The Beginning of the End of the Lies

By Abe Greenwald

Thursday, October 22, 2026

 

I have no idea what’s going to happen in the midterms (most consequentially in Michigan) or where the investigations into Ilhan Omar’s finances and immigration status are going to wind up. But whatever comes next in these and other significant national dramas, I’m feeling (uncharacteristically) optimistic that some large lies are on the verge of broad exposure.

 

Important things are already shaking loose.

 

Abdul El-Sayed’s documented trail of connections to and sympathies for Islamists is now the central issue of the U.S. Senate race in Michigan. And Omar’s defense against assorted allegations seems less than robust. Last night, on MS Now, when Chris Hayes asked her if she had married a man who was in any way related to her, Omar responded, “Not to my knowledge.” I’ll leave that there.

 

All sorts of pivotal truths have recently been coming to light. On the third anniversary of October 7, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani outed himself as an undeniable anti-Semite with a social media screed attacking Israel for supposed war crimes. Jews, liberals, and even friendly media noticed.

 

The next day, Ukraine launched drone strikes that significantly damaged three Yandex data centers in Russia. “It suddenly became a little easier to breathe on many social platforms,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky noted days later. “There was less hate, less division and fewer provocations.” The hate and division have probably returned already, but the successful strikes offered a small hint at how much online propaganda is a function of foreign influence. On X, there has since emerged a viral “I’m a Zionist” trend, and it’s still going strong.

 

Roughly a week ago, France began to unravel as rioters looted and burned city after city. The country, whose leaders promote Palestinianism, anti-Americanism, and Islamist Jew-hatred, was exposed as a demographic and economic basket case. One could see above the scenes of charred wreckage the official symbol of indiscriminate upheaval, the Palestinian flag. Before the Lebanese Civil War, people liked to call Beirut “the Paris of the East.” Since then, Paris has become the Beirut of the West. The only question now is which European city turns into its Damascus or Jenin.  

 

The truth is often disturbing but always necessary. Its revelation brings reality back into focus. I appreciate such moments. When Hunter Biden’s laptop was found to be legitimate; when Russiagate was discredited; when it became clear that Joe Biden was cognitively unfit for office; when Graham Platner was exposed as a creep; when Anthony Fauci was shown to have buried the lab-leak theory of Covid’s origins; when Karim Khan, the chief prosecutor of the ICC, was uncovered as a sexual predator attacking Israel as a distraction—truth bombs with the potential to right wrongs.

 

Of course, the usual parties are still doing their best to contain explosive truths from detonating. The media decided that the French riots were mostly peaceful student protests. Last night, Chris Hayes tried his best to portray Omar as the victim of crazy bigots, and this morning, ABC News claimed that there’s no evidence of El-Sayed’s ties to Islamic extremists. That’s okay. The propagandists played this game with Biden, Fauci, and Platner, too, and then they were unmasked along with their wards.

 

I’m even going to allow myself some modest expectation of truth about Israel. Hamas’s October 7 attack inaugurated a dark age of sinister lies about the Jewish state and flattering lies about its enemies. The latter are nearing a kind of reckoning. With a little luck, that just might begin to expose the former.

How Democrats Lost Their Way on Gaza

By Ludovic Hood

Thursday, October 22, 2026

 

There has been much public handwringing in the Democratic foreign policy establishment in recent months over Gaza policy. The party’s establishment and progressive factions were engaging in vicious finger-pointing about the Gaza war and America’s relationship with Israel even before the release of Biden adviser Brett McGurk’s new book about the October 7 hostages.

 

Biden confidants such as former Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan strike me as decent and principled men. While in office, both evinced frustration, publicly and privately, about the twisted discourse in Washington policy circles and the prejudiced media coverage of the Gaza war — and how that affected Hamas’s strategic calculus at critical junctures.

 

While party leaders now seem content allowing far-left voices to come to the fore, the Democratic foreign policy establishment needs an honest accounting of why and how the administration’s deliberations and messaging on Gaza lost their way — including muddying moral clarity about what happened on October 7, the ideology underpinning the atrocities, and how a sovereign nation-state should respond.

 

In the days following the Hamas-led October 7 onslaught, President Biden made clear his revulsion at the scale of the barbarity and his solidarity with the government and people of Israel — including his visit to Tel Aviv eleven days after the attack. That deeply felt outrage and sincere support for the Israeli people should have been the guiding light in the two years that followed.

 

Instead, narrow political considerations, biased media coverage, and far-left, anti-Israel activists’ demands were allowed to shape policy deliberations and official messaging, including the president’s. This miscalculation prolonged the conflict, increased Palestinian suffering, and fueled anti-Israel discourse in American society that nurtured antisemitism.

 

Israelis and Palestinians alike would be better off had the United States proceeded with strategic and moral clarity about the October 7 attacks and the responsibility of nations to respond. Israel was right to exercise military force against Hamas and its army of over 25,000 militants. Any other government, tasked with the primary responsibility of defending its people, would have done the same — and should be expected to do so.

 

Like the U.S. military, the Israel Defense Forces operate under legal frameworks requiring distinction, precaution, and proportionality in military action. But those laws were never designed to guarantee zero civilian harm when fighting an enemy deeply and intentionally embedded in civilian infrastructure. Credible allegations of operational misconduct demand transparent investigation and accountability within the Israeli military justice system.

 

Rather than helping the public understand these legal standards and Hamas’s practice of operating from high-density civilian locations, the Biden administration too often allowed the grim realities of urban warfare to be reframed as inherently unlawful — by failing to speak up about heavily biased media coverage and about Hamas’s use of human shields.

 

Americans are right to care about Palestinian suffering, and because Israel is an American ally using U.S. weapons, its conduct deserves scrutiny. But that scrutiny was not applied evenly. Hundreds of thousands have died in Syria and Sudan with a fraction of the outrage. Mosul and Raqqa were reduced to rubble at the cost of thousands of civilian lives during U.S.-led counter-ISIS operations, yet no comparable moral outcry followed. Demanding of Israel a standard that no army has met and no other conflict has faced is not accountability; Biden administration officials should have rejected that double standard and selective outrage early and repeatedly.

 

The Biden administration was right to press Israel on humanitarian access at certain junctures. Aid restrictions and the collapse of public order inside Gaza produced real hardship. The mistake was letting that pressure be heard as a verdict on the war itself, while saying far too little about Hamas’s systematic looting and diversion of aid.

 

There never was, and there is not, a “genocide” in Gaza. The administration should have been forthright about this from the start, including repudiating rhetoric from discredited UN officials. The misuse of this term is a grave disservice to the millions of Armenians, Jews and other victims of Nazi Germany, Cambodians, and Rwandans murdered en masse in the 20th century.

