Category: war

The Russian genocide against Ukraine

October 15, 2026 • 9:50 am

Here I contend that although there is no “genocide” being committed by Israel against Gaza or Palestinians as a whole, Russia is committing genocide of the Ukrainians. That the former is loudly touted but false, but the latter is not that newsworthy but is arguably true, shows that the world holds a double standard with regard to “genocide”.

Here I want to concentrate not on Israel’s war with Hamas, which I’ve discussed many times, but on Ukraine, which is being largely ignored by the U.S. (and by Western protestors), and is being mistreated. Indeed, the U.S., with its lifting sanctions on Russian diesel and its threats to withhold intelligence from Ukraine, is beginning to help Russia with this “genocide.”

The UN’s 1948 Genocide Convention defines genocide this way (Article II):

In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;

(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

The definition requires not only intent to destroy a group, but examples of acts undertaken to fulfill that intent.  The arguments against an Israeli “genocide” of Palestinians is not met by either the intent or the actions.  Although there are isolated statements by Israeli officials that could be interpreted as intent, the actions of the IDF have been directed at killing the enemy (Hamas) and avoiding wiping out Palestinians as a while. You’ve heard the counterarguments to this: the warning of Gazan civilians by the IDF before strikes, the designation of “safe zones”, the vaccination of 1.1 Gazan children by the WHO and Israel, and so on.

What is Russia doing to Ukraine? Let me count the ways:

The transfer of children from Ukraine to Russia. According to the UN itself,  Russia is deporting Ukrainian children on a large scale, amounting to crimes against humanity:

Russian authorities committed the crimes against humanity of deportation and forcible transfer of children, and of their enforced disappearance, the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine said in its latest report to the Human Rights Council, which is complemented by a conference room paper.

Thousands of children have been deported to the Russian Federation or transferred to occupied areas in Ukraine by Russian authorities, according to the Commission. It has so far verified the deportation or transfer of over 1,200 children from five regions in Ukraine.

Shortly before the full-scale invasion, the Russian authorities undertook large-scale relocations, which they justified as “evacuations” due to the risks of the armed conflict. But the Commission found that four years later, 80 per cent of the children from the documented cases have not been returned. This contravenes international humanitarian law, under which evacuations can only be temporary for compelling reasons of health, medical treatment or safety.

Mass murder of Ukrainian civilians and prisoners of war. One example is the Bucha massacre enacted by Russia soon after it invaded Ukraine in 2022.  Over 400 people were executed, and this was documented by the UN Commissioner for Human Rights.

The denial of Ukrainian statehood.  This could also be seen as “rhetoric,” but it was not an offhand statement, but a formal speech by Russia’s President Putin in February, 2022.  It includes these statements:

“Modern Ukraine was entirely created by Russia, more precisely, Bolshevik, communist Russia. This process began immediately after the revolution of 1917…

“Ukraine never had a tradition of genuine statehood.”

Grok adds this, which speaks to an intent to destroy a “national group”:

Officials and state-aligned figures (including Dmitry Medvedev) have repeatedly denied Ukrainian statehood or identity, with statements calling for the elimination of Ukrainian political independence, language/education in Ukrainian, or the state itself so that “not even ashes remain” or that hostile Ukraine “does not exist anymore.” State media and ideologues have used language of “de-Ukrainization,” “denazification” as erasure of Ukrainian distinctiveness, and eliminationist framing. In occupied territories, authorities have systematically replaced Ukrainian curricula and language instruction with Russian ones, suppressed Ukrainian books/culture, renamed places, imposed Russian citizenship and passports, and promoted Russian patriotic/military education. Human Rights Watch and others have documented forced Russification of education, threats to parents for Ukrainian-language remote learning, and erasure of Ukrainian identity markers. Proponents argue this pattern shows intent to destroy the Ukrainian national group “as such” by eliminating its independent existence and identity, not merely to win a war or change a government.

Widespread and continuous targeting of civilians.  Wikipedia has a long article on “Russian attacks on civilians in the Russo-Ukrainian War (2022-present” (see also the article on “War crimes in the Russo-Ukrainian War (2022-present“). I quote from the first article (the site documents the statements):

During the Russo-Ukrainian War (2022–present), the Russian military has continuously carried out deliberate attacks against civilian targets[1][2][3] and indiscriminate attacks in densely populated areas.[4] The United Nations Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine says the Russian military exposed the civilian population to unnecessary and disproportionate harm by using cluster bombs[5][6][7][8] and by firing other weapons with wide-area effects into civilian areas, such as missiles, heavy artillery shells, and multiple launch rockets.[7] As of 2026, the attacks had resulted in between the UN-documented 16,000[9] and an estimated 40,000 dead civilians.[10] On 22 April 2022, the UN reported that of the 2,343 civilian casualties it had been able to document, it could confirm 92.3% of these deaths were as a result of the actions of the Russian armed forces.[11]

On 5 July 2022, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), Michelle Bachelet, reported that most civilian casualties documented by her office had been caused by the Russian army’s use of explosive weapons with wide-area effects in populated areas, calling it “indisputable.”[12] By 30 June 2023, OHCHR assessed that 90.5% of all civilian deaths were caused by such indiscriminate attacks and that 84.2% of them were recorded in Ukrainian-held territory.[l

