It was so heartwarming this week to see the flotilla of human rights activists led by Swedish wunderkind Greta Thunberg steaming toward the shores of Iran on a dozen ships festooned with defiant banners, in support of the brave Iranians seeking to bring down the Islamic fundamentalist regime of the Ayatollahs.

It was wonderful to read petitions by masses of Hollywood movie stars, pop music icons, sophisticated novelists, and other highbrow types denouncing Ayatollah Khamenei for slaughtering thousands of his own citizens in the streets of Isfahan, Mashad, and Shiraz.

It was touching to see the “Free Iran” lapel pins worn by so many glamorous attendees at the Golden Globe film and television award ceremony this week, and to hear the passionate pleas for freedom in the Islamic Republic by distraught award winners.

It was gratifying to see students, including the new group Queers for Iran, setting up tent encampments, and breaking into libraries and classrooms at Columbia, Sydney, McGill, and Oxford universities to protest the war crimes of the Islamist clerics in Tehran.

It was rewarding to learn that powerful feminist organizations around the world, the new mayor of New York City Zohran Mamdani, chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court Karim Khan, and UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres all fulfilled their noble responsibilities by condemning the killings in Iran and calling for swift and historic regime change.

It was marvelous to hear the “squad” in the US Congress – Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, and Rashida Tlaib – and other “progressive” representatives like Sen. Bernie Sanders, known for their ardent advocacy on issues of racial justice and Palestinian rights, give a series of fiery speeches in support of decisive American and Western intervention to back the courageous Iranians seeking to free their country from tyranny.

And it was encouraging to see all of the above marching through Moslem neighborhoods and outside mosques in Toronto, Chicago, and Paris challenging locals to “prove” their loyalty to the cause of freedom in Iran by joining the rallies. Even restaurants serving Iranian traditional fare were picketed by protesters demanding justice in Iran.

BUT OF COURSE and alas, none of the above things are true; none of this happened. Nobody who has participated over the past two years in incessant and vehement condemnations of Israel, and fervid attacks on Zionists and Jews, has spoken out against Iran.

Why is this so? Why the speechlessness, why the indifference to suffering, why the hypocrisy? Where is the genuine sympathy for innocent men, women, and children in Iran? What happened to principled support for freedom and ardent opposition to oppression?

Why have people – intellectuals all! – who screamed so swiftly and enthusiastically about the “starvation” of Gazans and “genocide” of Palestinians (both of which were blood libels against Israel) been struck so utterly dumb about definitive, undeniable, purposeful carnage in Iran?

Well, perhaps this is because the Hamas, Hezbollah, and Houthi assaults on Israel of the past two years, which the Western paragons of “virtue” essentially supported, were fueled and supported by Iran.

Perhaps they simply hate the West and thus cannot bring themselves to criticize an Islamic regime. Even when Islamists commit mass murder against the innocent, it can only be construed as justified resistance against Western-backed “imperialism.”

Perhaps because those who hate the West and Israel sense that if the ayatollahs fall, the entire colossus of anti-Western and anti-Israel animus will fail, or at the very least be severely weakened.

Perhaps the insane totality of their commitment to the Palestinian cause, with Palestinians as the ultimate oppressed people and Israel as the supposed ultimate agent of “apartheid” in the modern world, leaves no mental space, no moral conscience disk space, for any other malevolence.

Perhaps because they are just drunk on Jew-hatred, and/or hatred of US President Donald Trump.

WHATEVER THE CASE may be, the result is clear: The burning of Jews alive in their homes by Nazi-like Islamic stormtroopers is a cause for celebration; the brutalizing of Iranians in the streets by Islamo-fascist revolutionaries is a cause for silence.

Unfortunately, such sickness crosses partisan lines, afflicting radicals of all stripes. Hard-Left columnist Max Blumenthal and hard-Right broadcaster Tucker Carlson, for example, are united in rejecting any American support for the protest movement in Iran. Why? Because that would be “collaborating with Jewish supremacy” and succumbing to the pressures of Jewish “lobby groups” to force regime change “for Israel’s narrow benefit.”

Here you have the “horseshoe effect” in action – extreme Left and Right coming together in rare consensus, specially and only when it comes to demonizing Israel or defending the forces (like Iranian theocratic dictatorship) that threaten Israel.

The plain fact that Iran is a great threat to America and to Western civilization – and to its own people – is no matter. Israel and its nefarious advocates are the greater threat, you see.

Let us hope and pray that Trump rejects such warped thinking and instead grabs the opportunity to help reset the regional and global strategic situation by helping bring down the evil empire in Iran.

And, in the meantime, let the hypocritical silence regarding Iran of Hollywood heroes, college campus denizens, and so-called international human rights organizations be a stark lesson for Israelis and supporters of Israel around the world: Do not bow a head before them.

Our opponents are motivated by hatred. They are neither honest nor moral. They are crooked actors and distorted thinkers who hold no purchase on justice.

Published in The Jerusalem Post and Israel Hayom 16.01.2026.

Israelis snicker a bit when US President Donald Trump declares with self-congratulatory assurance that peace in the Middle East has been achieved after 3,000 years of conflict.

They know, alas, that Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis have not been sufficiently defanged or deterred. They know that would-be hegemons in the region like Turkey, Qatar, and Iran are driven to conflict by long-term ideological goals and are in fact fighting a civilizational war against America, the Western world, and Israel.

But Trump does not do ideology. He holds an exceptionally transactional approach to political and foreign affairs – thinking that money, dealmaking, and the force of his personality can fix things and lead to swift peace everywhere. He prefers not to see the civilizational battles ahead.

Israel is appreciative of Trump’s dealmaking and is willing to partner with him to some extent – such as his buttering-up of the new Syrian president Ahmed al-Sharaa (aka, Mohammed Al-Jolani) – in order to peel Syria away, perhaps, from Russia and Iran.

But because Israel doubts that Sharaa is a reliable partner, it must also be prepared for renewed conflict. (Jihadis with deep roots in Al-Qaeda like Sharaa do not vacate their eliminationist beliefs very often or so suddenly.)

After the October 7, 2023, assault on Israel by Hamas, Israel cannot brook illusions about the dawn of regional peace, nor can it return to the “containment” policies of recent decades that prioritized diplomacy over decisive military triumphs against jihadist adversaries.

