Australia/Israel Review: Sep-Nov 2025

OF FAMINE, FACTS AND FRAUD

ISRAEL’S SEPTEMBER OF SUSPENSE – DOMESTIC TENSIONS AND A NEW GAZA CAMPAIGN

WE NOW KNOW – THE IRANIAN NUCLEAR FILE IN THE WAKE OF THE ISRAELI AND US STRIKES IN JUNE

ANTISEMITISM – WHAT EVERYONE SHOULD UNDERSTAND

WITH COMPLIMENTS

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EDITOR’S NOTE

HVolume 50 | No. 7 SEPTEMBER-NOVEMBER 2025

ere it is at last! After months of hard work, we are very proud to bring you the very first edition of the completely revamped Australia/Israel Review – bringing its more than 50-year history into a new era.

We particularly hope you will enjoy the new features our new completely digital format allows us to bring you, including:

• An elegant and spacious new layout, designed to be both aesthetically striking and easy to read.

• Embedded multimedia and videos.

• Colourful new graphics and illustrations to better illuminate our written content.

• Original articles from top-notch authors, all of which have never been published before anywhere.

There is so much we are proud of in this edition – must-reads, elegant expositions, and heartfelt reflections – but we particularly recommend:

• Top Washington expert Andrea Stricker on what we now know about the outcome of the Israeli and US strikes on Iran’s nuclear program in June, and where this leaves policymakers trying to stop Iran from building nuclear bombs.

• Former intelligence officer Sarit Zehavi on the significance of a UN Security Council decision to, eventually, shut down UNIFIL, the almost 50-year-old peacekeeping force in Lebanon.

• Dr Gerald Steinberg’s exploration of how NGOs and the UN network have been systematically weaponising the language and principles of human rights and international law to demonise Israel.

• The completely new “Washington Heights” column from our new US correspondent, top American policy expert and scholar Danielle Pletka.

• Our exclusive extract from long-serving and widely respected American Jewish leader David Harris’ forthcoming book, Antisemitism: What Everyone Needs to Know®

• An exclusive interview in which current top American Jewish leader Ted Deutch canvasses the current state of the Jewish world.

• Alana Schetzer’s breakdown of exactly what’s wrong with claims from the IPC, a key UN agency, that Gaza City is now in famine.

• Israel correspondent Ilan Evyatar’s look at the current turbulent situation in Israel, as IDF preparations continue for a major operation in Gaza City, even as several domestic controversies are causing turmoil and uncertainty. Your feedback about this complete revamp of the AIR – what you liked and didn’t like, appreciate or miss – would help us a great deal. Please be in touch at editorial@ aijac.org.au.

Tzvi Fleischer

ON THE COVER

Palestinians receive meals from the charity kitchen in Khan Yunis, southern Gaza Strip, on August 21, 2025 (Image: Anas Mohammed/ Shutterstock)

PUBLISHED BY THE AUSTRALIA/ISRAEL & JEWISH AFFAIRS COUNCIL (AIJAC)

EDITORIAL CHAIRMAN

DR COLIN RUBENSTEIN AM

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

DR TZVI FLEISCHER

STAFF WRITERS

JAMIE HYAMS OAM, ALLON LEE, OVED

LOBEL, JUSTIN AMLER, GALIT JONES, ALANA SCHETZER, BREN CARLILL

PUBLISHING MANAGER

MICHAEL SHANNON

CORRESPONDENTS

ISRAEL: ILAN EVYATAR

NEW ZEALAND: MIRIAM BELL

EUROPE: ALEX BENJAMIN

UNITED STATES: DANIELLE PLETKA

NATIONAL EDITORIAL BOARD

KEITH BEVILLE, RABBI RALPH GENENDE

OAM, GARY HERZ, MIRIAM LASKY, STEVE

LIEBLICH, RABBI DR JOHN LEVI AC, HON HOWARD NATHAN AM KC

NATIONAL CHAIRMAN MARK LEIBLER AC

NSW CHAIRMAN PAUL RUBENSTEIN

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR

DR COLIN RUBENSTEIN AM

DIRECTOR OF POLICY AND RESEARCH

DR TZVI FLEISCHER

EXECUTIVE MANAGER

JOEL BURNIE

DIRECTOR OF PUBLIC AFFAIRS

JAMIE HYAMS OAM

DIRECTOR OF SPECIAL PROJECTS

DR BREN CARLILL

SENIOR POLICY ANALYST

ALLON LEE

POLICY ANALYSTS

OVED LOBEL, JUSTIN AMLER, ALANA SCHETZER, GALIT JONES

DIGITAL MEDIA PRODUCER AREK DYBEL

DIGITAL MEDIA EDITOR REBECCA DAVIS

RESEARCH ASSOCIATE DR RAN PORAT

INTERFAITH AND COMMUNITY LIAISON

RABBI RALPH GENENDE OAM

EVENTS COORDINATOR HELEN BRUSTMAN OAM

ADMINISTRATION

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ISSN NO. 1442-3693

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

FROM THE EDITORIAL CHAIRMAN

COLIN RUBENSTEIN

SCRIBBLINGS

TZVI FLEISCHER

SEPTEMBER OF SUSPENSE ILAN EVYATAR

AFTER THE STRIKES ANDREA STRICKER

HOW HUMAN RIGHTS ARE WEAPONISED AGAINST ISRAEL GERALD STEINBERG

OF FAMINE, FACTS AND FRAUD ALANA SCHETZER

UNIFIL'S END

SARIT ZAHAVI

REMNANT OF RESISTANCE

OVED LOBEL

AUSTRALIA'S EXTREMISTS IN FULL FLIGHT

RAN PORAT

INTERVIEW: "SPEAKING WITH CLARITY"

AIJAC STAFF

BIBLIO FILE: WAS ISRAEL AN IMPERIALIST CREATION?

PAUL MONK

BIBLIO FILE: STONY GROUND ALLON LEE

CINEFILE: TERROR AFTER TERROR

JAMIE HYAMS

ESSAY: ANTISEMITISM – WHAT EVERYONE NEEDS TO KNOW

DAVID HARRIS

ASIA WATCH

MICHAEL SHANNON

EUROPA EUROPA

ALEX BENJAMIN

WASHINGTON HEIGHTS

DANIELLE PLETKA

AIR NEW ZEALAND

MIRIAM BELL

MEDIA MATTERS

ALLON LEE

KEEPING FAITH

RABBI RALPH GENENDE

DATA THAT MATTERS

FROM THE EDITORIAL CHAIRMAN

THE IMPLICATIONS OF IRANIAN ATTACKS UPON AUSTRALIA

COLIN RUBENSTEIN

PDR COLIN RUBENSTEIN is the Executive Director of the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council

rime Minister Anthony Albanese’s announcement on August 26 that the Iranian Ambassador in Canberra would be expelled and Labor would legislate to proscribe Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) should be a watershed in Australia’s foreign policy. The move came as a result of the regime’s involvement in at least two, and likely more, criminal antisemitic attacks on our soil.

Various Australian governments and many pundits have long maintained that the Middle East is of peripheral concern to Australia, and distant rogue actors like Iran are not something about which we need to worry. Our focus, they argued, should be almost solely on our own region. But ignoring the dangerous, destabilising and illegal behaviour of the Iranian regime did not make it go away. Instead, it has now been confirmed that Iran was covertly organising and funding violent attacks in Australia – something as close to an act of war as anything Australia has witnessed in decades.

For years, AIJAC has documented how Australia has substantially lagged behind allies and partners in terms of both statements and sanctions against the Iranian regime relating to all of its malign activities – including not only its horrendous domestic oppression, global

terrorism, regional destabilisation, illegal nuclear weapons efforts, and substantial material support for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but also hostage-taking and intimidation of antiregime Iranians in Australia. So the Government’s decisions following the confirmation by ASIO of Iran’s direct involvement in two of the worst violent antisemitic attacks in Australian history – the firebombings of the Adass Israel Synagogue and Lewis’ Continental Kitchen –are very welcome, but also overdue.

It is clear that ASIO’s findings caught the Government by surprise – but they shouldn’t have.

There were multiple reports that Iranians and anti-regime Australians, including former Iranian hostage Kylie Moore-Gilbert, were being spied on and intimidated over the past few years.

Since 2022, reports have emerged from across Europe that Iran was contracting out antisemitic attacks and the monitoring of potential local Jewish targets to organised crime, something publicly announced by intelligence officials in the UK in early 2023 and again in the UK and Sweden in 2024.

The Government acted quickly and effectively in the wake of ASIO confirming Iran’s orchestration of attacks on our soil. Now, it should also assess the implications of those attacks on other aspects of our foreign policy – especially its misconceived, premature recognition of “Palestine”.

On July 31 this year, Albania, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Czechia, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, the UK and the US released a joint statement condemning Iran for “increasingly collaborating with international criminal organisations to target” Jewish citizens, journalists, dissidents and former officials in their countries.

AIJAC warned of this Iranian threat on March 1, 2023:

Any potential overlap between organised crime in Australia, particularly Middle Eastern criminal networks, and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and Intelligence Ministry (MOIS), could prove to be extremely dangerous for Australians. This is especially true given the evidence that the IRGC’s Lebanese front, Hezbollah – itself a transnational organised crime syndicate – is intimately intertwined with Middle Eastern organised crime networks here.

And it must be remembered that the Iranian regime, which is foundationally antisemitic and believes for theological reasons that it is locked in an existential war with Jews, makes no distinction between Jewish and Israeli targets. It has relentlessly pursued targets like local synagogues and community institutions for decades – the most infamous example being the AMIA bombing in Argentina in 1994, which took 85 lives, and injured hundreds.

But if the Government deserves credit for its breakthrough action on Iran, far less welcome is its announcement that it will join the UK, Canada, France and others in recognising

a currently non-existent Palestinian state at the upcoming UN General Assembly. This is a completely counterproductive move that actually rewards Hamas terrorism and extremism, makes Palestinian Authority reform less likely, and abandons any ability to influence the Israeli Government we might have previously possessed – thus making the two-state resolution the Government seeks much less likely.

Given the announcements that have already been made, the Government almost certainly won’t reconsider its foolish and unhelpful decision to recognise “Palestine” – but in a world where politics did not have such a powerful role in decision making, the revelation of the targeting of both Australians and of Australian social cohesion by Iran should certainly cause a rethink.

We are now effectively in the same boat as Israel, which has been targeted by Iran for decades on a vastly greater scale.

While the timing of the October 7 attack was apparently decided by Hamas alone, it is nonetheless the case that this was the culmination of Iran’s plan to destroy Israel via a multi-front war waged by its “axis of resistance”, including Hamas, Hezbollah and others, termed the “ring of fire”. That horrific attack, let alone subsequent Iranian violence, should have seen the listing of the IRGC as a terrorist organisation. It also should have led to Labor becoming more aware of how its obsessive focus on recognising a Palestinian state – supposedly as “a way of building momentum towards a two-state solution” – was unrealistic for at least the time being, and how its statements and actions might disrupt attempts to force Hamas to capitulate, damage US-led mediation efforts in Gaza, or encourage domestic antisemitism here.

WATCH: Australia’s Recognition of a Palestinian State: Optics Over Outcomes – Rebecca Davis

Instead, we saw recognition pushed through, initially with conditions, but ultimately with none that have any actual substance. And predictably, Hamas welcomed this move, and presented it, along with the recognition from other states, as an achievement of the October 7 atrocities.

There is still time to at least clarify that recognition would only come into effect after all hostages are released and Hamas no longer controls Gaza, as Belgium recently suggested. Recognition could also at least be used as a conditional carrot to encourage PA reforms and genuine deradicalisation in Palestinian society.

However, the current effectively unconditional promise of recognition not only rewards Hamas, October 7 and decades of Palestinian rejectionism and terrorism, but is also farcically predicated on extremely dubious or downright impossible Palestinian Authority (PA) verbal commitments. Should there not at least be some evidence of implementation of those commitments prior to recognition?

The Government acted quickly and effectively in the wake of ASIO confirming Iran’s orchestration of attacks on our soil. Now, it should also assess the implications of those attacks on other aspects of our foreign policy – especially its misconceived, premature recognition of “Palestine”.

TARGETING HAMAS’ HAVEN IN QATAR

It was not surprising that Israel launched a precision strike targeting the most senior Hamas leadership in their haven in Doha, Qatar on Sept. 9 – even if it unfortunately did not succeed in killing them. These individuals were directly responsible for the brutal October 7 massacre, and have been orchestrating and managing the war against the State of Israel, replete with numerous war crimes, ever since – including vicious terrorist attacks like the one that occurred in Jerusalem on Monday, September 8.

Moreover, these Hamas leaders, who have made millions of dollars off Palestinian suffering and live a life of utter luxury in Doha, could end the war today if they would agree to Hamas laying down its arms and releasing the hostages, ending the suffering of both Palestinians and Israelis alike.

It should also be remembered that Qatar itself is far from an innocent bystander or neutral ‘mediator’. It is one of Hamas’ most important allies, hosting its leadership in lavish style, supplying the terror groups with funds, and employing the state-funded and controlled Al Jazeera media network as something akin to Hamas’ propaganda arm. The Qatari Government also spends billions spreading Islamist extremism and antisemitism around the world.

So while Qatar, as such, was not the target of this attack, it is to some extent reaping what it sowed, and it is hard to have much sympathy with its complaints about Israeli violation of its sovereignty.

SCRIBBLINGS

TZVI FLEISCHER

THE UN’S “500 TRUCKS” – A LIE THAT WON’T DIE

Throughout the war in Gaza, you would often have seen it reported that UN experts or aid agencies say that Gaza needs 500 or even 600 trucks of aid a day to meet the needs of the population. For instance, an unattributed Canberra Times story on September 1 said, “The United Nations and partners have said the pauses, airdrops and other recent measures fell far short of the 600 trucks of aid needed daily in Gaza.” Wire service stories repeat this claim regularly. For instance, Reuters made it on July 29, 2025, Aug. 4 and Aug. 5.

These numbers seem to mainly have originated in reports from the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). In February this year, an OCHA briefing said 500 trucks a day were needed to meet “people’s basic needs”. Other OCHA documents talk about a target of 600 trucks per day.

But any claim that Gazans need 500 to 600 truckloads of aid per day to meet their basic needs is obviously absurd if you look at the history of trucks entering Gaza before October 7, 2023.

The UN claims that prior to the outbreak of the war, 500 trucks a day crossed into Gaza, 150 of which were loaded with food. This is just wrong.

A recent study by four scholars from the BESA Centre at Bar-Ilan University has demonstrated this by going through OCHA’s own data on goods trucks entering Gaza. These show that, in 2022, only an average of 292 trucks entered Gaza per calendar day. Moreover, half of those were loaded with construction materials (which Gazans currently have little use for.) Of those 292, an average of just 73 carried food.

Food entering Gaza was actually more than enough most months to meet basic needs, even though levels almost never met the UN’s arbitrary and ahistorical target of 500 trucks a day (Image: Shutterstock/ Anas Mohammed)

The widely reproduced “500 trucks” error seems to have occurred mainly because UN agencies used the average number of trucks that were entering per working day, not calendar day, in its calculation of how many trucks Gaza needs daily.

While it is true that Gaza grew some produce and meat before the war, this probably accounted for no more than 12% of calories consumed, according to the BESA study.

BESA concludes that you would need no more than 86 food trucks daily to provide a food supply equal to the prewar situation – nothing like 500. And this was exceeded in almost every month of the war (barring the March through May pause earlier this year).

And you don’t have to accept the BESA academics’ estimate to know that enough was getting in. Looking at people’s needs, and not phony claims about pre-war trucks, the World Food Program (WFP) has estimated that Gaza’s population of 2.1 million needs a minimum of 62,000 metric tons of food aid per month. And from March through December 2024, 788,216 tons of food aid entered Gaza – an average of 78,821 tons per month, more than 25% above the WFP’s stated threshold.

Furthermore, during the ceasefire in January and February of this year, 380,223 tons entered in six

weeks – enough to provide five months’ worth of food according to the WFP’s numbers.

Taking advantage of this glut, Israel subsequently paused aid from early March to mid-May because Hamas was stealing vast amounts and using it to retain power, but since then aid has again peaked. No less than 123,000 tons of food was delivered to Gaza in August – double what the WFP says Gaza needs, causing food prices to plummet there.

But that excess required the entry of an average of around 199 food trucks per day (out of an average of 216 aid trucks of all kinds daily) throughout August – nothing like the 500 to 600 trucks per day we keep hearing about from supposed aid experts. (For detailed data on Gaza’s food needs and how much actually entered Gaza, see p. 100)

PAY-FOR-SLAY LIVES ON

You may have heard that the Palestinian Authority (PA) announced in February that its controversial “pay-for-slay” policy – which provides large pensions for Palestinians imprisoned for terrorist attacks, or to their families if they were killed in the attacks – was being terminated. You may have also heard the French Government claim that, in exchange for Palestine recognition, the PA wound up “pay-for-slay” on Aug. 1.

But neither claim appears to be true. Despite recent PA claims the system has replaced with one based on welfare needs, a variety of Palestinian sources put out announcements that these payments were once again available to recipients through the Palestine Postal Bank in early August.

Radio Al-Zaytouna’s Telegram channel announced on Aug. 3:

“Transfer of salaries for prisoners and families of Martyrs and the wounded via the ATMs of the Palestinian Postal Bank – today, Sunday 3/8/2025.”

Two other Palestinian Telegram channels made very similar announcements on Aug. 5 (Source: Pal-

estinian Media Watch).

This is yet another example out of myriads where a promise of Palestinian Authority “reform” was meaningless. Yet governments like France’s and Australia’s think they have achieved something when they succeed in getting 89-year-old PA President Mahmoud Abbas to give them verbal assurances that he will soon introduce reforms.

THE “MODERATES”

Meanwhile, how did the “moderate” Palestinian Authority react to the terrorist attack in Jerusalem on Sept. 8, in which two Palestinian gunmen opened fire on a crowded bus, killing six civilians and injuring at least 21 others?

Officially, Mahmoud Abbas released a statement saying the PA “emphasised its opposition and condemnation of attacking civilians, whether Palestinian or Israeli.”

However, Fatah, the political party that Abbas heads and that controls the PA, had a very different take. On its official feed on X, it said, “The Fatah Movement offers congratulations for the heroic operation [carried out] this morning.” The same feed later posted pictures of the bodies of murdered Israelis with the caption, “A very good morning.” [Source: MEMRI]

Meanwhile, official PA-TV, on Aug. 22, broadcast a sermon from PA religious judge Abdallah Harb calling on Allah to “destroy our enemies…O Allah. Allah, count them one by one, kill them one by one, and do not leave even one.” In a similar PA-TV sermon in June, Harb had been very explicit who these “enemies” he wanted completely wiped out are, saying, “Strike the thieving Jews, Allah count them one by one, kill them one by one, and do not leave even one.” [Source: PMW]

Just a reminder that, while Hamas is a huge obstacle to peace, it is folly imagining the PA as currently constituted can be the solution.

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A SEPTEMBER OF SUSPENSE

Gaza battle plans, a draft reckoning and a UN recognition push converge on a restless Israeli home front

Israelis in Haifa with various signs and flags take part in a protest rally calling for end the war, completion of the hostage deal and new elections (Image: Shutterstock)

ILAN EVYATAR

Israelis entered the new school year on September 1 in a state of limbo, with all eyes fixed on Gaza. The Netanyahu Government is threatening to launch a full-scale invasion of Gaza City and its environs in the days ahead amid open disagreements with the IDF command over the right course to free the hostages and bring an end to Hamas rule. Meanwhile, at home, the crisis over the Haredi draft festers alongside persistent talk of either a realignment of the governing coalition or even early elections. And abroad, Israel finds itself increasingly isolated as several Western governments prepare to recognise a Palestinian state at the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) later this month.

On the Gazan front, the Government has pressed forward with plans for a ground takeover of Gaza City and its surrounding districts even as the debate over strategy has spilled out of the cabinet room in leaks to Israeli media.

The IDF, which has increased the amount of territory in the Strip under its control to more than 75% following the completion of Operation Gideon’s Chariots launched in May, argues that those gains created the best conditions yet for a hostage deal and that the army can, if necessary, return to combat after any pause. Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, however, insists that a partial arrangement would squander finite diplomatic credit and force a costly withdrawal from recently seized terrain.

That tension framed a stormy overnight meeting in Tel Aviv on Aug. 31 where IDF Chief-of-Staff Eyal Zamir insisted on raising the phased hostageceasefire proposal even though it was not on the meeting’s agenda, setting out its advantages and the IDF’s ability to resume combat should negotiations fail. Several ministers, including Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar, signalled support for Zamir’s position, citing an approaching diplomatic “tsunami”

and the prospect of further countries recognising Palestinian statehood at the UNGA.

The counter-case came from the right flank of the coalition. National Security Minister Itamar BenGvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich urged a vote to formally reject the proposal and pressed instead for unrelenting military pressure, arguing that a pause would erode momentum and invite international restrictions. They were joined by voices, including that of the Prime Minister, warning that a 60-day ceasefire would, in practice, set the army back many months as it would have to regain any ground ceded during a truce. Versions of the phased deal at issue – ten living hostages out of 20 still believed to be alive, and the return of 18 bodies in exchange for a 60-day ceasefire, the release of hundreds of Palestinian prisoners and roughly 1,000 Gazan detainees, a partial IDF withdrawal and negotiations toward a permanent end to the war – have circulated for weeks. However, Hamas signalled its acceptance of an Arab proposal along these lines only on Aug. 18 – after Jerusalem had shifted to demanding a permanent, final deal involving the release of all remaining hostages.

Netanyahu refused to bring the matter to a vote and restated his opposition to any partial deal, a stance bolstered – according to participants – by private urgings he has received from Washington to avoid interim arrangements and “finish” the fight.