 

Washington also failed to challenge the figures released by the Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health. Officials should have consistently noted that the published statistics included deaths of Hamas and other militants, as well as those who died of causes unrelated to the conflict. Despite the terrible destruction of parts of Gaza, Israeli procedures ensured that the ratio of combatant to civilian deaths among Gazans remained historically low for dense urban combat.

 

Furthermore, the administration should have pushed back on slanted media coverage, reminding U.S. outlets to be thorough and judicious in their reporting — especially given that news organizations around the world look to American media to validate sensational claims. U.S. officials should have regularly reminded the world that Hamas conducted the vast majority of its military operations from homes, apartment buildings, schools, hospitals, and mosques, putting Palestinian women, children, and men in harm’s way every hour of every day.

 

Hamas had every opportunity to surrender. Israel even signaled a willingness to consider exile for its leaders. Hamas chose instead to keep fighting, using innocent Palestinians as human shields. The responsibility for Palestinian deaths lies overwhelmingly with Hamas and its enablers, including the regime in Tehran.

 

The Netanyahu government’s mistake was not the decision to fight Hamas, but the refusal to plan for “the day after.” The Biden administration’s mistake was failing to prioritize this. That left a campaign with no agreed political exit, allowing critics to brand the war aimless. A clearer American position would not have ended the war on Washington’s schedule, but it would have forced Hamas and Western critics to argue with an explicit postwar plan rather than a political vacuum.

 

America and Israel need one another: The strategic and economic partnership is too deep to squander in a political food fight. Future administrations must bring mutual respect and long-term stability back to the relationship.

 

Too many Democratic foreign policy figures currently defending their records on Gaza are reluctant to acknowledge these truths. But Democrats who want to govern again must face them. Biden flew to Tel Aviv in October 2023 and embraced Israel’s cause, and the Democratic Party has spent the past three years arguing over whether to disown that instinct. Ambivalence in American leadership was read by Hamas as a reason to keep fighting, by Tehran as proof of American fatigue, and by allies as a reason to hedge.

 

A party that wants to govern again must be able to say three things at once: that Israel’s war against Hamas was just; that its conduct, like U.S. operations in wartime, deserves scrutiny; and that the singular, selective condemnation applied to Israel but no other ally or adversary is wrong. Until Democrats can say all three, they will keep arguing about the last war while their adversaries prepare for the next one. A party that presided over the war and still cannot describe it with moral clarity will not be trusted to shape the one that follows.

The U.N. Is Making Trump’s Case on the Human Rights Council

By Brett Schaefer & Danielle Pletka

Wednesday, October 21, 2026

 

Few events as poignantly underscored the lamentable record of the United Nations on human rights as the awarding of a Nobel Peace Prize to the former U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay. And yet, Pillay, a dedicated antisemite whose Nobel was celebrated by Hamas, is an apt avatar for the U.N. Human Rights Council, an organization whose mission and work are regularly at odds.

 

No surprise, then, that a 2025 Trump executive order once again ended U.S. participation with the HRC, criticizing it for protecting “human rights abusers by allowing them to use the organization to shield themselves from scrutiny.” This echoes more detailed criticism in 2018 when the U.S. similarly ceased its participation, citing anti-Israel bias, human rights violators regularly winning seats on the council, and willful inattention to “the misery inflicted by regimes in Venezuela, Cuba, Zimbabwe, and China.”

 

Strangely, however, the European governments and U.N. bureaucrats that predictably condemned the American withdrawal have done precisely nothing to address U.S. criticisms, nor adopted any reforms to entice the U.S. to reconsider. Instead, they have chosen to tolerate and continue its dysfunction, ignoring some of the world’s most pressing humanitarian crises to focus disproportionately on one country: Israel.

 

The record of bias is plain. According to a database compiled by U.N. Watch, since it was founded in 2006, the Council has adopted 346 resolutions containing language condemning a country for human rights violations. Israel was the focus of 116 (34 percent) of those resolutions.

 

Alone among the world’s countries, Israel is subject to a separate human rights item: Agenda Item 7, titled “Human rights situation in Palestine and other occupied Arab territories.” Every other country is examined under Agenda Item 4, titled “Human rights situations that require the Council’s attention.”

 

In addition, the council currently has twelve “country mandates” that focus on human rights situations in individual countries, such as North Korea and Iran. All are subject to periodic renewal except for the “Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967” that remains in place “until the end of the Israeli occupation.”

 

Instead of taking U.S. criticism to heart, since the U.S. disengaged, the council has adopted eight new resolutions condemning Israel, and its human rights experts and an “independent” Commission of Inquiry have accused it of genocide despite lacking evidence of intent and in the face of contravening evidence.

 

Meanwhile, countries with human rights records beside which Israel pales continue to be elected to the council. The current membership includes China, Cuba, Egypt, Qatar, Vietnam, and other countries considered “not free” by Freedom House. Just this past week, Burundi and Kuwait, which are also considered “not free,” were elected to three-year terms starting in January.

 

How do they get elected? They game the system, making sure that only as many countries run for election as there are openings, thereby guaranteeing victory. Last year and this year, every election for a council seat was one of these “clean slate” elections. As Human Rights Watch accurately noted, “This uncompetitive vote makes a mockery of the word ‘election.’”

 

Historically, “not free” and “partly free” countries have jointly comprised a majority on the 47-member Human Rights Council. They have worked together to water down or block criticism of their abuses. This coordination explains why China, Cuba, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Vietnam, Zimbabwe, and others have never been condemned in a Human Rights Council resolution.

 

These problems are not new. The U.S. has consistently voiced concerns about these problems under both Democratic and Republican presidents.

 

As we argued several years ago, there is no way to make the council perfect. No reform can overcome or eliminate the hostility of many U.N. member states to Israel. If the council reflects the U.N. membership, disproportionate — and biased — attention will be focused on Israel.

 

But steps can be taken to address the most obvious flaws.

 

First, the U.N. General Assembly should ensure that Israel is treated like other nations institutionally and procedurally by eliminating Agenda Item 7 so that Israel’s human rights practices are examined under Agenda Item 4 as is the case for every other nation. It should also require country mandates and commissions of inquiry focused on Israel to be subject to periodic renewal, as is the case for other “special procedures” and investigations.

 

To address non-competitive “clean slate” elections, the General Assembly should amend the process to automatically list as candidates every state that is not currently serving on the council or is otherwise prohibited from running (such as having served two consecutive terms) and hold successive ballots eliminating the lowest half of vote recipients in each region until all the open seats are filled. The General Assembly could go further and increase the threshold for election to two-thirds (129 votes) of the General Assembly, as originally proposed, instead of a simple majority (97 votes).