Israel can no longer accept policies that emphasize “quiet for quiet” and prioritize “restraint” because this allowed enemies to develop attack capabilities under the cover of diplomatic breathing time; what some Western officials mistakenly call periods of “stability.”

That approach failed. It blew up in Israel’s face, with terror and invasion from the West Bank and Gaza and from Syria and Lebanon, and with the march of Iran’s nuclear bomb program to near completion.

Therefore, Israel is gearing up for extended conflict at varying degrees of intensity, basing itself on a more aggressive mix of diplomacy and the use of force to scuttle enemy threats. Israel intends to act like a superpower, proactively asserting dominance along its borders and strategic ascendancy against threats farther away.

To this end, the Israeli government last month approved its largest-ever military budget –about US$35 billion for 2026 – with US$100 billion in direct military expenditures expected over the coming decade, alongside other investments in advanced military technology and indigenous weapons production capacity.

A superpower mindset takes shape

In this regard, expect Israel to continue to make fierce, overwhelming, and surprise strikes against enemy assets and strongholds from Khan Yunis to Isfahan. It needs to keep its enemies off base with pager blasts and bunker-busting airstrikes.

Israel wants to be feared, militarily dominant, and even “hegemonic” – not loved. Jerusalem knows that its neighbours will seek true reconciliation only when Israel is strong.

In short, Israel intends to project its strength to definitively neutralize adversaries, and in so doing to lead the region – to gather a coalition of truly peace-seeking nations. Israel intends to “stabilize” the region but not through reliance on hackneyed diplomatic templates and failed formulas that ooze weakness. More Abraham Accords-style peace treaties (even with Saudi Arabia) are possible and desirable, but these will be based on strength and clear strategic thinking.

Again, all this is based on a clear strategic prism that stems from a realistic perspective on the region. Israelis and their leaders – all leaders, from current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to opposition leaders like former prime ministers Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid –
understand that the algorithms by which the worst actors in the Middle East operate are ideological, attritional, and genocidal. They are not accommodational or transactional. The jihadists are informed by violent eschatological visions of crushing victory over Israel that have not ebbed.

For example, Israelis understand that beyond whatever security accords might be possible with the new regime in Syria and the Aoun government in Lebanon, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) itself must and will continue to regularly interdict threats to Israel over the borders with these countries. Israel will not sit back for a decade or two, merely gathering intelligence on emerging threats until they reach monstrous proportions (as Israel unfortunately did versus Hezbollah for three decades, and Hamas for two).

It means that to some extent Israel will intervene on behalf of the non-jihadist Druze community in Syria, which holds a zone of strategic importance in the southeast of that country along Israel’s northern border. Israel will not wait for American mediators to calm the situation or rely on UN peacekeepers to protect the Druze and secure the border.

The same goes for Judea and Samaria. Nobody is under the illusion that any Palestinian “authority” can or will counteract the build-up of Iranian-backed Islamic terrorist armies in these areas that directly threaten Jerusalem and central Israel. Only the IDF can and will. Thus, brigade-level Israeli military operations in places like Jenin, Tulkarm, and Nablus will continue to resolutely root out such threats. This is likely to be a permanent feature of Israeli policy.

Why Israel will not outsource its security

On the Palestinian front, it is important to note that Israel has no confidence whatsoever in the ability of Canada, the EU, or the US to substantially reform the Palestinian Authority to make it into a “democratic, transparent, efficient, and sustainable governance system” – as the “international community” keeps pattering on.

Thirty years and billions of dollars and euros later, the return on Western investment in Palestinian independence is abysmal. There is no democracy, no rule of law, no transparency, no sustainability, no investment in economic stability, and no peace education in the Palestinian Authority (PA). There are only nepotism and corruption, “pay-for-slay” handouts (meaning the incentivizing and rewarding of terrorism against Israel), violent propagandizing against Israel (including support for Hamas’s October 7 invasion and massacres), and diplomatic assaults on Israel in every possible international forum.

And not one single new hospital in the West Bank has been built with those Canadian, European, and American funds. Only one sewage treatment plant. Not a single refugee has been resettled.

As for Western “security assistance” to the PA, well, over US$1 billion in training and equipment for PA security forces (including over US$40 million in 2025) and hundreds of millions of dollars and euros in Canadian and European funds – has produced mixed results, at best. PA security personnel have repeatedly participated in or facilitated terror attacks against Israeli civilians and IDF soldiers. PA security personnel account for 12 per cent of all Palestinian terrorists held by Israel.

This explains why it is so nonsensical of France, Canada, and others to resuscitate delusions of Palestinian statehood, specifically now. This is a recipe for devastating disappointment and escalated conflict; and of course, for the isolation of Israel.

Alas, that may be the entire point of the French-led exercise to “recognize” faux Palestinian statehood. The point is to weaken Israel, to prevent it from growing too strong, too “hegemonic” in its ambitions, too “aggressive” in its military actions, too “dominant” in resetting the regional strategic situation. Too successful in defending itself, including the prevention of runaway Palestinian statehood.

According to President Emmanuel Macron of France, Israel must not be allowed to win so much – especially after its game-changing, successful strike on Iran’s nuclear bomb program. Instead, Israel needs to be constrained, hemmed-in, humbled, and dictated to. “No discussion!” he declared regarding “the need to urgently recognize” Palestinian statehood. It “must” happen, Macron declared – over the protests, and if necessary, over the dead bodies of Israelis.

The situation regarding Gaza is similar. Israel still intends to thoroughly end the military threat from Gaza. This means that beyond whatever temporary truce has been blessedly reached, mainly to secure the release of Israeli hostages held savagely by Hamas, there are no long-term accommodations with that terror movement. It must be rooted out from Gaza.

Certainly, there must not be any reconstruction of Gaza without complete demilitarization of the enclave, which may mean years of additional warfare at varying degrees of intensity.

Do not expect Israel to rely on Egypt or any other Arab/Muslim state to bring security or stability to Gaza. For years, Egypt turned a blind eye to the massive smuggling of weapons from the Egyptian-controlled Sinai Peninsula into Gaza, and of course it did nothing to stop Hamas from staging a coup against the Fatah-controlled PA and making Gaza into a Muslim Brotherhood mini-state. Nor will Israel abide a “technocratic” Palestinian government in Gaza that is but a flimsy cover for de facto Hamas rule.