. . .The deadliest Russian attacks on civilians during the war have been the Mariupol theatre airstrike and the Bucha massacre, which are estimated to have killed hundreds. Other strikes on civilians with high casualties include the April 2022 Kramatorsk railway station attack (which killed 63); 3 March 2022 Chernihiv bombing (which killed 47); the July 2022 Chasiv Yar missile strike (which killed 46), the Zaporizhzhia civilian convoy attack (which killed 32), the 2023 Dnipro residential building airstrike (which killed 46), the 2023 Hroza missile attack (which killed 59), and the 2025 Sumy airstrike (which killed 35 people).[18]

In total, Russia has attacked more than 3000 health care targets,[19] more than 4000 schools and universities,[20] more than 2.5 million housing units,[21] more than 700 churches,[22] and killed more than 15,000 civilians as of February 2026.[23]

There is no similar article on “Ukrainian attacks on civilians in the Russo-Ukrainian war”, but an Al-Jazeera article reports a few:

The war, which began with the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, has seen both sides increasingly targeting civilian infrastructure.

According to an analysis by Armed Conflict Location and Event Data (ACLED), Russian forces carried out 29,792 attacks on Ukraine in 2022. Of these, 1,635, more than 5 percent, hit civilian infrastructure, including residential, energy, healthcare and education facilities.

By August 2026, the number of Russian attacks on civilian infrastructure in Ukraine had risen to 7,170, representing more than 13 percent of all Russian attacks on the country.

The same ACLED analysis recorded 245 Ukrainian attacks in Russia in 2022, with 24 of those – about 10 percent – targeting civilian infrastructure. By August 2026, that figure had risen to 3,560 attacks, or 27 percent of all Ukrainian attacks in Russia.

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Although a larger share of Ukrainian attacks targeted civilian infrastructure, Russia carried out far more attacks overall.

Indeed: 24 Ukrainian attacks targeted Russian civilian infrastructure as opposed to 1,635 attacks in the opposite direction: a 65-fold difference.  And Russia seems to be stepping up its attacks right now, as I hear of missiles targeting apartment buildings in Ukraine on almost a daily basis. I don’t know anything about accusation that Russia or Ukraine embeds its military among civilians to deliberately jack up the toll of civilians (this is what Hamas does), so I can’t speak to it with regard to this conflict.

The “war crimes” article in Wikipedia starts this way:

During the Russo-Ukrainian war (2022–present) starting with the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Russian military and authorities have committed war crimes, such as deliberate attacks against civilian targets, including on hospitals, medical facilities and on the energy grid;[1][2][3] indiscriminate attacks on densely populated areas; the abduction, torture and murder of civilians; forced deportations; sexual violence; destruction of cultural heritage; and the killing and torture of Ukrainian prisoners of war.[4][5][6][7]

What happened is clear: Russia believes Ukraine should be a part of Russia, and they invaded to effect that—for at least part of Ukraine. Without that invasion, there would be no war (sound familiar?).  Russia continues to attack civilian facilities in Ukraine and Ukraine is defending itself with counterattacks, with the bulk of them targeting Ukrainian military facilities or infrastructure that helps the military.  If Russia withdrew, the war would end.

To me, all of this adds up to a Russian genocide, one at least determined to wipe out the “Ukrainian” part of Ukraine. You can argue about whether that is targeting a national group, but clearly some war crimes and crimes against humanity are going on.

My purpose is not to dispel the “genocide” libel against Israel, which is ridiculous, but to show that that label applies far more clearly to Russia in its dealings with Ukraine. I find it disturbing that people in the West, especially the young people who holler about Israel, aren’t at least as concerned with the Russo-Ukraine war.  Hamas said it would keep trying to get rid of Israel, which is its primary aim, but Russia is, right now, trying to destroy Ukraine.

Why the relative silence?  Well, we know that if Jews are involved they take most of the heat, but the Russia situation is that of an unprovoked invasion that could blossom into further Russian attempts to take over other countries, like the Baltic states. The obligation of the West to defend Ukraine is not diplomatic but moral. It’s not only the right thing to do—defending a democracy besieged by an autocracy—but could nip further Russian ambitions in the bud.

Nobel Peace prize goes to Navi Pillay, promoter of the Israeli genocide blood libel

October 9, 2026 • 9:30 am

Well, the only thing that consoles me about this year’s grotesque award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Navi Pillay is that the same Prize was awarded to Henry Kissinger and Yasser Arafat.  But in some ways this Prize is even worse, for Pillay got it for ““for her efforts to promote peace and international law,” or, as the Nobel Prize page notes:

At a time of existential challenges – including more wars and conflicts than the world has seen in a long time – international law is no longer just a supplement to peace and security. It is an absolute necessity.

In historic international court cases, Navi Pillay has shown that legal measures can help prevent acts of war and violence. She has also contributed to strengthen the institutions of international law. Her independence, expertise and steadfastness have made her one of the most respected international jurists of our time.

What did she do to prevent acts of war and violence? She promoted the idea that Israel committed genocide, without saying a word about the explicitly outlined genocide of Hamas.  (She did condemn Hamas for war crimes, but, as you see below, that’s not why she got the Nobel Peace Prize.) As the NYT reports:(all bolding henceforth is mine):

Navi Pillay, a South African human rights lawyer and international judge, was announced on Friday as the recipient of the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize for what the Norwegian Nobel Committee called her efforts to uphold a system of international law that is increasingly under attack.

The committee said that Ms. Pillay had been “instrumental in ensuring that war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide are prosecuted.” Formerly the United Nations’ top human rights official, and a judge at the International Criminal Court and on an international tribunal investigating the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, she is “one of the most respected international jurists of our time,” the committee said.