 

Together, these changes would ensure that council elections are genuinely competitive and, by giving governments a wider pool of options, increase the odds for free countries to win seats on the council, which should make it more capable of fulfilling its claim as the premier human rights body in the U.N. system.

 

The Trump administration has been criticized for disengaging with the Human Rights Council. But Democratic and Republican administrations have both condemned council practices, although Democrats have been more willing to try and fix things from within. But U.S. reengagement alone will not fix things, as fundamental changes require support from most U.N. member states. So once again, the question presses: Do human rights really matter to the “international community”? Or is no incentive great enough to abandon the bias and omission that make the likes of Pillay proud?

How Israel Can Turn Hezbollah’s Blunder Into Lasting Defeat

By David Daoud

Monday, October 19, 2026

 

“Had I only known …” That was, in substance, Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah’s famous admission after Hezbollah’s 2006 war with Israel: Had Nasrallah anticipated that a raid to capture two Israeli soldiers would trigger a 34-day conflict that left thousands dead or wounded and displaced approximately 1 million Lebanese and 300,000 to 500,000 Israelis, he “absolutely” would not have ordered it.

 

The lesson didn’t stick. On October 8, 2023, the day after Hamas attacked southern Israel, Hezbollah committed an even greater blunder and voluntarily opened a second front in support of Gaza. Three years on, Israel has eliminated much of Hezbollah’s senior military and political leadership, severely degraded its arsenal, pushed it back from the frontier, and established a substantial security zone inside southern Lebanon.

 

Perhaps worst of all for Hezbollah, Nasrallah isn’t around to express regret, having succumbed to an Israeli airstrike nearly one year into the war.

 

Israel now has an opportunity to turn Hezbollah’s miscalculation into a lasting strategic defeat. But it could still squander that chance by withdrawing regardless of Lebanon’s compliance with its disarmament obligations under the U.S.-brokered trilateral framework agreed to in June, or by allowing the security zone to become another static occupation that Hezbollah can gradually wear down.

 

On October 6, Hezbollah’s secretary-general, Naim Qassem, demanded Israel withdraw first. “We have nothing to offer,” he insisted. Only afterward would Hezbollah discuss its arsenal—as a domestic Lebanese matter, not in an agreement with Israel.

 

Lebanese President Joseph Aoun has advanced a similar sequence. During a July visit to Washington, he said Hezbollah’s disarmament should “begin” with ending Israel’s presence in Lebanon—the “root cause” the group invokes to justify remaining armed. Aoun also insists that disarmament be negotiated with the group rather than imposed by force. His adviser Jean Aziz likewise argued in September that full Israeli withdrawal was necessary to make “decommissioning” Hezbollah “politically credible.”

 

But Hezbollah has given little reason to believe it will surrender its weapons after Israel leaves. Qassem has repeatedly rejected disarmament outright, and in June said that linking Israeli withdrawal to Hezbollah’s nationwide disarmament “crossed all red lines.” Hezbollah’s October 7 statement this year reaffirmed support for the Palestinian “resistance,” echoing the group’s 1985 Open Letter, which described Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon as a prelude to eliminating Israel and “liberating Jerusalem.”

 

History also argues against handing Hezbollah—or Lebanon, for that matter—another withdrawal on credit. In 1993, Nasrallah told journalist Robert Fisk that Hezbollah would “close the file” once Israel withdrew from south Lebanon. Asked whether that meant the Palestinians would be left to wage their own struggle, Nasrallah answered, “Correct.”

 

As Israeli withdrawal became realistic, Hezbollah began adjusting its position. In April 1998, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Cabinet accepted implementing U.N. Security Council Resolution 425—the 1978 resolution calling for Israel to withdraw from Lebanon—subject to security arrangements. That December, Hezbollah Political Council chief Mohammad Raad said the group had “numerous ways” to pursue Israel “even after they withdraw from our occupied land.”

 

In 1999, Ehud Barak won Israel’s premiership after campaigning on withdrawal. As Israel prepared to leave, Hezbollah began emphasizing Israel’s continued occupation of Shebaa Farms, a small disputed territory along the Lebanon-Syria-Israel frontier, as grounds for continuing its armed campaign. In May 2000, Hezbollah’s newspaper Al-Ahed acknowledged that the territory had only “recently” become a central political issue. On May 22, before Israel completed its withdrawal, Nasrallah declared that Hezbollah would continue fighting over the farms. Although the U.N. subsequently certified that Israel had withdrawn in compliance with Resolution 425, Hezbollah retained its arsenal and later justified it as necessary to protect Lebanon against Israel.

 

That’s not to say Israel should never withdraw from Lebanon. It should—but only under the conditions outlined in the trilateral framework. That agreement ties phased Israeli withdrawal to a “reciprocal, sequenced process” of disarming Hezbollah and dismantling its military infrastructure. Its security annex requires the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) to clear designated test areas, submit to outside verification, and establish control to prevent Hezbollah’s return. Israeli troops withdraw from those areas as those conditions are met. Complete Israeli withdrawal, however, should await Hezbollah’s nationwide disarmament.

 

Lebanon has so far fallen well short of its commitments. In September, Lebanese sources said the LAF’s expanded deployment in Nabatieh, a major southern city and regional administrative hub, was not intended to disarm Hezbollah or make the city weapons-free. At nearby Zawtar al-Gharbiyeh, Col. Raja Amer, deputy commander of LAF forces south of the Litani River, explained why troops were not forcibly confiscating Hezbollah’s weapons: Such operations risked violence against “our own people” and another civil war. Meanwhile, the framework’s outside verification committee still had not been formed, and LAF has relied heavily on coordination and negotiated handovers with Hezbollah rather than searching for and forcibly dismantling its hidden infrastructure.

 

LAF’s claims of achieving “operational control” are difficult to square with that record. On September 9, the army declared that it had achieved such control in three framework test areas: Froun, Srifa, and Zawtar al-Gharbiyeh. It reported establishing checkpoints, observation posts, patrols, and seizing 1,818 weapons and munitions. But 1,560 were undefined “light ammunition” (in other words, bullets), the tally included unexploded ordnance, and it identified no Hezbollah fighter disarmed or arrested, tunnel destroyed, or depot or command center dismantled. LAF had made an identical declaration before: On January 8, the Lebanese army had also claimed “operational control” south of the Litani. Less than two months later, Hezbollah was fighting Israel there again. Israeli forces subsequently reported finding three new Hezbollah tunnel entrances near Khiam at a site the IDF said it had cleared in December 2024.