The long war’s defining front

The Israeli superpower mindset applies, of course, to Iran. Iran must be prevented from rebuilding its nuclear bomb and ballistic missile programs and be deterred from rebuilding its network of proxy armies across the Middle East.

Any attempt at a cosmetic boondoggle with Iran, say another insubstantial P5+1 nuclear accord with the ayatollahs, will force Israel to again act against Tehran. The same goes for a situation in which Iran rebuilds its ballistic missile array. (The IAEA recently warned that Iran is rapidly doing exactly this, apparently with Chinese-supplied materials.) Israel will apply its updated defence doctrine, its regional superpower prism, of preventively downgrading enemy capabilities and preempting enemy threats.

In short, Israel intends to soldier on and maintain its upper hand. Israelis understand the long-term ideological and civilizational nature of the battles ahead. They gird themselves for these battles with the superpower mindset described here, intending to be a proactive regional power – the only true Western ally – reshaping the Middle East for the better.

Get used to a revamped Mideast strategic situation anchored by a very strong Israel.

Published in The MacDonald-Laurier Institute (MLI) on January 13, 2026.

One month before the Hamas assault on southern Israel in October 2023, I warned in these pages of the insanely widespread availability of weapons in Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) and Gaza, and especially in Arab and Bedouin communities in Israel.

The gargantuan wave of terrorist and criminal violence that Israel experienced all that year clearly was powered by the unbearable ease of obtaining weapons – increasingly advanced, sophisticated, and professional grade weapons, largely funded by Iran and smuggled into Israel across almost every border.

Since then, the crisis has escalated many times over. Hundreds of thousands of weapons are smuggled into Israel every year through the Egyptian and Jordanian borders via organized smuggling networks that are now using sophisticated drones. The weapons flow into mixed Jewish-Arab cities and from there penetrate Judea and Samaria, fueling both organized crime and terrorist activity and blurring the line between them.

Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) activity in Judea and Samaria over the past year clearly illustrates this. In Hebron and Bethlehem, broad Hamas terrorist organization infrastructures have been thwarted, involving dozens of operatives, firearms training, explosives production, and stockpiling of weapons. From the terrorists interrogated, it is clear that weapons smuggled as criminal transactions ultimately end up in the hands of terrorists. This could fuel a next Arab/Palestinian hybrid uprising against Israel, like the massive May 2021 Arab riots during Operation Guardian of the Walls.

The scale of the threat is vast. According to Hodaya Busheri and Yotam Deshe of this newspaper, 160,000 weapons are smuggled into Israel each year, about 14,000 a month. This amounts to 300,000 weapons over the past two years, with 100,000 illegal weapons estimated to be circulating in the Negev alone, with Bedouin criminal and terrorist gangs in the lead.

Just how much unlicensed and illegal weaponry is on the loose overall in Israel and in Palestinian-dominated areas? Nobody knows for sure, with estimates that vary from “mammoth” to “berserk” and “unlimited.” More than a decade ago, police estimates stood at half a million weapons, and since then, well, only G-d knows how many more weapons are out there.

The IDF admits that there are dozens of smuggling incidents across the Egyptian border each night, with each drone shipment averaging four long guns and several pistols; and it further admits that it intercepts one in four such “aerial packages,” at best.

The US Army at West Point estimates that for every smuggling attempt identified, thwarted, or disrupted by Israeli authorities, a vast number of other smuggling forays get through successfully without authorities ever learning about them!

In October 2025 alone (which is the last month on which there is published data), the IDF’s 80th “Edom” Division foiled 130 drone-assisted weapon (and drug) smuggling attempts across the Egyptian border; meaning that 500 attempts to smuggle weapons may have made it “successfully” into Israel.

The weapons smuggling situation across the Jordanian border – Israel’s longest and least protected – may be even worse, which is why the IDF is now beginning to deploy camera arrays, ambushes, and extensive area operations aimed at identifying smugglers and thwarting weapons transfers. Israel also is speeding up the building of a NIS 5.2 billion ($1.4 billion) 425-kilometer (265-mile) security barrier along the Jordan border from the Sea of Galilee all the way down to Eilat.

Nevertheless, despite the enormity of the problem, only one division of IDF troops holds down the entire Jordanian border from the Sea of Galilee to the Dead Sea, and only one division patrols the Arava from the Dead Sea down to Eilat.

Where does all the weaponry come from? Well, in August 2022 Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commander Hossein Salami (who has since been assassinated by Israel) bragged how he was driving weapons to Palestinians engaged in “jihad” against Israel, adding that just as Iran managed to send weapons to Gaza in the past, “the West Bank can be armed in the same way, and this process is happening.”

Also, ammunition and auxiliary weapons continue to be stolen from Israeli depots with alacrity. The IDF admits to about 200 theft incidents from its bases over the past two years. For example, last October, 30,000 bullets were stolen from ammunition warehouses in the IDF’s Sde Teiman base in the south. In November, 70,000 bullets and 70 grenades were stolen from an IDF base in the Golan Heights in the north.

Sure enough, most of the weapons smuggled into Israel by drone in recent times specifically match the types of weapons that the IDF uses and the ammunition the IDF stocks on its bases. The smugglers and criminal/terrorist gangs aren’t stupid.

THE VAST smuggling effort and widespread availability of weapons is no longer a marginal criminal phenomenon but an ongoing strategic threat that urgently demands a national response.

This requires designation of the threat as a high national security priority (the government seems to have done so, at least rhetorically), and establishment of task forces at the ministerial level and at executive levels managed by the National Security Council to coordinate between the police, army, intelligence services, justice ministry and prosecution, etc. This requires operational and technological resources, with budget for manpower that is both beefy and brainy.

Otherwise, none of the above agencies will make the countering of weapons smuggling a top priority. They each have so many other tasks to handle and will unsurprisingly point the finger of blame at one another. (That is the nature of such large security bureaucracies.)

The Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee should establish a dedicated subcommittee to ride herd on this matter.

If Israel can figure-out which exact window in a Tehran apartment building to fly a nearly invisible explosive drone through, launched from a secret base inside Iran, in order to clobber an Iranian Revolutionary Guard commander – then it should be able to get a handle on drone smuggling of weapons into the Negev and Jordan Valley spawned by Iran, too.

Attack the smugglers in neighboring states, interdict the drone flights, and aggressively prosecute the local gangs receiving and distributing the weapons on our side of the borders.

Published in The Jerusalem Post 09.01.2026.