“Let me dedicate this award to all the survivors of international crimes as well as to practitioners and defenders of international justice,” Ms. Pillay said at a news conference in Germany.

Last year, a United Nations commission led by Ms. Pillay determined that Israel had committed genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, a finding that the Israeli government rejected. The decision to honor her added to the growing global blowback against Israel’s actions in Gaza.

Danny Danon, Israel’s ambassador to the U.N., told The New York Times that honoring Ms. Pillay “would not only damage the credibility of the Nobel Committee, but also tarnish the legacy of the distinguished laureates who have received this honor throughout history.”

Though the committee did not explicitly mention Gaza in its statement honoring Ms. Pillay, its chairman, Jorgen Watne Frydnes, told reporters that her work on the U.N. commission was “an important part of the reasoning why she received the prize.”

There you have it.  But there were some problems with the “determination that Israel had committed genocide against Palestinians”. I’ve already discussed the ludicrous “genocide” accusation against Israel as one of the war’s Big Lies, but Maarten Boudry did a better job in his Substack article, “They don’t believe it either.”

And one take from Grok:

What is the problem with the UN’s finding that Israel committed genocide?

The claim is not a finding by “the UN.” It comes from the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory (the Pillay Commission), a body created by the UN Human Rights Council. In a September 2025 report, the three commissioners concluded that Israel had committed four of the five acts listed in the Genocide Convention against Palestinians in Gaza, with the specific intent required for genocide, and that President Herzog, Prime Minister Netanyahu, and former Defense Minister Gallant had incited it. The UN as an institution has not adopted that conclusion. The International Court of Justice case brought by South Africa remains unresolved on the merits; written pleadings run into 2029, and the Court’s earlier provisional-measures orders found only that certain Palestinian rights under the Convention were “plausible” and at risk—not that genocide had occurred.

The problems with the Commission’s conclusion are structural, methodological, and legal.

The Human Rights Council maintains a permanent agenda item directed solely at Israel and has long produced a disproportionate share of its country-specific resolutions against it. The Commission’s members entered with public records of hostility toward Israel. Miloon Kothari had spoken of the “Jewish lobby” controlling social media; Chris Sidoti had dismissed concerns about antisemitism; Navi Pillay had a documented history of partisan statements on the conflict. Israel has refused to cooperate with the body since 2022 on grounds of bias. The resulting reports rely heavily on the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry (which does not separate combatants from civilians), unnamed witnesses, NGOs, and outlets such as Al Jazeera, while giving minimal weight to Israeli operational data or the documented embedding of Hamas forces.

The report largely erases Hamas as a fighting force. It does not seriously engage the scale of the tunnel network, the systematic use of civilian sites, the diversion of aid, or the October 7, 2023 attack that killed roughly 1,200 people and took hostages—the casus belli. Statements by Israeli officials are parsed selectively (“human animals,” biblical allusions) while wartime context and explicit targeting of Hamas are discounted. UN Watch’s detailed rebuttal and other legal analyses describe the evidentiary base as one-sided and the inferences of intent as conjecture.

Under the 1948 Genocide Convention, the decisive element is dolus specialis: specific intent to destroy a protected group, in whole or in part, as such. High civilian casualties in urban warfare against an enemy that operates from within the civilian population do not establish that intent. Reported deaths (Gaza Health Ministry figures in the mid-to-high 70,000s by late 2026, including combatants) have not reduced Gaza’s population to anything approaching destruction; estimates remain around 2.1 million. Demographic breakdowns of identified fatalities show men of fighting age heavily over-represented relative to their share of the pre-war population. Israel issued evacuation warnings, opened corridors, and facilitated large volumes of aid—conduct difficult to reconcile with a policy of physical annihilation. Some advocacy groups that reach a genocide conclusion have acknowledged they are applying a broader standard than the Convention’s text and existing jurisprudence require.

The same bodies have not applied comparable scrutiny to Hamas’s charter language and explicit aims, or to far larger death tolls in other recent conflicts. The Commission’s finding therefore functions more as an amplification of a pre-existing political narrative than as an impartial legal determination. The only forum that can issue a binding ruling on the state responsibility question is the ICJ, and it has not done so.
As for some of Pillay’s statements on Israel before she was even appointed to the committee, much less before October of 1983, Grok says this:

Before [Pillay] was named to investigate Israel, she had already applied the apartheid label and backed sanctions:

  • In a November 2017 interview she said apartheid means enforced segregation on racial lines “and that is what is happening in Israel.”
  • In June 2020 she signed a South African BDS Coalition petition titled “Sanction Apartheid Israel!,” which called for an arms embargo, an end to military-security cooperation, and suspension of free-trade agreements, and equated Israeli policy with South African apartheid.
  • In May 2021 she described Israel’s treatment of Palestinians as “inhuman” and again compared it to apartheid South Africa.
  • On 14 June 2021, weeks after the May 2021 Israel–Hamas fighting, she signed a joint letter to President Biden decrying Israel’s “domination and oppression of the Palestinian people” and “ever-expanding discrimination and systemic oppression,” and characterizing clashes at Al-Aqsa as aggressive actions against peaceful protesters amounting to forced dispossession.

As for the 2026 Nobel Prize contest , we have a winner, but not for the Peace Prize, as nobody was dumb enough to guess Pillay. The winner is Renée Szostek, who guessed Carson for the literature prize. If you are Szostek, please get in touch with me so we can get you your boook.

Finally, a tweet from Maarten Boudry; you can see the letter, signed by U.S. military personnel, here.