 

Until Lebanon verifiably meets the framework’s standards in a given area—standards to which it agreed—Israel has little reason to surrender the leverage its positions there provide. But however long Israel must remain in Lebanon, its military presence can become strategically self-defeating if defending the zone displaces sustained offensive operations against Hezbollah.

 

That is largely what happened after Israel withdrew from most of Lebanon in 1985. Hezbollah’s emergence made full withdrawal risky. But Israel’s 1982 invasion, which reached Beirut, had soured Israeli public opinion on additional Lebanese campaigns and made incurring the casualties necessary to dismantle this new threat politically costly. Israel split the difference by retaining a security zone along the frontier, and initially expected its Lebanese ally, the South Lebanon Army (SLA), to shoulder much of the burden of countering Hezbollah. Instead, the SLA’s weakness forced Israeli troops to protect their ally’s positions as well as their own, leaving the IDF increasingly occupied with defending the security zone it had established to protect northern Israel—guarding fortified outposts and resupplying them along roads Hezbollah could mine and ambush.

 

Maj. Gen. Amiram Levin, commander of Israel’s Northern Command, sought to counter Hezbollah’s attacks in kind, helping establish the Egoz commando unit in 1995 to hunt and ambush Hezbollah fighters. A later IDF study found that Egoz engaged and inflicted casualties on Hezbollah more frequently than conventional Israeli units. Its raids also disrupted Hezbollah’s ability to attack nearby Israeli and South Lebanon Army positions.

 

But Egoz’s successes were not accompanied by a shift from static defense to sustained offensive operations. Hezbollah therefore continued attacking Israeli outposts and convoys, and the IDF’s overall losses did not significantly decline.

 

Levin had envisioned Egoz operating as precisely part of a broader strategic shift: fewer exposed outposts and convoys, coupled with sustained offensive operations against Hezbollah. But Israel’s military leadership restricted his offensive initiative, concerned that expanded raids could provoke rocket fire into northern Israel without reducing Hezbollah’s attacks on Israeli forces in Lebanon. Meanwhile, continued casualties increased public demands for unilateral withdrawal, particularly after a February 1997 incident in which two Israeli transport helicopters collided and killed 73 soldiers en route to Lebanon. By early 1999, 55 percent of Israeli Jews supported unilateral withdrawal, up from 41 percent in 1997. Israel eventually withdrew in May 2000—and Hezbollah claimed a militarily unearned victory that helped it grow stronger.

 

Israel’s current deployment is different. There is no SLA to protect. The IDF has also adopted a “forward and offensive defense” posture: Troops occupy commanding terrain inside Lebanon, using those positions to monitor and strike Hezbollah targets farther inland. Regular IDF brigades—not just commandos—now attack Hezbollah fighters and infrastructure.

 

The IDF’s operation at Ali al-Taher Ridge in south Lebanon demonstrates this approach. After Hezbollah refused Lebanese efforts to hand the position to the LAF, Egoz and other Israeli forces spent three months isolating a Hezbollah underground command complex and cutting its supply routes. Israeli forces then destroyed more than two kilometers of tunnels, along with weapons stores and the command center. Rather than establish a permanent garrison on the ridge, Israeli troops redeployed as planned to nearby commanding positions, from which they could monitor the area and strike Hezbollah fighters attempting to return.

 

Northern Command is considering extending that approach across the security zone. Under a proposed deployment called the “Gray Line,” Israel would reduce its presence from five brigade combat teams to four, concentrating them on commanding terrain while using surveillance and firepower to control the spaces between their positions. The plan, still awaiting approval in September, could leave Hezbollah with fewer fixed positions to attack without reducing Israel’s ability to operate across the zone. Those remaining positions, however, could still face infiltration and attack.

 

Yet even this offensive posture could inadvertently calcify into static defense. Israeli troops were already fortifying observation and firing positions and compounds inside Lebanese villages for winter. Commanders reportedly feared routine guard duty would displace offensive operations, exposing their positions to renewed Hezbollah attacks. Hezbollah is already attempting to infiltrate the zone, and on September 7, the IDF reported two explosive-drone attacks on its troops at Ali al-Taher and gunfire near Beaufort that wounded two soldiers.

 

In its October 7 anniversary statement, Hezbollah argued that Israel may have achieved “tactical successes,” but had failed to eliminate the “resistance” or turn its battlefield gains into a lasting victory. Three years after Hezbollah opened what may prove to be the most disastrous war in its history, Israel’s victory will be secure only when Hezbollah can no longer rebuild its military power—and Israeli troops can leave Lebanon without ever having to return.

Anti-Semites Waste So Much of Our Time

By Seth Mandel

Friday, October 16, 2026

 

Now she’s really gone and done it. Francesca Albanese, the U.S.-sanctioned unofficial Hamas mouthpiece with a UN badge, has finally crossed J Street’s line.

 

Yes, it turns out, even J Street has a line for anti-Semitism.

 

This week Albanese, the globetrotting intifada groupie who has said every horrific thing imaginable about Jews, joined yet another social media incitement campaign. In response to an Al Jazeera post criticizing Jews for buying homes outside of Israel, Albanese wrote: “Watch carefully. Cyprus, Greece, Serbia, south of Italy. Globalizing apartheid one brick at the time. One gated community at the time.”

 

In a surprising move, the left-wing pressure group J Street couldn’t even stay silent—although its critique was amusingly gentle:

 

Israelis buying property in other countries is not apartheid. Words have meaning, and we have a responsibility to use them wisely. Francesca Albanese’s now-deleted post grossly feeds the kind of collective blame that can spill over into hostility towards Jews. The UN does important work. It deserves representatives who strengthen its credibility, not undermine it.

 

You have to laugh at the “can spill over into hostility towards Jews” when the post is about encouraging anti-Israel “resistance” anywhere in the world one sees an Israeli buying a house. And of course the post ends with praise for the United Nations.

 

Back in J Street’s early days, its founder Jeremy Ben-Ami told the New York Times that the organization’s mission was to help Barack Obama, who was trying to put daylight between the U.S. and Israel: “Our No. 1 agenda item is to do whatever we can in Congress to act as the president’s blocking back.”

 

There are various practical effects this “blocking back” strategy has. One of those effects is to waste lots of everybody’s time.

 

I’ll explain. When a political figure emerges as a harsh critic of Israel, there is an instinctive circling of wagons around him, even when he don’t exactly radiate good faith.

 

Organizations like J Street that exist to point out Israel’s flaws don’t want anybody on their side of the aisle accused of anti-Semitism, because smart anti-Semites (I know, I know, that’s an oxymoron) will use the arguments already advanced by such groups. It gives them cover. They can say, “I’m just saying what these Jewish groups have already said.”