The Western media annually devotes considerable Christmas ink, and many Christian NGOs dedicate their Christmas appeals, to propagating the lie that Christians are under assault by Israelis. And worse still, that Jews are crucifying Christians smack in the heart of Bethlehem.

Not only is this untrue, but it ignores the radical Islamic assault on Christians across Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, often with government encouragement and support.

The international media does its best every Christmas season to demonize Israel. For example, Ben White of Middle East Monitor published a filthy piece entitled “Bethlehem Bantustan: Have Yourself an Apartheid Christmas.”

White wrote that Bethlehem is “a microcosm of Israel’s colonization of Palestine.” The refugee camps are home to those expelled from their villages in the “ethnic cleansing” that enabled a majority Jewish citizenry; camps where “Israeli soldiers snatch residents and deploy lethal force” against youth raised in the shadow of the “apartheid, choking wall.”

Harriet Sherwood of The Observer wickedly evoked Biblical and Christian imagery to savage Israeli settlement in and around Jerusalem. She painted a picture of a pastoral “Christian biblical landscape” with “gnarled olive trees,” “bleating sheep and goats,” and “vine covered terraces,” “near the site where angels announced the birth of Jesus to shepherds in a field” – all tended to with love by Bethlehem’s remaining Christian heroes.

She then contrasted this with the evil Israeli security fence – “Eight-meter-high concrete slabs casting a deep shadow, both literally and metaphorically, snaking around most of Bethlehem,” along with the monster “cranes, bulldozers, and concrete apartment blocks” – all of which are “strangulating” the Christian city.

According to Lubna Masarwa and Peter Oborne of Middle East Eye, Christians in Bethlehem face no less than an “existential threat” under Israel’s occupation. And Al-Jazeera – that genocide-against-Israel-supporting radical Islamist propaganda organ – had the chutzpa to publish this week an account of supposed Israeli violence against Christians in Jerusalem and Gaza.

THESE SCREEDS seek to cover up the real reason for Christian decline in Bethlehem: The Palestinian Authority and radical Islam.

It started with Yasser Arafat. Arriving from Tunis, Arafat immediately set out to suppress the Palestinian middle class across the West Bank, which he understood could be the only real opposition to his planned dictatorial authority. He nationalized most business sectors and squeezed Palestinian small businessmen out of business. Especially hard hit was the mainly Christian middle class of Bethlehem.

Arafat then sidelined the long-time Christian mayor of Bethlehem, Elias Freij, and Arafat’s henchmen led a campaign of terror and intimidation against Christian institutions and families in the city. Land theft, beatings, and intimidation of Christians in Bethlehem by PA security services and other gangs became routine. Forced marriages between Christian women and Moslem men were reported. In 2002, Arafat’s terrorists even took over and defiled the Church of the Nativity for 39 days, holding 200 priests hostage as the terrorists sought to escape Israeli justice.

The result was an inexorable and ongoing Christian exodus from Bethlehem: a city captured by the PA and taken over by a very intolerant strain of Islam.

Nevertheless, Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas annually releases a malevolent Christmas message in which he cynically calls Jesus Christ a “Palestinian messenger,” and goes on to blast Israel for denying “millions” of Christians their “right to worship in their homeland.”

This is an ugly attempt to apply replacement theology (in which Christians are said to have superseded the Jews in a covenant with G-d) to the Palestinian assault on Israel. In Abbas’s reversed and warped world, the Jewish-Christian Jesus has been replaced by a Palestinian Christ, and Christianity is under attack by the Jews, not the Arabs and Moslems.

INSTEAD OF exposing this nasty history, the global media prefers to parrot Abbas’s nonsense and to play up isolated instances of Jewish hooliganism against Christians in Jerusalem. Concurrently, the media and world leaders ignore the systematic, rampant, chronic, and deadly persecution of Christians in the Arab and Islamic worlds.

According to a British report, pervasive persecution of Christians “sometimes amounting to genocide” is ongoing across the Middle East. Millions of Christians in the region “have been uprooted from their homes, and many have been killed, kidnapped, imprisoned and discriminated against.”

The report highlights how states, and state-sponsored social media, incite hatred and publish propaganda against Christians, especially in Iran, Iraq, and Turkey.

The governing AKP in Turkey depicts Christians as a threat to the stability of the nation. Turkish Christian citizens are stereotyped as being not real Turks but rather Western collaborators. The oldest functioning Christian monastery in the world, the 5th century Mor Gabriel Monastery near the Turkish-Syrian border, has been stripped of most of its lands.

More than 600,000 Syrian Christians have been displaced or fled Syria since the civil war in that country began. Of the more than 80,000 Christians who lived in Homs prior to the uprising, only about 400 remain today. Christians have been massacred and buried in mass graves.

Iraq has lost at least two-thirds of its Christians over the past two decades. An al-Qaida raid on a Baghdad cathedral five years ago resulted in the murder of 44 Christian worshipers and two priests.

In Gaza, Islamic militants have bombed churches, killed prominent Christians, and forced others to convert to Islam. Greek Orthodox Archbishop Alexios tried to speak out against the persecution of Christians but was silenced by Hamas. Any foreign media interested in covering this story?

There are about a thousand documented cases in Egypt of the abduction, torture, rape, enslavement or forced conversion to Islam of Christians. Coptic churches have been bombed on Christmas and New Year’s Day, with flyers circulated calling for the total genocide of Egypt’s Christian Copts. As a result, tens of thousands of Coptic Christians have left.

Churches have also been attacked in recent years in Azerbaijan, Indonesia, Kenya, Lebanon, Nigeria, Sudan, and Tunisia. Christians have been threatened with death and imprisonment for “blasphemy” and “apostasy” in Algeria, Bangladesh, Iran, and Pakistan.

My friend Umar Mulinde, an Evangelical pastor from Uganda, has been receiving medical treatment on-and-off for almost two decades at Israel’s Sheba Medical Center following an acid attack that severely burned his face, destroyed his right eye, and damaged his lungs.

Pastor Mulinde, who converted to Christianity and began teaching favorably about Israel after spending much of his life as a Moslem, was attacked on Christmas Eve in 2011 in Kampala. The assailants shouted “Allah Akhbar” as they fled the scene. Since then, his wife and children have been under threat by Ugandan Islamists as well.

Have you seen any significant international media coverage of this story?

