female officer arrived and picked up the last delivery for the day. A box of flip-flops for the girls.

As you noticed, most of what we delivered was food. People show love by giving food and that’s beautiful. So when a whole nation wants to show love for the troops, it sends them a lot of food.

The problem is that the army already has a lot of food. Every soldier has a mom, who makes sure he has more food. Every unit is stationed near a town, and the locals show their gratitude by bringing even more food. Then charities come and bring, you guessed it, food.

Soon, you have so much food going around nobody knows what to do with it. Half the time we passed through police and army checkpoints, cops and soldiers offered us to take some food off their hands!

The following day, to make ourselves more useful, we called the staff sergeant we had coffee with and asked him what his battalion actually needed. He gave us a list and we told him we’ll try to help.

Originally, I didn’t plan to raise funds and purchase equipment. I’ve never done that before and didn’t know how since I was never the volunteering type.

However, I told my story on Twitter and someone asked if they could help. I joked that they could pitch in for gas money. To my amazement, he asked for my PayPal and within a few minutes, I saw $500 there.

That got the ball rolling.

Within hours, we had thousands of dollars, mostly from total strangers or online friends I’ve never met in real life. This phrase is used so often it has become a cliché, but in this case it’s almost mathematically precise:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

During those days, you’d speak to every person on the street as if they were an old friend. We could barely pay for anything because as soon as people realized we were buying stuff for the troops, they insisted on paying.

Shopkeepers chased us down and gave us food to take to the troops. It was difficult to talk them down. When we told them the soldiers had enough food, they insisted we took it for ourselves. Good stuff, too.

What did we end up buying and delivering? 700 pairs of antibacterial socks, 155 pairs of sweat-proof boxers, 11 mobile banks, and a whole lot of Advil, plus some private deliveries from people who wanted to make their loved ones more comfortable.

Amazing how many memories a few old blankets can bring.

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Gaza: The yellow line continues to shrink, increasing Israel’s security zone. The IDF is taking out people who participated in the October 7 attacks, as well as commanders and operatives who pose a risk to Israel. Hundreds of trucks enter Gaza every day, flooding it with food and supplies. The armed factions in Gaza are using it to rebuild their military and economic might.

West Bank: Organized resistance has been sent underground. For the first time in over a decade, there isn’t a single wanted murderer at large in the region. The majority of violent incidents stem from friction between Jewish homesteaders and Arab villagers as each seek to occupy strategic spots in the hills of Samaria.

Lebanon: Israel is focusing its efforts on the Ali al-Taher ridge, an area north of the Litani where Hezbollah has tunnels it uses to launch rockets at Israel. According to reports from Lebanon, the ridge has all but fallen. In the other areas there is an uneasy truce, which Israel is using to demolish buildings that pose a threat to the IDF.

Syria: Israel engages in mostly symbolic activity to prevent Turkey from getting a further foothold in Syria. At the same time, Israeli government officials are directly talking to the Syrian government with the goal of reaching a security arrangement. Israel still occupies part of Syria as a security zone to prevent militants from launching attacks against Israel and to protect the Druze from another massacre.

Iran: Israel has been relegated to the the role of an observer. Similar to the Tanker Wars of the 80s, the war is growing increasingly cold as it takes on the characteristics of a siege within a siege: Iran is trying to block traffic through the Strait of Hormuz and the US is blocking traffic to Iran. There are occasional small-scale attacks against ships but generally, this is a waiting game.

Yemen: These guys are so occupied with fighting their fellow Arabs, they seem to have forgotten Israel exists. Saudi Arabia started a blockade of Houthi-controlled ports. In response, the Houthis started attacking Saudi infrastructure. A plethora of tribes supported by different foreign powers are clashing in the desert. In lieu of going into detail here, I suggest you watch the excellent 2015 Australian film “Mad Max: Fury Road.”

Uri: It’s been generally peaceful in the last few months. There were no sirens, red alerts, infiltration warnings, stone throwing or any of other unpleasantries Israelis came to know and hate in the last 3 years. In fact, it’s probably the quietest period I’ve experienced since October 6. I had an intense little relationship that burned brightly and ended quickly, rather the opposite from my previous ones. I am currently working on a book investigating the question why so many intelligent people are convinced Israel is uniquely evil even when this belief contradicts their own values.

I hope you’ll like it!

Also, I’ve passed 100 supporters on ko-fi. Thank you so much for your support! It means a lot! I hope I’ll be able to keep supplying you with useful commentary and amusing anecdotes for years to come. God bless!

Anyway, that’s it for my update. I hope you have a great weekend.

Shabbat Katom!

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Palestine wasn’t even an administrative unit before the British mandate. “Palestinian” is what you called these pesky Jewish upstarts who had dreams of freedom of statehood on Arab land. The Arabs of Palestine had no more separate national identity than the people of East Texas.

Here are 10 historic quotes that prove it:

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Just to give you a taste of the scale of their enormities, here is a non-exhaustive list of their worst atrocities since WWI. I urge you to read more about these to understand the full depth of the evil of this state.

• Armenian Genocide (1915–1916) — Turkish forces massacred and deported 1.5 million Armenians.

• Greek genocide (1914–1923) — Turkish forces massacred and deported 1.2 million Greeks.

• Assyrian genocide (1915–1918) — Turkish forces massacred and deported 275,000 Assyrian, Syriac, and Chaldean Christians.

• Great Famine of Lebanon (1915-1918) — Turkish food requisitions caused a manmade famine in Lebanon which killed 200,000 people.

• Dersim genocide (1937–1938) — Turkish forces used chemical weapons to massacre and deport 25,000-70,000 Alevi Kurds.

• Forced displacement of Kurds (1980s–1990s) — Turkish forces forcibly emptied 2,685 village, displacing as many as 2 million Kurds.

• Wealth Tax cultural genocide (1942-1944) — 156% tax for Greeks, 179% for Jews, and 232% for Armenians, resulting in the destruction of these communities.

• Istanbul Riots (1955) — Following a Turkish false flag attack on a Turkish consulate in Greece, Turkish rioters raped hundreds of Greek women and boys.

• North Syria invasion and colonization (2015-ongoing) — Turkish forces and local allies displaced about 400,000 Kurds and settle their homes with about 200,000 Arabs.

• North Cyprus invasion and colonization (1974-ongoing) — Turkey invade Cyprus and displaces 200,000 Greeks, replacing them with around 160,000 Turkish settlers.

These are only the tip of the iceberg.

I strongly urge you to read more about the history of Turkey to understand who we’re dealing with. The media and academia are silent about the evil of this state so it’s up to us to educate ourselves and others about the danger is poses to the world.

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The previous Sunday Story was Syrniki, a dark tale inspired by a little known episode of Soviet history and by the tough Jewish grandmother everybody knew.

Oh, and don’t forget you can also listen to this story. Substack has a great AI reader!

Shabbat Katom

Being ginger is more than a race. It’s a lifestyle.

Now, I’m not just ginger. I’m also white. I’m complex. I like people, especially little girls who play with me and old ladies who feed me. There’re a couple of humans who live in a house surrounded by trees at the end of the street. They’re okay, I guess; always drop food when cooking, especially when I bite their ankles.

However, I also like to stalk the night and hunt birds and rodents and show other cats who’s the boss—

Oh sneeze! I should have started with that. I’m a cat.

I have a ginger back and a white belly. I’m larger than most cats, but not because I’m fat. I have the sharpest claws in town. I can bite painfully, too. Once, I killed a pigeon with a single bite. He was teasing me, so I guess the lesson here is that unless you want me to do some cat stuff to your face, you’d better not mess with me. What does it mean to mess with me? I don’t know…try it and find out.

Cats. I can’t stand cats. I hate black cats who crawl on their bellies and try to snatch bits of food from distracted humans. I hate white cats who strut about like they’re royalty. We cats bow to no one. I hate tabby cats who live in garbage and smell like garbage and are garbage. I hate ginger cats because they’re fat and lazy and stupid and eat things that cats shouldn’t eat. I hate fawn cats because— Hm. I’m not sure what fawns cats are, but they’re some kind of cat, so I hate them.

There. You can’t call me racist. I hate everyone equally. If you’re some kind of cat I missed, I apologize. I hate you, too.

Dogs are all right. Some are mean, but they’re always tied to something so you can walk around them. I don’t like how they bark. It’s loud and it hurts my ears, but if I walk quietly, they don’t notice me. There’s one dog I like. She lets me sleep with her on cold days. If only she didn’t try to groom me all the time. I’m a big cat. I can groom myself.

What else? Horses. I don’t have an opinion on horses. Owls? They’re cool.