Mamdani booed for his October 7 statement—by supporters of Palestine

October 8, 2026 • 9:30 am

UPDATE:  In what can only be a gesture of anti-Israel defiance, Mamdani ate dinner on October 7 at an ideologically-themed Palestinian restaurant (h/t Wayne):

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani dined at a Palestinian restaurant chain blasted for being “openly genocidal” against Jews on the third anniversary of the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks in Israel.

Hizzoner ate dinner at Ayat Hinds Hall on the Upper West Side — part of a chain whose sister restaurant in Brooklyn was blasted for featuring a menu section entitled “From the River to the Sea,” in the wake of the 2023 attacks.

The restaurant is named after Hind Rajab, a five-year-old Palestinian child who was killed by IDF forces in Gaza in Jan. 2024, and also pays homage to the anti-Israel protesters at Columbia University, who renamed Hamilton Hall “Hind’s Hall” when they took over the building.

A tweet:

**********************************

Yesterday, New York City’s Mayor, Zohran Mamdani, issued a statement commemorating the October 7, 2023 attack of Hamas on Israel. The problem for me and many others was the the commemoration was more about the depravity of Israel than of Hamas, and more sympathetic to the Palestinians to the Israelis.  Here’s the statement as given by the Mayor’s Office:

This day is profoundly painful for so many New Yorkers. It marks three years since the horrific war crimes of October 7. On that day, Hamas killed more than 1,100 Israelis and abducted 251 others. We grieve alongside our many friends and neighbors who still carry that unthinkable loss.

The suffering did not begin nor end that day. It instead continued through the Israeli government’s devastating, ongoing genocide in Gaza, in which it has killed more than 74,000 Palestinians—including more than 21,000 children. Even since the so-called ceasefire, more than 1,400 Palestinians have been killed. That suffering has intensified with every Israeli bomb dropped on ambulances waiting outside hospitals, every drone strike targeting a residential building or journalist, and every shipment of food aid turned away at a border crossing. Many New Yorkers are reckoning with this unbearable grief, and we mourn alongside them—all while knowing that our tax dollars fund these war crimes.

Three years later, we must refuse to accept a world in which occupation and apartheid continue, where war crimes are met with impunity, and our federal government continues its complicity with every arms shipment.

To honor the dead, we must fight for a world in which every person can live with freedom, safety, and dignity.

There you have it: 49 words devoted to Hamas’s attack, and 163 words on the crimes of Israel, including an erroneous statement about the death toll as well as inclusion of the Three Big Lies about Israeli apartheid, occupation, and genocide.

And it’s not that different from the statement he made on October 7 of last year:

Yesterday’s small-beer “commemoration” was decried by Jews and Jewish organizations, but what is surprising is that Mamdani was booed for it—by supporters of Palestine! When I first saw the headline below in the NYT, I thought, “Well, of course the Jews harbor anger and bitterness”about the statement, but then I learned that, no, it was supporters of Palestine who were angry and bitter. Click to read, or see an archived version of the article here:

An excerpt, and I have to say it brought me a frisson of pleasure:

It seemed inevitable that the third anniversary of the Oct. 7 attacks would touch off tensions for Zohran Mamdani, a longtime critic of Israel and the first Muslim mayor of a city that is 12 percent Jewish.

But Wednesday erupted with such anger and emotion that it seemed to overwhelm any efforts to solemnly mark the deadliest day in Israeli history.

Mr. Mamdani began the day shortly before 9 a.m. by issuing a statement that was meant to acknowledge the Oct. 7 anniversary but almost immediately caused an uproar among some Jewish leaders, who said it minimized Israeli suffering in the Hamas-led attacks.

It took a turn roughly 12 hours later at a vigil organized by Israeli peace activists in Union Square in Manhattan, where pro-Palestinian demonstrators disrupted the event to jeer the mayor. He appeared ashen and upset as he left, without addressing the crowd, flanked by his security detail as he walked to a waiting S.U.V. at 8:50 p.m.

The events raised questions about whether Mr. Mamdani, who energized his campaign with his embrace of the Palestinian cause and ardent criticism of Israel, can now, as mayor, unite New Yorkers whose emotions remain inflamed over the issue.

“This is a moment when people are looking to see if we have the kind of leadership that brings people together, lowers the temperature and makes everyone feel respected,” said Mark Treyger, the chief executive of the Jewish Community Relations Council. “And today was just not it.”

The mayor, who is known for his broad, effervescent smile, seemed especially stung by the opposition to him expressed by the pro-Palestinian crowd in Union Square, given his consistent support of their cause.

During the vigil, he stared stone-faced, and at times looked crestfallen, as the activists chanted in support of Hamas, called for the deaths of Israeli soldiers and denounced him as a “traitor,” many citing his meetings with President Trump or his efforts to build ties with Jewish leaders.

“Zohran, you coward!” someone yelled from the crowd, which numbered in the hundreds. Others yelled, “Zohran is a sellout!”

The chickens have come home to roost: now Mamdani, who’s tried to walk a fine line between the Jews and Muslims, is being booed by his own ilk—and it bothers him.

I have no doubt that Mamdani is not only anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian, but also suspect he’s an Islamist and may even be anti-Semitic.

There are more Jews than Muslims in NYC: Grok estimates about 960,000 Jews and between 250,000 and 700,000 Muslims.)Yet about a third of Jews who voted for Mayor in 2025 voted for Mamdani.  Granted, they may have been “progressives” taken in by Mamdani’s promises of free daycare, free public transportation, and subsidized grocery stores, but in the end they’re like chickens voting for KFC. You just know that when Mamadani goes home at night to his antisemitic wife Rama Duwaji, they don’t sit around and praise Israel!