AS FOR THE situation in Israel, well, Israel is the only country in the Middle East where the number of Christians is rising (at about one percent per year, currently standing at 184,000, amounting to two percent of the population).

For the first time, there is a significant population of non-Arab Christian Israeli citizens, mainly immigrants from the former Soviet Union who, unlike Arabs, are fully assimilated into the Jewish Israeli mainstream. There are newly arrived Roman Catholics, Russian Orthodox, and Ethiopian Orthodox.

Christians in Israel have it good. The percentage of Christian Arabs who graduate high school is higher than that of Muslim or Jewish students, and more than half of Christian students proceed to study at Israeli universities (including more than 60% of Christian Arab women).

But you would not know this from media reports. Instead, you likely would have received the impression that Christians in Israel are under assault by Jews – because of Palestinian propaganda, and because of a few isolated hooligan attacks on Christian clergy and sites in Jerusalem’s Old City.

(Note that every responsible Israeli political and religious leader, including the Chief Rabbis, has condemned such attacks and apologized profusely in the name of Israel and Judaism.)

None of this has given any pause to anti-Israel churches in North America and Europe who continue their merry Yuletide way of divesting from Israel and otherwise campaigning against it. (‘Tis the season to bash Israel, tralalalalala tralalala …)

They have almost nothing to say, ever, about imprisoned pastors in Iran, Islamic acid-attacks on pastors in Uganda, fire-bombings of churches in Gaza, or the mass expulsion of Christians from Syria. I guess their silence can be explained by the fact that those Christians weren’t assaulted by Jews.

Published in The Jerusalem Post, 02.01.2026

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese denies any link between Australia’s recognition of a Palestinian state and this week’s Bondi Beach terrorist attack against Jews celebrating Chanuka.

“Overwhelmingly, most of the world recognizes a two-state solution as being the way forward in the Middle East,” Albanese muttered in his trademark anodyne tone when relating to the attack. This was pushback against insinuations of Australian diplomatic culpability made by Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and many Jewish leaders.

Albanese is wrong. He is blind, purposefully in denial. His enthusiasm for promoting Palestinian statehood led to the Bondi Beach slaughter.

Albanese’s impudent and insolent, in-Israel’s-face, at-Israel’s-expense, over-Israel’s-objection, stance on this matter indeed makes him culpable in the murder of 15 Australian Jews. As Emile Zola famously wrote: J’accuse!

This may be an accusation not comfortable to make, but Israeli and Jewish leaders around the world must insist upon it in every interaction with politicians and diplomats.

Leaders like Albanese – and prime ministers Keith Starmer of Britain and Mark Carney of Canada, and President Emmanuel Macron of France – must be told that their insane insistence on unilateral recognition of Palestinian statehood, specifically after October 7 and especially as calls for the destruction of Israel escalate in Palestinian society and in Western streets – is immoral.

Unilateral recognition of Palestinian statehood in defiance of Israel obnoxiously delegitimizes Israeli historic-national and security positions and callously undermines the right to dignity of Jewish supporters of Israel. It amounts to abrogation of Western commitment to Israel’s security and to abandonment of the Jews. It is criminal appeasement of the enemy beast (and the beast will never be appeased).

It declares open season for hunting down Jews and “Zionists.” Yes, it directly paves the way to Sydney-style bloodbaths.

You see, the dereliction in countering antisemitism of the Australian government (and of the British, Canadian, French, and other governments) is clear, but that is only part of the picture.

Undeniably, they have been delinquent in setting proper limits on democratic discourse and in applying concrete policies that would combat the escalating hate fest. They have let the jihadist mobs rant-away in their streets with calls of “Gas the Jews,” Death to the IDF,” “Globalize the Intifada,” and other threats to Jews near and far.

Alas, dereliction of duty in combating such hate is an accusation easy to make and substantiate. It is a painfully obvious and searing indictment, but also too thin of an indictment. Western leaders must be charged with more – with mollycoddling the rapidly accelerating civilizational assault on the Jewish People and their indigenous homeland, the State of Israel.

WHEN GOVERNMENTS like Canberra give credence to false anti-Israel narratives about the Gaza war (such as allegations that Israel intentionally starved Gazan children, or targeted hospitals and journalists) – Hamas is handed a victory, and supporters of jihad are given incentive for violence against Jews everywhere.

When these falsehoods are presented as legitimate criticism of Israel’s government, Israelis and Jews inevitably become classified as villains undeserving of rights or sympathy – and outrages like Bondi Beach as well as campus and subway attacks on Jews become likely, even normalized.

When governments like Canberra blabber about the “urgency” of Palestinian statehood and shower Israel with “tough love” in this regard through highhanded UN resolutions – Palestinians get a green light for more war against Israel, and antisemites are encouraged to rev-up their attacks on Jews.

When governments like Canberra continue to massively fund the nefarious Hamas-penetrated agency, UNRWA (the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinians) – this feeds the Palestinian claim to a so-called “right of return” that would demographically destroy Israel and nourishes the convictions of jihadist gunmen that they can freely pop-off Jews on beaches or in synagogues.

In short and in plain language: By slap-happily bashing Israel and recklessly promoting Palestinian statehood at this existential moment, governments like those of Prime Minister Albanese weaken Israel and prolong the Palestinian campaign to demonize Israel. And this fuels the mobs rampaging through Jewish neighborhoods in Sydney and Melbourne, London, and Toronto.

And when Western leaders are willfully and stubbornly oblivious to this linkage, their professing of support for Jews rings hollow.

Every thinking Jew in the world knows this to be true. We feel this in our bones. Albanese and his ilk can deny this perspective and profess to be concerned both for the rights of Palestinians and for the safety of Jews with no contradiction between them, but we Jews know otherwise.

To paraphrase the actor and podcaster Jonah Platt: Western leaders absolutely do not get to foment hatred of the one place in the world where Jews are not a minority and where half of all Jews on Earth live – and then pretend they care about Jewish lives.

They absolutely do not get to dismiss mainstream Jewish community voices while tokenizing fringe anti-Zionist Jews who agree with them and who libel Israel – and then pretend they care about Jewish lives.

Mr. Albanese, Mr. Starmer, Mr. Carney, and Mr. Macron: You absolutely do not get to superciliously ignore the genocidal intentions of Palestinians against Israel and the murderous aims of antisemitic rioters against Jews – and then pretend you care about Jewish lives.