 

But anti-Semites obsess over Jews and Israel. And before long, that fixation asserts itself. They continue using the kind of rhetoric that a group like J Street might use—but they start using it all the time. Pretty soon they can talk about nothing else but the evils of the world’s one Jewish state. It’s a clear red flag that this person has an unhealthy concept of Jewish power in his head and self-pitying resentment in his heart.

 

That’s an explosive combination, and eventually it blows up. When that happens, crass anti-Jewish comments and actions start to show in place of the previously-measured “just anti-Zionism.” When that rhetorical escalation is criticized, the anti-Semite will toss aside all pretense and embrace the fame of podcasters and influencers who rally around them.

 

It will become obvious that those who initially raised concerns about them were right all along. At that point, partisan pressure groups will throw in the towel. They will condemn the rhetoric, after months (or years) of either silence or running interference for the now-obvious-anti-Semite.

 

Zohran Mamdani seems to finally have hit that point after his ghoulish statement and behavior on October 7. In the opinion of many liberal Jews in Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed is getting there, too. The defenses of Graham Platner’s Nazi tattoo—his Nazi tattoo—went on for months, during which time we were expected to pretend the Nazi tattoo didn’t have a very obvious explanation.

 

It is into this illustrious company that I guess we can finally place Francesca Albanese. For well over a decade Albanese has been making openly anti-Semitic comments. But her cheerleading for Hamas after October 7 really crossed a line for the Biden administration, which called her an anti-Semite. Even the secretary-general of the United Nations admitted she was “a horrible person.” Now there appears to be no one left with a sliver of mainstream legitimacy to defend her.

 

And all that was lost is time. What a waste of everyone’s time.

It’s Time for a Reset in U.S.-Israel Relations

By Richard Goldberg

Monday, October 19, 2026

 

It’s time for a reset in the U.S.-Israel relationship. No, not because Israel did anything wrong. To the contrary, it’s because Israel is so essential to America and too many Americans don’t understand why.

 

For decades, U.S.-Israel ties centered around foreign aid. Washington gives, Jerusalem takes, and American policymakers defend the cost as an investment in a solid ally. That model, however, no longer reflects today’s multifaceted, interest-based alliance.

 

Fundamentally, the United States wants to win the century over the Chinese Communist Party. And we should expect Israel to fully commit to that victory as well. After all, America’s most powerful adversaries are the leading enablers of Israel’s most powerful adversaries.

 

But America will only win the century if it dominates super intelligence, quantum computing, critical supply chains, and defense technology. Israel is one of the world’s most important centers of innovation in every one of these areas — with both a capability and will to align its own strategic investments for the benefit of the United States.

 

Americans should want Israel to invest billions of dollars, both public and private, into SI and quantum research and development in full cooperation with the U.S. Department of Energy, national labs, universities, and corporations.

 

Last year, President Trump issued an executive order launching a national Genesis Mission — a new Manhattan Project for SI, quantum, advanced energy, and scientific discovery. This summer, the U.S. welcomed Japan as the Genesis Mission’s first international partner.

 

Israel should be the second to join the mission, bringing its own multiyear investment pledge and offering preferential U.S. access to Israeli innovations. The move would also build on last year’s U.S.-Israel SI and Energy agreement, which envisioned a joint working group to help make America energy and SI dominant with Israel’s help.

 

Notably, Israel’s innovation ecosystem also includes research and commercial activity in advanced chemicals, synthetic materials, critical mineral recovery and refining, and the development of substitutes for scarce raw materials. America’s victory this century will largely depend on whether it can regain control of the periodic table and a wide range of critical supply chains.

 

Israel is already a member of the State Department’s Pax Silica, a diplomatic alliance aimed at building out an American-led ex-China supply chain for critical minerals and more. The U.S. should ask Israel to commit billions more to Pax Silica research, development, and commercialization — once again with American preferential access to Israeli innovation.

 

Finally, the 2026 National Defense Strategy recognizes Israel as a “model ally,” already spending a higher percentage of its GDP on defense than any NATO ally. After the United States, it’s the most innovative country in the world when it comes to defense technology. It battle-tests American platforms and makes them better. It co-develops missile- and laser-defense systems that help keep both countries safe from threats beyond the Middle East.

 

As global demand for munitions puts unprecedented stress on the U.S. defense industrial base, Israel is investing its own money to rebuild its own manufacturing lines for ammunition, tank and artillery shells, and bombs. And as the U.S. military looks for more flexible basing options, Israel provides air and sea possibilities for ongoing and contingency operations.

 

The U.S. defense relationship with Israel is no longer a one-way street. More can be done to drive that message home. Preferential access to Israeli defense technology for American warfighters and continued co-development of missile defense systems should be included on the American side of the economic benefit ledger.

 

Moreover, if Israel agrees to expand its own defense industrial base on its own dime — particularly in the areas where the U.S. defense industrial base will be most stressed in a multifront war with great power competitors — the national security benefits for America would be extraordinary.

 

Since the total economic benefit of Israeli commitments to the United States would more than pay for continued financing of American-made jet aircraft sales to Israel, that financing should continue with two conditions. First, every dollar must be spent inside the United States, supporting American workers and strengthening the American defense industrial base. And second, the U.S. military should have immediate access to all lessons learned from Israeli use in combat.

 

America and Israel remain natural allies because we share some things deeper than a transaction: a common Judeo-Christian moral inheritance, a commitment to democratic government, and a conception of human dignity that stands against the forces seeking to destroy the free world. Radical Islamists want to destroy America and Israel, Christians and Jews.

 

For tens of millions of Americans, that reality is enough. For others, it’s not — which makes the evolving national debate over the U.S.-Israel relationship an opportunity more than a crisis.

 

Moving from a foreign aid paradigm to an interest-based joint venture will deliver massive economic and security return on investment and help guarantee another American century. That’s a U.S.-Israel relationship every American should support.

Why Hamas Cheered Navi Pillay’s Nobel Peace Prize

By Hillel C. Neuer

Thursday, October 15, 2026

 

It’s not every day that an Islamist death cult celebrates the announcement of the Nobel Peace Prize winner, but that is exactly what happened on Friday evening when Hamas welcomed the selection of Navi Pillay as “an important step toward international justice.” Why is Oslo’s humanitarian hero winning applause from an Iranian-backed terror proxy that massacred families and kidnapped children?

 

I have dealt with Pillay in Geneva since she arrived here in 2008 as the United Nations high commissioner for human rights. Over 18 years, I watched her turn the language of universal rights into a weapon aimed relentlessly at the Jewish state.