Here’s a news clip showing some of the booing at the candlelight vigil.

 

Readings and videos for October 7

October 7, 2026 • 9:30 am

Here are three videos and several articles on October 7 that are worth watching and reading.

First, one from Coleman Hughes: “Inside Israel’s war room: what really happened after October 7.” (Subtitle: “Israel’s leaders hated one another. They fought a war anyway. Elliot Kaufman takes us inside the room where it happened.”) Kaufman is an editor of the Wall Street Journal, and imparts a number of facts about the war (and subsequent “peace”) that haven’t been widely reported.  It’s a long conversation, and I haven’t yet finished, but Kaufman is eloquent, Hughes asks good questions (as usual), and you’ll learn a lot.

Click to watch it (now on YouTube):

Free on YouTube:  “Israel regained deterrence. The U.S. lost it.” Bret Stephens is interviewed by Times of Israel editor deputy editor Amanda Borschel-Dan about all manner of Israel-related items: the war, why Israel won despite losing world approbation, the Democrats vs. the Republicans on Israel, is the New York Times anti-Israel?,  and so on. The one bit that irritated me was when Borschel-Dan asks Stephens whether the NYT is anti-Israel. It of course is, but Stephens weasels a bit, which he probably has to do to keep his job. Otherwise, it’s a good conversation.

A short video of Natasha Hausdorff being interviewed on October 7 by Julia Hartley-Brewer. Note the two big truths that Hausdorff says have been neglected by the media but which we must recognize.

The front page of the Free Press is loaded with articles appropriate for this day. You’ll have to subscribe to read any, though. Note the ones at upper left and lower right, which go against the prevailing narrative.

From Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib’s piece:

As the grim third anniversary of October 7 befalls a decimated Gaza Strip, the state of the discourse among many in the so-called “pro-Palestine” movement remains as embarrassing, dismal, and disastrous as it was when Hamas initiated the attack in 2023. Over the past three years, I have seen countless posts by self-described Zionists criticizing the conduct of Israel’s government, the behavior of Israeli officials, and the excesses of the Israeli reaction to October 7. And yet, I have struggled to see even a dozen posts by “pro-Palestine” activists, advocates, or organizations explicitly condemning Hamas for triggering the most catastrophic chapter in contemporary Palestinian history.

And let’s be clear: That’s exactly what this is. Three years after October 7, the Palestinian people face their greatest crisis of the modern era.

I begin on the ground, in Gaza itself. The majority of Gaza’s buildings are partially or fully destroyed. Tens of thousands have lost their lives, including entire families wiped out by ferocious Israeli bombardment. People will argue to the moon and back about who was ultimately responsible for the level of devastation in Gaza. I personally believe Israel killed far too many civilians, including dozens of my own family members. Israeli air strikes destroyed both of my childhood homes. I will never not be angry or upset about this.

But I will also forever be furious at the fact that Gaza would still be standing had Hamas simply kept its terrorists at home on October 7. I will forever be rageful at the fact that Hamas not only weaponized every aspect of Gaza’s infrastructure but also held Israeli hostages in a manner that was inevitably going to invite more devastation and suffering for Palestinian civilians. I will forever be resentful of the useful idiots who ignored Hamas’s sadistic tactics, hiding behind vacuous appeals to “international law” despite there being no legal framework to justify a terrorist group entrenching itself in medical facilities, educational spaces, markets, and areas meant to shelter the displaced.

. . . In other words, three years after the October 7 attacks on Israel, Palestinians have seen their homes decimated, their reputations destroyed in both Israel and the Arab world, and the actions of their supposed allies in the West amount to nothing. Yes, this has been the most catastrophic three years in modern Palestinian history.

However, a narrative shift is of paramount importance. To promote a fundamentally different future for the Palestinian people in Gaza and beyond, we must acknowledge that within the massive power differential between Israel and the Palestinians, there exists an immense margin for Palestinian agency, responsibility, and accountability. Recognizing that is far from “blaming the victims,” as many of my detractors allege; it is, in fact, the first step toward empowering the Palestinian people.

*****************

From Douglas Murray’s article:

Each day’s news is filled with declarations of defeat. The online world is filled with shrill declarations that Israel has lost this war.

But as we approach the third anniversary of the October 7 attacks, I stand by what I wrote here this time last year: that Israel and her allies have been winning the war on the ground even as they have lost the PR war around the world. The PR war matters. But it matters less than the war itself. Better to win the ground war and lose the PR war than the other way around.

Three years after the attack that Yahya Sinwar started, it is worth reiterating the successes of the nation he tried to defeat—and the utter decimation of the people who started this war.

. . .Once the mullahs [in Iran] had deliverable nuclear weapons, they believed they would be invincible—effectively able to continue repressing the Iranian people for the indefinite future and hold not just the Middle East but also the wider world by the throat. That was, effectively, what their mouthpieces in the Western media wanted. Only one great miscalculation prevented them from getting there: Sinwar’s launch of the October 7 attacks.

With the hindsight of three years of war, we can now see more clearly how complete the devastation of Iran’s plans has been. Piece by piece, the government of Benjamin Netanyahu took apart the Iranian axis.