Insects are delicious. Fun and delicious.

Rats? Hate those bastards. They are the reason I practice my pounce every night. If I see a rat, that bastard is going down.

Jackals? Nasty creatures, but they can’t get through the fence. It’s fun to tease them. I like the angry sounds they make. Boars? I sometimes see them through the fence. I don’t think they know I exist. Just smaller horses, as far as I’m concerned.

I see you’re getting bored. You didn’t come here to listen to a cat lecture you about race relations in small towns. You came here to hear about the abduction. Okay, this is how it went.

The sun was setting. I remember this, because the old woman was trying to get the three little girls to climb out of a big puddle and get back into the house so she could put them in a smaller puddle. I guess the point is to slowly prepare them for the trauma of not being in any puddle at all, but what do I know? I’m just a cat.

The old woman was bleating, the girls were whining, and their mother, who I guess is the old woman’s daughter, was snarling from the window. It was very loud and very splashy. A lot of cats hate splashing, but I don’t. Can be fun on a hot day.

I was lying on the grass in the shadow of the jumpy thing (humans need a big sheet of taut fabric to jump), chewing on a chicken leg I expropriated from a smaller cat and wondering if I should step in and set things straight. I was just about to do nothing at all when I noticed strange lights in the sky and realized that the ambiance was gone. Birds, insects, other cats, other girls fighting with their mothers or grandmothers…all gone!

I instantly knew this was a case of abduction.

How did I know this? Cats know more than you think. We’re not stupid, or at least I’m not. I don’t sniff catnip because I’m dumb. I sniff catnip because I’m weak. Are you happy now?

Okay, okay. I’m sorry I hissed on you. This won’t happen again.

You see, it’s not something I like to talk about, but when I was a kitten, I was abducted. Yeah, go ahead, laugh all you want, but I have proof.

One moment, I was sitting in the shadow of a garbage bin, waiting for the big cats to finish tearing up a bag to see if there was anything I could eat inside. Next, I saw some lights shining from above and felt constricted, like the whole world was closing around me, suffocating me. I tried to struggle, but I passed out.

I woke after what felt like just a few heartbeats, except it was already dark. The cats were gone and so was the bag. Even the eggshells and fish bones were gone. I was missing the whole evening!

Even worse, the tip of my ear was sliced off, but not like someone tore it with his claws or fangs or beak or whatever. It was a perfectly straight incision. I also felt, I don’t know, altered? I don’t know. I was never the same after it happened. Just thinking about that night makes my fur stand up.

Anyway, I saw these lights in the sky and instantly my tail blew like it does when jackals or dogs are nearby. I felt like everything had suddenly gotten lighter, like that feeling you get when you jump from a tall tree or people toss you out of the window, you know?

So yeah, I panicked. Wouldn’t you? I ran away as fast as I could and slammed headfirst into something I couldn’t smell or see. I hissed at it, I tried to bite it, but I could as well be fighting the wind— Um, which is something I did once…and won! Yes, one time I hissed at annoying wind, and it went away. True story.

Dazed from the collision, I turned around and noticed the girls and the old woman staring into the sky. The girl’s mom was gone. Even her scent was gone.

Stupid humans. They should have fled, but instead they just went on gawking. That’s the problem with humans; they’re so big and strong that when they can’t solve a problem by their bigness and strongness, they get more confused than a chameleon in a flowerpot.

Meanwhile, the wind started blowing harder, but it was a weird kind of wind; it felt like it was blowing from the grass upward instead of across the land. I felt this tugging on the tip of my tail, my ears, my whiskers, as if someone was trying to pick me up in the least pleasant way possible. Now, if you know cats, you know that you do not, I repeat, you do not touch our whiskers!

So yeah, I went blood simple and did something stupid. I started hissing like I never hissed before and tried to bite the wind. Okay, so that story about fighting the wind earlier? I may have exaggerated a little…I didn’t win. You can’t bite bad weather into good weather. Even humans can’t do that.

While I was trying to fight the wind like some stupid dog, the old woman picked up a broom and tried hitting me, the old crone, even though I was trying to protect her! What can I say? No good deed goes unpunished. That’s why we cats have trust issues.

So she swung her huge broom at me, and she would have smacked me, too, except the wind snatched the broom from her hands and sucked it upward, into the light in the sky. The girls started shrieking. It felt like knives in my ears. Little girls are even worse than barking dogs.

One of them jumped out of the puddle, a little girl, not much bigger than me, and also covered in stripes, and was sucked into the air. It reminded me of those roaring devices the humans use to suck uneaten kibble from the floor. By my claws, I hate those things! The noise they make is even worse than little girls.

The other girls, one with large spots and one plain, tried to grab their sister and were sucked into the air right after her. Their shrieking left my ears ringing and my brain hurting. By this point, the grandmother was also gone. I didn’t even notice her abduction. Usually, I can hear a mouse fart from twenty leaps, but now I missed a huge human being sucked into the clouds.

I tried to jump over the green fence into the yard of the couple with the tasty ankles…which was when they got me, too.

Damn abductors. I hate them even more than cats.

I landed inside a cave that looked like an oversized stomach, except it was made from shiny metal instead of meat. Just like a stomach, this cave had passages going into dark places. How do I know what a stomach looks like? Some rat thought he was tough enough to steal my kibble. He ended up teaching me anatomy. Later in life, I learned that rats, pigeons, even cats—we’re all basically the same inside—but not the three bastards I saw in front of me. They were weird!

They stood upright, just like humans, and had the same number of heads and limbs, but there, the similarity ended. One was sickly green and glowed. The other two were gray, like bad tuna that even a jackal won’t eat, though they didn’t smell like spoiled fish. They smelled like balloons, which, by the way, you are also not supposed to eat. Don’t ask why I know this. Painful memory.

These creatures were smaller than humans, only twice as tall as I am when I get on my haunches. They also had slender limbs with three digits each, ending in little pads, kinda like geckos. Or, as I like to call them: wall snacks.

The heads of these creatures were enormous, almost as big as their bodies. Their faces were as smooth as watermelons, and had tiny mouths without any teeth and huge black eyes without irises. Now, you know how whenever three or more humans are together, they’re always covered in fabric, and if you jump on a human without fabric, you need to be really careful or they’ll slap you? These guys had no fabric, only small patches on the backs of their heads, like, like… I don’t know like what. I’m a cat.

The human females stood in the center of the room, ordered by height. They looked like they were sleeping with their eyes open. Usually, humans get this look when they stare at the flickering surfaces inside their homes or when spoken to by older humans for a long time. However, these humans looked even more dazed than normal, especially the one who was both a mother and a daughter. She even drooled a little.

In addition to the humans and the creatures, the cave was littered with all sorts of devices made from stone and metal; some of it flickering, some of it beeping, and some of it just icky. I can’t go into more detail, because, again, I’m a cat.

The grays were smearing some kind of goo on the scruffs of the women while the green was illuminating them with what looked like a metal banana. Whenever one began to stir, he aimed it at her and she got dreamy again.

This was serious. I needed to get out!

However, great Bastet had other plans.

No, I didn’t hiss this time. I’m not a moron.

However, I did fart. You see, that bad tuna I mentioned earlier, the one that even jackals wouldn’t touch, well…I ate it.

I ate it all.

At this point, three pairs of black-on-black eyes were turned on me. One of the creatures reached for me, and I hissed at him to indicate that I won’t have his disgusting gelatinous pads soiling my perfect coat. He didn’t heed the hiss, so he got the scratch. I don’t care if you’re human, dog or Bastet herself; if you touch me when I don’t feel like it, you’re gonna bleed.

The creature drew his hand back while I bounced away. I tried running down one of the passages, but I ran into that invisible, odorless wall again. My head was starting to really hurt. I was ready to scratch someone’s eyes out.

The gray cradled his hand and glared at me, just like humans do when I rightfully scratch them. He reached for some kind of a device that looked like a metal claw, but his green buddy raised his hand, as if commanding the gray to stop, and aimed his own banana at me. A beam of light came out of it. It was bright, but not painfully bright. It made me feel warm inside my head, like my thoughts were racing and bumping into each other, but maybe it was just the bad tuna, or running headfirst into a wall. Twice.

Honestly, I don’t know what he expected was going to happen. I’m not a kitten. I don’t have to chase every beam of light I see. I know what a laser is. I’m not stupid.

I ran for the other passage, easily bypassing the clumsy grays, but of course, it was blocked by an invisible wall. And no, I didn’t knock my head a third time. I’m not a bird. I gave it a lick first. It tasted stupid.