Zamir warned the ministers that a takeover of Gaza City and the central Gaza refugee camps would mean that Israel assumes de facto responsibility for governance, whatever formal language the Cabinet prefers to use. The exchange turned pointed at times with far-right minister Orit Struck calling the Chief-of-Staff soft-hearted and Zamir replying that if the Government wanted “blind discipline” he was the wrong man for the job.

While no vote took place on Aug. 31, the Cabinet had already approved the plan, labelled “Gideon’s Chariots II”, to take over Gaza City on Aug. 8, and the IDF is continuing its preparations ahead of the launch of this major operation, despite Zamir’s apparent scepticism.

In late August, the army set out in detail what a full takeover of Gaza City would likely entail: a drawn-out campaign under Southern Command stretching well into 2026, involving at its peak some 130,000 reservists alongside five standing divisions. Mobilisation orders have already begun to go out, with the call-ups staged in three waves in September, in November, and again next March, so that forces can be rotated and combat units kept fresh. The design is for 12 brigade task forces, supported by the two Gaza territorial brigades, to advance in phases – first air strikes and evacuations of Gaza civilians to humanitarian zones, then encirclement, and finally a manoeuvre to take control of Gaza City and the camps.

Facing them, the army estimates, are two Hamas brigades still intact in Gaza City and the central

Israeli PM Netanyahu (centre) with Defence Minister Israel Katz and IDF Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir: Israeli media reports suggest disagreements about the details and risks of the planned Gaza City campaign (Image: GPO/ Flickr)

camps, backed by a network of strategic tunnels that still remains to be neutralised.

Yet alongside the military preparations, public sentiment is moving in a different direction, with growing calls to prioritise a hostage deal over an open-ended campaign.

Polls published in the Israeli press consistently show that a majority of Israelis are against a continuation of the fighting and would rather see a hostage deal and an end to the war. Thousands of high-schoolers marked the first day of school – which also marked 696 days of war –with a strike calling for a deal to secure the release of the hostages. Mass protests have been held since the G overnment decided not to sign off on the terms of the hostage deal that Hamas accepted. On Aug . 26, protestors held a “ Day of Disruption” , blocking roads across the country

and holding demonstrations outside ministers’ homes.

Meanwhile, as the IDF readies to enter Gaza City, the never-ending draft crisis is threatening to explode as tens of thousands of ultraOrthodox Israelis prepare for the traditional annual pilgrimage over Rosh Hashanah (Jewish New Year, which begins on the evening of Sept. 22 this year) to Uman in Ukraine, which houses the tomb of Rebbe Nachman of Breslov. Meanwhile, the Attorney-General’s office has issued an opinion that the Government cannot order immigration authorities not to enforce the law against draft dodgers who attempt to leave the country.

Arrests of Haredi draft-dodgers attempting to leave for the Uman pilgrimage could threaten the stability of the governing coalition just as Israel

launches Gideon’s Chariots II. Amid the IDF’s manpower shortage and reports that the army has been forced to cut training times for reservists, new Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee chair MK Boaz Bismuth – who replaced Yuli Edelstein in this role after the latter refused to bow down to Haredi demands regarding this bill – has been attempting to advance temporary emergency regulations to stave off a crisis.

Under Bismuth’s proposal, the Government would enact a one-year “state of emergency” order that allows the army to recruit Haredi soldiers according to operational needs without waiting for a full Knesset law. At the same time, enforcement measures imposed by Attorney-General Gali Baharav-Miara, such as the arrest of draft evaders and the freezing of state budgets for yeshivot (Jewish seminary schools), will be suspended. In the back-

ground, a constitutional crisis is brewing surrounding the Government’s move to fire the Attorney-General, that was basically disallowed by the Supreme Court in early September. But the Government, and especially Justice Minister Yariv Levin, remain defiant, insisting that the dismissal stands.

According to Bismuth, the framework is designed to provide immediate manpower while avoiding a coalition crisis. Ultra-Orthodox representatives have signalled they may accept higher enlistment numbers in principle under such an arrangement, though no specific targets have been set and the regulations would not include sanctions for noncompliance. Others, however, have criticised the move as a “trial balloon” with little chance of legal or political success, asking what would follow once the one-year period ends.

The gap between commitments and requirements remains significant. In 2024, only 2,940 Haredim were drafted. This is an increase compared to previous years, but still below the Government’s stated target of 4,800 and far short of the army’s operational need, which manpower officials put at more than 10,000.

On the diplomatic front, Israel faces mounting pressure ahead of the annual United Nations General Assembly, where a growing number of

countries are preparing to recognise a Palestinian state. French President Emmanuel Macron announced in late July that France would move ahead with recognition, describing it as consistent with his country’s historic commitment to Middle East peace. His statement, however, included no concrete conditions beyond a vague reference to Hamas demilitarisation. Israel has objected that the French move, expected to be formalised in New York, rewards terrorism by granting legitimacy without addressing Hamas’ continued rule in Gaza.

France’s step has been followed by similar announcements from the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia. While several European states, including Slovenia, Ireland, Norway, Belgium and Spain, have already recognised Palestine since the war began, France and Britain stand out because of their weight as permanent members of the Security Council and leading G7 economies. In Israel’s view, such decisions undercut the prospects of a negotiated settlement and diminish Western leverage by giving the Palestinians international standing without requiring any commitment to peace, changes in policy or leadership, or any attempt to address rampant corruption and incitement.

The UK has signalled that recognition will proceed in September, as a UN conference about this topic is scheduled for Sept. 22, unless Israel accepts a ceasefire in Gaza, halts annexation measures in the West Bank and reaffirms support for a two-state solution. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has said Hamas must release hostages and take no part in Gaza’s future government, but stopped short of setting these as binding preconditions. Israel argues that extending recognition while Hamas remains entrenched would allow the group to claim a political victory, which it will attribute to the October 7 attacks.

Angry ultra-Orthodox men denounce any conscription of yeshiva students (Image: Shutterstock)

Canada and Australia said that their recognition is tied to conditions such as democratic reform, demilitarisation and the exclusion of Hamas from governance, but Australian PM Anthony Albanese later indicated that recognition would go ahead based solely on verbal assurances on these issues given by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.

Jerusalem’s concern is that unilateral recognition shifts the incentive structure: rather than encouraging compromise, it signals that violence and rejectionism yield diplomatic dividends. Officials warn that recognition in the absence of actual Palestinian reforms risks strengthening Hamas’ hand just as Israel intensifies military operations in Gaza.

At the same late-night Aug. 31 Cabinet session where ministers clashed over Gaza, the question of annexation also surfaced. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, backed by several colleagues, urged that Israel respond to the expected wave of international recognition of a Palestinian state by applying sovereignty to parts of the West Bank. He argued that any step must be “significant and not merely symbolic,” pressing Netanyahu to make a commitment before the General Assembly convenes later this month.

Jerusalem’s concern is that unilateral recognition shifts the incentive structure: rather than encouraging compromise, it signals that violence and rejectionism yield diplomatic dividends

Officials said the option under discussion would be limited in scope, focusing on specific areas rather than the entire territory. Netanyahu has not taken a final position, though participants noted that the idea is being seriously weighed. American officials have told their Israeli counterparts that the decision ultimately rests with Jerusalem. While Washington has not offered a green light, neither has it drawn a clear red line. “First decide what you want – then talk to us,” one source quoted US envoys as saying, according to the Jerusalem Post.

Diplomatic recognition does not alter facts on the ground, but it does carry symbolic and legal consequences. It could give the Palestinians wider access to international forums such as the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court, and feed campaigns for sanctions or boycotts. Israeli officials fear that, at a minimum, it narrows the country’s diplomatic room for manoeuvre at a time when the Government is already confronting protests at home, coalition instability, and the looming Gaza City campaign.

Recent visits by senior US figures, including House Speaker Mike Johnson and Ambassador Mike Huckabee, have reinforced the impression in Jerusalem that there may be no roadblock out of Washington, though officials acknowledge that any sovereignty move would carry significant diplomatic risks.

In the previous Trump Administration, Netanyahu clashed with the President over plans for annexation of areas of the West Bank shortly before the move was suspended to pave the way for normalisation with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain in the framework of the Abraham Accords.

The present convergence of war, diplomacy and coalition politics looks likely to make for an uncertain, and turbulent, New Year’s holiday for Israel and Israelis.

AFTER THE STRIKES

Preventing an Iranian nuclear resurgence

ANDREA STRICKER

ANDREA STRICKER is deputy director of the Nonproliferation and Biodefense Program and a research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Follow her on X @StrickerNonpro. FDD is a Washington, DC-based, nonpartisan research institute focused on national security and foreign policy.

Israeli and US strikes on Iran during the 12-Day War last June likely decimated Teheran’s capacity to make nuclear weapons for years to come. The two countries must use this time wisely to prevent an Iranian nuclear resurgence.

While Jerusalem and Washington delayed the regime’s nuclear threat, preventing Teheran from rebuilding its nuclear breakout capacity requires sustained action. First, the Israeli Mossad must maintain its penetration of Iran’s leadership and nuclear program to uncover and sabotage any reconstruction efforts. Second, the United States, Israel, and key partners must detect and halt Teheran’s efforts to acquire needed nuclear equipment, focusing on assistance from Russia, China, and North Korea. Third, Washington and Jerusalem must be prepared to conduct additional military strikes to destroy any rebuilt Iranian nuclear facilities and assets.

WHAT IS NEEDED FOR NUCLEAR WEAPONS?

The construction of nuclear weapons requires two primary steps: the development of specialised fuel and the fabrication of a bomb integrating the fuel, a process called weaponisation. Specialised facilities, equipment, information, and personnel facilitate these activities.

While an aspiring nuclear weapons state may also seek missiles capable of delivering nuclear weapons, a missile-delivery vehicle is not necessary to test an atomic bomb and establish nuclear-armed status. A state can transport nuclear weapons, for example, via truck, shipping container, or aircraft.

Despite international demands that it halt its nuclear activities, Iran was producing the necessary fuel – enriched uranium – for more than two decades. It possessed a uranium mine and mill, a conversion facility to transform uranium into gas form, and enrichment plants to increase the purity of the gas and separate out desired bomb-grade material. Iran was the only non-nuclear weapon state amassing highly enriched

uranium (HEU), or uranium enriched to 60% purity. Nuclear reactors for peaceful use typically run on uranium enriched below 20% purity. This left Iran a short step from 90% enriched nuclear weapons-grade material. As of May 2025, Iran had amassed enough enriched uranium overall to produce up to 22 nuclear weapons, with fuel for the first 11 bombs ready within a month – meaning it could make a small but formidable arsenal.

Teheran had also increased its work on weaponisation. It reactivated remnants of the regime’s prior effort to make nuclear weapons in the 1990s until 2003, known as the Amad Plan. In 2003, Teheran had downsized Amad after the international community detected its illicit nuclear program and facilities, compartmentalising remaining weaponisation activities at universities, research institutes, and military sites to allow incremental but sustained progress.

Israel opted to strike Iran in June because it detected Teheran undertaking new work at former Amad sites and elsewhere. Personnel were working on key weaponisation steps in preparation for the leadership’s final order to construct nuclear weapons. Israel claimed this effort was known only to a few senior Iranian officials, including the commander of Iran’s armed forces and a close adviser to Iran’s Supreme Leader. US President Donald Trump later claimed Iran was around two months from nuclear weapons.

In light of these developments, combined with Teheran’s growing missile, military, and terrorist threat and clear willingness to attack Israel as shown by its missile and drone barrages in April and October of 2024, Jerusalem could not tolerate the regime’s mounting proximity to nuclear weapons.

A satellite image made available by Maxar Technologies shows damage at the Isfahan nuclear technology centre after US airstrikes in Isfahan, Iran, 22 June 2025 (Image: AAP)

WHAT CAPABILITIES DID ISRAEL AND THE UNITED STATES ELIMINATE?

Starting on June 13, Israel dealt severe blows to Iran’s uranium fuel-making and weaponisation capabilities.

Israel destroyed several sites where Teheran manufactured and tested centrifuges, the machines that enrich uranium, the uranium conversion facility at Isfahan, and the above-ground enrichment site at Natanz. Israel also stymied Iran’s potential to operate two other enrichment facilities, the below-ground Natanz enrichment plant and the deeply buried Fordow site, as well as the regime’s access to HEU stockpiled in tunnels near Isfahan.

In addition, Israel largely eliminated the regime’s future route to plutonium – another means of fueling nuclear weapons – by destroying an inactive nuclear reactor at Arak and associated facilities, as well as reactor fuel-making capacities at Isfahan.

Yet Jerusalem did not stop there. It decimated Teheran’s weaponisation capabilities so that even if Iran recovers enriched uranium fuel, the regime is in no position to turn it into weapons.

Targeted sites included a specialised Isfahan lab where Iran could transform enriched uranium to metallic form for atomic bomb cores; sites and equipment relevant to research and production of explosives for the shell that triggers a nuclear weapon detonation; and likely a facility associated with producing the inner core of Iran’s nuclear weapon, known as a neutron initiator.

Israel also destroyed the headquarters of Iran’s nuclear weapons activities, known as SPND, and associated research institutes in Teheran – possibly eliminating essential nuclear weapons documentation.

Operation Narnia, a specialised operation at the start of the war, also saw the Mossad and its agents assassinate up to 20 Iranian nuclear scientists in

their homes. Most had experience in the Amad Plan and therefore specialised expertise in nuclear bomb-making. Scientists who survived and could replace those killed reportedly remain in hiding. Any Iranian scientist who dares work in the nuclear field now must fear assassination.

Israel’s remarkable military feats convinced US President Donald Trump to help finish off or restrict Iran’s access to key facilities. On June 22, surprise US bombing using massive ordnance penetrator bombs and Tomahawk missiles further disabled Iran’s access to HEU stockpiles in Isfahan tunnels, destroyed the underground enrichment plant at Natanz, and possibly damaged or rendered inaccessible – and thus inoperable – the Fordow plant. Another US strike on the Isfahan conversion plant ensured its annihilation.

While battle damage assessments remain underway – drawing on intelligence accumulated over subsequent months – Iran probably cannot make nuclear weapons for two years or more. Even if it can recover limited stockpiles of fuel, it likely lacks the ability to weaponise thanks to Israel’s strikes.

DETECTING AND PREVENTING A RESURGENCE

The Islamic Republic will likely attempt to rebuild its nuclear weapons program in the years ahead. The United States, Israel, and their allies and partners must prepare to thwart these attempts.

Israel’s operations against Iran’s weaponisation program in particular showed the extent of the Jewish state’s intelligence penetration of the regime’s nuclear activities. However, Teheran will undoubtedly institute draconian counterintelligence efforts to root out spies.

Israel must plan accordingly and ensure it has new recruits and agents who are well-protected

yet positioned to learn of resumed nuclear efforts. From there, the Mossad can employ its time-tested tactics of sabotage to stop Iran from activating facilities and equipment for fuel-making and weaponisation.

countries to sound alarms about covert help, and collaboration with the private sector, which is often the first to detect illicit procurement attempts and shipments.

To that end, the United States must work with

After the 12-Day War, Teheran is still recalibrating. Soon, it will be back to the business of rearming. Only removing the threat root-and-branch will stop Iran.

However, Teheran could speed its progress to atomic bombs by securing nuclear assistance from Russia, China, and North Korea. For around two decades, due to consistent Western pressure, Moscow and Beijing have hesitated to directly assist aspiring nuclear weapons states like Iran with facilities and technical help. Yet both have turned a blind eye to unofficial assistance, such as sales of dual-use nuclear equipment from domestic companies to outfit Teheran’s nuclear facilities. The Kremlin also looked the other way as Russian nuclear experts advised Iran on dual-use processes relevant to weaponisation.

North Korea, meanwhile, is content to provide direct proliferation assistance for monetary gain. In Syria, it aided the Assad regime in building an illicit nuclear reactor, which Israel bombed in 2007, and may have assisted Teheran with early weaponisation and missile integration needs.

Detecting and preventing both direct and unofficial assistance, as well as unwitting sales of needed equipment by supplier states, will be challenging. Doing so requires enhanced US, Israeli, and partner intelligence efforts, cooperation with other

its European 3 or “E3” partners, the United Kingdom, France, and Germany, to restore by the end of September suspended and lapsed UN sanctions on Iran’s nuclear program, which outlaw nuclear trade with the regime. The sanctions would also reinstate a UN Security Council demand that Teheran halt all uranium enrichment.

At the end of August, the E3 triggered a 30-day clock for the return of UN sanctions, yet the trio remain prepared to negotiate an extension. Washington and the E3 must reject empty Iranian overtures to delay sanctions reimposition and ensure their full reimplementation in September.

Should these efforts fail, Washington and Jerusalem must directly destroy new Iranian nuclear facilities and stop Teheran from sprinting to nuclear weapons. This requires a commitment from future US and Israeli leaders to carry out new strikes and refuse to tolerate resumed Iranian enrichment and weaponisation work.

After the 12-Day War, Teheran is still recalibrating. Soon, it will be back to the business of rearming. Only removing the threat root-and-branch will stop Iran from making nuclear weapons.

HOW HUMAN RIGHTS ARE WEAPONISED AGAINST ISRAEL

Decades of distortion by rich and powerful NGOs

GERALD STEINBERG

DR

GERALD M. STEINBERG is President and Founder of NGO Monitor, and Professor Emeritus of political studies at Bar-Ilan University.

Within hours of the Hamas atrocities of October 7, 2023, the leaders of major institutions claiming to promote the moral principles of human rights and international humanitarian law issued statements for major news platforms and posted texts on social media. The condemnations from these powerful non-governmental organisations (NGOs) were directed not at Hamas but Israel – already then, before the IDF response in Gaza began, with accusations of “war crimes”, and “apartheid”, and, for some, genocide and starvation. If Hamas slaughter and the Israeli victims were mentioned, these were cursory and designed as tokens.

In the months that followed, these accusations were amplified continuously in campaigns led by the NGO industry’s global powers – Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch (HRW), Oxfam, Doctors without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières – MSF), etc. and their UN-based allies – particularly the Human Rights Council’s “Special Rapporteur” on Palestine, Francesca Albanese. On every available platform, they repeated the demonisation that was promoted decades earlier in the UN and peaked with the 1975 “Zionism is racism” resolution led by the Soviet bloc and the Arab League. Following the end of the Cold War and the USSR’s subsequent dissolution, this legacy was revived in the UN- and NGO-led Durban conference, held in 2001 under the false premise of anti-racism. In this highly orchestrated venue, representatives of 1,500 NGOs adopted a plan of action that called for the complete international isolation of Israel as an apartheid and genocidal state.

The NGO and UN network was central during the following two de-

cades in systematically weaponising the language and principles of human rights and international law to demonise Israel. Amnesty, HRW, Oxfam, MSF and others that began as altruistic groups promoting human rights were taken over by radical ideological activists allied with Palestinian and Islamist movements supporting “armed struggle” and “resistance” (terror) – the “green” component of the red-green alliance. Israel was their central target, reflecting the “new antisemitism”, in which the nation-state of the Jewish people is painted as the prime example of Western colonialism. These were amplified by “intersectional solidarity” for those automatically designated as innocent victims – particularly Palestinians. Within this prism, for many human rights leaders and activists, the Jewish state is seen as intrinsically malevolent, regardless of policies.

Numerous smaller NGOs operating in different frameworks, including radical church organisations claiming agendas of peace and humanitarian aid, joined these campaigns. Immediately after the October 7 atrocities, university-based groups like Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) – with hundreds of branches, many under different names – and Palestinian Youth Movement orchestrated violent “protests” – tent encampments, boycotts, and systematic intimidation of Israeli and “Zionist” (meaning Jewish) faculty, organisations and guest speakers. Already on Oct. 9, 2023, more than 100 SJP branches held a web-based workshop to disseminate strategies for disruption and information warfare, based on a detailed toolkit that was prepared in advance. These groups chanted the same slogans, held the same signs and recycled the same talking points claiming to speak for human

rights and international law – while claiming to be a grassroots movement.

The malign influence of the vast NGO industry is highly visible in the litany of false accusations – including war crimes, starvation, and genocide – leveled at Israel. The statements and reports by the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) and the pronouncements of the International Criminal Court prosecutor Karim Khan – including the arrest warrants issued for Prime Minister Netanyahu and Defence Minister Gallant on the claim of starvation – directly reflect the NGO impact. This is also evident in the “genocide” case brought by South Africa before the International Court of Justice. The direct result of these systematic campaigns against the Jewish state has been clear: a massive increase in antisemitic attacks against Jews worldwide.

In addition, the NGO “halo-effect” – in which these organisations and their leaders are routinely described and lauded as “highly respected” politically-neutral experts – grants them tremendous power, amplifying the malign anti-Israel agenda across major media platforms. For example, in the numerous conflicts triggered by rocket and terror attacks from Gaza after the 2005 Israeli withdrawal, as well as in the 2006 Lebanon War, NGOs issued a continuous stream of publications condemning Israel, which were automatically embraced by journalists. Similarly, the repetition of non-factual claims and interpretations of international law by political figures and anti-Israel academics ignored numerous detailed analyses exposing the lack of NGO credibility.

This key role of journalists in promoting and am-

The NGO network’s outsized power and influence is facilitated by massive budgets. For example, the annual budget of Amnesty International exceeds €370 million (AU$661.5 million)

The NGO network’s outsized power and influence is facilitated by massive budgets. For example, the annual budget of Amnesty International exceeds €370 million (AU$661.5 million); HRW has US$100 million (AU$154 million), while Oxfam enjoys €1 billion (AU$1.79 billion) and MSF €2.4 billion (AU$4.29 billion). These organisations devote a highly disproportionate percentage of their staffing and funding to the demonisation of Israel, but in contrast to democratic political and business frameworks, NGOs are not subject to any form of independent oversight or checks and balances, and their governing boards are generally rubber stamps.

plifying the agendas of advocacy NGOs is reflected in all issues related to Israel. For example, in 2021, a New York Times headline declared: “Rights Group Hits Israel With Explosive Charge: Apartheid,” with this sub-headline: “Human Rights Watch is the latest watchdog to accuse Israel of perpetuating a version of the racist legal system that once governed South Africa. Israel says the charge is baseless” (April 27, 2021).