 

It began with a welcome. In September 2008, my team at U.N. Watch publicly saluted her struggle against South African apartheid. Her story deserved respect. But already then, her first act as U.N. human rights chief was to champion Durban II, the planned Geneva follow-up to the notorious 2001 conference in South Africa, where an ostensible campaign against racism became a festival of antisemitism.

 

At Durban I, thousands of radical activists marched against Israel and Jews, some carrying signs praising Adolf Hitler. Jewish students were threatened. The Arab Lawyers Union handed out cartoons of hook-nosed Jews. Copies of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the notorious antisemitic forgery, were openly distributed. At the NGO Forum, Israel was declared a “racist apartheid state” and accused of “genocide.” In the Durban outcome document, the Jewish state alone was singled out as a perpetrator of racism. Rep. Tom Lantos, a Holocaust survivor, called it “the most sickening and unabashed display of hate for Jews” he had witnessed since the Nazi era.

 

Pillay wanted to rehabilitate Durban. We wanted to prevent a repeat. Alarm bells started ringing when Muammar Gaddafi’s Libyan regime was appointed chair of the preparatory committee, and Iran the vice chair.

 

Months before the April 2009 conference, Pillay was already rebuking the U.S., Canada, and Israel for threatening to boycott, dismissing their “all or nothing” approach, and warning against “pretexts for inaction.” In the end, Canada, Italy, the U.S., Germany, Australia, and the Netherlands were among 10 countries that boycotted.

 

When Durban II finally opened, Holocaust denier Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, then president of Iran, was the first head of state to speak. He used the Geneva podium to denounce Israel’s existence. France, along with many other European delegations, walked out of the room in protest. Pillay defended Ahmadinejad’s right to speak, and urged against more countries pulling out of the conference.

 

That same year, after Hamas and Israel fought a three-week war, the U.N. Human Rights Council condemned Israel and created a commission of inquiry. Pillay recruited Richard Goldstone to serve as chair, with her staff doing most of the work. The inquiry’s September 2009 report was a bombshell, accusing Israel’s political and military leaders of a “deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population.” It called for action by the International Criminal Court, and for criminal proceedings in foreign courts under universal jurisdiction.

 

The report was a travesty of justice. A year and a half later, in a Washington Post op-ed, Goldstone himself retracted the core charge.

 

It later emerged that Pillay’s office had hired Grietje Baars, a radical Marxist law professor, to write key sections of the report. Before joining the investigation, Baars had already described Israel’s operation as a “massacre.” While working on it, Baars signed a declaration denouncing Israel’s “apartheid regime.” The next year, in 2010, Baars joined the Hamas-backed Gaza flotilla campaign as a European spokesman.

 

Under Pillay’s leadership, this is what passed for fact-finding at the U.N. I later submitted a legal complaint to the secretary-general about Pillay’s hiring of Baars. I received no reply.

 

Pillay herself “strongly condemned” Israel’s use of force as “disproportionate” as soon as the fighting began. Her verdict preceded the examination. By contrast, joining the U.S. and Canada, German Chancellor Angela Merkel stated that Israel had a right to self-defense and that responsibility for the conflict lay “clearly and exclusively” with Hamas. Even U.N. Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs John Holmes spoke out against “the reckless and cynical use of civilian installations by Hamas.” Not Pillay.

 

In January 2009, after years of rocket attacks from Gaza, Israel imposed a naval blockade to prevent weapons reaching Hamas by sea. In May 2010, Turkey’s terrorist-linked IHH organized a flotilla which set out to breach it. When Israeli commandos boarded its lead ship, the Mavi Marmara, they were attacked by militants wielding iron bars, clubs, chains, and slingshots.

 

Within hours, Pillay declared that Israel treated international law with “perpetual disdain,” denouncing the blockade as “inhumane and illegal.” Yet the subsequent Palmer inquiry appointed by the U.N. secretary-general concluded that the naval blockade was lawful—a legitimate security measure to prevent weapons from entering Gaza by sea. Again, Pillay’s verdict came before she examined the facts—or the law.

 

By 2014, Pillay had endorsed the charge that when Palestinian men beat their wives, it’s Israel’s fault. “Women with husbands explained that the dire economic situation and the pressures of the occupation have made men more violent because they have lost their ability to provide and protect — two essential elements of manhood in a traditional patriarchal society,” Special Rapporteur Yakin Ertürk wrote in 2005, following her visit to Palestinian territories. “As men become stripped of their manhood, women become the shock absorbers of the crises as targets of domestic violence.” Nine years later, Pillay reported to the U.N. that this analysis “remains valid.”

 

After leaving the U.N. human rights office in 2014, Pillay dropped any pretense of distance. In 2020, she signed a campaign titled “Sanction Apartheid Israel!” In June 2021, she joined a letter blaming Israeli “domination and oppression” for the previous month’s war, which began with Hamas firing rockets at Jerusalem and other Israeli cities.

 

A month later, the president of the Human Rights Council—Nazhat Shameem Khan, now a deputy prosecutor of the International Criminal Court—appointed Pillay to chair an inquiry into the very conflict for which she had already blamed Israel. But its mandate went even further: a permanent investigation of alleged violations before and after the 2021 clash, reaching into the conflict’s “underlying root causes,” with no end date. The campaigner became the investigator, and Pillay’s verdict came with her appointment.

 

In February 2022, U.N. Watch submitted a detailed legal brief requesting Pillay’s recusal. We cited her statements and the U.N.’s own impartiality standards. We received no reply.

 

That June, I walked up to Pillay at the Human Rights Council and handed her a copy. She acknowledged having seen our motion.

 

“We never received a reply,” I said.

 

“We can’t respond to everything,” she answered.

 

Everything? This was a core challenge to her fitness to preside. A few days ago, Pillay claimed that her inquiry “essentially worked like a court.” Yet a judge cannot dismiss a recusal motion as unwanted correspondence.

 

Later, in July 2022, her fellow commissioner Miloon Kothari railed against “the Jewish lobby” and questioned Israel’s U.N. membership. Pillay defended him, claiming his remarks had been taken out of context. In the end, Kothari retracted his comments after numerous democracies condemned him for antisemitism, as did the Human Rights Council chair himself. Pillay never recanted.

 

In September 2025, the Pillay inquiry fulfilled its purpose: It accused Israel of genocide. The report was built on selective quotations used to infer genocidal intent, and a complete sidelining of Hamas’ military infrastructure and use of civilian sites. According to the Pillay report’s chronology, it was Israel that attacked on October 7.