Meanwhile, the girls began to stir, so one of the grays picked up a banana and shone on them. They slackened and got back to dreaming and drooling.

Ugh. Humans are so sloppy. One time, one of these girls touched me after she’d had ice-cream. Sweet Bastet, that was awful!

With the light still shining on me, I tried running up the wall, but it was too smooth. Meanwhile, the gray I scratched opened one of the big rocks and pulled out something that looked like a broom with a clawing tip instead of a spanking tip. Good luck matching celerity with a cat, moron. I can catch lasers. I’m literally faster than light!

I used the stick as a springboard and gave him a good scratch across his balloon-like face. His head didn’t explode, but he did let go of the claw-stick and grabbed his face, which started oozing something black and foul. At this point, both his companions aimed their bananas at me, and I felt really hot inside my head, like I was sprinkled with some kind of evil catnip or something.

This only made me madder.

I pounced at the other gray and tried to scratch his eyes out. He parried me with his arm, but I bit him. I bit him so hard I can tell you what he tasted like. (Bad, in case you were wondering.)

He started waving his hand around, dropping his banana, and started sprinkling the human females with his black goo…at which point, they came to, and this madness got upgraded into a proper frenzy. Not since a human child vomited inside the jumping thing have I seen so much crazy all around.

The girls started wailing and kicking at the grays’ shins and pinching on their torsos, their mother employed some kind of a sonic attack (sure made my head rattle) and her mother picked up the broomstick (the actual broomstick, not the one with the claw) and started swatting at the green, who scampered up the wall like a spooked gecko.

He aimed his banana at the mother of mothers, and she instantly dropped her broom and became dazed again. Meanwhile, her daughter picked up the claw-stick and tried hitting the gray cradling his bleeding arm. However, he quickly aimed his banana at her, and her eyes became glazed again. However-however, this time she was running, so the momentum carried her across the cave and onto a big stone with all sorts of glowing crystal poking from it. Right away, the cave started spinning like the inside of a washing machine.

Yes, I know what a washing machine is. It’s one of my favorite things in the world, and no, it’s not a pervy thing. I just appreciate its meditative and aesthetic qualities. If no one hits me with a broom, I can spend countless heartbeats watching a washing machine running.

Anyway, the cave started spinning, tossing women, girls and creatures not from this world like they were dirty fabrics. They all just screamed and tried to grab onto surfaces that were too smooth even for me to hold. I, however, am a cat, and can pounce and bounce like a god.

I used the woman’s ample behind as a jumping thing and went for the green, the only one I didn’t have a chance to maul yet. By this point, he realized his stupid banana had no effect on me, so he pulled out a different device, the one that looked like a metal claw. This one shot a narrow beam of light, as thin as a whisker, and I instantly felt searing pain in the tip of my ear.

Sneeze and diarrhea! Now both of my ears were missing their tips! What can I say? I came at him with everything I had.

With my fangs, I tore at his wrist until he dropped his claw. With my front paws, I dug deep grooves in his gelatinous flesh. With my hind claws…I don’t have eyes in my butt, but I felt them connect with something, so they must have done some damage. I’m a cat. My body is a weapon.

At this point, I wasn’t hissing. I was snarling like a cat fighting for his life, which I guess I was. Meanwhile, one of the grays managed to reach the big stone with the claw stick. He twisted one of the crystals, and the spinning instantly stopped, throwing me and the green across the room. I landed with the elegance of a cat. He smashed against the wall with the lack of elegance of someone who was not a cat.

However, while the first gray was fiddling with the crystals, and the second one held the women trapped inside a beam of light, the smallest girl, the one with the stripes, picked up the banana that the first gray had dropped and shone it at him. He went numb right away.

The girl giggled and started shooting beams in all directions, alternately paralyzing and freeing random greens, grays, girls, and women.

This bedlam was amusing to watch, but the green still had two eyes, which meant I still had a job to do. I turned toward the green bastard with my most feral grin and snarled like one of the great cats of yore. The creature reached for his metal claw, the one that sliced the tip of my ear earlier, but in all the spinning and tossing and brain-freezing, it’d rolled away under one of the stones.

He was now defenseless against my claws and fangs. I was ready to exact terrible vengeance for what he did to my perfect ear…so of course the bastard decided to cheat. He reached a hand behind his back and pressed the patch I mentioned earlier, the same kind they were trying to fit the humans with before I put the fear of the claw into the bastards.

Everything disappeared in an instant. One heartbeat, I was inside a smooth cave full of panicking humans, world-controlling stones, and ear-mutilating abductors. The next, the humans and I were just hanging in midair, higher than any tree in town.

Then we started falling.

Now, I’m a cat. We know how to stick the landing. We even know how to land on a stick, so I wasn’t worried about myself. The humans, though, I was sure they’d break all their bones upon impact. They can barely survive tripping on me. Falling from many times their height? Eh! Forget about it!

This thought made me sad, because it meant they’d never feed me or play with me or splash me again…and it’s not like the males of the house would let me eat the dead females. Um, not that I would. I’m a cat, not a jackal. I don’t eat roadkill. It’s undignified.

However, and this is the point where I realized the true value of the jumping thing, the humans landed on the taut fabric one by one, the women screaming, the girls laughing. After sinking several tails deep into the fabric, they somersaulted out with almost feline grace, and landed on the grass in a heap, perhaps slightly bruised, but definitely not smashed. Even the oldest one seemed unharmed, though you’d never tell it by the amount of noise she was generating.

The males of the house ran to hug the females, and there was a lot of crying and kissing and blubbering. However, none of this was my concern, so I got back to gnawing on my chicken thigh, which remained just where I left it, except there were a few ants trying to rob me of my meal.

All in all, this was a strange afternoon.

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It’s fascinating to examine why this happened, but first, let’s get the geography and demographics out of the way because in the end of the day, this is what it’s all about: land and people.

Unlike Israel, there has never been such a state as Lebanon, nor was “Lebanese” a national identity. The term was been purely geographical and quite vague. The modern borders of Lebanon were drawn under the French mandate in 1920, the same year as Palestine was created by the British. Prior to that, Lebanon was the Mount Lebanon Mutasarrifate, a predominantly Christian and Druze region of the Ottoman Empire.

Originally, the entire French mandate was called “Syria.” However, wanting to maximize their territorial gains following WWI, France moved the Lebanon-Syrian border to the Anti-Lebanon Mountains. This territory had historically belonged to Damascus and was culturally closer to it than to Beirut.

This change of borders wasn’t a purely cynical imperialist move, however.

In 1919, a Lebanese delegation led by Maronite Patriarch Elias Peter Hoayek asked for a significant extension of the frontiers of the Lebanon Mutasarrifate, arguing that the additional areas constituted natural parts of Lebanon.

The French obliged.

This was rather shortsighted of the Maronites, since it resulted in the Christian community losing its absolute majority in Lebanon. However, their desire for more land was not the result of greed, but trauma.

Just like the Jews in Palestine desired to have a state with as many Jews as possible due to the horror of the Holocaust, which saw two third of the Jews of the Old World murdered by the non-Jews they lived among, the Lebanese were motivated to have as much land as possible by the Great Famine of 1915-1918.

Strangely, it’s an event few people outside of Lebanon know about, even though it killed half the population of a country and was almost entirely manmade.

The Great Famine of Mount Lebanon (1915–1918) was caused by three factors coming together during World War I:

• The Ottoman requisitions and restrictions on food, which worsened shortages.

• The Allied blockade of the eastern Mediterranean that blocked food imports.

• Local hoarding and profiteering.

During the famine, 200,000 people living in Mount Lebanon died, creating an existential fear of not having enough land to independently feed the population, just like the Holocaust created an existential fear not being able to independently defend the population.

As a consequence of the border shift, the demographics of Lebanon changed dramatically. Sunnis increased X8 and Shias increase X4. Christians became barely half the population, which is what the British originally planned for the Jews in Palestine.

In 1943, the new Lebanese government voted to abolish the mandate. The French grudgingly agreed and the last French troops withdrew in 1946, one year before the British left Palestine, leading to the creation of the State of Israel.

Both regions soon experienced civil wars fueled by the heterogeneity of the population.

The post-Holocaust Jewish strategy prioritized military self-reliance and a centralized nation state designed to prevent Jewish helplessness; a Jewish fortress where Jews would not depend on anyone to protect them.

The war in Palestine resulted in the creation of a Jewish state with an absolute Jewish majority, following a population exchange with the surrounding Arab states. The conflict is rarely framed this way, but this is what it was: the Arabs fled from areas under Jewish control while Jews fled from areas under Arab control.

Israel’s goal was achieved: a strong and stable nation state, albeit with smaller borders than it had hoped.