In parallel, the NGOs have a very large presence on social media, where the singling-out of Israel is also blatant. In three months, HRW head Ken Roth posted more than 100 tweets on Israel and apart-

heid, as well as dozens on Gaza that accused Israel of “war crimes”. In comparison, during the same period, Roth posted 20 tweets on Afghanistan, as the number of killings by Taliban forces was increasing daily. In addition, HRW staff members –including Omar Shakir, listed as the main author of its publication on alleged Israeli apartheid – posted and retweeted massively in promoting this theme. A few months later, Amnesty launched a parallel “apartheid” publication and surrounding marketing, with the same characteristics.

Abroader repeatedly-rehearsed, well-financed, tightly-orchestrated and high-impact NGO disinformation war was put into action in parallel to the October 7 attacks, specifically in the campaigns on “genocide”, “starvation”, and allegedly unjustified attacks on hospitals in Gaza. In December 2024, both HRW and Amnesty published what they advertised as detailed research reports claiming to provide evidence of genocide in Gaza. Journalists instantly cited these accusations with-

out attempting to assess their credibility (or its absence) – for example, the headline of a BBC report was “HRW accuses Israel of acts of genocide over Gaza water access” and the text was taken directly from its press summaries (Dec. 20 2024).

A core strategy in these NGO industry campaigns, reflected uncritically by journalists and academics, is the systematic elimination of terrorism from history, evidence, and timelines. This includes ignoring the most heinous examples of sadism, torture and sexual violence proudly live-streamed by Hamas on October 7. By artificially removing the context of these incomprehensible attacks, the NGOs misrepresent Israel’s military responses and blockades as “disproportionate” and violations of international humanitarian law.

Furthermore, the anti-Israel NGO advocacy network is characterised by extensive ties to Palestinian terror organisations, and by blatant antisemitism. David Collier’s 2019 comprehensive study of Amnesty and many of its employees demonstrated that “Amnesty has employed people with open proterrorist sympathies, crucially relying on them to provide information upstream that shapes opinion.” Staff members and consultants tweeted support for terror and shared “advice about hiding the truth to protect the ‘resistance’.” In late December 2024 (during the Christmas period), Amnesty featured an image of Joseph, Mary and Jesus being targeted by a missile with a large stripe of red (connotating blood), under the heading “End Israel’s Genocide Against Palestinians in Gaza.” The antisemitic nature of this messaging was unmistakable.

The exploitation of the genocide label, led by the powerful NGO network and its allies, is also a form of heinous Holocaust inversion, in which the Jews (Israel) are turned into “the new Nazis”, and Palestinians portrayed as “new” Jews. Beyond the obvious historical fallacy (European Jews extermi-

Former HRW head Ken Roth (Image: Wikipedia)

nated by the Nazis did not engage in mass murder or call for “wiping Germany off the map”), this tendentious movement seeks to replace Jews as primary victims with a fraudulent universalism that removes the unique guilt of Germany and its numerous collaborators.

CONFRONTING NGO WARFARE AND ANTISEMITISM

These biases are open secrets, fully recognised within the NGO world. Shortly after the October 7 atrocities, Danielle Haas, a senior editor at HRW for 13 years, left the organisation, denouncing the blatant anti-Israel and antisemitic climate in which the top officials “surrendered its duty to stand for the human rights of all.” [See Haas’ article detailing the full story in the October 2024 edition of the AIR] Her statements reinforced the evidence of systematic targeting of Israel, double standards, and extreme disproportionality at HRW. She noted HRW’s initial response to October 7, which stressed “the ‘context’ of ‘apartheid’ and ‘occupation’ before blood was even dry on bedroom walls.” It reflected, said Haas, the systematic politicisation that violated “basic editorial standards related to rigor, balance, and collegiality” and “abandoned principles of accuracy and fairness.” Anonymous HRW staff members, both Jewish and non-Jewish, said that their concerns about antisemitism were met with “hostility at worst,” and “inaction and indifference at best.”

Following Haas, other current and former staffers have spoken out about the anti-Israel and antisemitic environments that permeate the human rights NGO industry. Former Amnesty senior employee Dan Balson referred to a “harshness creeping in whenever the subject of Israel arose,” and “an antipathy toward Israel and anyone who identified as a Zionist.” Balson cited Amnesty’s statements

on October 7 that condemned “unprecedented escalation in hostilities between Israel and Gaza” and only once referred to Hamas. A colleague’s post declared that “resistance against oppression is sometimes ugly,” and staffers dismissed the concerns raised by Jewish colleagues, accusing them of Islamophobia. In his resignation post, Balson condemned Amnesty’s leadership, which “has shown such disdain for Israelis’ existential fears that it seems deliberately calculated to repel rather than attract and persuade.”

As Haas concludes, “Dissenting in today’s increasingly dogmatic human rights organisations is rapidly turning into an act of kamikaze bravery, dared only by those willing to risk their jobs, profes-

Ending the widespread

man

rights principles

abuse of hu-

that

so often leads to violent Jew-hatred and widespread intimidation will require direct confrontation with these powerful institutions, their leaders, and allies for whom the demonisation of Israel and Zionism is the primary objective

sional sidelining, and personal attacks.”

As demonstrated, the systematic targeting of Israel, in violation of the principle of universality, is deeply embedded in the institutions claiming to promote human rights. False accusations of “apartheid”, “deliberate starvation”, and “genocide” – accompanied by the systematic omission of heinous terror, as demonstrated by Hamas on October 7 – are major contributors to modern anti-Zionist antisemitism.

Going forward, it is essential to restore the principles of universality and “evenhandedness” to institutions that base their legitimacy on the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The first step is to consistently and repeatedly challenge and confront major NGOs like Amnesty, HRW and Oxfam, as well as the UNHRC and other UN agencies.

The application of the consensus-based working definition of antisemitism adopted in 2016 by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) is also an urgent priority for human rights NGOs and the UN. As stated in the text, “Manifestations [of antisemitism] might include the targeting of the State of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity,” including “Denying the Jewish people their

right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor... applying double standards... and drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.”

Ending the widespread abuse of human rights principles that so often leads to violent Jew-hatred and widespread intimidation will require direct confrontation with these powerful institutions, their leaders, and allies for whom the demonisation of Israel and Zionism is the primary objective. Victory on this essential battlefront is vital in restoring the centrality of the moral principles embodied in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights – adopted in the shadow of the Holocaust.

WATCH: How Hamas exploits the suffering of Gazans – Rebecca Davis

OF FAMINE, FACTS AND FRAUD

Looking at the data from the IPC

ALANA SCHETZER

Palestinians receive meals from the charity kitchen in Khan Yunis, southern Gaza Strip, on August 21, 2025 (Image: Anas Mohammed/ Shutterstock)

War is about many things – violence, death and destruction.

But war is also about methodology, statistics and data analysis.

Just look at the latest United Nations-backed Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) report on Gaza, released in late August, which formally declared that parts of Gaza were officially in famine and these areas were projected to expand.

There is no doubt that civilians in Gaza have suffered greatly in the war between terrorist organisation Hamas and the State of Israel. However, declaring a famine is an exceptionally significant and consequential step to make, one that has only been made officially four times this century – Somalia in 2011, South Sudan in 2017 and 2020 and Sudan in 2024

And this brings us to methodology, statistics and data analysis. Because looking closely into the IPC’s report, there are multiple problems – many of which appear deliberate – that allowed the IPC to declare a famine for reasons other than those based on solid facts and data.

WHAT IS THE IPC?

The IPC is a coalition of more than 20 organisations. It is a leading tool used to track and classify food security across more than 30 countries. It uses a five-phase classification system:

1. None/Minimal

2. Stressed

3. Crisis

4. Emergency

5. Catastrophe/Famine

For a famine to be declared, three criteria must be met:

1. A very high rate of child malnutrition, with children who are dangerously thin;

2. The collapse of household food access; and

3. A daily mortality rate of two adults or four children per 10,000 people, due to starvation.

The IPC uses a standardised system for each classification across all countries.

However, for its July and August reports on Gaza, the IPC made two substantial changes which meant it was easier to reach the classification of famine in one part of the Strip.

MUAC

Under the IPC’s standardised rules, it measures children’s height and weight (known as a weightfor-height Z-score, or WHZ) to test for malnutrition. This is a well-established metric. To reach the most serious category, famine, 30% of children must record a WHZ score of less than -2.

The IPC’s handbook allows practitioners to swap using WHZ with measuring children’s mid-upper arm circumference (MUAC), but the IPC very rarely uses this metric because it is less accurate and requires additional evidence. It also increases the risk of false positives compared to WHZ.

The IPC states in its technical manual that a MUAC measurement of less than 125mm is a sign of acute malnutrition. However, MUAC does not take into account the child’s age, so if a disproportionate number of younger children are screened, this will inflate the results. And this is what happened in the Gaza data. The malnutrition screening data revealed that a disproportionate number of younger children were screened, and being younger and smaller, they naturally have a smaller MUAC regardless of their nutritional status.

Several studies have cast doubt on the viability of MUAC screenings, with a 2023 study on the effectiveness of MUAC to assess nutrition status stating that it was only a “potentially credible alternative method ” A 2018 study found that:

Predicting prevalence of wasting by WHZ in

contexts where only wasting by MUAC is known, the high correlation of wasting by WHZ and the difference in wasting prevalence has limited practical utility; wasting by MUAC has very little predictive power ...

The same study recommended against using MUAC as a substitute for WHZ.

It is important to note that this is not the first time the IPC has changed its methodology for its reports. However, it is a very rare occurrence and can only “be used if approved by the IPC Quality Review Team as well as the as the [Global Emergency Review Committee]”. There have been at least two other instances, for South Sudan in 2020 and Sudan in 2024, when MUAC was used for malnutritional screenings.

However, there was a significant reason why this was done for Sudan and South Sudan, which is not applicable in Gaza

In Sudan and South Sudan, WHZ found about twice as many children suffering from wasting as MUAC, which meant MUAC on its own made the situation look less severe.

In the two Sudan situations, experts recommended the use of a lower threshold of 15% – later also employed in Gaza.

The IPC stated that the WHZ-to-MUAC ratio for Gaza was 1.9, which places it in a similar position as Sudan in 2024. However, the ratio the IPC used for Gaza is actually for the entire Middle East region. The score was calculated from only nine samples taken collectively from Iraq, Jordan, and Yemen. There is no WHZ-to-MUAC ratio for Gaza.

Not only that, but, as stated in the IPC’s technical manual, it admits there is zero scientific basis for ever using the 15% threshold, and even put a call out to experts across the world to create a scientifically precise system.

IPC’S LINK WITH UNRWA

There are further problems with the IPC report.

The IPC used three organisations to source data on Gaza – Ard El Insan (the people’s land) Palestinian Benevolent Association (AEI), the Eastern Mediterranean Public Health Network (EMPHNET), and United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA).

UNRWA has been directly linked to Hamas for years; an independent investigation found that at least 12% of UNRWA employees (1,462 people) are members of Hamas or other designated terrorist organisations.

It is widely documented that Hamas used UNRWA facilities as weapons storage facilities, and bases to attack IDF soldiers from, amongst many other practices that compromised its neutrality obligations.

Given these long and deeply disturbing links, the choice of UNRWA to screen children and collect data should not have occurred.

And it was UNRWA that over-surveyed younger children in MUAC malnutrition screenings, as seen in the data, which contributed to skewing the results. There was also a disproportionate number of children who were screened in hospitals and medical clinics which, given that the children were already patients at these facilities for various medical reasons, further distorted the results.

The IPC ignored another key part of its protocol for declaring famine. According to the IPC, famine can only be declared when the population suffering famine is recording two adult deaths or four child deaths per day... For this criteria to be met for the area in which the IPC declared famine, which has a population of about 500,000, would mean 180 people dying every day

THE DATA DOESN’T MATCH THE CONCLUSION

The authors also ignored critical data provided by the Israeli authority, the Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), about the dramatically decreased price of flour, and market availability of certain foods, among other important changes.

Standard IPC protocols for the declaration of famine include a global acute malnutrition (GAM) rate of 30%, using the WHZ measurements. In its July declaration that it would use MUAC in Gaza, the IPC said that would use a threshold of 15% GAM.

Notes made available after the report was released show that the data sample for July was 15,749 children and their unweighted and weighted global acute malnutrition (GAM) rates were 13.5% and 12.2%, respectively. Both of these results are well under the 15% imposed threshold, let alone the standard 30% threshold. But the IPC only included the data for half of this, about 7,500 children, which yielded an average result of about 16%. This indicates that it selectively used data in order to find that parts of Gaza that could be defined as under famine.

DEATH RATES

The IPC ignored another key part of its protocol for declaring famine. According to the IPC, famine can only be declared when the population suffer-

ing famine is recording two adult deaths or four child deaths per day due to starvation or related disease. For this criteria to be met for the area in which the IPC declared famine, which has a population of about 500,000, would mean 180 people dying every day from starvation or related disease. However, according to the Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health, there had been about six deaths per day from across the whole strip – those isolated to Gaza City would be much less, even on Hamas’ figures. The IPC claimed that there could have been more unreported deaths but didn’t elaborate on why it believed the death rate could be 30 times higher than that claimed by Hamas itself.

BIAS BY KEY REPORT AUTHORS

Beyond serious problems with the data itself is the fact that one of the report’s key authors, Andrew Seal, Associate Professor in International Nutrition at University College London, has a long history of posting anti-Israel and pro-Iranian regime comments on social media. On his X account, Seal has even supported the Iran-backed terrorist group, the Houthis – who have stolen humanitarian aid, tortured civilians, recruited child soldiers, held UN personnel hostage, and routinely committed forced disappearances and extrajudicial killings. Seal also justifies Houthi attacks on dozens of commercial ships in the Red Sea, which have killed several people, increased the cost of living and caused significant environmental damage.

He posted on January 12, 2024, “The Houthi Gov position is that it is acting legally to prevent #genocide in Gaza, as is required under the Genocide Convention.”

Seal has also claimed that it was a poor argument for Hamas to be forced from power in Gaza just because it commits “war crimes” and he reposts Iran state propaganda

A second report author, Zeina Jamaluddine – Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Epidemiology and Population Health at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine – also appears to have a clear anti-Israel bias. She co-authored a study published in the Lancet that claimed the Gaza death toll

WATCH: Did Gaza Really Meet the Famine Threshold?

might have been under-reported by 41%.

The study relied on unverified Hamas-supplied data. Some academics said of the report: “Math is intentionally confusing to cover the partiality of the authors.”

Interviewed following the release of the IPC report, UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell defended IPC staff, saying that they are “technical people. They’re not political people”

She then belittled anyone asking questions about the report’s methodology. "... It’s kind of obscene that we are having these conversations arguing about whether the methodology works or not...children are dying... I am tired of a discussion about, well, are we giving the right information or not?"

WHERE THE ‘FAMINE’ WAS DECLARED IN GAZA

It’s vital to note where exactly the IPC declared famine – Gaza City, which remains under Hamas control and where humanitarian aid is coordinated by the UN or humanitarian groups.

Data from the UN Office for Project Services revealed that, between May 18 and Sept. 8, 85% of trucks carrying humanitarian aid had been intercepted (the page in the link updates daily).

Despite this, the UN continues to deny that Hamas is stealing aid. In a late July interview, Tom Fletcher, the UN’s Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, declared that, “the vast, vast majority of the aid that we get in gets to civilians.”

The UN’s own data says the exact opposite.

This was not the first time Fletcher made a false statement about the humanitarian situation in Gaza; in May, he was exposed for lying about the forecast from another IPC report when he baldly claimed, “There are 14,000 babies that will die in the next 48 hours unless we can reach them. I want to save as many as these 14,000 babies as we can in the next 48 hours.”

Fletcher’s dire warning was repeated across the world, eliciting horror from the public, governments and human rights groups. Fletcher had lied. The report had actually forecast that 14,100 severe cases of acute malnutrition were expected to occur between April 2025 and March 2026 among children aged between six months and five years.

The IPC’s longer report on Gaza, which includes conclusions and recommendations, makes only one brief mention that some aid has been “intercepted” – AKA, stolen.

Interestingly, the IPC does not claim there is famine in the areas of Gaza

under Israeli control, where considerable aid is being distributed by the controversial Gaza Humanitarian Foundation – which rarely has its aid trucks intercepted.

MOVING THE GOAL POSTS

There is a long history of UN agencies, NGOs and international tribunals, to name just a few, overturning long-held practices to favour the Palestinian national cause and more easily condemn Israel.

In December 2024, Amnesty International expanded the definition of ‘genocide’ in order to accuse Israel of committing that crime in Gaza.

At the same time, Irish Foreign Minister Micheal Martin, also wanting to change the definition of ‘genocide’, said he would ask the International Court of Justice to “broaden its interpretation of what constitutes the commission of genocide by a State.”

This is on top of the fact that the UN, humanitarian groups, governments and countless media outlets have relied, and continue to rely, solely on data and claims provided by terrorist group Hamas, including its death toll, which does not distinguish between combatants and civilians and has also been plagued by controversial methodologies. Hamas’ death toll and various claims

Tom Fletcher, the UN’s Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, has repeatedly made highly alarmist statements unsupported even by the UN’s own data (Image: X/ Open Source Intel)

are also not in any way verified by the UN, despite this assertion being repeated in the media.

A thorough and independent review of the IPC’s report, including the methodology used and why it ignored so many of its own rules, is urgently needed. The issue is far too important for the UN to claim that asking questions about the data and methodology is somehow “obscene”, as UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell did.

A thorough and independent review of the IPC’s report, including the methodology used and why it ignored so many of its own rules, is urgently needed. The issue is far too important for the UN to claim that asking questions about the data and methodology is somehow “obscene”

The Israeli Government has written to the IPC requesting that it retract its Gaza report and that it conduct an urgent review of it. Ministry of Foreign Affairs Director-General Eden Bar Tal said the report, “is deeply flawed, unprofessional and gravely missing the standards expected from an international body entrusted with such a serious responsibility.”

There is no doubt that people in Gaza are going hungry and a lot more needs to be done, but there is a significant difference between that and a famine, and this is what is at the core of the IPC’s report.

The IPC report, its methodology, and various other issues – including the decision to partner with UNRWA to collect data – make it appear that it was designed to come to a pre-determined conclusion. The questions are why and by whom?

UNIFIL’S END

Forty-seven years of failure in Lebanon

SARIT ZAHAVI

LT. COL. ( RET.) SARIT ZEHAVI is the founder and President of the Alma Research and Education Centre, specialising in research and analysis on Israel’s security challenges on its northern borders. She previously served for 15 years in the Israeli Defence Forces, primarily in military intelligence, and holds an M.A. in Middle East Studies from BenGurion University.

On August 25, the UN Security Council (UNSC) adopted a historic resolution, No. 2790, ending the mandate for the UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) after some 47 years. The decision is unprecedented –not only because it marks the conclusion of an international mission that lasted nearly five decades, but also because of the messages and provisions it contains. While it represents a significant diplomatic achievement for Israel, it also underscores a shared recognition of UNIFIL’s utter failure. In addition, the resolution raises questions regarding the international community’s ability to genuinely understand the challenge represented by Hezbollah’s Iranian-supported military dominance of Lebanon.

At the outset, it is important to note that the UNSCR 2790 contains several elements that warrant careful consideration. A prominent example is the Security Council’s emphasis on the safe return of civilians on both sides of the “Blue Line” Israel-Lebanon border to their homes.

From Israel’s perspective, the return of Lebanese civilians to villages situated immediately along the border – mere metres from Israeli communities – seems tantamount to the reestablishment of Hezbollah’s presence at the frontier. The historical reality of southern Lebanon over the past four decades has been unequivocal: Hezbollah thoroughly entrenched itself within the civilian infrastructure of Lebanese towns and villages, sustained by extensive Shi’ite communal support, and evolved into an existential threat to Israeli border communities. This is a situation Israel is determined not to allow to recur.

Although Hezbollah has suffered significant losses in the present conflict, it has not relinquished its resolve to continue waging war against Israel, while utilising Lebanese civilians as human shields. This determination is based on a strong religious belief, part of the radical interpretation of Shi’ite Islam exported by the Ayatollahs in Iran.

UNSCR 2790 outlines a proposal to deploy an additional 6,000 Leba-

nese Armed Forces personnel to southern Lebanon. At first glance, this measure appears intended to mitigate a potential security vacuum following UNIFIL’s withdrawal. In practice, however, such a vacuum does not exist. UNIFIL has never fulfilled any substantive role in the area: it has neither reported systematically on Hezbollah’s activities in the south nor undertaken measures to facilitate its disarmament nor done anything else that substantively “keeps the peace” along the border.

We have recently seen images circulating in Western media depicting cordial joint UNIFIL patrols with the Lebanese army and the discovery of a single rocket launcher and some rockets – the first time in nearly two decades UNIFIL has “found” any

UNIFIL has been present in southern Lebanon for 47 years and effectively facilitated, rather than constrained, Hezbollah’s vast illegal arms build-up in the area (Image: Shutterstock/ Sebastian Castelier)

weapons in the area. The images are not representative of the reality on the ground. They obscure the vast scale of Hezbollah’s extensive weapons build up in the southern villages in violation of the relevant UNSC Resolutions and UNIFIL’s longstanding and complete inability to confront or constrain it –or indeed, to even document it.

From Israel’s standpoint, there is no compelling requirement in 2790 to suspend its strikes against Hezbollah’s infrastructure, or demand for the withdrawal of IDF forces from the five positions situated on the Lebanese side of the border that it continues to hold since last year’s war with Hezbollah, except in the context of Lebanon fulfilling its obligations to disarm Hezbollah and assert full control over southern Lebanon. In the meantime, Israel continues to pursue a proactive strategy of almost daily strikes against Hezbollah. It is particularly significant that over half of the 500 strikes conducted

since the ceasefire have occurred south of the Litani River – the very core of UNIFIL’s designated area of operation.