First, they took apart Hamas in Gaza. They did this despite constant attempts to make them stop, which came not just from the negligibly important “allies” in Europe but from President Joe Biden’s White House. Throughout the years during which the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) attempted to finish its mission in Gaza, the Biden administration consistently tried to pull it back. But the Israeli government refused. Even as Kamala Harris declared that she had “studied the maps” and the hashtag “All eyes on Rafah” went global online, the IDF went into Hamas’s last stronghold. There they cornered Sinwar and killed the mastermind of the attacks. There was no “massacre” in Rafah, as the online world had predicted. There was simply another Israeli victory.

People will beef at Murray’s praise of Netanyahu, but there’s a nice ending, referring to last week’s failed hijacking attempt of a FlyDubai airplane:

Sinwar was a psychopath, and so he probably would have launched his war anyway. But by any analysis, what he started on October 7 was one of the greatest military missteps in history. Everybody alongside and above him in the chain of command is now dead. Neither Hamas, Hezbollah, nor the Iranian regime has a noose ready to pull around Israel’s neck anymore. Three years ago, this set of victories would have seemed unthinkable. Today, it is an average day’s news. That a large share of the Israeli hostages who Hamas claimed on October 7 were eventually returned alive is an additional victory worthy of scripture.

Only one part of the war has been lost, and that is the war for public opinion—especially among the young. That is both concerning and unsurprising. The terrorist-linked regime in Qatar, among others, has been superb at using its mouthpieces at Al Jazeera and other, more covert propaganda channels to influence global opinion. These outlets started making false claims that Israel was committing “genocide” in Gaza beginning in October 2023. Sadly, large parts of the world have believed this lie, and weak governments like that of the UK have decided to pander to a part of their domestic political base by repeating and feeding it.

In the years ahead, that will be their problem. But for the time being, what happened in the skies above Saudi Arabia on Wednesday morning stands as a metaphor for three years of war. The Israelis saw an existential threat, took matters into their own hands, and decided their own course. The rest of the West will have to decide whether it will follow the Israeli model or let its own future be dictated by terror and the hijacking of its entire society.

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From It’s Noon in Israel; click the headline below to read. Tatarka and Segal paints two worlds: the “Nova world” described this way:

The Nova world is a world of good and evil. Evil is the entity that raped and pillaged its way through the Gaza envelope, kidnapped 251 people and sacrificed Gazans on the altar of its deity, death. It is the militia that fired on the north and drove tens of thousands of Israelis from their homes. And it is the regime in Tehran that armed and funded them both, the Great Satan of this world.

and the “October 8 world”, in which Israel is the evil and hapless entity:

The other world dates its birth to October 8, omitting the day its ideology won its greatest victory and its goals were realized: October 7. This “October 8” world has even fewer shades of gray than the Nova world. Its black is Israel, the unholy nation, the spearhead of Western colonialism and the last obstacle to the world’s redemption. Its white is the Gazans, victims of oppression and genocide, who have replaced Jews as the archetypal persecuted other. It has adopted the jihadist’s categories: “settlers” and Israelis are one and the same, as are terrorists and civilians.

An excerpt:

Reality conforms to neither narrative entirely.

The hostages have come home. Hamas is shattered, Hezbollah decapitated, Assad gone, and Iran struggling for breath. By almost any military measure, Israel has never been stronger. And yet France, the U.K., Canada and Australia have recognized a Palestinian state, and visitors to the Netherlands are having their bags rifled through for products from Judea and Samaria.

That does not make the two worlds equally wrong. The October 8 world’s distortions are too many to count. The most fundamental is its refusal to see non-Westerners as actors in their own right. In its telling, every event is written in Jerusalem or Washington. Hamas didn’t choose to attack; it was provoked. Hezbollah didn’t choose to open a second front, and Iran didn’t choose to build an axis; they were simply defending themselves from Israeli aggression.

The Nova world’s error is subtler, and for Israel, more dangerous. Before October 7, Israel fell for a conceptzia of safety: the belief that Hamas was deterred, contained, and bought off. Three years later, it risks the opposite, a conceptzia of unsafety, in which every threat is existential and every problem is answered with force. Israel has become a hammer in search of nails. This complicated region is fluent in the language of force, but it is not monolingual, and those who insist Israel speak only that language will miss the larger opportunities its military victories have created.

Criticizing the Nova world is not the same as doubting it. On the question that matters most, it was right: evil is real. Today, three years on, a letter by an officer of Shayetet 13, the Israeli Navy’s special forces unit, has been published. I will let it speak for itself.

עַם יִשְׂרָאֵל חַי

The man who predicted the October 7 attack

October 5, 2026 • 8:15 am

You heard it here first, and only now, nearly three years later, the Free Press has reported on this.

When I was in Israel in September of 2023, I met Yigal Carmon, the head of MEMRI. He’s described this way by Wikipedia:

. . . . the president and co-founder of MEMRI, an organization which monitors and translates Arabic and Persian publications, radio and TV broadcasts, and religious sermons into many languages and circulates them over the Internet.

Carmon was a colonel at Aman, the Israeli military intelligence service, and later counter-terrorism advisor to Israeli prime ministers Yitzhak Rabin and Yitzhak Shamir.

Malgorzata, who translated over 5,000 articles from English into Polish for MEMRI, gave me an introduction to Carmon, and I spent a lovely day with him in and around Jerusalem. After our “security tour,” (see below) we had a fateful lunch.