Meanwhile, post-famine fear in Lebanon led the fledgling state to demand the borders of “Greater Lebanon.” By expanding beyond Mount Lebanon to ensure economic viability, they incorporated diverse sectarian populations without a unifying national narrative. The political system designed to protect the cohesion of these diverse groups sharing the same land eventually paralyzed the state, making its borders a pressure cooker rather than a shield. The result was several bloody civil wars and a failed state that constantly succumbs to foreign influence.

As it turns out, in the Middle East, diversity is not our strength.

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However, for Israel it’s a matter of life and death.

When the left was in power, Israel’s international image and “brand” were much stronger. The left did a good job at projecting their delusional view of the world as reality.

Most people in the West had positive associations with Israel. If you asked a random person what came to mind when they heard “Israel,” they’d probably say Jaffa oranges, Eskimo Lemon, and Ofra Haza.

Israel was the villa in the jungle; exotic yet urbane, mysterious yet familiar, adventurous yet safe.

However, since the right (for lack of a better term) came to power, the left has redirected its creative and cultural strengths toward a single goal: defeating the right. Israel’s needs were abandoned in favor of partisan goals.

Meanwhile, the right is poorly equipped to manage Israel’s image. Most right-wing politicians are inward-looking, with little sensitivity to how their rhetoric is perceived beyond the borders of Israel. At best, they do little to improve the country’s image; at worst, they damages it by appealing to the barbaric instincts that resonate with their most most extreme supporters. As a result, Israel stopped being the villa in the jungle and became just another pack of baboons, just with bigger clubs and a more clever warlord.

Today, even Israel’s allies mostly praise it for being good at killing people. Impressive, yes, but hardly endearing. We want to be the Rebel Alliance, not the Galactic Empire. Coincidentally, most right-wing politicians probably wouldn’t understand this reference because they didn’t watch Star Wars.

Ben Gvir’s crocodiles are a good example.

This idiotic stunt makes Israel look less like Doctor Evil’s lair. The political logic behind is entirely local: appeal to a narrow domestic base, even if doing so carries an hefty international cost.

Most right-wing politicians can’t even appreciate the damage they are causing to the country because they are so disconnected from the cultural and political norms of the world. Many of them are vulgarians elevated beyond their station by a leader who prefers to surround himself with incompetent barbarians rather than smart people who can challenge him. This may help him politically, but it causes the country huge harm.

Both sides are failing Israel in the same way but for different reasons: the left won’t and the right can’t. If the left specializes in virtue signaling, then the right specializes in vice signaling. Both stopped considering the needs of the nation over their partisan goals a long time ago.

Once again, we see the horseshoe theory in action. It’s just a shame the horseshoe is being used to beat us on the head.

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Every Sunday, I’ll post a new short story inspired by Jewish and Israeli folklore and history.

My goal is to move away from the misery porn and “shooting and crying” that Jewish—and especially Israeli—fiction is so expected to be, and instead tell cool, fun stories in a variety of genres.

I hope you have fun!

Syrniki

“The good people died first. Those who refused to steal or to prostitute themselves died. Those who gave food to others died. Those who refused to eat corpses died. Those who refused to kill their fellow man died.”

— Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin

Rehoboth, Massachusetts, 1993

After grandma Rachel died, or rather, after her beneficiaries got tired of searching for her body, the whole mishpocha gathered for a shiva at her New England home.

Do you know how old folk homes get a certain quality kind people compare with museums and honest people describe as tomblike? Well, there was none of that in Rachel’s home.

Bebe was not good at being old.

There were lots of black-and-white photos and more books in Yiddish and Russian than in English, that’s true, but there was no “old people smell” and none of that meticulous order born out of chronic forgetfulness and fear of change. If you wandered into her home at random, you’d have guessed her home to be the study of some eccentric professor or a zealous collector of macabre memorabilia, not of a woman so ancient she put the “old” in Old Country.

I was sitting in a rocking chair, and tilting my head to and fro to examine curious-looking books and pictures through a mass of relatives mistakenly thinking that going “oy vey” and “boje moi” would fool anyone into thinking they were mourning.

The truth is that no one really loved Bebe. Why would they? She was a harsh and belligerent woman who insisted on discussing only the most terrible subjects because, “that’s real life.” She was a good cook, but you needed guts of iron to stomach her dinner conversations.

Her favorite subjects were the small tragedies of the Great Patriotic War, as she insisted on calling WWII. Failing that, she could always go into detail about the various ailments afflicting her old friends. The few that still lived. Deprived even of that riveting topic, you were always free to discuss dead kittens.

Her vast collection of art and literature in at least five different languages demonstrated that she obviously had other interests in life. Only, being merely her closest family, we were not worthy of such lofty discourse.

Her sole redeeming feature, as far as younger me was concerned, was her cooking, particularly her syrniki, which are fried tvorog pancakes. Now you must be wondering what tvorog is. Frankly, I’m not sure myself. I suppose it’s like quark cheese, but not quite? My cousin Betty used to make really great syrniki too, but she’s also gone.

She went on some kind of an archeological expedition to Australia and never returned. I guess empty graves are hereditary in this family. Now Betty wasn’t just a great cook, she was a great cousin too. She’s been to so many places, and have done so many thing.

Oy vey.

At the shiva, the family served weird Ashkenazi food because we’re very proud of our heritage, and normal food, because we also need something we can actually eat and not just oy vey over. There were syrniki too. They were good, but they were not Bebe good.

Feeling nostalgic, I decided I wanted to go over Bebe’s notes and find her recipes. I told my parents I’ll return home tomorrow with aunt Ira and her family, who planned to stay the night to take care of some stuff.

I didn’t want to cause a scandal by abandoning my mother at this supposedly difficult hour over a mere pancake, so I said I wanted to go over Bebe’s albums and learn more about her life and our family history.

It was not a complete lie. I was a little curious.

Bebe clearly had a fascinating life she never bothered to share with her family. Once, I found a whole box of letters in Arabic or Farsi and asked her what these funny squiggles were. She snatched it away and told me to go wash my hands.

I’ve never seen that box since.

So, with the help of my cousin Sasha, the only member of the family who spoke Yiddish and wouldn’t judge me for not taking part in this schmaltzy circus, I started going over Bebe’s notebooks in search of the recipe. Soon, we were reminded why we were never very eager to visit this house.

Bebe had some notes and pictures from Europe that I swear to the Almighty I’d rather eat a whole bucket of mud than ever see or touch again.

Eventually, we found this old and yellow sheet, probably torn from a Soviet notebook, with the recipe written in barely readable English.

The reason the note was in English was that Bebe was born in America to a family that fled Russia before the October Revolution, so English was her native tongue. However, after the Russian Civil War, she found herself back in the Old Country as one of the few girls among Hoover’s boys. Specifically, she was an agent of the American Relief Administration that came to Russia to feed the starving millions. I wouldn’t be surprised if she was the only American woman in the whole Soviet Union at the time.

She had this kind of chutzpah.

Sasha and I managed to decipher all the ingredients except one: almahrusafatat, which sounded either German or Arabic, depending on how you mispronounced it. We dug through Bebe’s archive until sunrise, but found no further information on this ingredient except for a single quickly scrawled note in Russian, the kind you write with a phone pressed to one ear. All it included was the word “almahrusafatat” and an address in the Russian city of Saratov.

The other side was a horrid photograph of a grim couple with dead eyes displaying their wares—a man’s deformed head, some unidentifiable chunks of meat and the torso of a child frozen in a grotesque mockery of Rodin’s “the Thinker.” An elegant cursive note in the corner read, “Samara province, Volga region, 1921.”

I did not sleep well that day, nor did I have much appetite. More than anything, I was haunted by the dead eyes of the meat merchants. Whenever I closed mine, the couple seemed to stare at me—a man and a woman deprived of any semblance of humanity—less human, less vital, than their dismembered victims.

With time, the nausea of that picture subsided, but it never fully left me. This stain was there to remain.

Saratov, Russia, 2002

At the urging of my uncle Isaac, an assistant professor in the Department of History at Miskatonic University, and my parents, who felt a family can never have too many academics, I applied for a BA in History and Ethnography at Miskatonic University.

Not surprisingly, I was accepted. I suspect that if I didn’t apply, they would have just kidnapped me in the middle of the night and dragged me screaming to the dorms.

However, I had time for one last surge of freedom before the semester commenced. Perhaps manipulated by my subconscious, and perhaps driven by boredom, I decided to go on a little “roots trip” and explore my family’s past from New York to Moscow, with stops in Germany, Poland and Ukraine along the way.