Instead, breed a strategic brain and scale back your dangerous delegitimization of Israel and Jews. Get some gumption and tell Palestinians that there will be no Palestine “from the river to the sea” (i.e., no erasure of Israel). Grow a collective spine and tell your own publics that you reject the relentless equation of Israel and Jews with the evils of faddish radical discourse (imperialism, colonialism, apartheid, white supremacy, genocide, etc.).

Stop scurrying about the international stage with schemes to ram a hostile Palestinian state down Israel’s throat while offering crocodile tears when local Jews pay the price of your maliciousness and malfeasance.

Published in The Jerusalem Post and Israel Hayom, 19.12.2025

US President Donald Trump’s unprecedented record of pro-Israel diplomatic and defense moves and his commitment to Israel remains undeniable. Any of the other candidates in recent years for US presidency would not have matched, and most of those likely to be presidential candidates in 2028 are unlikely to match, Trump’s staunchly pro-Israel record.

Therefore, Israel must appreciate and work with Trump as best possible over the next two years to lock-in further gains (as Martin Oliner this week correctly argued in these pages).

But the fact that Donald Trump does not do ideology is problematic. His exceptionally transactional approach to political and foreign affairs – thinking that money, dealmaking, and the force of his personality can fix everything and lead to swift peace everywhere – is refreshing but also dangerous. It leads him to ignore the villainous nature of people like Ahmed al-Sharaa and Zohran Mamdani.

I can understand to some extent Trump’s buttering-up of the new Syrian president Sharaa (aka Mohammed Al-Jolani). America has a strategic interest in drawing Syria into the US orbit, and away from Russia and Iran. Israel shares this aspiration (although doubts that Sharaa is a reliable partner).

I can understand to some extent Trump’s love fest with Saudi and Emirati leaders, which stems from strategic reasons (as above) alongside Trump’s great desire for mega-investments in America from these extremely wealthy countries.

Israel shares Trump’s aspiration for expansion of Abraham Accord-style regional partnerships with the Saudis (although it should not and will not pay the diplomatic high price for such accords that the Saudis apparently are currently demanding).

But Trump’s buddy-buddy-like meeting in the Oval Office with Mamdani, the incoming mayor of New York City, upsets me terribly. As does Trump’s non-response to virulent antisemitic voices emerging in a significant branch of his own political party.

Mamdani represents a broad cultural shift in America in which opposition to Jewish peoplehood has become a mark of moral virtue. Mamdani’s victory means that it is legitimate to slander Israel with allegations of genocide and tar all Jews with insinuations of apartheid and “white” slave-mastering; that it is kosher to wage Marxist and Islamist class warfare against Jews and Zionists.

Tucker Carlson of the extremist MAGA right-wing represents the rise of Nazi-like and Christian supersessionist thinking in radical Republican circles.

So I cringe and cry when President Trump sits in his Oval Office chair silently by as Mamdani brazenly accuses Israel and its main backer, the United States of America, of genocide and war crimes. As if this was not any offense to Trump and to America, as if this were not an outrage against Jews and Israelis, and as if this weren’t an assault on truth and decency.

I shudder when Trump has nothing to say about Carlson’s consorting with Holocaust-denying and outright Jew-hating creeps like Nick Fuentes. As if this did not happen, as if this has no major impact on public discourse in the mainstream political party that Trump claims to lead.

IN TRUTH, Trump may not have been listening to either Mamdani or Carlson. He has, as we have learned, a wooden ear for all things ideological. He thinks that only the practical political act is meaningful, that all leaders can be cajoled or wedged into his lane by the force of a deal.

Now it is true as Trump loyalists have said that there is value in wearing one’s ideology lightly. This allows for the flow of fresh thought, frees one up to react to crises in unexpected and novel ways, and keeps your enemies guessing.

But in the long term, Trump’s ideological truancy is rigorously wrong. Rejection of moral limits in politics and ignorance of ideological currents in global affairs lead to incoherent or corrupt policy or both. Combine this with narcissist craving for deals that ostensibly prove one’s “greatness,” and you have a recipe for bad results. You open the door to gargantuan strategic mistakes and to deep ideological rot.

The two immediate theaters where such bad policy results are emerging are the Russia-Ukraine and Hamas-Israel conflicts.

Ukraine is being abandoned by Trump to Russian ravaging, and Israel is being handcuffed in its existential war with radical annihilationist Islam.

Kyiv is expected to permanently relinquish Donbas to Russian conquest, and Jerusalem dare not make a military move without Trump’s approval. Neither Ukraine nor Israel can upset the transactional-on-steroids, global and regional “peace” deals that Trump is driving.

In the Middle East, it is ridiculously inappropriate to declare “peace in our time for the first time in 3,000 years,” while imposing a flawed freeze on the situation. Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Iran have not been sufficiently defanged or deterred.

In Gaza specifically, Trump seems to be dialing back from demands for real disarmament of Hamas and instead pushing for rapid reconstruction while overseeing the free flow of humanitarian aid straight into the hands of Hamas. Equally upsetting is Trump’s internationalization of the conflict in Gaza by inviting-in Egyptian and Turkish troops and offering the snake-like Qataris a central role in controlling territory bordering Israel.

Alas, Trump’s non-dogmatic methodology for “solving” conflicts, refreshing in some contexts, is deleterious here. It ignores the fact that major actors in the regions like Turkey, Qatar, and Iran apply an ideological-hegemonic prism to regional affairs, and are in fact fighting a civilizational against America and the Western world (and of course against Israel).

It ignores the need to distinguish between good and evil, between victim and perpetrator, between necessary escalation and all-out civilizational collapse.

In this regard, the Jewish People and the State of Israel are this generation’s great generator of moral purpose. We are attempting to awaken the West from suicidal slumber, from dangerous cultural and strategic malaise; to help Trump and the West defend against the worst radical actors on the world stage and rout the insidious forces that threaten to undermine Western righteousness from within.

Published in The Jerusalem Post and Israel Hayom 05.12.2025

There is no satisfactory solution to the haredi draft issue. Ultra-Orthodox young men cannot be forced into IDF service. And the phony draft law presented by the new chairman of the Knesset Foreign Affairs & Defense Committee, Boaz Bismuth, certainly won’t do the job. It is a draft evasion law, not a pathway to realistic shouldering of the national security burden by the haredi community.