The resolution does introduce a set of additional challenges for the IDF. Chief among them is the call for the deployment of approximately 10,000 Lebanese Armed Forces personnel in the previous UNIFIL area, coupled with the references to Israel withdrawing from its five positions and ending its military strikes in Lebanon. These provisions may be construed as implicit conditions for the termination of UNIFIL’s mandate and could possibly provide a pretext for the continuation of its activities after they are scheduled to end.

request action from the Lebanese Armed Forces on the basis of credible intelligence. The Mechanism incorporates the active involvement of senior military officials from the United States and France, alongside representatives of Israel, Lebanon, and UNIFIL. Developments in recent months demonstrate that this framework renders any UN role largely redundant.

Importantly, the resolution also extends UNIFIL’s mandate until December 31, 2026, and then grants an additional year to facilitate an orderly withdrawal. In practice, although the resolution formally announces the termination of the mandate, it also prolongs the force’s presence until the end

Thus, the continuation of UNIFIL’s presence until the end of 2027 lacks strategic justification. Each additional day that the force remains on the ground represents a squandered opportunity to pursue more effective security arrangements

Although 2790 reiterates earlier Security Council decisions (notably Resolutions 1559 and 1701) that call for the disarmament of Hezbollah across the entirety of Lebanon, it also limits the scope of responsibility entrusted to the newly established post-war “Mechanism” – an oversight body that includes the United States and France – to the geographic area of UNIFIL’s operations alone. This could effectively allow the Lebanese Government to refrain from taking action against Hezbollah north of the Litani River, thus maintaining Hezbollah’s freedom of action in those areas.

The five-party Mechanism is designed to facilitate more efficient channels of communication regarding violations of the cease fire agreement, thereby enabling the IDF to transmit reports and to

of 2027. This stands in contrast to previous extensions, which were limited to one year at a time. Accordingly, the declaration of UNIFIL’s termination is more theoretical than substantive. The resolution does not delineate the stages of dismantlement, justify the protracted timeline, or specify who is responsible for supervising and implementing the process.

To understand how urgent it is to end the UNIFIL mandate, one must look at the report recently published at Alma Research and Education Centre under the title “The UNIFIL Mandate Must End” (July 2025). The report summarises UNIFIL’s activity and sketches a grim picture: not only did this force not contribute to Israel’s security or Leba-

Recent PR images have shown UNFIL working with the Lebanese army to find some small caches of arms. But these are the first time in nearly two decades that UNIFIL has discovered any weapons whatsoever (Image: Shutterstock/ Sebastian Castelier)

non’s stability, it sometimes even served as a cover that allowed Hezbollah to expand and prepare for war unhindered.

Since its establishment in 1978, the UNIFIL mandate was conceived as a provisional mechanism designed to facilitate Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon and to support the reassertion of Lebanese sovereignty. Over time, the mission expanded numerically and in terms of its budget, yet this quantitative growth was not matched by any corresponding enhancement of its operational effectiveness. With the adoption of Security Council Resolution 1701 in 2006, UNIFIL was entrusted with a critical mission: not only to monitor the ceasefire, but also to support the Lebanese Armed

Forces in extending their deployment across southern Lebanon and in disarming Hezbollah north of the Litani River – a zone extending up to 27 km from Israel’s border

In practice, however, UNIFIL evolved into a passive mediating presence, systematically avoiding direct confrontation with Hezbollah and maintaining a deliberately low profile, even in the face of manifest and recurring violations of the agreements. The force’s activity focused mainly on humanitarian assistance.

UNIFIL repeatedly failed to report Hezbollah’s persistent violations, including the construction of offensive tunnels and the establishment of weapons depots within civilian areas – some even in close proximity to UNIFIL bases. In many instances, when the Force sought to inspect suspected sites, it was obstructed or attacked by local residents operating under Hezbollah’s direction, leading to its withdrawal. Rather than functioning as an effec-

tive monitoring and enforcement body, UNIFIL assumed a symbolic role that permitted the international community to disregard the realities on the ground.

Over the years, UNIFIL maintained that its mandate precluded it from entering residential structures in which Hezbollah concealed weapons. Nevertheless, the substantial quantities of armaments uncovered by manoeuvring IDF forces in proximity to the border during last year’s war, together with the exposure of multiple storage sites, clearly demonstrated that Hezbollah made use not only of Lebanese villages but also of open, non-residential areas. In the latter case, UNIFIL consistently refrained from conducting patrols or identifying such stockpiles, despite the absence of any conceivable legal impediment to doing so. And those Hezbollah weapons were deployed there as part of the plan to occupy the northern part of Israel.

During last year’s Israel-Hezbollah conflict, UNIFIL was not only ineffective but also harmed the IDF’s efforts to dismantle Hezbollah’s weapons near the border. By refusing to evacuate combat zones, it placed its own soldiers at risk, while its unexpected presence on the battlefield endangered IDF troops, forcing them to cease their fire and enabling terrorists to escape.

Last year’s conflict demonstrated that UNIFIL’s problem is fundamental – the United Nations, as an institution, does not constitute a framework capable of actively pursuing the disarmament of Hezbollah. Consequently, UNIFIL functioned less as a security instrument and more as a costly mechanism that enables Lebanon to evade responsibility for addressing its own security challenges. Regrettably, the latest resolution once again fails

to place the onus of responsibility for dealing with the instability and violence created by Iran’s sponsorship of Hezbollah in Lebanon on the Lebanese state.

For four decades, UNIFIL’s mandate was extended incrementally through short, annual renewals. By contrast, the recent decision granted an unprecedented extension of two and a half years – albeit with a reversable call to wind up UNIFIL by the end of 2027. Until the end of 2026 the force is expected to continue its current operations despite the near-universal recognition that its effectiveness has been negligible or counter-productive.

This outcome can be attributed primarily to political considerations: the desire to preserve diplomatic flexibility and the concern that a sudden withdrawal might create a power vacuum.

As noted above, however, this supposed vacuum does not exist. The true vacuum was, in fact, created by UNIFIL’s persistent failure to fulfill its mandate. The force has neither contributed to the disarmament of Hezbollah nor provided accurate reporting on the extensive accumulation of armaments in southern Lebanon. On several occasions, its presence has even undermined Israel’s operational capacity to counter the threat.

Thus, the continuation of UNIFIL’s presence until the end of 2027 lacks strategic justification. Each additional day that the force remains on the ground represents a squandered opportunity to pursue more effective security arrangements. A rapid transition to a framework in which Israel and Lebanon, with direct American and French support, assume responsibility for security in southern Lebanon would offer a much more cost-effective, operationally efficient, and strategically sustainable alternative.

REMNANT OF RESISTANCE

The Houthi problem

OVED LOBEL

On August 22, Ansar Allah, more commonly referred to as the Houthis, reportedly launched a ballistic missile at Israel containing cluster munitions, the first time such a weapon has been fired from Yemen at Israel.

Israel launched one of its regular large-scale retaliations against Houthi-controlled infrastructure, with about a dozen jets dropping 35 munitions on four targets, including two power stations, a military compound and a fuel depot. One of the power stations had also been targeted days earlier, reportedly by the Israeli navy.

The Houthis seemed ready to absorb these strikes, as they have multiple times in the past two years.

But then, on Aug. 29, Israel wiped out much of Ansar Allah’s civilian government facade, including Prime Minister Ahmed al-Rahawi and the ministers of foreign affairs, electricity, transportation, public works, justice, human rights, youth and sports, local administration and information.

The IDF alleges as many as 20 senior Houthi officials were killed, including the nominal “chief of military operations,” and possibly the Defence Minister. While most or perhaps all of these figures played little role in actual administration and are not a core element of Ansar Allah, their removal could still

cause disruption and distraction. And as Israeli intelligence penetration increases, so will the value of the other leaders that may be targeted in future.

Assassinations of this sort are a more promising avenue for retaliation and deterrence than hitting the same infrastructure targets repeatedly, though they still won’t by themselves remove the threat or halt Houthi fire, which is overseen directly by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps–Qods Force (IRGC-QF).

Even killing the overall leader of the group, Abdul-Malik al-Houthi, as well as his male relatives involved in the leadership, would likely not severely impact the group, notwithstanding the fact that, until now, Ansar Allah’s local leadership has revolved entirely around that one family. The true executive power in Ansar Allah lies with the IRGC-QF Brigadier who serves as the Houthi’s “Jihad Assistant” and his Hezbollah deputy on the Houthi “Jihad Council”. Moreover, as with Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah and other terrorist and insurgent organisations, leadership decapitation tends to have limited long-term effects, though it can certainly cause short term disruption and confusion.

Moreover, the repeated past strikes against the Houthi-controlled air and sea ports, power stations,

oil terminals and fuel depots by Israel – and, during Operation Rough Rider from March-May, by the US –have not succeeded in preventing the Houthis from receiving Iranian weapons shipments. On July 17, US Central Command announced that the Yemeni “National Resistance Forces” of Tareq Saleh “seized over 750 tons of munitions and hardware to include hundreds of advanced cruise, anti-ship, and anti-aircraft missiles, warheads and seekers, components as well as hundreds of drone engines, air defense equipment, radar systems, and communications equipment.”

There are multiple routes for Iranian weapons shipments, including overland via Oman, and repeated bombings of Yemen’s primary ports have not halted and will not halt arms shipments, which are still pouring into Yemen. Because of this, intensive bombing campaigns by the US, sometimes joined by the UK, since January 2024, aimed at degrading Houthi military capacity, have not had any substantial impact despite the number of missiles, drones

and launchers allegedly destroyed.

That the Houthis seem almost impervious to military pressure should not be surprising. As an inchoate organ of the IRGC since the 1980s, they survived their long jihad against the Yemeni regime beginning in 2004, despite the death of their founder, and then several years of war and a massive bombing campaign by Saudi Arabia and the UAE, alongside their respective mercenaries and local proxies. It was always very unlikely that renewed airstrikes, however intense, by the US, UK or Israel could ever truly threaten or deter the group.

Of course, Houthi salvos against Israel are generally ineffective; however, they still disrupt daily life and deplete vital air defence interceptors, and the risk of them causing damage and casualties, as they did on July 19, 2024, and May 4 this year, remains. Since the end of the Israeli-Hamas ceasefire in late March, the Houthis have launched about 70

Houthi rebel fighters in Sana’a, Yemen (Image: Alamy Live News)

ballistic missiles and more than 20 drones, almost all of them intercepted or failing to reach Israel.

With the rest of Iran’s so-called “axis of resistance” neutered by Israel since 2024, and Iran’s own missile arsenal decimated or depleted during Operation Rising Lion in June, the Houthis, however ineffectual they might be, are the last active front the Iranian “Axis of Resistance” has to demonstrate involvement in the war it launched against Israel following Hamas’ invasion on October 7, 2023.

Part of that involvement is not just projectiles launched at Israel, but attacks on international shipping, which have increased in recent months and which the Houthis say will continue until Israel ends the war in Gaza. Since the end of Operation Rough Rider in early May, there has been no international response to these attacks.

Ansar Allah, as the Yemeni outgrowth of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s Islamic Revolution, exists to destroy Israel and kill Jews, with whom adherents of that Revolution believe Islam is locked in a perpetual, existential war. Hussein al-Houthi, Ansar Allah’s founder, believed the al-Qaeda attacks against the US on September 11, 2001, were actually a ploy by Jews and the United States to unleash a war on Islam. His group became known as the Ashab al-Shiar, or “Followers of the Slogan” – the slogan being “God is Great! Death to America! Death to Israel! A Curse Upon the Jews! Victory to Islam!” This remains the Houthi call today, an augmentation of the Islamic Revolution’s own in Iran.

A fundamental element of Houthi activity since their inception has been to cleanse Yemen of its few remaining Jews. This process began in the early 2000s and ended successfully in 2021, although

Honour guard carry the coffins of senior Houthi officials who were killed in recent Israeli strikes, during a funeral in Sana'a, Yemen, September 1, 2025 (Image: EPA/Yahya Arhab)

the Houthis continue holding and torturing Salem Levi Marhabi, the last Jew in Yemen, as a hostage. While the Houthis reportedly kidnapped him in 2016 in part to trade for the departure of the rest of Yemen’s Jews, they did not release him after the ethnic cleansing was completed.

Since at least 2017, the Houthis had been pub-

For Ansar Allah, launching projectiles at Israel from Yemen is not merely a symbolic show of support for Hamas, but reflects a core tenet of their entire raison d’être – war against Jews. The Houthis therefore cannot be deterred from attacking Israel, since this is one of their primary purposes. No number of strikes, of whatever intensity and no matter

For Ansar Allah, launching projectiles at Israel from Yemen is not merely a symbolic show of support for Hamas, but reflects a core tenet of their entire

raison d’être – war against Jews

licly saying they would join the next war against Israel, began openly threatening to attack Israel in late 2019 and reportedly tried to join the war in 2021 after Israel launched Operation Guardians of the Wall.

That year, the Houthis started recruiting across Yemen by telling fighters they are joining to “liberate the Al-Aqsa Mosque,” with senior Houthi official Mohammed al-Bukhaiti telling recruits that “liberating Palestine” was as much a commandment from God as conquering Yemen.

Houthi Political Bureau member Abd Al-Wahhab Al-Mahbashi summed up the core of the Houthi world view in 2020:

[All Muslims] should… unite in a rank that pits us directly against our enemies, the Jews… The only path is the path to Jerusalem, the path of Jihad against the Jews. This is the path that will sort out all the other movements and guide them in one direction — the direction of enmity towards the Jews. Enmity towards them is the number one criterion for [Muslims]. Tell me who your enemy is and I will tell you who you are. If the Jews are your number one enemy, then you are a [Muslim].

the target, will change that.

Only with the eventual destruction or collapse of the regime ruling Iran will the Islamic Revolution and its regional organs and proxies truly disappear. Until that happens, the Houthis will continue firing whatever they can, even if only one in every 100 missiles or drones causes damage or casualties. Of course, a permanent end to the war with Hamas in the would at least temporarily halt Houthi attacks.

For Israel, Ansar Allah remains more of an irritant than a genuine threat, but one that cannot be halted for the time being. A strategic ground offensive by Saudi and UAE proxies coordinated with Israeli or US airpower against Houthi control is not currently on the cards, and this is the only potential means of delivering a decisive blow against the Houthis. Israel will thus have little choice but to continue to try to manage the situation with retaliation against infrastructure and occasional assassinations when intelligence and physical opportunities make this possible. This won’t stop the Houthis firing, but fortunately, the threat posed is likely to remain tolerable and manageable.

AUSTRALIA’S EXTREMISTS IN FULL FLIGHT

Australian Arabic and Islamic media continue to spread conspiracy theories

RAN PORAT

DR RAN PORAT is an AIJAC Research Associate. He is also a Research Associate at the Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation at Monash University and a Research Fellow at the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism at the Reichman University in Herzliya.

Recent developments in Gaza and Syria have provided ample fodder for extreme anti-Israel and antisemitic content in Arabic-language media in Australia, as well as some English-language media targeted at Muslim Australians.

AUSTRALIA’S ENVOY AGAINST ANTISEMITISM IS “NETANYAHU’S VOICE”

In late July, regular Australasian Muslim Times (AMUST) contributor Gary Dargan, who in the past made vicious innuendos about Australian Jews and alleged dual loyalty, targeted the plan presented by Jillian Segal, Australia’s Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism (ASECA), in response to rising antisemitism in the country. In his “Jillian Segal: Netanyahu’s Voice to Parliament,” Dargan reviewed Segal’s career highlights and her work for several Jewish organisations, also noting the donation made by her husband’s family trust to a conservative group.

Jillian Segal, Australia’s Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism

Dargan concluded his text with an all-out personal attack on Segal. “With a track record like this it should come as no surprise that Ms Segal is promoting hard-line pro-Israel views and trying to criminalise criticism of Israel. Just as Advance Australia [the organisation Segal’s husband’s family allegedly donated to] is an oxymoron which in no way advances Australia, so too is the title anti-Semitism Envoy. Given all the controversy it is time for a more appropriate rebranding. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Jillian Segal, Netanyahu’s Voice to Parliament.”

PROPHECIES OF ISRAEL’S DEMISE

In some cases, hate for the Jewish state leads media outlets to forego any pretence of adherence to journalistic standards – and permits the publication of complete fabrications. Australian Arabic-language portal Farah News, with its long history of spreading antisemitism and conspiracy theories, provided an example of this pattern when it published an article (on Aug. 4) supposedly authored by Israeli journalist Lior Ben Shaul, “a political analyst at the Hebrew newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth.” However, no such person exists – the name may have been a warped version of Lior Ben Ami, a reporter at Israel’s news website Ynet.

The article itself, titled, “The beginning of the end. Israel will collapse in two years, and Israelis are fleeing like rats,” was actually a text posted on X by Kuwaiti anti-Israeli activist Abu-Oshaibah. It contained a supposed “prophecy” that Israel will vanish in two years (in line with similar popular “prophecies” in the Muslim world) following the latest developments since the Hamas terror attack on October 7, 2023.

Openly supporting Hamas, the text argued that Israel is now facing “an existential earthquake that has shaken the foundations of the Zionist project from its base. Hamas has not only won on the battlefield, but has also exploded the myth of the ‘invincible state’ and exposed our fragility to the world.”

It went on to fantasise that Israelis are secretly fleeing the country: “Flights to Europe, America and Canada are fully booked. Embassies are full of immigration applications. Families are silently selling their belongings. Parents send their children to study abroad, with no intention of returning… Yes, they flee like rats from a collapsing ship.”

THE GREATER ISRAEL CONSPIRACY

Farah News also continued spreading antisemitic tropes. Columnist Zuheir al Sibawi offered a conspiratorial interpretation of the clashes in Syria during

Farah News columnist Zuheir al Sibawi

July between Druze and Sunni factions and government forces in his article, “The Israeli aggression on Syria and the betrayal of the Druze” (published July 19).

Israel intervened in the crisis on the side of the Druze community. For Sibawi, that was “proof” that the Jewish state, aided by the US, is pursuing the clandestine plan he labelled “David’s Corridor” – an ‘evil’ scheme to set up a new trade route from Iraq to Israel using alliances with the Kurds and Druze. Moreover, he said this was a step towards taking over the whole region, the so-called “Greater Israel” project. According to Sibawi, mooted contacts between Israeli officials and representatives of Syria’s new ruler, Ahmad al Shar’a, were meant to “prevent its [Israel’s] withdrawal from the Syrian territories it occupied since the fall of the former regime on the eighth of December 2024, and to keep several military sites it has established inside the Syrian depth, and it wants to implicate the Druze in this battle to facilitate its plan… it has succeeded temporarily, while the farthest and most dangerous goal is the David Corridor project, which Israel seeks to achieve by dividing Syria and linking the occupied territories in southern Syria with the Kurdish areas in northern Syria, which are rich in oil and gas, while providing them with a corridor on the Syrian coast, thus achieving the dream of Greater Israel.”

Sibawi went on to argue that Israel wants to ethnically divide Syria, and “will not allow there to be an economically prosperous democratic state on its borders, as democratic countries in our Arab world threaten their existence, so they always seek to impose tyrant rulers and dictators… to rule the Arab countries… if [Israel] cannot do so, it will seek to create sectarian strife and infighting.”

Sibawi is not alone in promoting old lies about Jewish aspirations to dominate the region. Antoine al Kazzi, the editor of Australia’s best-known Arabiclanguage newspapers, El Telegraph, also deduced from the events in Syria in July that the Jewish state is pulling the strings behind the scenes to promote a “Greater Israel”.

Al Kazzi based his “analysis” on a series of stories aired on Israel’s Kan 11 TV channel about the roughly 15,000 Israelis now living in Cyprus (mostly in Larnaca and Limassol), some of whom commute to work there from Israel (a short 45 min flight each way).

Antoine al Kazzi, editor of Australia’s best-known Arabic language newspaper, El Telegraph

Al Kazzi’s interpretation of this trend was very conspiratorial –he warned that Israel is taking over the little island of Cyprus as a step in the grand plan to take over the Middle East, as presented in the platform of the antisemitic and fascist pro-Assad Syrian/Lebanese party, the Syrian Social Nationalist Party, (which has also been active in Australia, as AIJAC has previously documented).

The graphic chosen for his editorial, “The star of the fertile crescent ‘Bye-bye’?!”, on July 28 was a map of the areas Israel is allegedly plotting to take over – from the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula to the south, through Jordan and Syria, all the way to Iraq in the east, as well as Cyprus in the west.

Screenshot from ElTelegraph’ s “The star of the fertile crescent ‘Byebye’?!” (July 28)

“Cyprus is the star of their [Israel’s] fertile crescent,” posited al Kazzi, and the island is now “witnessing an Israeli ‘brutality’ that makes Cyprus an Israeli ‘settlement’ par excellence.”

His proof? Al Kazzi quoted an Israeli in Cyprus featured in one of the stories who expressed the dream of peace with Syria by joking that “We can’t eat hummus in Damascus, at least we eat it in a Syrian restaurant here.”

Conspiracy theories, lies and antisemitic tropes about Israel and Jews being published in the Australian media in Arabic and for Muslim Australians are

dangerously

feeding into the ugly and unprecedented wave of antisemitism

Al Kazzi warned that “this is no ordinary joke, but it has a lot of symbolism that goes beyond the space of a small restaurant.” To bring his argument home, he quoted from Hassan Nasrallah, the slain leader of Hezbollah, Iran’s terror proxy in Lebanon (who was eliminated by Israel on Sept. 27, 2024). Al Kazzi reminded readers that in June 2024, Nasrallah warned Cyprus, an ally of Israel, not to allow the IDF to use the Mediterranean island in possible attacks against Lebanon. Now, said al Kazzi, “It seems that the star of the Fertile Crescent is turning into an Israeli settlement,” as if 15,000 Israelis living legally in a country of 1.3 million represents any serious threat to its independence. Meanwhile, apparently, their greatest “brutality” is enjoying hummus.