On January 17, 2024, with Yigal’s permission, I posted an exchange I had with him during my September visit. Here’s from my post:

Yigal is an email friend of Malgorzata, and she put me in touch with him before I went to Israel last September. The second day I was in Jerusalem, I visited MEMRI, and Yigal took me to lunch, along with a reporter named Benjamin Weinthal (name given with permission). During that lunch, Yigal said offhandedly, “You know, I think there will be a war between Hamas and Israel in September or October.” I was stunned, but the reporter wasn’t taken aback and in fact was the first journalist to report Yigal’s prediction.  I said “How do you know this?”  Apparently the buzz that MEMRI got from the Arab world had given him a hint.  Yigal added that there might be a terrorist attack, and if, say five or fewer IDF soldiers were killed, there probably wouldn’t be a war. But if it were ten or more, he added, Israel would probably go to war.

Of course at that time Yigal had no idea that the attack would be on Israeli civilians, not IDF soldiers, and far more than ten would die.

Later, Yigal gave us a “security tour” of the Jerusalem area, pointing out spots of interest in the Arab/Israeli conflict. When I returned to America, I sent his wife (who also gave me several great tours of Jerusalem) a copy of my two trade books as a token of gratitude. They were sent to the MEMRI offices. [JAC: They were returned six months later. No packages got into Israel at that time.]

On October 6, I informed Yigal that I mailed the books, and wrote this email (I’ve bolded the interesting bits):

From: Jerry Coyne Sent: Friday, October 6, 2023 1:32 PMTo: Yigal Carmon

Hi Yigal,
I am sending two of my books, as per your wife’s request, to MEMRI, so if the package below comes, please sign for it. They are autographed.
Hope all is well in Israel. Where is that war you predicted?
best,Jerry
And Yigal answered the same day. Here is what he said:
From: Yigal Carmon
To: ​Jerry Coyne​
Fri 10/6/2023 12:43 PM
Thank you , Jerry. We will read at least significant parts of them.
Give me some 3 weeks more – as I predicted. I said Sept. or October….😂😂🤣🤣

As you can see, that exchange was on October 6. The very next morning when I woke up, I learned that all hell had broken loose. Hamas had attacked Israel, killing 1200 people, almost all civilians. Yigal was right, but the toll wasn’t 10 or 100, but 1200, and more then ten IDF soldiers. A war, according to Yigal’s prognostication, was then inevitable. Yigal’s prediction had been previously published in MEMRI, but apparently the Israeli government paid no attention.

Of course that day changed everything. It was the beginning of the war and its concomitant rise in Israel and Jew hatred in the world—something that I never could have predicted—as well as the beginning of my own awareness of antisemitism and the onset of my sympathies for Israel (“the more they hate us, the Jewisher we get”).

Now the Free Press is late to the party (see the article by Weinthal), but still accurate, with this article published today). If you’re a subscriber, click to read it:

A few excerpts:

In August 31, 2023, Yigal Carmon, a counterterrorism adviser to Israeli prime ministers Yitzhak Shamir and Yitzhak Rabin more than a generation ago, published a warning on the website of his think tank, the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI). “Signs of Possible War in September–October,” said the headline of the article, written from Jerusalem in Carmon’s succinct, often brusque style.

Carmon, MEMRI’s 80-year-old founder, didn’t predict specifically that Hamas would instigate the war, or that it would begin on Israel’s border with the Gaza Strip. But he stressed that there were increased rumblings and threats of a major operation coming from the militant chiefs in the Middle East that he and MEMRI constantly monitor through Arabic- and Persian-language media channels. “The leaders of the terror organizations have recently increased their threats of a comprehensive regional war, in response to Israeli threats to assassinate terror operatives and those who dispatch them,” wrote Carmon.

Carmon’s warning proclaimed that Hamas, Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), and other Iranian-backed proxy groups were acquiring and deploying increasingly sophisticated weapons and tactics that would compel a major Israeli reprisal. Those weapons “can cause a large number of Israeli fatalities,” Carmon wrote.

But that didn’t cause alarm in Jerusalem or Washington—or cause much reaction at all. President Joe Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, said the week before Hamas’s attack that “the Middle East region is quieter today than it has been in two decades.”

And those in Israel’s national security establishment who did respond to Carmon’s prediction of doom resolutely dismissed it. “At this time, I believe that neither Hezbollah nor Hamas have an appetite for a full-blown confrontation with Israel, because they understand how devastating it would be for them,” retired Israeli general Amir Avivi told Iran International on September 5, 2023.

. . .Three years later, Carmon’s credibility has been bolstered by a string of recent reporting by the American and Israeli media claiming that he was not the only one sounding the alarm, and that Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu received advance warnings about a possible attack, including from the United Arab Emirates and Egypt. According to The Atlantic, Egypt’s intelligence chief flew to Tel Aviv less than two weeks before Hamas’s attack to report that the group seemed to be preparing for a major assault. Netanyahu’s office has denied that claim.

When I spoke to Carmon, he told me that Israel’s government didn’t need secret intelligence from Egypt or anywhere else to see that a catastrophic war could be coming. “It was all open-source. We’re not dealing with secrets,” he said about himself and MEMRI, the NGO that he started in 1998 and still leads, and that’s headquartered in Washington but has offices in Jerusalem and a number of European and Asian capitals. “We believed them. We didn’t dismiss it as bullshit,” he said of the threats issued by Israel’s enemies.

This week, Carmon is expanding on his warnings with the publication of a new report titled Chronicles of a Disaster Foretold and shared exclusively with The Free Press. In it, he lays out in much more detail the Arabic-language media and social media posts that pointed to Hamas’s preparations for an attack in 2023. The report also outlines evidence that the Palestinian militant group was channeling outside aid into weapons development.