As I was sitting in a small diner in Saratov, trying to make heads or tails of a menu that didn’t have a word in English, I recognized the word Syrniki in Cyrillic letters. This brought the pangs of unsatisfied curiosity and the realization that I now had a weapon I couldn’t dream of in 1993.

The internet.

Searching for information on almahrusafatat returned only an academic paper by Professor Randolph Warren of Miskatonic University titled “Investigation into the dietary habits of pre-Islamic Arab tribes,” where the ingredient was mentioned, but not described. A footnote referenced “al-Azif,” which was not electronically available.

The mention of unscanned documents led me to the thought that many ARA and Soviet documents could still be available in the city archive. It was possible that, for the price of a bottle of vodka, I could relieve the intellectual itch that has been bothering me for the better part of a decade.

Not yet enrolled at the university and already making academic progress. Mom would have been proud.

With the help of Semyon, a local college student who was eager to practice his English on a real American, I skimmed through surviving documents from the famine of 1921. While many documents were removed by the NKVD after the war, most ARA documents remained intact, likely due to the fact the local apparatchiks couldn’t be bothered to find English speakers in this backwater while dealing with the aftermath of a bloody civil war.

Then the Nazis came.

After several hours of sifting through crumbling papers stored in crumbling boxes, I found a reference to Rachel Bloch, an ARA employee who died of cholera in 1922. According to Semyon, “died of cholera” was a code for foreigners accidentally killed by the poison gas used by the Soviets against the starving peasants of the Tambov Rebellion. I remember I literally slumped to the floor as the magnitude of this discovery dawned on me.

So many stories of horror and evil, and not once did Bebe mention she was killed by illegal chemical warfare in the Soviet Union. How inconsiderate of her.

I left America without concerns, but returned with enough concerns to last a lifetime, or at least a degree.

Who was my true grandmother if Rachel Bloch was killed in 1922? Who is my mother? Who am I?

And why was the horrible photo of the “meat merchants” kept by my grandmother as if it was a postcard from a vacation?

Arkham, Massachusetts, 2007

As soon as I finished my first day at Miskatonic University, I sought out Professor Randolph Warren to compare his findings on the dietary habits of pre-Islamic Arab tribes with my findings on the dietary habits of post-Soviet Jewish grandmothers, since the two shared at least one vital ingrident.

Sadly, I soon learned that he retired, somewhat suddenly, and replaced these corridors of hallowed knowledge with the sun-swept beaches of South Australia.

Or so the rumor went.

All attempts to contact him had failed. It seems the old man had enough of this university for a lifetime and then some. Even his assistant, Doctor Joshi, couldn’t contact him.

My BA consisted of boring lectures that could as easily have been replaced by reading a couple dozen random history books. There were also a few relationships. They could have been replaced by random books as well. In the instance of Doctor Joshi, at least, these would have been some satisfying books.

I had good grades and wrote interesting papers. Not that it mattered. I could as well have turned in essays that consisted of nothing but pictures of flowers and unicorns.

Half the faculty were mishpocha; my academic career was as assured as the progress of time itself. Sleeping with my tutor didn’t hurt my odds either.

Having completed my second degree, I gained access to the limited Greek translation of al-Azif by Abdul Alhazred. It is there that I finally made some progress in my study of almahrusafatat.

According to the author, nicknamed “The Mad Arab” by Western alchemists, when treated with certain chemicals, the human body dissolves into a substance similar in texture to Labneh, which is a type of creamy cheese popular in the Middle East. Whoever consumes a pastry cooked with almahrusafatat would instantly die and their body would decompose within hours.

However, the following night, their rotten corpse would miraculously heal and reform in the exact shape and condition as the source of the almahrusafatat at the time of their death. Thus, unscrupulous alchemists could live and evade the authorities indefinitely by shifting bodies through alchemical rituals.

Had I not seen the documents that I’ve seen in Saratov, I would have discarded this as superstitious nonsense. However, knowing what I already did about my grandmother, I would have to be insane to let sanity limit my inquiry.

Doctor Joshi still had a key to Warren’s filing cabinet, and, against every rule of tenure-track self-preservation, still had feelings for me. It took one dinner and two bottles of a Merlot to get the key out of Joshi’s pants and return it before Joshi noticed it was gone.

Was it theft? No, it was drive-by archaeology.

I want to say I felt bad about it. I did feel something. However, I’ve since learned that feeling something and letting it stop you are two very different things. I guess my priorities have shifted over the years.

Once my goal in life was to be a nice Jewish kid. Now it was the truth.

After ransacking the professor’s life’s work (if you can call it that), I found a carbon copy of a formal request, addressed to a Dr. Chulpan Gildeeva of Voronezh, asking with excessive politeness for a soil sample from a specific parcel of former kolkhoz land in the Tambov Oblast in Russia. This was followed by a lab report redacted so thoroughly that only the term “organic anomaly,” remained.

At the bottom was scrawled a single word. “Almahrusafatat?”

Knowing the professors in this university, he probably went on to have the soil tested in a less formal laboratory to get a full reply. However, he probably paid for it out of pocket and didn’t share the results with anyone.

I googled Doctor Chulpan Gildeeva and found she was an expert on peasant rebellions against Bolshevik rule during the Russian Civil War. Her doctoral thesis was on the use of chemical weapons against peasants by the Red Army.

Beneath the lab report, there was a printed email with a list of flights to Adelaide, South Australia, dated eleven months before professor Warren stopped answering his emails. The sender was named BB. Betty Bloch?

I snickered. The old fool dug his own grave.

Well, if they made a point of not sharing with me vital data about my research, my family, my life, I saw no reason to share any data with them. They were not my colleagues. They were my stepping stones to the truth.

I took the papers and stormed out. Let Joshi deal with the fallout. After all, Joshi was the only person who had a key, right?

Voronezh, Russia, 2008

My first trip to Russia was financed by my family. My second was paid for by the Historical Department of Miskatonic University, which, if we’re honest, is essentially the same thing. The main difference was me. I was fifteen years older, three academic degrees higher, and armed with actual knowledge and a sense of direction instead of mere curiosity.

I met Doctor Chulpan Gildeeva in a cafe that was suitably a time capsule of the ‘90s, with music to match. She remembered Professor Randolph Warren immediately.

In 2005, an American professor had written to her, saying he understood she had access to former kolkhoz land outside the city, and would she be so kind as to send him soil from a section marked a map he attached to his mail. He promised to pay, and he did. Not exactly work fitting for a respected historian, but she needed the money.

Because he was so charming, they stayed in touch. Warren told her he mailed the sample to a lab in America, then, dissatisfied with the result, to a private consultancy with less strict ethical rules.

Chulpan showed me his final email on her phone, effusive and a little strange, thanking her for making possible “confirmation of the most significant kind,” and mentioning, almost as an aside, that the results matched something he’d need an expert to properly identify. An eccentric who lived in South Australia, didn’t use phones or computers, and was considered borderline insane by her colleagues.

An involuntary giggle escaped me. My whole life since Saratov has been borderline insane.

He did not write again.

Chulpan assumed that he had simply retired somewhere warm, the way American professors of a certain age tend to, and thought no more of it. Then, she smiled, an American half his age turned up at her department years later with that same peculiar interest.

I asked her if she’d be willing to help the new American. Her smiled became a blush, and so we became informal partners.

It was no great feat of ingenuity to discover that the chemical agents used by Tukhachevsky and his goons to crush the Tambov Rebellion had nothing in common with the substance described in al-Azif, except for one instance, in which an experimental agent developed by a “Worker from the East” was used to “liquidate” a group of peasants hiding in a forest near the city of Saratov.

Chulpan thought this was a metaphor. I knew it wasn’t.

All it took was some digging through charred records from the era, which Chulpan was kind enough to grant me access to. It is one of the great ironies of fate that the Soviets’ attempt to hide their crimes by burning all documentation turned out to be what preserved them. Instead of burning the orders in a trash bin, with typical Russian grandiosity, the Soviets set fire to the entire structure housing the documents, a church in the city of Kazan.

As the fire grew out of control and threatened to spread to nearby buildings, water and sand were used to suffocate the flames. Thus protected from the ravages of the environment, the damning evidence was preserved for sixty years in almost pristine condition.

Most of these documents were uncovered in 1982 by the local ethnographer Boris Sennikov, who lost his job and correspondence rights due to this discovery. The papers he uncovered on the blackened altar were damning indeed, but they were not damned.

Amateur! He should have dug deeper.