There seems little doubt that that these sorts of conspiracy theories, lies and antisemitic tropes about Israel and Jews being published in the Australian media in Arabic and for Muslim Australians are dangerously feeding into the unprecedented wave of antisemitism over the past 22 months.

“SPEAKING WITH CLARITY”

An interview with AJC head Ted Deutch

AIJAC STAFF

Ted Deutch served over 12 years in the US House of Representatives for Florida before taking up the leadership of the American Jewish Committee (AJC) three years ago. The American Jewish Committee, for its part, is one of the most important and venerable civil rights and Jewish advocacy organisations in the US, and even globally, and was once described by the New York Times, as “widely regarded as the dean of American Jewish organizations.” It has also been AIJAC’s partner in the US for more than three decades.

Deutch recently visited Australia as a guest of AIJAC, and what follows is excerpted from an interview he did with AIJAC’s Joel Burnie in early September in which he canvassed both the state of the Jewish world today, and what can be done to advance peace between Israel and its neighbours in the wake of the current Gaza war.

Joel Burnie: We all know and we’re all aware that the issues that we’re experiencing with antisemitism in Australia is a global problem. Recognising that AJC has such a huge reach globally, offices in Latin America, Israel, Europe, obviously Northern America as well, and with us here in Australia, you hear the stories, you see how antisemitism is more globalised than ever. So, leveraging off both your Congressional experience as you set up the bipartisan task force for combating antisemitism while you were in Congress and now leading an organisation with such a global reach like AJC, what tools are proving effective and where are we falling short?

Ted Deutch: First, it’s really, it is vitally important to always emphasise the importance of truth, the ability to speak with clarity, with moral clarity about what’s actually happening – everything else flows from that… I mean, for anyone who’s been to Israel since October 7th and if you’ve had the opportunity to go to the crossings to see the trucks going into Gaza… look, the situation in Gaza is challenging, the fact that virtually no stories anymore even mention the

fact that all of this continues because Hamas still holds 48 hostages because of what happened on October 7th, it’s as if they’re no longer an actor in what’s happening there… suddenly Israel just decided that it was in its interest to send troops in and have 900 IDF soldiers killed in action on its own.

So, reminding people exactly what happened is critically important, speaking with clarity about that but then also looking at what we’re seeing and pointing out the dangers of the kinds of things that are being said and done. We’ve been saying since… October 8th, those first protests, which we all remember right after October 7th, the ones that we saw in the United States and around the world… they weren’t protesting anything that Israel had done because the IDF hadn’t sent a single soldier into Gaza yet to defend the people of Israel and the Jewish people. They were out there supporting Hamas, and right from the start, we knew that if people allowed that to become the narrative then it was ultimately going to impact the Jewish community negatively and severely.

Nobody wants to be right about this, but we said right at the beginning that as long as people are allowed to say freely, allowed to scream about genocide and make claims about genocide and call Israelis baby killers and Zionists baby killers, by calling Zionists baby killers you’re calling Jews baby killers. When you allow anti-Zionism to become a socially acceptable form of antisemitism and when you talk about globalising the intifada, it’s only a matter of time until that leads to real violence.

In the United States and AJC, we saw this firsthand. We had an event in Washington DC back in May and two young people were murdered outside of an AJC event at the Jewish Museum by someone who was coming to kill Zionists… Thereafter in Colorado where someone set fire to Jews killing one and

Ted Deutch (Image: American Jewish Committee)

injuring more than a dozen others, again wanting to end Zionists.

This is the most important thing that we stress to policy makers that they have to speak with clarity, they have to call out antisemitism and… finally, they have to be willing to acknowledge it wherever it comes from. So, if you are in the United States, if you’re a Democrat you have to be able to call out antisemitism within the Democratic Party; it is not enough to point to extremists on the right. Likewise, Republicans have to acknowledge the same thing. And we see that here [in Australia]… Sunday [Aug. 31] at the protest, when you had neoNazis on the right and you had these pro-Hamas marchers on the left… I saw an interview the next day where they were trying to explain ‘well, one type of these protesters were really dangerous and the other… was really just mostly families’ and then the other side was saying ‘well one side was really just opposing immigration and the other side hates Jews.’ Policymakers have to understand… that… if you’re not seeing antisemitism wherever it comes from then you’re not seeing it at all – and you can’t … win unless you do.

JB: So that moral clarity is essential in government… In the United States… President Trump signed an executive order to combat… global antisemitism, so executive branches of the US Government are empowered by that executive order… to look at issues that are facing not just Jews in the United States in terms of antisemitism but globally, including in Australia. So how important do you think that executive order is and do you think that institutions of the executive branch of the US government can actually have a positive impact in assisting global Jewish communities like here in Australia?

WATCH: Joel Burnie’s full interview with AJC head Ted Deutch

TD: Well, I absolutely do. In the last administration, the Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism, Deborah Lipstadt, was somebody that we worked closely with on a whole host of areas. She travelled extensively making sure that people understood that the fight against antisemitism matters to the US. Now with President Trump you also have this executive order, and you have a president who’s made clear that this is a priority and we know the impact that it’s already having.

[When we were told] that the [Australian] Deputy Prime Minister was going to be meeting with [US Secretary of State Marco] Rubio in [late August]... I reached out to the designated Special Envoy [to Combat Antisemitism] Yehuda Kaplan – who has not yet… been confirmed by the Senate (his family has roots in Australia by the way)… just to make sure that they’re aware. And I know that in the meeting that the Secretary of State had with your Deputy Prime Minister that the issue of antisemitism and the recognition of a Palestinian state… were on the agenda… When a visiting dignitary hears from the executive branch that fighting antisemitism is not just in the best interest of the Jewish community and in the best interest of your country but also matters to the United States, and when it’s a relationship like the US-Australian relationship, which also is critically important, then that’s going to make sure that the issue is elevated and gets the attention that it deserves.

JB: Let’s take that a little bit further – so we’ve spoken about that executive order to combat global antisemitism but obviously and Colin and myself and other AIJAC colleagues have been talking about the impact that the Australian Government’s positions are having on the bilateral relationship with the United States. So just a comment or two on certain policy directions that this Government or our Government in Australia will make vis-a-vis Israel. How are they being perceived within this Administration. On something like [Palestine] recognition coming up in the next couple weeks in the General Assembly, we’ve seen moves by Secretary Rubio to block Mahmoud Abbas and his delegation from coming. Do you see any other moves by the Trump Administration to countries like Australia, Canada, the UK and France, in terms of the pursuit of unilateral recognition?

TD: Well… the President is, shall we say, never unwilling to speak out, I think is the way we can put it… Look, President Trump is going to say what’s on his mind and in this case, that the President has centred the fight against antisemitism in a way that matters in the United States and the battle against antisemitism especially on college campuses but also matters in this context… I know the steps that were taken by the Administration with respect to France

when France first announced that they were going to do this program at the UN with the Saudis and then that got shelved because of the war with Iran, and Macron announced he’s going to [recognise] a Palestinian state without really any conditions. Then you have Starmer and Carney and Albanese now chiming in with announcements of recognition subject to conditions… Each of them has different conditions, all of them know these conditions aren’t going to be satisfied before the UN General Assembly. And all of them understand that, diplomatically, you can’t achieve the outcome they say that they want by simply declaring it, as if negotiations don’t have to take place in order to achieve them.

The Administration has made that point and I think is going to continue to make that point leading up to the UN General Assembly and I suspect not just leading up to [and] during the UN General Assembly week. This is [a] point that US diplomats will be making on an ongoing basis… because … if the goal is to achieve peace in the region and that can’t happen until Hamas lays down its weapons… until it’s clear that Hamas can play no role in the future of Gaza –something that was I guess one of the Prime Minister’s conditions – none of that happens if world leaders just declare that there’s going to be a Palestinian state…

When you allow anti-Zionism to become a socially acceptable form of antisemitism and when you talk about globalising the intifada, it’s only a matter of time until that leads to real violence

I’ll add that none of that happens without the assistance of the United States. So, both on ending the war and ultimately if there is a global coalition in recognising and pursuing a legitimate and secure two-state solution, maybe not now but in the future there has to be a realisation by leaders, including here in Australia, that this cannot be done without the assistance or the cooperation of the United States.

And it requires, I think, an even broader perspective. At AJC, we have offices in Jerusalem and in Abu Dhabi, which we opened… right after the Abraham Accords… [the] first full-time office by a Jewish organisation in the Arab world. We spend a lot of time thinking about what’s going to come next; that’s what our Center for New Middle East focuses on… So, a key part of that is Israel and Saudi Arabia normalising relations…

The Saudis aren’t going to normalise relations until there are certain assurances that they’re getting – Israel has to be involved, obviously, but the United States has to be involved there… To think that the prime ministers of Australia and Canada and the UK can somehow, with whatever conditions they try to impose, circumvent the important role that the US has to play, it’s just not a serious way to get to the outcome that they claim they want to achieve.

JB: So, that’s a great segue because on my list of questions [is] the Abraham Accords… So, just quick three quick question: The first is, where do you see the accords expanding? We’ve obviously seen huge economic booms, tourism booms and great bilateral relationships, so where’s the untapped area of those accords? Finally, what do you perceive the effect of the war in Gaza has on the expansion of those accords?

TD: Okay, in terms of expansion we could talk about different countries and how they approach Israel, but Saudi Arabia is the key. If Saudi Arabia, which is the most important country in the Muslim world and the most important country in the Arab world, the most important country in the Gulf, if Saudi Arabia normalises relations with Israel then, suddenly, if you have the most important

WATCH: What does October 7 mean for Israel’s future – and the Jewish people worldwide? AIJAC’s Paul Rubenstein talks to award-winning Israeli journalist Nadav Eyal

Muslim country then Indonesia – a country where… Shira Lowenberg, who is the head of our Asia Pacific Institute does such great work, the other Gulf countries might join. If Saudi joins, then the broader Arab world suddenly there sees that it’s possible to do that… That’s the key in terms of the opportunities…

There are still so many economic opportunities that exist… Right now, the relationship between the UAE and Israel has, I mean it’s been strong throughout, even since October 7th but there are enormous opportunities to do more there and then… Bahrain is a country where so much more can be done. And, obviously, those economic opportunities when more countries join will be significant.

As was explained to us when we were in Saudi Arabia, the opportunity to view the region, not as a series of bilateral relationships between different countries and Israel or any other country, but as one unified region that’s where the huge opportunity is… What was the third question?

JB: The impact of the war…

TD: Ultimately, there has to be a focus on the day after in Gaza. Everyone’s focused on that, including AJC, but we also have to be thinking about longer term.

In the near term, the Gulf countries, the Emiratis in particular… made clear… the Arab League made clear that there can’t be Hamas in Gaza. And when it’s clear that Hamas won’t be in Gaza then the rest of the region is prepared to start investing in rebuilding Gaza and when that starts to happen then it becomes easier to envision the future and we didn’t even… talk about the rest of the world…

We’ve spent a lot of time working on the India-Middle East economic corridor and what it would mean for India to be able to connect through the entire region through Saudi Arabia and Israel and then into Europe and what it would mean for the European countries that could be on the receiving end of that… I mean it will be a transformative event, but we need to actually get through this moment first.

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WAS ISRAEL AN “IMPERIALIST” CREATION?

Stunning archival findings put current controversies in perspective

PAUL MONK

Israel’s Moment: International Support for and Opposition to Establishing the Jewish State, 1945-1949

Jeffrey Herf

Cambridge University Press, 2022-23, 500 pp.

DR PAUL MONK is a former senior intelligence analyst and long-time consultant in applied cognitive science. He is the author of a dozen books, including The West in a Nutshell: Foundations, Fragilities, Futures (2009) and Dictators and Dangerous Ideas (2018).

This book is a superb piece of historical research. It ought to have been required reading for anyone reacting to the Hamas atrocities of October 7, 2023 or claiming to put the subsequent war in perspective. The ‘Leftist’ denunciations of Israel and calls for ‘Palestine’ to be “free from the river to the sea” are founded on falsity and antisemitism. This book is a much-needed, closely documented corrective to such vicious nonsense.

In a letter to the editors of the Jewish quarterly SAPIR, dated August 19, 2022, Professor Herf deplored the prevalence of antisemitism and anti-Zionism even among Jewish scholars in the United States. He wrote:

The propaganda assault of the last half-century on Israel and Zionism, which spread the falsehoods that Zionism was a form of racism, and that Israel was a settler-colonial state founded in a war of expulsion, has had an impact on the academy.

His vastly illuminating and liberating book is a must-read in this context. Herf, now 78-years-old, has long been a fine historian. With this book, he excels himself and vindicates the vocation of historian.

The range of his primary research, in American, European and Middle Eastern sources and archives, is immensely impressive. We get an integrated and detailed coverage of American, British, French, German, Russian, Czech, Arab and Israeli archives and memoirs. Only a lifetime

of serious language learning and familiarisation with archives could yield so rich a cross-examination of what diplomats, generals, statesmen and activists were thinking and doing a lifetime ago.

He minutely covers the absolutely foundational realities that both the British Foreign Office and the American national security establishment (the State Department, the Pentagon and the CIA) were opposed to the partition of British Mandatory Palestine and to the creation of a Jewish state and attempted to prevent such an outcome between 1947 and 1949. Given the endless claims that Israel is an imperialist venture and a “settler colonial” society without legitimacy, this detailed dissection of the Anglo-American position is devastating.

Herf shows that the calculation, in both London and Washington, was that Middle Eastern oil was crucial to the economic future of the West; that access to it required coddling reactionary and backward Arab potentates; and that the Soviet Union was seeking to facilitate the creation of a pro-Soviet state in Palestine, by infiltrating into it thousands of ‘communist’ Jews from Eastern Europe. He also shows that there was no appreciable concern for the fate of the Jews or mention of the Holocaust in the British or American foreign policy establishments.

They connived in refusing to arrest or prosecute the egregiously antisemitic and pro-Holocaust Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, and allowed him to return to the Middle East, as an agent of anti-Zionist and antisemitic agitation. The implications of this were and remain disturbing.

Long an admirer of US Secretary of State George Marshall and the US State Department’s George F. Kennan, I found myself stunned by the overwhelming evidence that they worked and thought on all these lines. Herf closely documents how the British Labour Government led by Clement Attlee sought to cut off Jewish immigration to Palestine, armed the Arab states and connived in their blatant attempt to destroy the nascent State of Israel in 1948. Meanwhile, Marshall arranged an arms embargo that was plainly tilted against Israel. Only Czech arms, supplied at Stalin’s instigation, enabled the micro-state of Israel to survive the Arab onslaught, under the leadership of the country’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion

The single most stunning aspect of Herf’s book is his meticulous demonstration that, in 1947-49, the Left – in both the United States and Western Europe, not least in France –

President Harry Truman with Secretary of State George Marshall in 1948 (Image: Wikimedia Commons)

passionately supported the Zionist project and helped Israel in any way it could. The Soviet Foreign Minister, Andrei Gromyko, excelled himself at the United Nations in denouncing the Anglo-American machinations against Israel and their underlying geopolitical purpose of keeping the British Empire in place in the Middle East.

This history has long been buried – supplanted with an ignorant Cold War consensus that Israel was itself an Anglo-American imperial project directed against the Muslim Arab world. Nothing could be further from the truth. The astonishing thing is that Ben-Gurion’s heroes were able, against all the odds, to establish an effective state apparatus, import and make highly effective use of Czech arms (the nature and quantities of which Herf tabulates) and withstand the relentless and mendacious pressure put on them by London and Washington.

Not the least striking feature of the study is the very clear evidence that US President Harry Truman’s pro-Zionist views were overridden by the State Department and the Pentagon and that he clashed head on with Marshall over the matter of Israel. So striking is Marshall’s

President Harry Truman with Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion and Foreign Minister Abba Eban (Image: Wikimedia Commons)

intractable position in the matter that one is left to puzzle over the coherence of his overall worldview.

In Europe, he was seized of the danger of communism and sponsored the famous Marshall Plan. In China, he laboured to get Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government to come to terms with Mao Zedong’s communist insurgency. In the Middle East, he cold-bloodedly sought to smother Israel and to back the Arabs and the British Empire for the sake of future oil supplies. The first policy was visionary, the second myopic, the third ruthlessly Machiavellian.

Herf shows that the US government, as well as public opinion, was deeply divided over Middle East policy. The Truman White House, the Treasury Department and the Department of Justice were lined up against the State Department, the Pentagon and the CIA. Each acted according to its lights, not in coordination. The same, he shows, was the case in France, with the Ministry of the Interior defying the Foreign Ministry on Jewish emigration from Europe into Palestine and also arms smuggling to the Zionists.

Renowned US State Department offical George Kennan was part of the Washington consensus that rejected Israel's creation and took the Arab side (Image: Wikipedia)

This tension, illustrated in the minute examination of long classified cables and memoranda, is fine-grained historical inquiry at its best. One of many high points in the book is Herf’s ninth chapter, "The US State Department Policy Planning Staff Memos Oppose the UN Partition Resolution: January-February 1948.” The pivotal role of the State Department’s George Kennan is here highlighted. Herf shows how Kennan’s judgement was shaped by the Arab and oil lobby and, in turn, became foundational to State Department obstruction of Truman’s pro-Partition position.

The key paragraph reads:

In a series of memoranda prepared early in 1948, George Kennan, the director of the Policy Planning Staff in the State Department, made the case that the Zionist project was irreconcilable with the policy of containment of communism. He did so with the same eloquence and analytical clarity that had earlier brought him renown. Since writing the ‘Long Telegram’ of February 22 1946, Kennan had emerged as the intellectual architect of American global strategy in the emerging confrontation with the Soviet Union and communism. That, plus his association with Secretary of State Marshall, and his leadership of the Policy Planning Staff, meant that his views both mirrored and shaped a consensus that influenced the US national security establishment as a whole. Kennan and his staff did not invent that consensus; his accomplishment was to extend it beyond the anti-Zionists among the Arab specialists in the State Department, the CIA and the military and connect it to the core strategic policy of the United States in Europe and around the globe in the first years of the Cold War.

Herf then shows in detail how, from that point on, settled State Department policy was to work with London to obstruct Jewish immigration, deny arms to the Zionists [and] turn a blind eye to Arab aggression

Truman had, on Dec. 1, 1947, in the immediate wake of the UN vote on the partition of Palestine, called for a review of America’s Middle East policy. Kennan drafted his memoranda on that basis. In doing so, he was strongly influenced by the lobbying of one William Eddy, a former State Department official who had moved to work for the Arab-American Oil Corporation (ARAMCO). Eddy argued that the Arabs would never accept a Jewish state and that a pro-Zionist American policy would alienate the Arab world, with adverse consequences for ARAMCO.

Herf then shows in detail how, from that point on, settled State Department policy was to work with London to obstruct Jewish immigration, deny arms to the Zionists, turn a blind eye to Arab aggression and then, under the Bernadotte Plan of July 1948, seek to reward Arab aggression by demanding that Israel give up the Negev (and the port of Haifa), constituting 60% of the territory allotted to it under the UN partition plan.

Under the scheme of the first UN mediator for the Arab-Israeli conflict, Swedish diplomat Count Folke Bernadotte, Britain would come to control the Negev, via its Hashemite puppet state of Transjordan. Meanwhile, though the Arab states refused to engage in peace negotiations, Washington and London pressed Ben-Gurion to allow Arab refugees from the Israeli territories to return to their homes.

Israel was in no sense an Anglo-American conspiracy against the Muslim Arab world. Ben-Gurion’s Israel was fully within its rights, under the UN mandate and international law, to defend itself as it did, to refuse the “right of return” and to insist that its statehood be acknowledged by the Arab world. On May 20, 1948, Florimund Bonte, a member of the Central Committee of the French Communist Party, declared in the French National Assembly:

We cannot forget that on the territory of Europe dominated by Hitlerism, half of the Jewish population has been exterminated and that for three years millions of human beings have been reduced to scraps of emaciated skin. We must pay tribute to those who fought alongside us during the war for liberation of all peoples… from the barbaric philosophy of Hitlerism. It was from their attitude that the possibility of the creation of the Jewish state was born.

Yet for decades now a fascistic pseudo-Leftist antisemitism has called for the destruction of Israel as a tainted product of British and American imperialism. Herf has now corrected the record.

STONY GROUND

Under Jerusalem there are treasures, but also a minefield

Allon Lee

When the Stones Speak: The Remarkable Discovery of the City of David and What Israel’s Enemies Don’t Want You to Know

Doron Spielman

Center Street, 2025, 304 pp. $55

There are few areas of the Levant left untouched by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – including below ground.

When the Stones Speak by American-Israeli Doron Spielman offers a window into how this century-old battle plays out in the realm of archaeology.

For 20 years, Spielman was Vice President of the City of David Foundation, which has overseen a remarkably significant dig adjacent to the Old City of Jerusalem, in the Palestinian-majority neighbourhood of Silwan.

This gave him a rare, close-up view of discoveries that are fascinating in their own right, but, critically, strongly reinforce the Jewish people’s claim that their ancestral roots in the Land of Israel stretch back at least 3,000 years.

Few issues in the conflict are more radioactive than Jerusalem, especially when questions of heritage and legitimacy touch upon disputed territory.

Spielman’s book enters that minefield unapologetically.

One hundred years ago, there was broad global acceptance that the Jewish people were indigenous to the Middle East. Today, however, Israel fends off accusations of being a settler-colonial state. Both the City of David project and When the Stones Speak share the same goal: excavating the past to prove Jewish longevity and continuity in the area.

The book, then, is part history, part personal account and part polemic.

Of the three monotheistic religions that assert a claim to Jerusalem, up until 1967 Judaism’s physical presence was the weakest, eroded by successive conquests that diminished Jewish political, institutional and demographic strength in the city.

Spielman argues that as the oldest national and religious group linked to Jerusalem, the

Jewish claim enjoys the greatest legitimacy.