 

Pillay’s accusation of genocide against Israel appears to be what prompted the Nobel. Her earlier achievements—as a judge in South Africa and on the U.N.’s Rwanda tribunal—were known for decades. That record deserves recognition. But it also makes her disregard for impartiality harder to excuse.

 

She knew the standards. A reputation earned in one courtroom cannot exempt its owner from scrutiny in another. Nor can past courage transform a partisan investigation into justice simply because its findings carry the United Nations seal.

 

Pillay was named to the inquiry for her authority as a judge, but she acted on the commitments of a campaigner. The Nobel Committee is now seeking to magnify her imprimatur.

 

Hamas understands the benefit perfectly. Its war against Israel gains a prestigious legal vocabulary, and its victims recede behind an indictment of the state that defended them. That is why Hamas cheered. The Nobel Committee should now tell the world whether this is its desired outcome.

Buck Up

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, October 08, 2026

 

This post is in response to Western Discourse Suggests October 7 Achieved Its Political Purpose

By Daniel Foster

 

Far be it from me to interrupt a bout of cathartic fatalism. Lord knows I’m good for those when the occasion permits. But Dan Foster’s latest is a bit too morose even for a “morosity” veteran like me.

 

A cursory survey of the noxious rhetoric coming from the American left and the nationalist right (in Israel, where they gathered for a conference, of all places) calling for America to, if not outright sever, at least strain its relationship with Israel to the breaking point led Dan toward a dour realization: “There’s really nothing else to conclude here but that October 7, at least as an act of political terrorism, if not as an attempt to destabilize the Israeli state, worked.”

 

To view Israel’s relative value to the world through the prism of anti-Israel activism in the West is to despair. But that’s not the only perspective we might bring to bear.

 

We could evaluate how Israel has fared, for example, since the single most violent attack on the Jewish people since 1945. If we did, we’d see that almost all of Qasem Soleimani’s “seven armies,” the “ring of fire” surrounding the Jewish state, are, for now, hobbled to the point of being negligible. Even the Syrian Assad regime — an Iranian satrap since at least the ouster of Saddam Hussein’s regime — is gone.

 

The ringmaster, Iran, is similarly crippled. Its military is in tatters. Its nuclear program is entombed in rubble. The American blockade is throttling its political class. Its people are destitute and angry, and we should expect that — just as the Iranians rose up in 2009, 2011, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2022, and 2025 — they will come for the Islamic Republic’s leaders again.

 

As for Israel itself, the Jewish state is hardly isolated in its region. The war has repelled the Gulf Arab states further from Iran’s orbit and closer to the U.S.-led effort to create a reliable security architecture in the region, with Israel at its center. The Israeli state, already one of the more socially cohesive enterprises in the Western world, is even more integrated (if not exactly harmonious). Despite the deteriorating security situation in the region, foreign direct investment is pouring in from all over the world.

 

I don’t mean to suggest that the animosity toward Israel reliably displayed by Eurocrats, socialist revolutionaries, and right-wing post-liberals presents no threat to either Israel or Washington’s relationship with Jerusalem. It does. Moreover, it would be disastrous if the American right adopted the anti-Israel fashion that has overtaken the American left. But just survey some of the rhetoric coming out of the “NatCons in Jerusalem” that so unnerved Dan:

 

 

What American conservative believes that the U.S. should support Israel as some sort of cosmic recompense for the Holocaust? Do the NatCons even talk to conventional conservatives? If they did, they’d probably have been informed that Israel is by far the most capable American ally in the region, as well as a liberal democracy that promotes Western values and culture. Theirs is a materialistic and ideational argument that has precisely nothing to do with Hitler’s works. If the NatCons cannot even pass a Turing test in their attempts to nudge the American right in its ideological direction, their project isn’t going to get too far.

 

There are challenges ahead for the U.S.-Israel relationship, although the Israeli government’s eagerness to be done with American aid should compel Americans to wonder if the loss of a client for U.S. arms would leave us worse off than the Israelis. Still, those challenges do not remotely resemble the sort that Yahya Sinwar envisioned when he unleashed Hamas on Israeli civilians. The Jewish state was not supposed to emerge from this war stronger, richer, more regionally integrated, and more confident in its civilizational mission. But it has.

 

There’s plenty to be dismayed about these days. Israel’s future probably isn’t one of them.

 

 

Anti-Zionism Is an Old Soviet Plot

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, October 8, 2026

 

You have to think that New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani had a grudging admiration for the mob of braying lunatics who heckled him during his appearance at an event memorializing the October 7 massacre.

 

The masked and keffiyeh-clad activists who hurled epithets and slogans at Mamdani — “coward,” “shame on you,” “Zohran, you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide” — evinced the uncompromising ideological conviction toward which the mayor himself strove not long ago. Like Mamdani and his wife, they are true believers in the anti-Zionist cause. Why would Mamdani resent their activism? By attacking him, the crowd was doing precisely what their philosophy prescribes: targeting the symbols of Western authority in whatever form they take.

 

After all, anti-Zionism isn’t just about Israel. It began as a Soviet conspiracy designed to undermine the West. And if the American humanities professoriate had any interest in educating their charges, the hordes that have glutted America’s city streets and campuses since October 8, 2023, would know it.

 

I outline anti-Zionism’s underexplored history in my latest book, Blood & Progress: A Century of Left-Wing Violence in America:

 

After Israel’s founding, when the Jewish State was little more than an archipelago of communitarian Kibbutzim populated by a significant number of Russian expatriates, Moscow was not hostile toward Jerusalem. Indeed, the Soviets were among the first countries to grant Israel legal recognition in 1948. But throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the USSR and its Warsaw Pact satellites cultivated military and diplomatic relations with Israel’s Arab neighbors.

 

Those investments did not yield returns.

 

In 1967 and again in 1973, the Israelis defeated a coalition of Soviet-backed Arab states, a challenge to Moscow’s geopolitical position that could not go unanswered. So, the instruments of Soviet statecraft were applied to a propagandistic campaign to brand Israel an enemy of proletarian civilization. The author Izabella Tabarovsky was not shocked by the objectively shocking displays of violent antisemitic animus that erupted across the country after the worst one-day massacre of Jews since 1945. She had seen it all before.

 

“With antisemitic conspiracy theory firmly part of KGB’s thinking, the agency’s head, Yuri Andropov, elevated Zionism to the rank of USSR’s primary ideological nemesis,” Tabarovsky wrote. In Soviet publications and communiqués, Israel was portrayed as a mesmeric force—both an instrument of international socialism’s enemies in the West and, somehow, also a puppeteer hypnotizing Westerners into doing Israel’s bidding.