He should have dug deep enough to discover the name and address of that mysterious Easterner who used a crime of great banality to hide an experiment of eldritch malevolence. A note written in handwriting that was by now as familiar to me as my own. And he should not have shared the key to such eldritch secrets with a cadre of unimaginative official schmucks. Such wisdom is not for the masses. It should be earned.

Poor Chulpan. She should have respected my privacy when I left the hotel in the middle of the night to perform some private digging.

Well, if nothing else, I made my own humble contribution to archeology that night. Or perhaps to criminology. The only difference between the two is the number of years that passed. And what are years to those free from the constraints of aging?

I think I will part ways with my alma mater now.

It has nothing more to teach me and I have no more desire to teach it. My destiny doesn’t lie in its hollowed corridors. I have learned as much as I could from books. A shovel would guide me much better than a laptop from now on.

I am under no delusion that the address I found would be my final destination. One more piece for the puzzle, hardly a solution, but I am in no hurry.

Time is on my side.

I will follow the trail region by region, country by country, war by war, genocide by genocide, until one day I will find myself standing in front of a humble door. In my dreams, it is painted blue to ward off the evil eye in the Mediterranean fashion.

From the other side of the door, I imagine, I dream… there will come chants in a forgotten tongue, a tongue only a few scholars can name, let alone understand… and I among them.

Yes, I can almost smell it in my imagination.

The nostalgic smell of Bebe’s syrniki.

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The survey found that acute malnutrition in Gaza based on WHZ (Weight-for-Height Z-score) was about 0.5% across regions. Gaza’s pre-war rate was 0.8%.

This means that the “famine” in Gaza has actually improved the nutritional situation in this famously obese region. An often overlooked fact is that before the war, the obesity rate of Gazan men was 58.7% and Gazan women was 71.3%. And that’s already during Israel’s “terrible” blockade.

The acute malnutrition in Gaza’s children is well below nearby countries such as Egypt (2.9%), Jordan (2.0%), and Syria (12%). In fact, it’s much better than Bulgaria (5%), Romania (5%) and Malta (5%).

In Yemen it’s 16%. In India it’s 18%. Two orders of magnitude higher than Gaza!

As per current journalistic standards, I’m totally ignoring Africa, but you can Google it and see that the numbers in many regions are not pretty.

The UNICEF survey measured WHZ, which is considered the international gold standard for population surveys. Previous surveys used MUAC (Mid-Upper Arm Circumference). This is problematic because it often identifies children with low muscle mass as suffering from acute malnutrition even though their WHZ normal.

However, even the combined WHZ and MUAC measures in Gaza are 1.3%; much better than in most countries in the region and even in some EU-member states.

Once again we see that the UN’s numbers have nothing to do with the UN narrative.

Next time Greta and her friends are planning a voyage of the dimmed to save the children, they can cut costs and avoid Ben-Gvir and his crocodiles by simply heading to popular vacation destinations such as Bulgaria or Malta!

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This is about perception.

For decades, Israel had a very strong peace movement. Its secular belief in peace was as fanatical and messianic as the faith of any religious Jew in the coming of the Messiah. To contradict the cult of peace was to appear barbaric and uncouth. Peace was literally a subject taught in schools when I was in primary school.

Israelis were urged to accept the thousands of Israeli civilians murdered and maimed by suicide bombers and other attacks that were universally celebrated in Arab villages as “sacrifices for peace.” The Israeli leaders who acquiesced to this were embraced by the international community and won Nobel peace prizes.

Israel sacrificed thousands but somehow peace never came. All we got was more hate.

After October 7—the worst day in the life of any Jew alive today—and the vicious gaslighting and mockery that followed, all but the most fanatical adherents of the death cult of peace realized they were delusional. Every Israeli saw the unspeakable brutality committed by Arabs, including “unarmed civilians,” against the most liberal and peaceful communities in Israel. They also saw the lukewarm (at best) response of the people who purported to be the champions of human rights. There was no hiding from the enormity or the hypocrisy.

This trauma led to constant fear of the same thing happening again. No one is willing to risk more one-sided deals or indulge dangerous peace fantasies. Sacrifices for peace now seem as logical as sacrifices for Quetzalcoatl.

Plus, we’re angry. Very angry.

Folks tend to forget wars are emotional affairs. For some reason, the idea Israelis can have feelings and act based upon them is ignored even by Israeli media. Only the Arabs are allowed to be emotional. Jews are expected to always be cool and calm.

Well, the Jews are angry and scared right now and no one is doing anything to “deradicalize” them.

Yes, there is an element of revenge there. How could there not be? Would you not wish to avenge yourself on the people who’ve hurt you so deeply? Would you not be furious at the people who dismissed or mocked your pain?

Gaza isn’t Israel’s Vietnam, Afghanistan or Algeria. Those were distant wars in which the Western powers could afford to lose without deadly consequences. They fought to shape the fate of other nations, not to defend their heartland.

This is a kind of war people in the West have forgotten could even exist: a war for survival.

Israel isn’t an “occupation” or a “colonial project.” It’s a country, just like any other country in the world. It’s the home of millions of people who have no other home. Israelis are not colonizers, occupiers or “settlers.” They have no desire to shape the fate of other nations. They are just people trying to live normal lives without being bombed and butchered.

Most Israelis would love to peacefully “divorce” with the Palestinians if this was possible. However, it’s now obvious to everyone but the most delusional leftists that the Palestinians have no such desire. Their goal (as well as their hundreds of millions of fighting allies) is to destroy Israel.

Israeli soldiers don’t fight thousands of kilometers from their cities.

Many of them can see their homes from their military posts. Missiles drop on their families just as they drop on their comrades. They are literally fighting to defend their homes.

When you call to “dismantle” Israel or use the euphemism “from the river to the sea,” Israelis view it as a threat of killing them and everyone they love. This is personal and genuine.

Every Israeli grew up around Holocaust survivors. Holocaust memory is a big part of Israeli culture. Other holidays mark attempted destruction by other nations such the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans, and the Amalekites. Israelis remember the massacres and expulsions of Jews from European countries in medieval times and the expulsion of Jews from Arab countries in the recent past.

For Israelis, the threat of annihilation is not an abstraction. It’s something concrete and immediate. Yes, we are afraid, and the constant attacks on Jews all over the world do nothing to reassure us.

Half are saying, “Jews get out of Palestine, go back to Europe” while the other half is attacking Jews in Europe and doing everything to make Jews feel unsafe and unwelcome. So where are we supposed to go, Mars?

Because of this, Israelis don’t believe they can lose a war and survive. They don’t believe they can live in safety and dignity without Israel either. Gaza isn’t our Algiers, this is our Stalingrad.

The threats of the enemy are no less severe than the threats of the Nazis. The more threatened we become, the more we insist on ruthlessly defending ourselves. We ask for no more rights than other people have.

We cannot retreat because we have nowhere to retreat to. Israel is too tiny. It has no strategic depth. It has already given back more land than its entire territory and received no peace in return. We’re literally with our back to the sea.

Arabs have been promising to drive Jews into the sea for our entire lives. Enemies such as Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, and the Houthis constantly promise to destroy Israel. In the case of the Houthis, it’s literally on their flag. The threats we hear from them every day are horrific.

Given our painful history, we take their threats seriously. The enemy shows no interest in a two-state solution, and the idea it’s possible to live in a single state with such people is comically absurd.

We are not fighting to rule a foreign land. We’re fighting for survival.

The reason most of the fighting takes place on foreign soil is the same reason the Allies ended the war in Germany or Ukrainian attacks take place in Russia: to make the enemy unable to hurt us by taking the fight into his backyard.

Yes, we value the lives of our own citizens more than the lives of the people trying to murder us. Every sane nation does the same thing. The demand Israelis die to minimize the harm to hostile populations dedicated to destroying them is insane and only contributes to the Israeli belief that those talking about deals really just want to see Israel destroyed.

We no longer believe that a piece of paper can protect us, but we do believe it can cut us.

The more Jews are attacked abroad, the more we see the hypocrisy of Israel being singled out for doing what anyone else would have done in Israel’s place. We see that Jew hate is inherent to some societies. When faced with such overwhelming hate, one wants to have a safe place where one doesn’t depend on anyone’s whims for protection.

For the Jewish people, this is Israel.

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You may think you have created the most revolutionary product since the discovery of fire, and maybe you have, but guess what? So do thousands of other people vying for the attention of this investor, publisher, or director. Even if he was so inclined, he simply could not afford to listen to an entire lecture from every shmoo looking for his attention.

Another important term is “high concept.”

A high concept is a book or a movie that can be easily pitched with a single brief statement. For example, the pitch for “Snakes on a Plane” was “Snakes on a Plane.” That’s it. Three seconds and you already knows all there is to know about the movie.