What’s more, while Jerusalem is sacred to Christians and Muslims, for Jews it is the axis of both faith and national identity. As Spielman notes, the name “Jerusalem” appears 669 times in the Hebrew Bible but not once in the Quran.

Modern archaeology in Jerusalem begins with a Welshman, fittingly named Charles Warren.

In 1867, Warren took advantage of Britain’s alliance with the Ottoman Empire to investigate the hills outside the Old City. Digging shafts, he believed he had uncovered the water channel mentioned in the story of King David’s conquest of Jebusite Jerusalem.

He concluded that the original site of Jerusalem lay not within the current Old City walls but outside.

As Spielman explains: “Over the course of thousands of years, the inhabitants of Jerusalem had moved only a few hundred yards away from the City of David, the original location of Jerusalem from the Bible, to safer ground at the top of the mountain.”

With each conquest, earlier layers of the city were buried deeper, preserving history to be uncovered millennia later. Spielman surveys the major Christian and Jewish efforts to dig between Warren’s era and the end of the British Mandate.

Archaeology was soon weaponised by political leaders. Palestinian Arab figures accused Jews of plotting to undermine Islamic holy sites on the Temple Mount – a charge Spielman notes Hamas would later recycle as religious justification for the October 7, 2023, massacre.

Panorama of the so-called 'Tower of David' in the Old City of Jerusalem with view of the new Jerusalem in the distance (Image: Shutterstock)

He describes how, after the 1948 war, Jordan controlled east Jerusalem, including the Old City. For 19 years, “all of Charles Warren’s excavation sites were covered over, either with hastily built homes or with garbage.” The Old City’s Jewish Quarter was destroyed, and thousands of graves on the Mount of Olives desecrated.

Some people will refuse to ever believe Jews are anything other than interlopers in their homeland. But for those with an open mind, Spielman’s story illustrates the determination of Israelis working to unearth and protect a 3,000year connection to the city

Spielman quotes from the testimony of Jordan’s Colonel Abdullah el Tell: “For the first time in one thousand years, not a single Jew remains in the Jewish Quarter. Not a single building remains intact. This makes the Jews’ return here impossible.”

This remained the status quo until the Six-Day War of June 1967, when King Hussein lost the West Bank, including east Jerusalem, and the Old City, to Israel.

Jewish graves on the Mount of Olives: Desecrated during the period of Jordanian rule 1948-67 (Image: Jewish Virtual Library)

Although Israel allowed the Islamic Waqf to continue administering the Temple Mount, for the first time since antiquity Jews now exercised exclusive control of Jerusalem. Archaeology resumed in earnest.

The contribution of the City of David to this legacy has dwarfed all that had come before – monumental structures dating back to the First and Second Temple periods have been revealed, while coins and seals have captured the human element.

But renewed digging has also provoked efforts to shut them down.

Spielman is unsparing in his criticism of Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, which, he argues, promote ahistorical claims to delegitimise the Jewish connection to Jerusalem –including the assertion that no Jewish Temple ever existed there, despite the many Islamic sources acknowledging otherwise. These falsehoods, he writes, are often coordinated and amplified by media outlets, NGOs and UN agencies such as UNESCO.

Spielman recalls how clandestine Palestinian Authority attempts to buy the Givati Parking Lot – a site critical to the excavation – were thwarted at the last moment. Its loss would have devastated the project and run the risk that the PA would bulldoze the site, thus destroying it, as has happened elsewhere in Jerusalem.

Not all the opposition, however, arrived via politics. Some archaeologists were uneasy with relying on the Bible as a guide. Here the book’s title becomes important: “Let the Stones Speak” was the mantra used by the lead archaeologist to disarm critics who doubted scripture’s historical reliability. Spielman makes a strong case that the finds uncovered are grounded in fact rather than faith alone.

The broader argument of When the Stones Speak is clear: archaeology exposes as baseless the charge that Israel is “Judaising” Jerusalem.

The evidence of Jewish continuity is too weighty, too embedded in the ground itself, to be denied.

Some people will refuse to ever believe Jews are anything other than interlopers in their homeland. But for those with an open mind, Spielman’s story illustrates the determination of Israelis working to unearth and protect a 3,000-year connection to the city.

Spielman’s message is simple but potent: the Jewish link to Jerusalem is not only written in texts but indelibly embedded in the very soil of the city.

TERROR AFTER TERROR

What October 7 unleashed

JAMIE HYAMS

October 8

Directed and co-written by Wendy Sachs

Briarcliff Entertainment, Australian release June 2025, 1:40 min

While Jewish communities across the world were still struggling to comprehend what had happened on October 7, 2023, they were confronted with a new shock – a huge and sudden upsurge in antisemitism. An increase in antisemitism wasn’t shocking of itself. It had been an established pattern – whenever Israel has been forced to fight a war, antisemitism has increased.

What was shocking, however, was the virulence of the antisemitism, and the speed of its onset. It began the very day after the atrocities, on October 8, hence the name of this worthy and sobering documentary.

The movie, completed in October last year, is obviously a passion project for US writer and director Wendy Sachs, who directed and co-wrote it, and was one of several executive producers.

Its focus is on events in the US, but had it been made here in Australia, it would not have been terribly different. On October 8, in Sydney, we had a crowd led by a hate preacher celebrating the worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust. Similar celebrations of murder were seen in New York’s Times Square the same day.

In Australia on October 9, we had those notorious scenes at the Sydney Opera House, lit up in the colours of the Israeli flag to show solidarity with Israel and the local Jewish community, yet too dangerous for the Jewish community to go near due to violent protesters chanting “F..k the Jews” and, on the most charitable interpretation, “Where’s the Jews?” And all this before Israel even had a chance to commence its military campaign to prevent Hamas ever repeating the October 7 atrocities.

Viewers should be warned that the documentary begins with brief but harrowing footage of the October 7 attacks and their aftermath, and emotional accounts from survivors and victims’ family members.

It then proceeds methodically through the various manifestations of the antisemitism epidemic in the US, with testimony and explanations from various activists, victims and experts, many of whom will be familiar to AIR readers, including Jonathan Schanzer, Asaf

Romirowsky, Dan Senor, Einat Wilf, Jonathan Greenblatt, Noa Tishby, Bari Weiss, Douglas Murray, Michal Cotler-Wunsh, Hen Mazzig, Hillel Neuer, Emily Schrader, Deborah Lipstadt, Democrat Congressman Ritchie Torres and actors Debra Messing and Michael Rapaport.

We see that, on October 8, 31 student groups at Harvard put out a joint statement saying they “hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.” Rabbi David Wolpe, a visiting scholar, explains that Harvard set the tone and started an “unfathomable chain reaction”. The movie regularly returns to the events on university campuses, where, like in Australia, Jewish students were made to feel unsafe and unwelcome; where matters deteriorated further once encampments were established, where student bodies passed virulently anti-Israel motions including calling for boycotts and sanctions, and where administrators were hesitant to act.

Just as in Australia, anti-Israel activists on campus and elsewhere are no longer content with calling for an end to the “occupation”. They brazenly demand Israel cease to exist, denying the Jewish right to self-determination in the Jewish homeland.

We follow the story of Tessa Veksler, who had been elected student body President at the University of California Santa Barbara, with her Zionism well known, but became vilified, was forced to take her exams online (an option also offered to students in Australia) and narrowly avoided a recall motion.

Schanzer explains how Students for Justice in Palestine, which organised the antisemitic activity on the campuses across the US, started when 25 Hamas activists met in 1993 in the US to plot how to make what Hamas was doing seem palatable.

WATCH: The official trailer for “October 8”

Romirowsky notes that it still receives funding from Hamas today.

The film explains how pro-Palestinian activists in the US have used liberal dogma to advance their cause, with Romirowsky stating, “The Palestinian narrative, through the narrative of intersectionality, has hijacked every underdog cause in the world.”

It also detours through the bias of the press and NGOs, especially those regarded as human rights organisations, and how these feed into the anti-Israel narrative. We hear revelations from former Human Rights Watch (HRW) senior editor Danielle Haas about the pernicious way that organisation conducts itself with regard to Israel. She observes that people consider HRW as reputable, but says that’s “an incredibly dangerous assumption to make.”

We see many examples of the disturbing levels of hatred. In the US, as in Australia and internationally, posters of the hostages were frequently torn down. Congressman Ritchie Torres explains that every time he says anything supportive of Israel or Jews on social media, the response is an “endless stream of antisemitic, homophobic, racist hate,” including death threats. It’s the only issue on which he faces such harassment.

It also looks at the role played by social media. Oren Segal from the Anti-Defamation League explains that threats against Jews increased 400%, and October 7 iconography such as inverted red triangles (which signal Israeli targets in Hamas combat videos and have since become symbols of supporting Hamas) and paragliders (used by Hamas on October 7 to invade Israel) was widely adopted. He notes that the algorithms on TikTok, which for many or most under 25s has taken the place of news, mean users see 54 anti-Israel videos for every pro-Israel one.

He also explains that Russia, China, Iran and North Korea seed social media with incitement and false posts, leading to violence against Jews. Jews make up 2.4% of the US population, but suffer 55% of religiously motivated hate crimes. This brings to mind the recent revelations that Iran has been funding and organising antisemitic attacks in Melbourne and Sydney. I’m also reminded of the fact that, in the immediate aftermath of the June 2025 Iran-Israel ‘Twelve Day War’, 80 seemingly grassroots social media sites in Scotland that had been pumping out anti-Israel, anti-US and pro-Independence material suddenly went dead. They were part of an IRGC disinformation campaign.

The film sets out the lack of support from Hollywood, with Debra Messing and Michael Rapaport bemoaning the lack of sympathy for the hostages. However, I would have liked to have known if Jewish people in the creative areas were ostracised and excluded in the US, as they were in Australia. I guess there’s only so much that can fit into a 100-minute running time.

The movie tries to end on an optimistic note, with various talking heads saying Jews are strong, do have partners and should have hope. However, I found it profoundly depressing. It’s a movie you won’t enjoy, but it’s well-made, engrossing and informative, and one you should definitely watch.

"October 8" is available to stream on Amazon for A$5.99

ANTISEMITISM: WHAT EVERYONE NEEDS TO KNOW

Understanding an infinitely adaptable conspiracy theory

DAVID HARRIS

DAVID HARRIS, a lifelong Jewish activist, led the American Jewish Committee (AJC) – described by the New York Times as the “dean of American Jewish organizations” – from 1990-2022. He was referred to by the late Israeli President Shimon Peres as the “foreign minister of the Jewish people.” Harris has been honoured more than 20 times by foreign governments for his international work, making him the most decorated American Jewish organisational leader in history.

The following short essays are excerpted from a forthcoming book, Antisemitism: What Everyone Needs to Know®, written by David Harris, the long-serving former CEO of the American Jewish Committee, and published by Oxford University Press. It will be available for sale on October 6, 2025, at the recommended retail price of US$18.99 for the paperback version.

WHAT IS ANTISEMITISM IN PLAIN SPEECH?

Above all, antisemitism is an enduring and infinitely adaptable conspiracy theory. It ascribes to Jews, as a group, malevolent characteristics and aims. Even if historical circumstances should change over time, those essential characteristics and aims do not. Thus, for hardcore antisemites who seek off-theshelf answers for the world’s calamities, the Jews offer a convenient, one-sizefits-all answer. Jews are evil incarnate. They are the devil incarnate. They are Satan incarnate. They are the anti-Christ.

According to this worldview, or, more precisely, demonology, the Jews are always plotting, scheming, deceiving, cheating, undermining, sabotaging, or manipulating. They are at any moment conspiring with Masons, Bolsheviks, globalists, cosmopolitans, Black people, even Nazis to undermine the established order and gain power. They are clannishly out for themselves at the expense of others, seeking political and economic control, starting wars for their own benefit, spreading diseases to the non-Jewish population, pursuing other nefarious aims to weaken and dominate society at large (see image on next page).

How else, then, to explain their ability to achieve “disproportionate influence” in key sectors of society, be it in prewar Germany or contemporary America, other than by their treachery? To those who malevolently seek explanation, jus-

tification, or distraction, such trigger words as “Jew”, “Yid”, “Hebrew” or, in the modern era, “Zionist” or “Israeli” can offer an irresistible temptation, with the foreknowledge that there is likely to be a ready-made audience that picks up the charge and runs with it. After all, how many people have been conditioned to believe any and all accusations against the Jewish people and, since 1948, the Jewish state?

And to match the wicked intentions, Jews must be depicted accordingly: caricatured, demonised, vulgarised. They need to be portrayed as short, hunched, ghoulish, gnarled, hook-nosed, beady-eyed, secretive, avaricious, sinister, mysterious, animalistic, donkeyeared, spidery, rat-like, blubbery, or otherwise physically repulsive and subhuman.

Because of the Jews’ alleged perfidy, they merit no understanding, much less sympathy. Whatever tragedies befall them are fully deserved. After all, should there be any other fate for unadulterated wickedness?

An 1893 cover of La Libre Parole , a notoriously antisemitic newspaper published by Edouard Drumont in France, depicting a grotesque, power-hungry Jew straddling a globe. The two word caption underneath says, “Their homeland”.

And if, after the Holocaust, antisemitism got a “bad” name among those who thought the gas chambers and crematoria were a step too far, then the rebirth of Israel offered a new outlet, according to some observers, including Michal Cotler-Wunsh, Israel’s special envoy for combating antisemitism. According to this view, the evil is shifted from the individual Jew to the Jewish nation, together with the projection of every imaginable sin, from genocide to ethnic cleansing, war crimes to child murder. Yet, at the same time, proponents insist that such accusations are anti-Israel, not antisemitic, even as they are transparently transferable tropes from long-held antisemitic beliefs and have no relation to the truth.

At heart, then, antisemitism is an irrational, intractable set of views about an entire group of people. Facts alone are unlikely to cure the disease. As the Irish author Jonathan Swift wrote centuries ago, “You cannot reason a person out of a position he did not reason himself into in the first place.”

WHY ARE JEWS SOMETIMES REFERRED TO AS “THE CANARY IN THE COAL MINE”?

For miners, having a canary along in the coal mine was a matter of life and death. If carbon monoxide, which is odourless and colourless, was present, the canary would feel it well before the miner, in fact dying as an alert to the miner to get out immediately. Jews have often been cast by the world in essentially the same role as the canary. When

Many believe that a new form of antisemitism has emerged: anti-Zionism. Rather than focus on the individual Jew or Judaism or the Jewish “race”, the target is the Jewish state, and "Zionists", those who support its existence. (Image: Shutterstock)

antisemitism rises and Jews’ anxiety level grows, it is a warning sign that something bigger and broader is amiss. It may first affect Jews, but left unchecked it will threaten society as a whole, be it other minorities, respect for human dignity, or broader democratic values. Some Jews, however, reject the description of the canary in the coal mine not because it is inaccurate but because they say they are unwilling to continue to die from society’s poisonous carbon monoxide, in this case antisemitism, so that others might have the chance to live.

ANTI-ZIONISM AS ANTISEMITISM

In November 1947, the UN General Assembly voted to recommend that separate Jewish and Arab states replace the British Mandate. The Arab world categorically rejected the plan. Notwithstanding, the Jews announced the establishment of Israel on May 14, 1948. Since then, many believe that a new form of antisemitism has emerged: anti-Zionism. Rather than focus on the individual Jew or Judaism or the Jewish “race”, the target is the Jewish state. Its exponents often claim their rejection of Israel is not antisemitic but rather state-driven. Others insist the two cannot be separated. Is calling for Israel’s destruction inherently antisemitic? Does any attempt to compare Israel’s actions to those of Nazi Germany or apartheid South Africa cross a line into antisemitism? Does treating Israel differently at

the UN compared to other member states constitute antisemitism? If Israel’s overseas supporters are accused of “dual loyalty”, meaning their loyalty to Israel is seen as in conflict with loyalty to their country of citizenship, is this antisemitism?

WHEN DOES CRITICISM OF ISRAEL BECOME ANTISEMITISM?

Natan Sharansky was a leader of the Jewish and human rights movements in his native USSR. He was arrested for his activities and sent for nine brutal years, 1977– 86, to the Soviet Gulag, where he became one of the world’s best-known political prisoners. He was finally allowed to leave the USSR in 1986 and resettled in Israel. Fifteen years later, he was the Israeli minister of diaspora affairs. As he said at the time, while witnessing a surge in antisemitism starting in Europe, he “was grappling with the question of how to distinguish between legitimate criticism of Israel and antisemitism.”

He came up with a formula, known as the 3D test, that has been widely used by mainstream Jewish organisations and various Israeli governments. Here is his explanation:

These 3Ds – demonisation, delegitimisation and double standards – are the three main tools that antisemites employed against Jews throughout history.

For thousands of years, Jews were demonised, they were charged with blood libels, with poisoning wells, and, later, with controlling the global banking system. The Jewish faith and the Jewish claim to nationhood was delegitimised.

And double standards were applied to Jews, either through the imposition of special laws – from the Middle Ages in Europe, to the Russian Empire and Nazi Germany – or through de facto government policy discriminating against Jews, as I experienced in the Soviet Union. Throughout history, demonisation of Jewish people, delegitimisation of their faith or nationhood, and double standards applied to Jews created fertile soil for pogroms, expulsions and genocide.

My 3D test shows that if we see these same tools of delegitimisation, demonisation and double standards that were used against Jews in the past being used against the collective Jew, the Jewish State, today – we know we are witnessing a new face of the old antisemitism.

WHAT IS THE ROLE OF A NATION’S LEADERS WITH RESPECT TO ANTISEMITISM?

There are three basic responses on the leadership level: fanning the flames of antisemitism, confronting it head-on, or downplaying or ignoring it. In the first category, there are several examples in recent history.

When Pope John Paul II visited Syria in 2001, he was greeted by President Bashar al-Assad, who, speaking to the world’s media, said: “They [the Jews] try to kill the principle of religions with the same mentality they betrayed Jesus Christ and the same way they tried to betray and kill the Prophet Mohammad.” While the pontiff, for whatever reason, did not react in the moment, the Israeli President later responded by calling Assad’s words “careless, racist, antisemitic”.

During his two terms of office, from 1981 to 2003 and 2018 to 2020, Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad of Malaysia was accused on multiple occasions of promoting antisemitism. Indeed, his bigotry was revealed as early as 1970, when he wrote an essay titled “The Malay Identity”, in which he exclaimed, “The Jews are not only hooked-nosed… but understand money instinctively… Jewish stinginess and financial wizardry gained them the economic control of Europe and provoked antisemitism which waxed and waned throughout Europe through the ages.”

In 1984, he prevented a scheduled visit of the New York Philharmonic to Kuala Lumpur because the program included a piece by a Swiss Jewish composer, Ernest Bloch, inspired by a Hebrew melody. And in subsequent years, he invoked many of the classic antisemitic tropes about Jews and control of the media, Jews and financial thievery, and Jews and plots to undermine his country. Incidentally, this was a striking example of antisemitism without Jews. There is no Jewish community in Malaysia, but, to Mahathir, Jews pose a global threat, irrespective of whether they are physically present in a country – and despite the fact that Jews, in total, comprise 0.2% of the world population, or one in every 500 people on the planet.

In 2010, in a particularly noteworthy development, longtime Cuban leader Fidel Castro, a staunch Communist, publicly accused the President of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, of antisemitism for, among other reasons, denying the Holocaust. Castro told the Atlantic magazine, “The Jews have lived an existence that is much harder than ours. There is nothing that compares to the Holocaust… I don’t think anyone has been slandered more than the Jews. I would say much more than the Muslims. They have been slandered much more than the Muslims because they are blamed and slandered for everything. No one blames the Muslims for anything.” In the same interview, Castro recalled his childhood: “He reminisced about being a young boy and overhearing classmates saying Jews killed Jesus Christ. ‘I didn’t know what a Jew was. I knew of a bird that was called a ‘Jew,’ and so for me the Jews were those birds. This is how ignorant the entire population was.”

Then there is the case of Jeremy Corbyn, leader of Britain’s venerable Labour Party from 2015 to 2020 and candidate for prime minister in the 2019 national election.

Long-serving former Malaysian PM Mahathir Mohamad believed Jews pose a global threat, even though none were present in his country (Image: Shutterstock)

Corbyn was frequently accused of antisemitism during his tenure, as well as countenancing antisemitism in the party’s ranks. Britain’s Equality and Human Rights Commission issued a blistering report of that period in 2020: “The investigation was prompted by growing public concern about antisemitism in the Labour Party and followed official complaints received by us… [O]ur investigation found significant failings in the way the Labour Party has handled antisemitism complaints over the last four years. We found specific examples of harassment, discrimination and political interference in our evidence, but equally of concern was a lack of leadership within the Labour Party on these issues, which is hard to reconcile with its stated commitment to a zero-tolerance approach to antisemitism.”

Former UK Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn was found to have allowed antisemitism to flourish in his party by the British Equality and Human Rights Commission (Image: Shutterstock)

Again, it needs to be stressed that the leader of the party under investigation by this politically neutral body was vying for occupancy of 10 Downing Street and was the runner-up in the 2019 election. The report illustrated the constructive role that such a commission can play in a democratic society. After its release, Corbyn did step down, to be replaced by Sir Keir Starmer, who pledged a “zero-tolerance approach to antisemitism and racism.” In 2024, Starmer became Britain’s prime minister.

In 2024, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, in an election many believe he manipulated, tried to divert attention away from himself and point the finger at Zionism (in other words, Jews). He said Venezuela’s “extremist right” is “financed” and “supported by international Zionism,” claiming that “all the communication power of Zionism, which controls all social networks, the satellites, and all the power, is behind this coup d’état.”

By contrast, there are examples of a country’s leaders standing clearly and unambiguously against antisemitism. Does it help? No guarantee, but at the very least it sends the right message to a nation, all the more so if reinforced by actions that back up the words and have some teeth.