Haredi leaders are not budging. Despite October 7, despite the near-existential threat situation Israel finds itself in across seven fronts, despite the attendant acute military manpower crisis, despite the enormous sacrifices in dead, wounded, and displaced, and despite financial deprivation, household disruption, and emotional trauma experienced by so many Israeli families religious and secular alike – haredi leaders remain adamant that “yeshiva boys” cannot be drafted in any minimal way (whether they are really learning Torah full time or not).

These leaders are overwhelmingly cut-off from the war reality that “mainstream” Israel is living, purposefully and devastatingly so. Alas, they are disconnected, even unfeeling towards the broader public – as several condescending critical statements and recent interviews of the highest-ranking rabbis and their spokesmen have sadly made clear.

(For a particularly revealing and infuriating example, see the interview given three weeks ago by Yisrael Friedman, editor of the main haredi newspaper Yated Neeman, to the Religious Zionist newspaper Makor Rishon.)

I no longer believe that this can be changed even if the most drastic punitive measures were applied (and they won’t be) – like a complete cut-off of government funding for everything haredi from schools that don’t teach basic secular subjects to the massive subsidies that non-serving Kollel families enjoy in municipal taxes, health insurance, school tuition, daycare, and more.

I just don’t see solutions on the horizon for the constitutional, political, and social crisis over haredi draft exemption (even though I believe that there are pathways to a better place in the very long term along the lines of haredi “hesder” yeshivas, which are growing very slowly).

There are certainly no solutions that will adequately address the IDF’s immediate needs, which is about 10,000 new soldiers a year, including at least 6,000 full-time combat soldiers in the 18-24 age cohort. No “change government” headed by the current opposition leaders is going to be able to fix this, even if such an alternative government were to be voted into office next year. That’s the miserable reality.

WHAT REMAINS is adoption of a moral stance as a matter of principle; the proclamation from every platform of the sociological and ideological suffering of serving Israelis – the echoing of their scream.

And within the religious world, it is extraordinarily necessary to defiantly distinguish distorted haredi interpretations of religious ideology regarding military service from authentic Torah ideology in this regard. This is an obligation for the sake of the “honor of Torah” as well as it being an emotional and social imperative.

In these pages in June 2024, I debunked at length four pseudo-foundational concepts that haredi ideologues cite in defense of their refusal to participate in “carrying the burden” of military service. Today, we’ll let the voices of Religious Zionist heroes and heroines sound the siren.

Listen to Noa Mevorach of the Religious Zionist “Shutafot LaSheirut” movement (Partners in Service), speaking earlier this year to the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee. She held up her husband’s conscription notice for reserve duty – his fifth tour of IDF reserve service since the Simchat Torah (October 7, 2023) invasion of Israel and the massacres led by Hamas.

“The blood of great Torah scholars from my community who went to battle for Israel over the past year, the husbands of my friends who were killed in battle and whose kids are orphans – cries out from the ground,” exclaimed Mrs. Mevorach.

“I hear the discussion here in this committee where it is repeatedly said that haredi men cannot be drafted except by consensus, that they cannot be drafted against their will, that force won’t work. And that the great goal of the proposed new draft legislation is to softly and slowly reach a 50% draft of haredi men over the next ten years.”

“Behold my husband’s fifth draft notice! I ask every member of Knesset to consider this: Why am I not eligible for a 50% discount too, for a 50% reduction in the army burden placed on my husband and on the shoulders of my family? Give me a 50% reduction! “

“I’ll take either the holidays of Tishrei (Rosh Hashana, Yom Kippur, and Succot) or the holidays of Nissan (Pesach) in this cutback, so that my husband can be home for 50% of the holidays and we won’t have to sit at the holiday table alone or go to my parents.”

“Why am I not eligible for 50% savings? Who decided and with what authority was it decided that one particular population in the State of Israel, the haredi public, is entitled to a 50% discount? I also want the option to choose such a bargain!” concluded the valiant Noa Mevorach.

This week, a large group of (mostly religious) bereaved families published a petition aimed at members of Knesset from Religious Zionist and traditional backgrounds, in opposition to the Bismuth draft evasion proposals.

Among the signatories are Rabbanit Avivit Granot (mother of Amitai z”l), Rabbi Benny Kalmanson (father of Elhanan z”l), Hagai Lober (father of Elisha z”l), Rabbi Yonatan Sltoki (father of Yishai z”l and Noam z”l), Rabbanit Rachel Goldberg (widow of Rabbi Avi Goldberg z”l), Yair, Sarah, and Shira Schwartz (the family of David z”l), Haya Hexter (mother of Yakir z”l), Tovah and Ariel Shinkolevsky (parents of Yakir z”l), Miriam and Aharon Haber (parents of Zecharia z”l), Zvika Greenglick (father of Shauli z”l), Haim and Leli Deri (parents of Saadia z”l), Tzofia Dickstein (mother of Ivri z”l), and twenty other families.

“We call upon MKs from religious and traditional backgrounds to reject the current draft (evasion) proposals on ideological grounds. This is not the way of Torah! ‘Every person must participate in a milchemet mitzva, a war of commandment and merit’ – so teaches our tradition, and so we taught our sons; Torah teaching that unites the People of Israel and does not divide the nation.”

“On October 7 and in the two years since, our sons, brothers, and husbands sallied forth to defend the nation, in the name of Torah, out of mutual responsibility for all Israelis, out of responsibility for the fate of the Nation of Israel. They left home and did not return. The pain that we feel is endless, and this requires us to speak out.”

“We do not seek to end Torah study. On the contrary, we know that Torah is the lifeblood of our people. But the Torah of Israel does not allow one to exempt himself from the burdens of the public; it obligates everybody to collective responsibility. This is the Biblical commandment ‘Do not stand idly by when the blood of your neighbor is at stake.’ All the much more so when your neighbor is fighting to save you!”

“Specifically out of respect for Torah and those who study it, it is difficult for us to hear people using Torah to justify exemption from military service along with exemptions from basic social and economic obligations. A nation cannot survive if a third of its citizens enjoy all benefits of society without shouldering its obligations. Not today, and not in the future.”

“Therefore, the basic minimal requirements for new draft legislation involve true participation of the haredi public in national service with strict enforcement, and the denial of government budgets to the haredi public until this happens. Do not vote for the current legislation, which allows for continued draft dodging, involves more feeding at the trough, does concrete damage to Israel’s national security, and insults the Torah tradition by which our loved ones lived and died.”