The rest, as our sages say, is commentary.

This is where most pro-Israel voices fail. They respond to high concept elevator pitches with lectures.

For example, let’s take the statement, “you are killing children.”

It’s a high concept elevator pitch. It’s simple, effective, and succinct. It has the advantage of describing something people can plainly see. Children really have been killed during the war. The Palestinians are not shy about sharing images and they are gruesome.

For most people, that's enough to form an immediate moral judgment. The sight of dead children evokes an instinctive feeling of revulsion. It is an image that no one wants to see. It is emotionally indefensible.

This is exacerbated by many circumstances outside of our control, such as:

• Hatred of Jews is deeply rooted in the history of the world’s two biggest religions.

• Israel is symbolic of the struggle against the status quo for an entire generation.

• Jews are a tiny minority and their voice is easily drowned by the vast majority.

• Attacking Jews has been the default reaction to instability for 2,000 years.

However, even if a person knows nothing about the war except that Israel is “killing children,” then they will naturally become hostile towards Israel. Even people acting entirely in good faith. This is something Israelis need to learn to accept as well. Not everyone attacking Israel is cynically acting out of Jew hate or a bullying instinct. Some of these people truly act in good faith.

It’s natural to hate someone who’s killing children and to want to stop it. It’s also natural to get angry at someone who’d defending killing children.

Never mind that these children were not targeted on purpose but were killed as a consequence of military operations in a densely-populated area while fighting against an enemy who benefits from maximizing civilian casualties.

Never mind that there were no major urban operations without collateral damage in human history so there is nothing unique about the Gaza war except the huge amount of attention it’s receiving due to to “interest in the Jewish question” in the words of Mahmoud Darwish.

Never mind that many of the people attacking Israelis come from nations with far more blood on their hands, while others haven’t fought in so long they forgot what wars looks like.

Never mind that Israel has never done the people shouting at it any harm. In fact, they’ve only benefited from Israel due to its contribution to science and medicine.

None of this matters because it’s a lecture and you have 30-seconds to come up with an effective reply, if you’re lucky. Clearly, a person shouting in your face is not looking for a debate.

Furthermore, many people instinctively associate defensive explanations with guilt. If you’re defending yourself, in the heads of many people, then they’re already guilty, otherwise why would you have to defend yourself?

Now, due to the prevalence of anti-Israel propaganda, when something bad happens, the automatic reaction of many people isn’t “who did it?” but “why did Israel do that?” even when talking about unrelated events like a mass shooting in America, mass migration in Spain, or a forest fire in Argentina.

All of these are things that have been blamed on the Jewish state and repeated millions of times.

For committed Jew haters, no accusation is too absurd if it harms Jews. The same is true for those who view Israel as a convenient symbol of everything they dislike about the modern world.

George Orwell wrote an entire article about it. I’m not going to compete with him because he’s a better writer than I am, so I’ll just quote him:

“One of the marks of antisemitism is an ability to believe stories that could not possibly be true… Clearly, if people will believe this kind of thing, one will not get much further by arguing with them. The only useful approach is to discover why they can swallow absurdities on one particular subject while remaining sane on others.”

The real problem is that these narratives don’t stay confined to Jew haters and Israel haters. They’re repeated, amplified, and accepted by people who have no particular hostility toward Jews or even Israel.

So, in the words of Theoden King, “what can men do against such reckless hate?”

The answer is: “Ride out and meet them.”

This may sound counterintuitive, but pro-Israel voices should stop defending Israel. As we’ve already demonstrated, in the current situation, defense only digs a deeper hole.

For decades, Israeli advocacy was based on the premise people should side with Israel because it’s less brutal than it could have been. This is a terrible approach from both a moral and pragmatic point of view!

No matter how good your arguments are, you sound as if you’re defending killing children with all sorts of mental gymnastics. There is no “but” when the ultimate evil is concerned. This is why Israel’s enemies are so fond of the term “genocide.”

For generations, it has been drilled into the heads of people as the ultimate evil. How can the ultimate evil be defended?

Every time you answer “you're killing children” with an explanation of proportionality, international law, urban warfare, and casualty ratios, you accept the enemy’s narrative. The conversation becomes not whether the war is necessary, but whether enough children have died to justify it. That’s not an argument you can win in thirty seconds.

Actually, take a moment to pause and reflect why you support Israel? Do you have a high concept elevator pitch to sell your fight, at least to yourself? If you can’t explain your cause in a single sentence, don’t expect strangers to understand it in thirty seconds. I’d love to see your answer in the comments, especially if you’re not Israeli or Jewish.

My answer is simple: Israel is fighting a movement that massacred civilians on October 7 and has openly said it intends to repeat those attacks as long as Israel exists.

No matter what question you’re asked or what slogan is thrown in your face, the answer you should give should be to the question, “why is Israel fighting?”

• “Every nation has the obligation to destroy anyone dedicated to murdering its citizens.”

• “Israel isn’t fighting children. It’s fighting the people who carried out massacres and have said they’ll do it again.”

• “No country can live next to an entity committed to repeating October 7.”

Stop boasting of how we sacrifice the lives of our brothers to minimize the risk to the people who danced on the corpses of our sisters. Stop boasting on how you warn mass murderers before dropping bombs on their head. Stop helping the enemy with weak slogans like “free Gaza from Hamas.”

It’s not your job to provide excuses for the enemy.

Who is even the audience for that? People aren’t asking for an organizational chart. They want to understand why Israel is waging a bloody war.

Your allies will be disappointed by your lack of conviction. Your enemies will smell weakness and attack harder. Neutral people will be annoyed at you for prolonging a war that’s inconveniencing them.

And remember: your target isn’t the hardened Israel hater. It’s the audience following your exchange in good faith. I know it’s hard to accept this during the current storm of hate but they are the majority of people.

An elevator pitch isn’t a legal brief. It’s the answer to one simple question:

“Why are you fighting?”

If your answer is a lecture, you’ve already lost. The enemy understands this. His entire case fits on a protest sign.

It’s time ours did too.

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So what is semantic drift through experience?

When people repeatedly encounter a positive moral term used to harm them, they begin to resent that term. This doesn’t mean they have rejected the underlying value, but that the word itself has become associated with hypocrisy, manipulation, and suffering.

For example, empathy is the ability to understand others’ feelings. However, when it’s used to defend criminals instead of crime victims, it becomes associated with evil and stupidity. Today, it’s rare to hear “empathy” without it being preceded with “suicidal.”

Tolerance is the ability to coexist with different people. However, when it’s used to force people to celebrate things they find objectionable or prevents them from resisting things that harm them, it becomes associated with coercion.

Diversity means having a greater variety. However, when it’s used to reduce the amount of white people and enforce ideological conformity, it becomes associated with prejudice, discrimination and, ironically, uniformity.

There are many other examples, but you I think you got my drift.

Now, when this starts happening, the people misusing the good words start attacking the people rejecting the formerly good words as if they are rejecting goodness itself.

Folks who prefer to keep their money instead of giving it to people who openly despise them are called “greedy” while people who want to forcefully take away the possessions of others are called “compassionate.” This results in anyone using the word “compassion” in politics automatically being seen as a robber, even though the value itself is universally seen as positive while greed is seen as negative.

The tragedy here is that when people find themselves without words for good values, it pushes them away from those good values. We think in words and once words are corrupted, our thinking is corrupted as well.

Right now, it’s impossible to talk about “diversity” without folks automatically translating this into hatred of white people, disdain for Western civilization, and ideological conformity. As a result, those who’re against prejudice and discrimination find themselves against diversity as well because the word itself was weaponized to push these values. They still want diversity, but find themselves without words to express this desire.

The inability to name good values is making good values drift way. Worse, it makes good people adopt the language of evil out of sheer self-defense.

Virtue signaling is forcing vice signaling. That’s why so many rude and belligerent politicians are celebrated by good people and why even decent people are forced to adopt the language of evil, ironically to resist evil.

When the words for good values are corrupted, the good values themselves take a beating. Just try to talk about inclusivity and compassion in conservative circles or faith and order in progressive circles and you’ll see how quickly you will be attacked. However, if you describe the values without using the actual words, people will most likely support you.

As someone said on Twitter, “if you call everything people want racist they will eventually conclude that racism is everything they want.”

The harm done to our language in the last 20 years is immense, and we should all start thinking how do we fix it before the only way to resist fake goodness will be joining evil.

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When the British government declared war on Germany, it spread a pamphlet which advised pet owners to kill their pets because they may not be able to feed them during the war.

It was not an order, merely a suggestion.