After the rape of a 12-year-old Jewish girl in June 2024, which was reportedly accompanied by antisemitic slurs by the three perpetrators, French President Emmanuel Macron minced no words in speaking of the “scourge of antisemitism” plaguing France and urged all schools to devote time to a dialogue about racism and antisemitism. Whether such school discussions take place, including how antisemitism and racism are juxtaposed and addressed, and with what results, remains to be seen, but, again, it reflects a recognition that condemnations of antisemitism alone are woefully inadequate to address the growing threats around the world.

In the face of rapidly rising antisemitism in the United States, President Joe Biden not only forcefully condemned it but also, in 2023, issued the comprehensive US National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism, the first of its kind in American history. In a statement at the launch

of the groundbreaking initiative, Biden announced that “it represents the most ambitious and comprehensive US government-led effort to fight antisemitism in American history.”

During Austria’s rotating presidency of the European Union in 2018, Chancellor Sebastian Kurz successfully pressed for EU member states to adopt national strategies to combat antisemitism, based on the key dimensions of education, security, law enforcement, integration, documentation, and civil society.

Elsewhere in this book, reference was made to the initiative of the 35-nation International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, formalised in 2016, to create a standardised definition of antisemitism, including seeking to confront the complex issue of when criticism of Israel spills over into antisemitism. After all, in order to combat antisemitism, some common understanding of what it is (and is not) is needed.

And as a final example of leadership, the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution in 2005, however late in coming, designating January 27, the day in 1945 that Soviet troops liberated Auschwitz-Birkenau, as International Holocaust Remembrance Day. UN commemorations, as well as events in some countries, have taken place since. In the resolution, any attempt at Holocaust denial was strongly condemned.

At the same time, the UN does not have enforcement power and, being such a highly politicised institution, has not always been able to ensure that the original measure would be used as intended by its sponsors. Nonetheless, it offers an example of recognising the need to go beyond ritualistic condemnations of antisemitism and, in this case, mobilise education and remembrance as ongoing tools to fight it.

As for the third category of leadership response, let’s call it the middle ground, this clearly falls short. In 1995, Father Henryk Jankowski, a parish priest in Gdansk, Poland, delivered a fiery sermon that included an attack on Jews. He asserted, “The Star of David is implicated in the swastika as well as in the hammer and sickle.”

While these words were not new for him, what elevated the mass to a global news story was the presence in the church that day of Polish President Lech Wałęsa – and his failure to react either during the service or for the next nine days, until he finally denounced antisemitism, but without any reference to the offender in this case.

In a subsequent meeting with an AJC delegation in San Francisco during the 50th anniversary celebration of the UN founding, Wałęsa defended his long silence by asserting that anything else would have only brought more attention to Jankowski’s bigotry. By contrast, the AJC group argued that, by staying silent for as long as he did, he sent the wrong message to his nation of 35 million people. As one Jewish participant in the meeting said, “Two totally different interpretations. No meeting of the minds.” Did this story suggest that Wałęsa himself was sympathetic to antisemitism? Not necessarily, but it certainly raised questions for many. In 2001, as antisemitism erupted in France, home to Europe’s largest Jewish community, and as rabbis told religious Jews that taking off a kippah or hiding it under a baseball cap was now permitted for safety reasons, AJC met with President Jacques Chirac in his office.

The aim was to alert the French head of state to the growing threat and enlist his help. His response: “I know my country better than you. There is no antisemitism in France.”

Chirac was not an antisemite. Indeed, as noted, he had been the first French leader to acknowledge that Vichy collaboration with the Nazis, including in the roundup and deportation of Jews, was part and parcel of French history and could no longer be denied. Yet he was unwilling to acknowledge what had become painfully obvious – that French Jews were fearful for their safety due to intimidation and threats from the country’s growing Arab and Muslim population, which dwarfed the Jewish community by a ratio of 10 to 1. In a later meeting with Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrine, in November 2001 in New York, the same group again tried to raise alarm bells, but once more without success. The chief diplomat’s reply: “There is no antisemitism in France. Instead, there is hooliganism and also the regrettable importation of the Arab-Israeli conflict onto French soil.”

This inability, or unwillingness, to see the rising menace of antisemitism, which after all was not a new or foreign disease in France, delayed the awareness of its magnitude. As a consequence, the state failed to reach out to an increasingly anxious community wondering if its place in France was still assured, as well as the opportunity to formulate a timely national strategy while there was still a chance to nip it in the bud.

Poster from Hungarian political party Fidesz showing the opponents of PM Viktor Orban surrounding Jewish billionaire philanthropist George Soros (Image: Shutterstock)

In Hungary, President Viktor Orbán has been accused of antisemitism, particularly depicting his political nemesis, the Hungarian-born financier George Soros, in ways that evoke antisemitic tropes – distorted features, money bags, devious plots to sabotage the country – whenever there is an election, not to mention trying to idealise Hungary’s less-than-perfect record in the Holocaust.

Orbán’s defenders argue that Hungary is home to the largest Jewish community in Central Europe, and that Orbán is one of Israel’s staunchest allies in the European Union and at the UN. So, which is he, or is he cunningly both? Certainly each side believes the facts are with them.

As a final example of this middle space, there was the neo-Nazi march in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, when repeated chants of “Jews will not replace us” were heard. President Donald Trump’s first reaction was “We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides, on many sides.” Shortly afterward he spoke again: “You had some very bad people in that group, but you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides.”

When antisemitism rises and Jews’ anxiety level grows, it is a warning sign that something bigger and broader is amiss. It may first affect Jews, but left unchecked it will threaten society as a whole, be it other minorities, respect for human dignity, or broader democratic values.

That led Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, a fellow Republican, to comment, “It sounded like a moral equivocation or, at the very least, moral ambiguity when we need extreme moral clarity.”

Some concluded that Trump was an antisemite by appearing to take a two-handed approach, even as he later sought to dispute that interpretation of his remarks.

Others hastily pointed out that he has always had good friends in the Jewish community, is a grandfather to three Jewish grandchildren, and was one of Israel’s best friends ever in the White House.

For those who are genuinely concerned about antisemitism, whatever its source, the response must be quick and unequivocal, and it needs to mobilise the power of government to stand unflinchingly against such hatred. Anything less sends mixed messages to the general public and the organs of state and, however unintentionally, offers wiggle room to potential perpetrators.

ARE THERE POSITIVE EXAMPLES OF ACTION AGAINST ANTISEMITISM?

As discussed earlier, in the Second World War there were shining examples. They were too few to save six million victims of the Holocaust, but they demonstrated what a belief in shared humanity – and the courage to act on it – could accomplish. Their common denominator was that they did not see Jews as somehow the “other”, the “alien”, the “stranger”, but

rather simply as fellow human beings.

And, ultimately, returning to the earlier question of whether there could ever be a “Pfizer vaccine” to inoculate against antisemitism, or perhaps even intolerance more broadly, the admittedly utopian answer lies in seeking to educate in homes, classrooms, houses of worship, the political arena, the worlds of sports and culture, and our public spaces – and not just in one lesson plan, one sermon, one speech, one gesture, but consistently and in real-life behaviour – genuine respect for one another.

Not tolerance. That sets the bar too low. The aim should be not tolerance for one another but rather appreciation for those of different backgrounds. In other words, affirming one’s own identity should not have to come at the expense of denigrating or denying someone else’s.

Those Second World War rescuers put themselves on the line to protect fellow human beings and affirm the kind of world in which they wanted to live.

As Dr Martin Luther King Jr. said in 1962, “We must learn to live together as brothers or we will die together as fools.” And as the Hebrew Bible states, “God created humankind in God’s image.” No hierarchy. Universal equality. All the major religions have a variation of the Golden Rule – “Love thy neighbour as thyself,” in the Christian tradition – embedded in their teachings. The age-old challenge has been to put these noble visions into daily practice.

One community that did so was in the city of Billings, Montana. In 1993, some White supremacists and admirers of the Ku Klux Klan moved into town. In December, during the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah, a cinder block was thrown through the window of a small child’s bedroom, where a holiday menorah was displayed. Luckily, the child, Isaac, was in another room at the time. But the incident, following other threats to the tiny Jewish community, galvanised the city into action.

Led by the Executive Director of the Montana Association of Churches, the publisher of the Billings Gazette newspaper, and the chief of the Billings Police Department, together with Isaac’s mother, Tammie Schnitzer, the city made available paper menorahs and encouraged residents of all faiths to display them prominently. The message to the haters: The Jews were no longer few in number. They now had thousands of allies. The minority had become the majority. The tables had been turned on the antisemites. In the end, those extremists vanished.

The police chief early on reacted to the hate mongers in Billings: “Silence is acceptance. These people are testing us. And if we do nothing, there’s going to be more trouble. Billings should stand up and say, ‘Harass one of us and you harass us all.’”

Maybe the millennia-long search for the end of antisemitism is, in reality, as straightforward as that: communities of goodwill everywhere banding together and saying loudly to the world “Harass one of us and you harass us all.”

© David Harris. Extract from Antisemitism: What Everyone Needs to Know® published by Oxford University Press in November 2025 (US), February 2026 (UK), March 2026 (AUS) – available in hardcover, paperback and eBook formats, $34.95 AUD PB.

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MICHAEL SHANNON

DOWNWARD TREND

Indonesian attitudes towards Israel have, like much of the globe, taken a significant dive since October 2023. At the political level, President Prabowo Subianto’s Government appears to be trying to balance diplomacy and relief operations with a population that remains uncompromisingly pro-Palestinian.

A poll conducted in June by MEDIAN, a Jakartabased survey and research company, revealed a ten-point drop in public Indonesian support for the notion that both Israel and Palestine have the right to a state, with 30.2 per cent endorsing a two-state solution compared to 40.5 per cent in a similar

survey in February.

Likewise, the percentage of Indonesians believing that only Palestinians are entitled to a state rose in June to 67.3 per cent as opposed to 56.9 per cent in February, while a remarkable 74.9 per cent of those surveyed agreed with the proposition that Indonesia should never establish diplomatic relations with Israel or recognise the Jewish state.

To explain the hardening of attitudes over just a few months, respondents pointed to the resumption of heavy conflict in Gaza after the ceasefire this January and February. Crucially, the survey also took place during the period of US-Israeli attacks upon Iran, hence the public mood likely reduced the percentage willing to support a pragmatic peace.

The Government responded by marking Inde-

Anti-Israel sentiments dominate the streets of Jakarta (Image: Shutterstock)

pendence Day (August 17) not only with parades and speeches at home, but also with two Indonesian Air Force C-130J aircraft flying over Gaza and releasing food and medical aid at ten drop points. “This is Indonesia’s Independence Day,” one Government communiqué declared, “and we celebrate it by standing with the oppressed.” The imagery of parachutes floating down over Gaza was widely broadcast in Indonesian media. Around a dozen other countries have done similar aid drops.

Barely a week later, the Government confirmed plans, first signalled by Prabowo in April, to treat roughly 2,000 wounded Gazan Palestinians in Indonesian facilities on Galang Island and several military medical centres. The messaging emphasised coordination with the UN and Palestinian authorities, but especially that the program was for a limited period. “Treatment will be temporary,” officials explained, “with all patients guaranteed the right of return to Gaza” – a nod to concerns voiced by Indonesian activists that evacuation could become permanent exile.

This insistence came in response to damaging reports in mid-August that an Israeli official had told CNN that Israel was in discussion with several countries, including Indonesia, about taking in Gazans displaced by the conflict. This struck at one of Indonesia’s most taboo subjects: collusion with Israel behind closed doors. The rebuttal was swift – Foreign Minister Sugiono stated flatly: “There are no talks with Israel… We never negotiated with them.” To make the point clearer, he repeated variations of the same denial over several days.

Sensitivity on these issues can be explained by the continued, widespread pro-Palestinian/antiIsrael protests by civil society groups, NGOs, and grassroots networks across Jakarta and at least 15 other major cities.

Among the most notable, the Free Palestine

Network organised a protest march to the Egyptian Embassy in Jakarta on Aug. 2-3, demanding that Egypt open the Rafah crossing to Gaza; a large rally on July 9 titled “One Million Women for Gaza” was held at the massive Gelora Bung Karno stadium in Jakarta, where speakers demanded “Boycott Israeli products and those that support Zionism;” while in June, Greenpeace Indonesia staged a protest outside the US Embassy in Jakarta under a giant banner reading “Stop Genocide, Peace Now!” while street performers depicted civilian casualties in Gaza.

Religious leaders and community organisations have also been active. The Indonesian Ulema Council (MUI) in July urged Muslims to “strengthen boycotts of products linked to Israel,” while the Nahdlatul Ulama youth wing called Israel’s actions “a humanitarian catastrophe” and pressed the Government to “act more decisively at the international level.”

All of this unfolded in the wake of President Prabowo’s most notable statement on the issue. Standing beside French President Emmanuel Macron at the Presidential Palace on May 28, he declared: “Once Israel recognises the State of Palestine, Indonesia is ready to recognise Israel and open diplomatic relations… and we stand ready to contribute peacekeeping forces.” His remarks were the first time an Indonesian president had publicly set a condition for potential normalisation of ties with Israel.

The following day, officials reiterated that Indonesia remained committed to the two-state solution. They stressed that Prabowo’s remarks did not signal a policy change but rather restated Indonesia’s position that Palestinian statehood must be recognised before any diplomatic moves with Israel could take place.

Since then, the Government has repeated this

conditional formula in public statements. On several occasions, ministers have emphasised that Indonesia’s stance is “unchanged and firm”, with Palestine’s recognition as a prerequisite for any engagement with Israel.

But there are indications.

Let’s look at the recent growth in the proportion of Muslim children among school-aged populations across the principal European capitals.

EUROPA EUROPA

“ENORMOUS DOMESTIC PRESSURE”

This September, as Jews around the world dip our apples in honey and wish each other a sweet new year, the UN General Assembly will meet in New York

France, Britain, Canada, Australia and Malta all say they are preparing to recognise a “State of Palestine” at that gathering. They would join another 147 UN countries that already do so.

It will not change the realities on the ground, at least not in the short term. So why do it?

There are two answers to this question. Perhaps the most telling one is the first. It was recently articulated by French President Emmanuel Macron when he met German Chancellor Friedrich Merz in late July to discuss the Gaza crisis.

At that meeting, Macron acknowledged he was under “enormous domestic pressure” to do so. This pressure – from my vantage point in Brussels – is shared across most Western countries with significant migrant populations from the Middle East and North Africa.

To give you a sense of this “pressure” is not so easy. Not every European country regularly holds a census, and, in questionnaires or focus groups, you cannot simply ask someone’s religious orientation.

In Brussels’ schools, the number of Muslim pupils now sits at 52%. In London it is 37.5%; in Paris, 29%.

And if you don’t trust the numbers, you can just trust your eyes.

This northern summer saw me visiting three different capitals – Prague, Lisbon and London – before returning to my hometown of Brussels.

London and Brussels were visibly different than Lisbon and Prague. Not only in the number of people that were identifiable as Muslim, but also in the numbers of Palestinian flags and amounts of antiIsrael graffiti on the streets. In fact, in downtown Lisbon and Prague, I didn’t see any.

With a rapidly changing demographic in large capitals, and with shrinking or static Jewish communities that rarely make up a single percentage point in terms of population, you don’t need to be a cynic to understand that “domestic pressure” is often shorthand for “votes” in a changing electorate.

The second answer lies in politics and influence. Confronted with altered demographics and changing activist demands in many countries, politicians and political parties are finding it increasingly difficult to – no matter the rights or wrongs of Israeli politics (more on this in a minute) – continue taking a nuanced or pragmatic position. To survive politically, and to capitalise on the growing demographics, they must follow, not lead.

Of course, most of these countries have little to no leverage over the State of Israel.

The Netanyahu Government, composed as it is mostly of hawkish hardliners, doesn’t appear to care very much what Europe, Australia or Canada think. As far as they are concerned, there’s only one world leader who can meaningfully constrain

ALEX BENJAMIN

Demographic change and public pressure have a great deal more than statesmanship to do with the sudden spate of decisions to recognise "Palestine" (Image: Shutterstock/ Pierre Laborde)

Israeli action in Gaza or the West Bank: US President Donald Trump.

And if there is one thing a political leader fears more than being loathed, it is feeling irrelevant. Macron, Starmer, Carney, Albanese and – you go to the top of class if you know the Maltese Prime Minister’s name – Abela, collectively share this fear.

Which leaves them all in a bit of an embarrassing political pickle every time they are asked at a press conference what they can do to change the situation on the ground in Gaza. They can’t very well say “erm, nothing really”.

They hate the Israeli Government, not necessarily because of its policies and rhetoric, but because it refuses to listen to the concerns of political leaders reflecting the wishes of domestic demographics that are largely implacably opposed to Israel anyway.

You don’t have to be a supporter of the Netanyahu Government to sympathise with the Israeli position. And it also certainly doesn’t help that in the French and UK cases – the places with the two largest Jewish communities in Europe – these countries are suffering from some of the worst levels of antisemitism in decades, weekly marches of hate, and a significant exodus of Jewish families preferring to live in an Israel at war than a supposedly peaceful Europe.

Netanyahu certainly hit a nerve with Macron, as did America’s ambassador to France, when they had the temerity to point out that antisemitism, already rampant in La Republique, is not completely unrelated to the moves to recognise a Palestinian state. Cue much vaudevillian outrage from the French.

Starmer is facing the same domestic pressure as Macron at home, aided and abetted by a record

number of Labour MPs whose general position towards Jews and Israel for decades could be generously termed “creatively ambiguous”, at best.

I am no expert on Australian politics, but I do know that, from an Israeli perspective, there is little impetus to listen to or placate Albanese, because he is seen as someone who met with Yasser Arafat just before the Second Intifada and whom sources said was starry-eyed and fawning at the time.

As for Canadian PM Carney, is it a coincidence that, since 2001, the Muslim population in Canada has doubled, representing today the second largest religious group in the country?

For the sake of space – and of relevance – I won’t go into Malta but hopefully the fact that the Prime Minister agreed to pay for repairs at sea for the recent Gaza “Freedom Flotilla” tells you all you need to know.

So, we have established the ‘why now?’ Yet, when you dig down deeper, beyond the “domestic pressure” that leads to this spate of recognition, there is little real thought about what a Palestinian state actually means.

Let us remember that the establishment of a Palestinian state was always envisioned as the end goal of a process in which Israelis agree to swap land for peace.

And recognition was envisioned to be conditions-based – not an end to itself.

What are these conditions? Simply put, any future Palestinian state must recognise Israel’s right to exist, renounce violence and terrorism, and agree to arrangements to make this renunciation more than words.

That means disallowing any government role for groups such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad, whose raison d’etre is the elimination of the Jewish state. And indeed, so far the countries that are set to recognise a Palestinian state in September have been

pretty consistent in verbally rejecting any future Hamas involvement. But, even if there was any serious thought given to how this exclusion can be achieved – and there is little evidence that there has been – not having terrorists in government is a very low bar for statehood.

Statehood must also mean undoing the education of young Palestinians in schools and mosques with deep-rooted and insidious hatred of Israel and the Jewish people. And it must mean establishing a meaningful governing authority with the credibility and resources to govern the new entity without the endemic corruption and nepotism that typify the current Palestinian Authority, and to also stop radical groups from developing into armed militias outside state control.

Making this state a reality, if it ever happens, will take much more effort than facile recognition based on the demands of “domestic pressure”.

It will require the eradication of Hamas, proper security guarantees for Israel and internationally agreed-upon borders.

All that can only possibly come through painstaking negotiations that win buy-in from Israelis and Palestinians. And we are a million miles away from any of that. There are still up to 20 living hostages who haven’t been released. This was, disgustingly, not a condition in the recent calls for recognition.

In the absence of any of this painstaking work, and within the obvious shorthand meaning of ‘enormous domestic pressure’, the recognition of statehood is not only hollow, but insulting to the only country that can actually bring such statehood about: Israel. It won't happen even under a government led by any of the current leaders of the Israeli opposition – never mind a Netanyahu-led one –without first achieving these pre-conditions. Nor should it. And “enormous domestic pressure” cannot change these basic realities.

WASHINGTON HEIGHTS

DANIELLE PLETKA

RELATIONSHIP TROUBLES: THE ANTI-ISRAEL EVOLUTION OF THE US DEMOCRATIC PARTY

It has become a truism to suggest that the USIsrael relationship is set in bedrock. For years, the country was referred to, without rancour, as the 51st state. Over more than 50 years, the United States has subsidised both the Israeli economy and the Israeli military to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars. Nor was that support, for the most part, controversial. No longer.

Understanding the history is critical, because the relationship was neither founded nor moored in the way many assume. Far from a project of the American Jewish community – the largest outside of Israel itself – American support has, for more than a century, been anchored in Anglo-American Protestant Evangelism. In his seminal book, Arc of the Covenant, Walter Russell Mead traces this history: Calls for “Palestine” to be given to the Jewish people began in 19th century America. And, as Mead notes wryly, were endorsed by the New York Times before it was Jewish-owned, only to be abandoned once Jews took over the paper. Towards the end of World War I, former President Theodore ‘Teddy’ Roosevelt said, “there can be no peace worth having” until “the Jews [are] given control of Palestine.”

True, under Harry Truman, America was the first to recognise the new Jewish state in 1948, but the so-called ‘special relationship’ did not begin under Truman. Indeed, for the first quarter century of USIsrael relations, Washington did little to support either the Israeli economy or the Israeli military. Between 1949 and 1973, US assistance to Israel totalled US$3.1 billion, substantially less than it

currently receives (in mostly military assistance) per annum. Even as aid began to ramp up, the sums remained relatively small – US$16.3 billion between 1970 and 1979.

It was under the Nixon Administration that the current US-Israel relationship began. Mead argues persuasively that, far from a Jewish-American led love affair, Washington’s newfound commitment to Jerusalem was rooted in Nixonian realpolitik. Although in the years prior to the 1967 Six Day War, Israel’s military prowess shone in comparison to its feckless Arab neighbours, it was only after that 1967 rout that the United States began to think of Israel in its own strategic context. With the backdrop of the Cold War, and looking at Sovietaligned Egypt and Syria, Israel suddenly appeared to be more than just a sentimental cause.