“At this historic moment we say to our representatives in Knesset: Stiffen your spine and speak proudly in the name of Torah in the Land of Israel. Do not assault our common values, do not degrade our tradition, do not disappoint all those who have paid the highest price for defense of Israel and for the resilience of our people.”

Published in The Jerusalem Post, 28.11.2025.

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair…”

Charles Dickens famously began his 1859 novel A Tale of Two Cities with the above dichotomous description of reality. Such a bifurcated reading seems to apply to Israel’s current strategic situation too. We seem to be living in two different worlds based on two divergent worldviews with two contradictory conclusions.

From one perspective, Israel is winning on all fronts. It crushed Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis with American support, and proved to everybody in the world that it can bounce back from stinging collapse to reasserted regional dominance.

Israel has reset its defense policies to prioritize offense against all threats, real-time and developing. No one says boo as Israel daily bombs enemy emplacements and reinforcements in Lebanon, Syria, and even Gaza. Washington runs cover on this for Israel. President Trump is wising up to the chicanery of Hamas and Turkey too.

Moreover, Trump and his Secretary of State Marco Rubio just drove through a UNSC resolution that accepts the indefinite halving of Gaza with Israeli control of the eastern section; insists on total demilitarization, disarmament, and deradicalization of the remaining Palestinian-held Western half; makes clear that there is no legal or practical obligation to create a Palestinian state (thus pushing back against French President Macron and others who have “recognized” a hallucinatory, non-existent state); and does not define peace as contingent on Israel territorial withdraws in the West Bank.

On the contrary, the administration has justified/legitimized intensified Israeli settlement in Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria.

The United States is willy-nilly driving Saudi-Israeli normalization, coming sooner or later, with clear linkage between Saudi moves towards Abrahamic peace with Israel and the goodies like jets and nuclear facilities promised to the Saudis. The administration also promises to maintain Israel’s qualitative military edge, even if it sells F-35 jets to Riyadh five years down the line.

Washington is tightening sanctions on Iran and probably will rejoin Israel in striking at Iran’s still-dangerous nuclear and missile facilities again this year. In the meantime, Trump is massively replenishing Israel’s armaments for the next wars. Trump is also scheming smartly on the broader strategic stage, acting to bring Kazakhstan and other Asian powers into alignment with America (and Israel) and away from partnership with Russia, China, and Iran.

And oh yes, Trump’s practical, Israel-friendly diplomacy played a key role in securing the near-miraculous release, all-at-once, of the remaining Israeli hostages held by Hamas in Gaza.

And finally, can you imagine how perilous the Mideast situation, and Israel’s, would have been if a radical progressive Democratic candidate had won the US presidential election?

ON THE OTHER HAND, perhaps Israel’s strategic situation ain’t so rosy. Radical Islam – including Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the Turks and Qataris – is on the rebound. The world is doing little to stop Iran’s nuclear rebuilding, Hezbollah’s rearming, or Hamas’ re-asserting of dictatorial control in Gaza.

Israel’s borders remain porous; thoroughly penetrated by Iranian-supplied drones delivering weapons to terrorists and criminal gangs. Terrorism is on the rise in Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria – fueled by the massive numbers of hardcore Palestinian terrorists just released from Israeli prisons.

And Trump? He thinks he can reshape the region by hucksterism and braggadocio alongside mega-business deals, ridiculously declaring “peace in our time for the first time in 3,000 years,” and handcuffing Israel in the process. Israel dares not make a military move – not even a local strike on remaining Nukhba cells underground in eastern Gaza – without Trump’s approval. Israel must not upset the transactional-on-steroids, egocentric, big money “peace” deals that Washington is advancing!

It seems that Trump does not want to disappoint his dictator buddies in Ankara and Doha, nor his new dictator buddy in Damascus either. Nor his “best friend” from Riyadh, whose wobbly Saudi throne could “blowback” F-35 jets against Israel in an Islamic coup situation.

It is almost as if Trump is ignorant of the enduring ideological, transnational/religious nature of conflict in the region, thinking instead that money and the force of his personality can fix it all.

So, Trump is imposing a flawed freeze on the situation. He is “Bibi-sitting” Binyamin Netanyahu, preventing Israel from finishing the job in Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran. He already seems to be dialing back from demands for real disarmament of Hamas and instead pushing for rapid reconstruction in Gaza. American troops headquartered at the new “Civil-Military Coordination Center” in Kiryat Gat essentially are overseeing the free flow of humanitarian aid straight into the hands of Hamas.

Equally upsetting is Trump’s internationalization of the conflict in Gaza by placing US troops in Israel and inviting Egyptian and Turkish troops into Gaza. (Israel must prevent this!). Hamas denies that it ever agreed to disarm or accept an “International Stabilization Force” (ISF) in Gaza, but Trump wants Israel to swallow the delusion that Azerbaijani and Indonesian soldiers will waltz into Gaza under ISF auspices and then Hamas will melt away.

Worse of all is that after two years of heroic battle against Hamas, and with tough battles ahead against Hamas in the West Bank, Trump expects Israel to swallow the re-tabling of Palestinian statehood as a possible “pathway” to peace in the future. UNSC resolution 2803 introduced by the US even references the rotten French-Saudi declaration on a two-state solution and the even worse “New York” plan voted on in the General Assembly.

How disappointing, especially when this comes from the Trump administration! October 7 should have been a super-final nail in the coffin of the Palestinian statehood boondoggle, not a spur to a Security Council resolution that revives it!

So where are Israel’s strategic-diplomatic gains? What happened to mass emigration of Gazans and recognition of Israeli sovereignty over Judea and Samaria?

Alas, one gets the feeling that President Trump is riding on Israel’s hard-fought battles to advance his own, narrower, secular-materialist goals.

And despite his super pro-Jewish and pro-Israeli address to the Knesset just a few weeks ago, Trump now is turning a blind eye to rank antisemitism and anti-Zionism growing in the MAGA wing of his Republican party, by refusing to sideline hate-purveyors like Tucker Carlson and Groypers like Nick Fuentes.

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times… It was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.” Israel must maneuver with wisdom and caution through these muddy times, contending with confounding narratives and bewildering alternatives. Above all, Israel must act with determination to protect its core interests against foe and friend alike.

Published in The Jerusalem Post, 21.11.2025