Nevertheless, over 750,000 animals were killed that year before a single bomb dropped on Britain.

Almost instantly, it was recognized as unnecessary.

For example, a single animal shelter, the Battersea Dog Shelter, was able to take care of as many as 145,000 dogs according to some accounts. The Duchess of Hamilton turned her home into a cat sanctuary and saved about 6,000 cats. There were ways.

All bonds of love, caring, the very close connection people should have with their pets, were instantly thrown out of the window as soon as the government merely insinuated that it should be done for the sake of public order.

It’s the same mentality that makes people choose degradation and even death over being called racists or corona deniers or simply get mean looks from “civilized society.”

I'm willing to bet that you have never heard of the British pet massacre until today (unless you’re following my awesome Instagram).

That's how easily those things fade from memory. But they shouldn’t, because they explain what’s happening right now.

Because the people who were able to so easily abandon and kill their pets 80 years ago are now doing exactly the same with their children.

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The Haredi Welfare State

The Haredi education and social support system is designed to produce welfare cases who hate the country. It's by far the fastest growing and best-funded system in Israel. Haredim take away the most from the state and give the least.

For example, the average non-Haredi Jewish household annually contributes around 2,200 shekels to the state. The average Arab household takes away around 200 shekels from the state. The average Haredi household costs the state around 2,700 shekels. This simply cannot continue, even if we put their hostility towards the Jewish state aside. A body can only have so much fat before the muscles cannot hold.

The Haredim are also becoming increasingly more violent and disruptive towards other groups. In recent months, they’ve been the cause of more disruptions to the life of the average Israeli than outside enemies. This is without taking into account the immense economical damage they’re causing.

The Haredi parties are currently the biggest threat to Israel's long-term survival. This isn't a matter of ideology, it's simple math.

For Israel to survive, this system must be defunded and the Haredim must be made to contribute at least enough to carry their own weight. Otherwise, the state simply will not survive. The best people will be tired of exploitation and leave and the ones who will remain will not be able to maintain it.

Arab Lawlessness

There are areas in the Negev and North which are effectively ruled by Arab gangs. These groups are armed to the teeth and there is nothing that stands between them and Jewish towns. If tomorrow they decided to switch from organized crime to terrorism, they could carry out an October 7 style attack with ease. Iran would be thrilled to help. Already, the amount of weapons it’s smuggling to Israeli Arabs through Egypt and Jordan is terrifying and includes advanced weapons such as drones and rockets, far more than what is needed for robberies and protection rackets.

Even if we ignore the major security risk from these homegrown cartels, their criminal activities cost the state hundreds of millions of shekels and end up decreasing the quality of life and increasing prices for all Israelis.

To restore security and prevent the next massacre of Jews, the rule of law must be restored to these areas by any means necessary. And make no mistake: this means military action. It cannot be solved by police means alone since the Arab population is generally hostile to the state.

Socialist Bureaucracy

Israel is choked by endless regulations meant to stifle competition and protect narrow interest groups. This results in huge difficulties in opening businesses, importing goods (the taxes are insane!), and even making Aliyah. Why would a Jew from a flourishing Western country move to a country where everything is expensive and difficult? Highly-skilled labor is the source of Israel’s prosperity yet Israel is pushing them away. This connects sharply with the first issue:

The problem with the Haredim is not their religious beliefs but their cynical exploitation of Israel’s socialist welfare policies. They are an extreme collectivist movement; communists without the red flag.

It makes no sense for anyone who opposes the Haredim to support their leftist socialist “rivals”. The solution is to dismantle the excessive welfare state and the socialist system we’re trapped in, not to replace one socialist gang with another. In case anyone hasn’t noticed, Netanyahu and his allies are social democrats as well. Almost all parties in Israel are, in part due to this system’s control over education.

Despite their differences over religion, United Torah Judaism and Shas are, paradoxically, just as much natural allies of Meretz and Labor as they are of Likud. To end this injustice, we don’t need a Mamdani. We need a Javier Milei.

To attract high-quality people from successful countries and stop the brain drain, the archaic bureaucracy, the corrupt national trade union, and various special interest groups must be dismantled and replaced with a true free market.

The War

While there have been achievements in the many fronts in which Israel is engaged right now, not a single one of them has anything people would call a victory. The enemy is diminished but not defeated. The same hostile towns are emptied, resettled, emptied again, then resettled again, each time costing Israeli lives. This is like putting out 99% of the fire and waiting for the flames to rise.

At the end of the day, the IDF depends on the goodwill and trust of the population that serves. If you lose their trust through dirty deals, insane rules of engagement, and lack of purpose, they will simply give up.

People are becoming frustrated from conquering the same villages and towns for the fifth time only to hand them back to the enemy. And without a strong and highly-motivated military, Israel won’t survive five minutes.

To win lasting peace, Israel must truly crush the enemy, not just degrade his armed factions. Otherwise, all tactical achievements will be eroded in a matter of years and this madness will start again.

Honorable Mentions

While less critical, other issues that need to be addressed are:

• International relations. We need proactive PR, not just PSAs. Right now, the state of Israel is mute and pro-Israel organizations are reactive. We must take initiative and attack in the information war!

• The judiciary. Israel has a serious constitutional problem and frankly the class of people who become judges is quite terrible. This must be resolved while maintaining the separation of powers. Not easy!

• The military. Same problem as the judiciary. Israel’s officers a small group of ideologically cohesive people who appoint each other. This made the IDF unimaginative and stale. The officer class needs a serious refreshment!

• Political system. Israel has zero separation between legislation and execution. These are literally the same people. Folks can vote for parties but don’t have personal representatives. It’s almost impossible to form a stable government. The whole thing is a mess a needs to change!

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The term “Islam” appears surprisingly late in history. It’s first attested in inscriptions and coins minted under Abd al-Malik in the 690s, almost 60 years after the alleged death of Muhammas. The earliest surviving sources do not call the Arabs who conquered the Middle East “Muslims” but Arabs, Saracens, Syrians, Hagarenes, and Ishmaelites.

Notice the last two are references to the Old Testament. Many ancient Arabs accepted the Jewish view of them as the offspring of Ishmael and Hagar and even observed Jewish customs on that account. This is described by Christian monks and officials who lived in the Negev desert and had dealings with the Arabs. For example, the Greek lawyer Sozomen wrote about the Arabs:

“After all, their origin being what it is, they practise circumcision like the Jews, refrain from the use of pork like the Jews, and observe many other Jewish rites and customs. That they deviate at all from the Laws of the Jewish people can only be ascribed to the lapse of time, and to the influence upon them of other, pagan people.”

Now, the conquerors didn’t refer to themselves as Muslims either. They referred to themselves as Muhājirūn, which means immigrants. The earliest use of the term appears in a papyrus from 643 which contains texts both in Greek and Arabic. These were the kind of immigrants you had to give nice gifts to or your town burned.

Just like today.

That would imply that Islam as a distinct religion formed later than most people think. While many people would use the Quran to counter this argument, I’d like to draw your attention that we don’t actually have any intact copies of the Quran from the period in which Muhammad allegedly lived.

The famous Birmingham Quran Manuscript is only two pages. Furthermore, radiocarbon analysis only tells us only when the animal from whose hide the parchment was made died. Parchment is a sturdy material and for all we know could have spent decades in a warehouse until it was used to write down these two pages. This cannot be used as a historical source in good faith.

Putting current Muslim mythology aside, it’s highly likely that what we now call “Islam” started as a generic Judeo-Christian community that was a vivid mishmash of Jewish and Christian ideas with a bit of local color thrown in. They viewed Jews, Christians, and themselves as the same community with the same shared mythology.

That’s one of the reasons Arabs embraced their Jewish mythological background even though it’s unflattering: the offspring of a rejected slave and a wild cousin. Coincidentally, Jews refer to Arabs as “cousins” to this day on account of the same Biblical passage.

Another material evidence that support this claim are Arab coins minted before the 690s with both modified crosses and “bism Allāh” (In the name of God). Surely, a strict Muslim who views Islam as a distinct religion would not mint coins with modified crosses.

Many Hadiths are closer to the Old Testament than the Quran. For example, those that instruct adulterers should be be stoned rather than flogged. This indicates openness to Jewish ideas, which were not seen as foreign at the time.

If we look at the actual history of Islam as opposed to its mythology, we see that Islam developed as a distinct religion decades after the death of the prophet, whose own historicity is highly questionable. Even today, Muslims will tell you pre-Islamic figures such as Jesus or Moses were Muslim because the term is used not as a member of a specific religious community but simply as one who submits to God, that is, any kind of monotheist.

Islam is literally a Judeo-Christian movement.

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