The American left is following the rest of the democratic world’s left-leaning political parties and turning against Israel. And, as Jew-hatred races toward epidemic levels the world over, this will likely mark the beginning of a new and dangerous period for the Jewish people

Politically, Israel had always enjoyed support, albeit largely rhetorical, from the Democratic Party. Since the birth of the Jewish state, the American left vibed comfortably with Israel’s socialist-leaning leadership, which dominated for the first decades of Israel’s existence. Collective farms (kibbutzes), cooperative farms (moshavs), socialist institutions, and the pre-World War II eastern European-nostalgic small “L” liberalism resonated deeply with the Democratic Party. And

much less so with a Republican Party that viewed the Middle East through a prism of reliable energy, and with little sympathy for Lenin-adjacent economic ideals.

If the Six Day War and the subsequent 1973 Yom Kippur War – by the end, another display of magnificent Israeli military prowess – contributed to an inflection point in Republican views of Israel, the same was true for the Democratic Party. Less visible in Democratic halls of power, the worm was beginning to turn at a venue that will be familiar to all today: the college campus. Still in the throes of violent anti-Vietnam War protests, the vanguard of the American student far left, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), in lockstep with the Communist Party USA, turned with venom against the Jewish state. Daniel Rubin, a Jewish SDS Central Committee member, focused his ire on American Jewish support for Israel: “They find themselves on the side of US imperialism in opposition to national liberation movements and on the side of rabid anti-Communist cold-warriors.”

Disproportionately represented in both SDS and CPUSA, American Jews gave no quarter to the

new, “imperialist” Israel. Former SDS leader Mark Rudd summed up the issue of Israel years later: “It distinguished the true anti-imperialists from the liberals.” Luckily, for Israel, it was the liberals who would continue to dominate the Democratic Party for years to come. Until now.

If the inflection point of the Nixon Administration mainstreamed support for Israel in both major American political parties, it would be the Obama Administration that marked the second major turning point, in this case, a break by the liberal left with support for Israel.

Born in 1961, Obama represented more than a simple break with the post-World War II generations that had spawned his two predecessors. In simple terms, he didn’t see the Israel of 1948 to 1967. Rather, he saw a modern, mighty and wealthy power that, far from being a bastion of democracy and human rights in a region with little of either, was the root of all of America’s woes in the Middle East. Israel, in Obama’s world view, was the reason America was constantly mired in “forever wars” in the region; the hindrance that was stymieing his desired “pivot” to Asia.

Obama would be the first president for whom the 1960s’ radical framing of Israel made sense. Still, his party and its base were not truly with him. American Jews (less than 3% of the population) vote overwhelming Democrat and, while support for Obama’s Iran-centric view of the Middle East was hesitant in this tiny slice of the base, the rest of the party was in the process of adaptation.

The Gallup chart above notes the moment when the Democratic Party base shifted. Most importantly, the moment more members of the party support Palestinians over Israel came before October 7, 2023. The changeover happened in 2022. Obama was a bellwether, but, even in 2019, as the rabidly anti-Israel House of Representa-

tives “Squad” – Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – took office, their antipathy towards Israel was a minority view in the Democratic Party.

Fast forward to 2025, and the Squad/Bernie Sanders fringe of the American left is beginning to look like the mainstream of the Democratic Party. Where Republicans have completed their transformation into the pro-Israel American political party (with some notable exceptions), the Democrats are also close to completing their own transformation.

In a recent vote on two Sanders US Senate bills restricting arms sales to Israel, a resolution barring the sale of assault rifles to Israel won 27 Democrats, while another to block US$675 million in arms sales won 24. There are 45 Democrats in the Senate, joined by two Democrat-caucusing independents. In other words, more than half of the Senate Democratic caucus supported blocking arms sales to Israel while it is at war. The numbers are all the more remarkable given that the Senate has historically been a bastion of bipartisan support for Israel, and the current Democratic leader is Chuck Schumer of New York, the highest-ranking Jew in American politics.

AIR NEW ZEALAND

MIRIAM BELL

“NOT YET AND NOT UNTIL”: NZ DEBATES PALESTINIAN STATEHOOD

Debate over the issue of recognising Palestinian statehood reached levels of passion rarely seen in New Zealand’s Parliament. Meanwhile, the broader discourse surrounding the subject has been yet another blow to the country’s weary Jewish community.

Over the last year, about a dozen countries have announced plans to recognise a Palestinian state, the most recent being New Zealand’s closest ally, Australia. Public pressure on New Zealand’s Government to do the same has ratcheted up in response.

In August, Foreign Minister Winston Peters announced he had taken an item to Cabinet about recognition of a State of Palestine, and it would formally consider the issue before making a decision in September.

New Zealand had been clear for some time that its recognition of a Palestinian state was a matter of when, not if, but Cabinet would weigh up whether the pre-requisites for a viable and legitimate Palestinian state existed for recognition at this juncture, he said.

“This is not a straightforward, clear-cut issue. There are a broad range of strongly held views within our Government, Parliament and New Zealand society over the question.”

What does this all mean for the future of the USIsrael relationship? Simply, once the heart of global support for the Jewish state, the American left is following the rest of the democratic world’s leftleaning political parties and turning against Israel. And, as Jew-hatred races toward epidemic levels the world over, this will likely mark the beginning of a new and dangerous period for the Jewish people, not only in the US, but wherever they are.

DANIELLE PLETKA is a distinguished senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the host, with Marc Thiessen, of the podcast What the Hell Is Going On? and the related Substack.

Those views would be canvassed, and the issue would be approached “calmly, cautiously and judiciously” before a decision was made, he said.

That approach has not been appreciated by pro-Palestinian lobbyists, certain academics and former politicians, and opposition parties. Instead, the demands for the National-led Government to

immediately recognise a Palestinian state have become more heated.

A debate in Parliament culminated with the keffiyeh-clad co-leader of the Green Party, Chloe Swarbrick, being thrown out of the debating chamber for saying that Government MPs should “grow a spine”. She subsequently refused to apologise as requested by the Speaker and continued to push her private members bill which would impose sanctions and a trade embargo on Israel.

Swarbrick’s behaviour has been praised by some and criticised by others, but to date it has not moved the Government. Meanwhile, Peters also attracted further criticism for not joining with the 22 countries that condemned Israel’s approval of a settlement project in the West Bank in a statement they released on August 21.

Broadcaster Michael Laws [a former MP] said he had rarely seen a debate in Parliament that was as passionate as that one. He pointed out there are kids in New Zealand being murdered, and very few are as passionate about it as they are about a Palestinian state, which left him scratching his head.

While there are differing views on the issue within the Jewish community, many are simply concerned that the rhetoric and misinformation accompanying the debate are further fanning antisemitism.

The New Zealand Jewish Council, which released a statement on the issue, since a potential shift in policy would directly impact the Jewish community, asked the Government to proceed with caution.

New Zealand’s standing as a principled voice for peace and the rules-based international order was jeopardised by a potential move that was out of step with the realities on the ground and which risked prolonging the conflict, it said.

“The council urges the Government to remain

steadfast in supporting a genuine two-state solution that emerges from direct negotiations, mutual recognition and security guarantees for both peoples. Anything less risks replacing the prospect of peace with the certainty of further war and bloodshed.”

NZ Jewish Council spokesperson Juliet Moses told the Australia/Israel Review that local debate on the issue seemed ill-informed, with many people appearing to think that if New Zealand recognised a Palestinian state, then the war would end.

But that was not the case – even if every country recognised Palestine as a state, it would not achieve an end to the war, she said.

“New Zealand recognising a Palestinian state will not move the dial one way or the other. We are a small country which is not a major player in geopolitical affairs, despite what we often like to think. And with the debate in Parliament, there was a degree of hysteria in there.

“In much of what was being said, there was a real dislocation from the realities of the situation, and no-one was presenting a coherent, strategic policy position on the issue.

“So, while it’s good that Prime Minister Christopher Luxon has said Hamas has to go, how do we get to the point where Hamas is not in power, and if you recognise a Palestinian state how will that play out with Hamas still in power?”

NZ Greens MP Chloe Swarbrick (Image: Reddit)

Moses said it was hard to know what decision the Government might make, although it seemed like there could be a bit of caution around the Cabinet table.

But the country’s Jewish community felt exhausted by the situation at this point, as the onslaught was constant, she said.

“Our kids are being bullied at school, every day there are more antisemitic posters and stickers everywhere, academics are saying terrible things, and some Jewish people are being harangued by neighbours. And what can we do? This latest debate is all part of it, and how do you deal with it?”

It was possible to be pro-Israel and still concerned about the war, the Israeli Government and the extremist stance of certain Israeli ministers, Moses added.

“There are many different views, but none of that equates to ‘therefore we should have a Palestinian state right now’ – because if so, there is that disconnect again.”

The Jewish Council is not alone in asking the Government to tread carefully on the issue. A delegation of Christian and community leaders has also done so publicly, and had a session with Winston Peters’ adviser to discuss its position.

The delegation warned that premature recognition of a Palestinian state would reward terrorism and undermine peace. Its position on Palestinian statehood was to recommend a pragmatic approach of ‘not yet and not until’ as the best way to go.

Delegation representative Pr. Nigel Woodley said that meant not until all hostages were released by Hamas; not until Hamas was removed from Gaza’s governance; and not until international criteria for statehood (including defined borders and a properly functioning government) were met.

We cannot remain silent, as a Palestinian state

under the present UN terms would endorse a terrorist entity right in the heartland of Israel,” he said. “We agreed it was important for people other than just the Jewish communities in New Zealand to speak up for Israel, which is so wrongly being maligned by our mainstream media.”

The delegation thought the Government was weighing up its decision on the balance, Woodley said.

The Israel Institute of NZ has also taken a ‘not yet and not until’ position.

Israel Institute spokesperson Greg Bouwer acknowledged the Government had signalled that recognition was a question of “when”, not if, but said the Institute’s concern was the timing.

“Recognition should follow verifiable reforms, not precede them. New Zealand’s credibility as a principled, rules-based actor is strongest when we apply consistent standards: sovereignty is earned through responsible governance and renunciation of terror, not bestowed as a consolation prize amid ongoing violence.”

The Institute does not claim to speak on behalf of New Zealand’s Jewish community, which holds a diversity of views on the conflict and on recognition of a Palestinian state, he said.

“Our role is to contribute analysis on New Zealand’s foreign policy choices. Our position is that recognition must not reward terrorism or incitement but be contingent on genuine reforms that make peace viable.”

Bouwer said the Institute has had strong engagement across New Zealand from people who shared a concern that premature recognition would entrench the wrong incentives.

The Institute has asked people to make a stand against rewarding terrorism and sign a petition that urged there should be no recognition until there was peace.

ALLON LEE MEDIA MATTERS

STARVED FOR BALANCE: THE ABC’S COVERAGE OF GAZA’S FAMINE CLAIMS

The intersection of humanitarian aid, the UN and accusations that Israel is creating starvation in Gaza has become one of the most contested narratives in global politics.

In Australia, the ABC has devoted extraordinary coverage to the issue, but too often that coverage has reflected a narrow editorial frame: famine in Gaza is assumed, not questioned. Claims to the contrary are either minimised or aggressively interrogated.

A typical example of the ABC’s editorial position came on August 15, when Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister Sharren Haskel appeared on ABC Radio National “Breakfast”.

Haskel sought to highlight perspectives rarely given prominence on the ABC, including the threats Hamas issues against Palestinians cooperating with the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF).

But she battled to be heard, as “Breakfast” host Sally Sara repeatedly interrupted, haranguing her to admit that famine was already entrenched in Gaza. When Haskel made a claim that “98% of the goods that the UN was handling did not reach the end destination,” Sara pressed for evidence. Haskel cited a UN report that elicited the response by Sara, “report by who? Who wrote that report?”

After the interview, Sara did tell listeners “according to the latest update from the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, in July, its World Food Programme collected 1,012 trucks carrying almost 13,000 metric tonnes of food from… crossings in Israel. But only 10 trucks reached warehouses, and the rest were offloaded en route.”

Sara did not elaborate on what that meant. In fact, according to the UN’s own data, 87% of aid was looted between May 2025 and August 2025. In other words, Haskel was essentially correct.

Appearing on “Breakfast” (Aug. 22), AIJAC’s Jamie Hyams had more luck countering accusations that Israel has a deliberate policy of starvation in place. He conceded there was starvation and deprivation in parts of Gaza but explained Hamas caused it by stealing most of the aid. Hyams also pointed out the UN only counts the aid that its agencies bring in and ignores the GHF and various other aid groups.

On Aug. 22, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) issued a report that, for the first time, asserted that parts of Gaza were in famine. That same day, the ABC website ran a wire report explaining the IPC’s criteria: famine requires that 20 percent of the population suffer extreme food shortages, one in three children be acutely malnourished, and at least two in every 10,000 people die daily from hunger or related disease.

What the ABC did not explain was that, in Gaza, the IPC had shifted the goalposts. In previous cases,

Israeli MK Sharren Haskel (Screenshot)

the threshold for acute malnutrition was 30% of children. In Gaza, the IPC lowered that threshold to 15%. Also, instead of using the standard weight-to-height measures, it relied on mid-upper arm circumference, a less precise metric. And most crucially, it ignored the fact that death rates were nowhere near famine thresholds.

The same day, an infographic on the social media platforms of COGAT – the arm of the Israeli military overseeing aid – explained precisely why the report was flawed:

“In other countries [Somalia and Sudan], the IPC declares famine at 30% malnutrition. In Gaza only, the UN-backed IPC lowered the bar to 15% and it is based on unreliable data. They didn’t find famine –so they forged one.” (See Alana Schetzer’s report in this edition for more on the IPC report’s clear problems).

Yet there is no evidence the report’s major defects were ever seriously covered by the ABC.

On Aug. 23, when ABC Middle East correspondent Matthew Doran reported the story, none of the Israeli criticisms were included. His website piece mentioned COGAT’s rejection of the famine claim but with no explanation of why Israel alleged the report was flawed.

After the weekend break, on Aug. 25, ABC RN “Breakfast” returned to the IPC report, this time with UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs spokesperson Olga Cherevko.

Sara put to Cherevko that “Israel rejects the famine classification as a lie and says that it is allowing in enough aid and is repeatedly accusing Hamas of stealing food from aid trucks. How do you respond to those accusations?”

Cherevko confidently insisted the report was “obviously” based on “scientific data and based on thresholds that have to be crossed to confirm these scenarios and this reality that we have on the ground.”

But she was never pressed on the damning allegations about the death rate or the fact that the IPC had lowered its own thresholds specifically for Gaza.

A week after the report’s release, ABC Radio National’s “Global Roaming” (Aug. 29) only presented experts who would endorse the report. This included an Australian official working for UNRWA in Gaza who admitted she would not recognise a Hamas member.

In fairness, the other free-to-air media outlets were scarcely better. The best was a report on SBS’s website that included a quote buried deep in the text from Israel’s Ambassador to the UN, Danny Danon, accusing the IPC of lowering “its own threshold to manufacture a so-called famine. It cuts the global standard from 30 per cent to 15 per cent for this report only and ignored its second criteria altogether.”

Sky News Australia offered the fairest coverage, including Israeli Special Envoy for Trade and Innovation Fleur Hassan-Nahoum (Aug. 25) explaining that, in March 2024, the IPC made similar claims which subsequently proved false.

Hassan-Nahoum added that the IPC “had to alter their own criteria for famine… to stick Gaza into that category. They’ve actually cooked the numbers in order to be able to do this. And, on top of that, they’ve ignored numbers. We have, at the moment in Gaza, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which has distributed over 150 million meals in the last few months. And those numbers, surprisingly, are not included in the IPC report.”

Long time observers of the ABC will not be surprised – staffers have earned themselves well-deserved reputations for acting as gatekeepers protecting certain orthodoxies from any substantive criticism.

But, in so doing, they have starved ABC readers and listeners of vital facts, context and balance – fundamental building blocks of objective and informed journalism.

Compliments

2-6 Clevedon Street, Botany NSW 2019 PO Box 283, Botany NSW 1455 With compliments

KEEPING FAITH

SWEPT AWAY: LIFE INSIDE AN AVALANCHE

“I stepped into an avalanche, It covered up my soul”

In 1971, the celebrated Jewish poet and singer Leonard Cohen wrote these words during a period of deep depression, where “absolutely everything was beginning to fall apart.”

Over this last year, living as a Jew and one who loves Israel, I too feel like I have stepped into an avalanche.

This is what it feels like for Jews across the world, including in Australia. Everything that we have taken for granted as proud Jewish citizens of Australia seems to be falling apart. Our leaders are castigated, our artists are excoriated, philanthropists are humiliated. A former foreign minister, Bob Carr, dredges up the most disgraceful slurs about us all and especially so-called Jewish lobby groups (shades of the “Elders of Zion” canard); Jewish school children are targeted; university students intimidated; friends walking innocently along the streets of our cities or visiting a hospital are confronted with the vitriolic “Free, free Palestine”. There are merchants who won’t serve Jewish customers, while Jewish businesses are being boycotted and our places of worship attacked.

Is this what freedom in our democratic country has come to – a slew of toxic primitive hatred and anti-Jewishness? Never before have I felt what my mother and father must have experienced in pre-war Lithuania when they ran to escape from hostile antisemitic groups. Suddenly Mum’s trauma of being attacked by a group of kids and having acid thrown at her when she was just sevenyears-old no longer seems like a distant scene of horror.

I simply can’t remember carrying a weight like this. A time aching with acute anxiety. An age of rage, a time of turmoil. Hatred is promiscuous, our ability to communicate is collapsing.

In addition, what is most disturbing is that everybody feels free to express whatever comes into their mind. No filters. No reflection. No thoughtfulness. I try not to follow the social media invective because I don’t want to descend into the sewer.

I am in despair because polarisation is king and black-and-white are the only colours. Simplistic primitive thinking at its very worst has pervaded our public spaces Street protest in Melbourne (Image: Shutterstock)

RABBI RALPH GENENDE

– including in Israel and in our own Jewish community.

The only solution is to seek out and embrace nuance, even when it’s uncomfortable. In my interfaith work for AIJAC, I don’t avoid the difficult conversations with liberal Christians, Buddhists or Muslim clerics. I have the unsettling conversations with them, even if they express views and attend the protest marches I so strongly oppose. You grow stronger through living with uncertainty and confronting dissent. It underlies our Jewish tradition of debate, argument and disagreement. You meet it on virtually every page of the Talmud and it’s implicit in the tefillot (daily prayers).

Yes, so much of this is because of the war in Gaza and a wilful and inane inability to distinguish between the Jewish population of Australia and the government of Israel. As if the Jews of Caulfield or Bondi decide policy in Israel. I, too, agonise over some of the decisions and actions of the Israeli Government – especially the short-lived withholding of food aid earlier this year. I am driven to distraction by action and words of some of the right-wing extremist Israeli politicians riding like Mad Max across the landscape. My heart is shredded daily by the suffering of the population of Gaza. My faith in humanity is decimated daily by the barbaric audacity and brilliant propaganda strategy of Hamas.

But I know there is no other country for the Jewish people. I know that this is a lone democratic country in the Middle East where the harshest critics of the government are free to express their opinions. I am totally befuddled by the media from ABC to BBC, Al Jazeera to CNN when it comes to Israel. They are so unabashedly one-eyed – truly, as John Milton put it, “eyeless in Gaza”.

I am tempted to hide in a safe corner until conditions improve. I am tired of talking about hatred. I am exhausted by

the unrelenting barrage of hostility against Jewish people.

But the words of Deuteronomy speak to me with an alarming and urgent clarity: “I place before you today a blessing and a curse. Choose the blessing, choose life.”

I will choose love above losing my voice – the love of recognition of the other; reconciliation with those who choose dialogue before death, healing and repair rather than revenge and destruction.

As a Jew, this Yom Kippur, I will again reassert that we are a L’Chaim people; remember us for life is the refrain of our many prayers.

Two recent wedding engagements in Israel remind me that love can be cultivated even in the midst of the most terrific grief and loss.

Hadas Lowenstern’s husband Elisha was killed during his reserve duty shortly after October 7. They had six children together. Just a few weeks ago, she announced her engagement to Hod Reichert, a widower and a single parent. In a similar vein, Rabbi Leo Dee, whose wife and two daughters were killed in a terrorist attack in April 2023, also announced his engagement recently.

Love and chesed (deep loving kindness) are about not invalidating the other. They are about sharing the burden of protecting your community and your country. And they are about eschewing extremism (on both the right and left) and pursuing the path of radical moderation. If we do not find that path of the Biblical darchei noam, the way of peace and pleasantness, of reaching out in care and consideration to the other, what kind of world are we creating?

This awesome High Holiday season I will pray more intensely and commit all the more passionately to pursue the path of life and love for my people, my community, the people of Israel and for all humanity. May we all step into an avalanche of love.

DATA THAT MATTERS

FOOD AID TO GAZA AS COMPARED TO VARIOUS ESTIMATES OF GAZA’S NEEDS

• All food entry data sourced to COGAT (the IDF’s Coordinator of the Government Activities in the Territories).

• The estimated number of monthly trucks required to duplicate food consumption levels that occurred in 2022 – 2,615 trucks (representing 86 trucks per day) – is sourced to “Debunking the Genocide Allegations: A Reexamination of the Israel-Hamas War from October 7, 2023 to June 1, 2025” by Danny Orbach, Jonathan Boxman, Yagil Henkin and Jonathan Braverman.

• Average number of monthly trucks entering Gaza carrying food in 2022 – 2,220 (representing 73 trucks per day) – is based on United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) data analysed in the same paper

• The World Food Program’s estimate of Gaza monthly food needs – 62,000 tons – can be found in this media release from July 29, 2025.