 

In Soviet academe, such as it was, “Zionology” became the subject of study. Zionism was declared a “world threat” typified by “militant chauvinism, racism,” and “anti-communism,” Soviet researchers maintained. It was an “anti-human reactionary” movement, an exporter of the evils of “colonialism and neo-colonialism.” The KGB took its new mandate and ran with it. Soviet spy residencies were instructed to collect information on “the plans, forms and methods of Zionist subversion” and work to “weaken and divide the Zionist movement.”

 

Tabarovsky continues,

 

Obsessed with the supposedly omnipotent Zionist lobby, the KGB sought to discredit it by forging racist letters in the name of Meir Kahane’s Jewish Defense League and sending them to Black American leaders and heads of Arab missions in New York. Believing that “virtually no major negative incidents” happened in the socialist bloc without Zionist involvement, the KGB blamed Poland’s Solidarity movement on the few Jews within its ranks. At the U.N., it helped engineer the passage of the “Zionism is racism” resolution.

 

“They cast Israel as a white imperial outpost in the brown global south,” Tabarovsky observed. “It was a lie, but it worked.” The degree to which the multigenerational grievances that animate Israel’s critics owe their origins to Soviet innovation is astonishing. Moscow’s assets concocted lies about Israelis forcibly sterilizing Arab women, engineering famines to starve Palestinian populations, and even planning to destroy Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa Mosque in advance of Israel’s reconstruction of Solomon’s Temple. Soviet media harped endlessly about Israel’s “criminal plan of liquidating the Palestinian people” and circulated false narratives surrounding the Israeli Defense Forces’ deliberate slaughter of women and children.

 

All those Soviet narratives — Israel the genocidaire, the neo-colonialist project that uses famine and rape as weapons of war — have been with us for a half century, and they’re with us still. Mamdani himself cannot help but accuse Israel of an “ongoing genocide” even today, a year after combat operations in Gaza ceased, with Hamas in control of 40 percent of the Gaza Strip and where a supposed famine has been replaced by an outbreak of childhood obesity and the population increased last year by a rate that rivals almost every other country on earth.

 

The cause exists independent of the facts that supposedly support it. That’s because the cause is much broader than Israel. Its activists are devoted to bringing down the West, including those who would work within its structures to seek incremental change — even radicals like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders, and, yes, Zohran Mamdani.

 

The mayor knows this. Until very recently, at least, he was a fellow-traveler. So, perhaps, behind the stony expression he maintained throughout his heckling, Mamdani repressed a sly smile. These are his people, after all, and they’re doing the work.

The War at Home, Three Years After October 7

By Shabbos Kestenbaum

Wednesday, October 07, 2026

 

On the third anniversary of the October 7 attacks in Israel, perpetrated by Hamas, it would be easy to think that the conflict has passed and that Jewish life, both in Israel and America, is returning to its pre-war state of calm and normality. The news coming out of Gaza has slowed considerably as tensions have eased since the release of the hostages held by Hamas. Yet the memory of October 7 has lingered, opening a fissure that appears increasingly impossible to close.

 

On September 24, Hasan Piker, a Twitch streamer with 3.1 million followers, spoke at Cornell University’s Sage Chapel, where he was hosted by Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), Jewish Voice for Peace, and the Young Democratic Socialists. Six days later, he was invited to the University of Texas at Austin by the school’s University Democrats. More than 2,500 students signed up for the event.

 

It’s clear to those of us who are paying attention: These are radical activists who have chosen the DSA over the USA.

 

In April, Piker said, “I would vote for Hamas over Israel every single time.” He has “no issue” with Hezbollah, and in August, he warned that if American Jews keep identifying with Israel, “eventually someone’s going to come around and take action, not against the state of Israel, mind you, but against American Jews.” One week before he took the stage in Ithaca, he told Axios that the United States is worse than al-Qaeda “pound for pound as far as the number of deaths.” Two of America’s most prestigious universities gave him a stage, a microphone, and a line out the door.

 

For two years, university presidents insisted that the hostility toward Israel on their campuses was about Gaza. But with the war in Gaza paused and the Israeli hostages returned, the hottest ticket on campus this fall was a man who calls Hamas the lesser evil. Three years after October 7, the war is not over — not in the Middle East, and not on American campuses, where protesters’ tents are gone but the ideology behind them has moved into chapels and lecture halls, with the blessing of universities.

 

In 2025, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) counted 6,274 antisemitic incidents in the United States, the third-highest total in its history, including a record 32 assaults with deadly weapons and three homicides. The Gaza cease-fire was declared that fall, but antisemitism in America continued unabated.

 

During the 2023–24 academic year, anti-Israel encampments were established on more than 160 campuses. Last year, only around a dozen remained because the anti-Israel movement shifted from tent encampments to other forms of activism, which the ADL describes as “internal pressure and disciplinary evasion.”

 

Suspended SJP chapters at universities such as Tufts and George Washington simply disaffiliated from their schools and kept organizing independently. The University of Michigan student government attempted to freeze funding for every campus club unless the university divested from Israel. In 2024, activists vandalized the home of a Michigan regent three times. The next year, activists defaced the homes of four Wisconsin regents over one July weekend. Weeks later, National SJP published a manifesto branding university trustees the “Board of Butchers” and the university system “a keystone of empire” to be dismantled.

 

The targeting has extended beyond “Zionist” figures and organizations to purely religious institutions. Between October 2023 and October 2025, Jewish campus organizations, including Hillel and Chabad, were targeted in nearly 200 incidents of harassment and vandalism. An ADL survey found that, during the same period, more than half of Jewish faculty saw shadow boycotts on their campuses, and a majority of those respondents said that departments avoided co-sponsoring events with Jewish or pro-Israel groups. Nearly three-quarters of all respondents, meanwhile, had witnessed anti-Jewish activity from fellow faculty, staff, or administrators.

 

Recently, Columbia student Noah Lederman, who was shoved against a wall in 2024 for wearing an Israeli flag shirt, aptly summarized the state of campuses today when he told Jewish Insider: “Campus is not better, it’s just different.”

 

For years, university administrators told American Jewish students and parents that the hostility they faced was a regrettable byproduct of a faraway war and that it would recede when the fighting did. The fighting in Gaza has receded. But American Jewish students returned to campus this semester to find the same student senates, the same faculty, and the same whispered exclusions.

 

Cornell gave Hasan Piker a chapel, and UT Austin gave him a crowd, but neither school has ever given its Jewish students an honest answer about why a man who believes America deserved 9/11 should be given either. It’s been three years since October 7, and we will no longer wait for one. We know what the war on campus is, we know who is fighting it, and we know that it will not end simply because the shooting in Gaza did.