I won’t describe the rest of the piece, which you can read for yourself (a subscription is worth it), but here are two more bits:

Particularly alarming in retrospect was a large Hamas military drill staged in Gaza in September 2023. MEMRI reported on the military drill at the time, and Carmon now believes it was essentially a “final walkthrough” for what occurred a month later.

. . . So how did Israel fail to better anticipate an attack? Carmon now believes that Netanyahu and his government were lulled into a false sense of security by their views that Hamas’s leadership was focused on this economic growth and that Qatari-supplied cash flowing into Gaza was essentially buying peace. That money was easily diverted into Hamas’s military growth, such as “building Hamas military power and its labyrinth of underground tunnels,” according to the new report by MEMRI.

I remember asking Yigal, after hearing him and the reporter, why the Israeli secret services (there are three) didn’t pay attention to MEMRI.  I don’t recall his answer, but it was something along the lines of “the security services are jealous of their own information and don’t pay attention to stuff coming from other sources.” Pity, that. Imagine if Israel had beefed up security at the border with Gaza before October!

h/t: Anna

Pushback on the the movie “NAZA”

September 25, 2026 • 9:30 am

About ten days ago I reported on the first public showing of the anti-Israel film “NAZA,” made by two Israelis. Its premise was the IDF had, during the Gaza war, engaged in the deliberate targeting of civilians using AI, not caring about how many civilians they killed and, in fact, killing as many as possible (the “genocide” trope). The movie apparently used information from 24 anonymous IDF sources, and showing of the movie has been highly restricted. In fact, I wasn’t sure whether it had been shown beyond the Venice Film Festival, where it got  not only a prize but a standing ovation that was 24½ minutes long: the longest in the history of the festival. Grok now tells me that it’s been shown at a festival in Bologna as well, and there are plans for a wider release. But most people haven’t seen it, including the IDF.  Some of its approbation comes from the fact that it was directed by two Israelis, who, of course, couldn’t possibly be showing stuff that was wrong or distorted.

Nevertheless, you can tell a lot about the movie’s premise from this short , 83-second trailer, which has English subtitles. And some of the film’s contents have leaked.

The premise is that there was an IDF program to deliberately kill civilians, whether directly or as “collateral damage” (the meaning of the word “Naza”), and in some strikes up to 500 Gazan civilians were killed.  The video by Natasha Hausdorff and the two articles in the Times of Israel below vigorously dispute this allegation, though you can dismiss them, if you wish, because those sources are either Israeli or sympathetic to Israel.  But before you join the Stalinesque-wave of applause for NAZA (remember from The Gulag Archipelago that the first person who stopped applauding for the Russian leader was arrested), hear them out.

The 26-minute take by Hausdorff, who hasn’t seen the movie, is based on what has been made public about the movie and its trailer. She clearly explains the rule of proportionality as obeyed by the IDF and the ways the IDF warned civilians of imminent attacks.  NAZA apparently ignores Hausdorff’s point: estimating “collateral damage” before a strike is a legal obligation, not a nefarious exercise. As she says:

“And what the filmmakers do is present the modeling of incidental harm to a lay audience as though it were some cold Israeli invention devised for the purpose of justifying slaughter. Well, it isn’t an Israeli invention—it’s the law. And it’s precisely intended  to minimize excessive harm to civilians. Pre-strike collateral damage estimation is the standard practice in every law-abiding Western military—that includes Americans and NATO forces. It’s the procedural tool that compels a commander to confront the presence of non-combatants before a weapon is ever released.”

She goes on to explain what kind of civilian assessment and damage do and do not constitute war crimes. As for the “death of 500 civilians” accusation in NAZA, it’s been strongly denied by the IDF; indeed, no attack was approved to eliminate a Hamas commander, however powerful he be, that would kill more than 100 civilians.  Hausdorff also denies that decisions about where and who are attacked by the IDF are made by machines rather than humans; here the IDF has already published its protocol, which involves three different groups of people.

As for the anonymous IDF souces, Hausdorff avers that, “From an evidential standpoint, these accounts are unverified in every respect that actually matters. We don’t know who these individuals are. We don’t know what roles they had. And we don’t know they are who the filmmakers say they are.” This means that neither Israel nor anybody else can establish whether the accounts are true.

Second, this Times of Israel by Sarit Zehavi (click to read) also casts strong doubt on the film’s premise, for Zehavi, who was willing to be interviewed but wasn’t asked, helped construct the very system of estimating civilian casualties. (She is a Lieutenant Colonel in the Israeli IDF reserve.) Click the headline to read.

An excerpt:

The creators of the recent documentary, “NAZA,” about “Naza” (a Hebrew military acronym for Nezek Agavi – collateral damage) did not have to work too hard to discover the truth.

They could have simply interviewed me. I would have stood in front of the camera, without hiding my identity, on the roof of my house nine kilometers (5.6 miles) from Lebanon, where we endured endless barrages of rockets, and explained the reality on the ground.

A little less than 20 years ago, I was one of the founders of the unit within the IDF that deals with warning populations on the other side of enemy lines and preserving civilian lives.

We built the processes that define how to issue evacuation warnings, and how to track evacuations. I was personally involved in formulating target approval processes and operational discussions.

If they had spoken with me, I would have explained that the chart shown at the beginning of the film’s promotional material is not a “killing chart,” but rather a planning chart for a target identified as being used by Hamas.

Its purpose is to determine whether to strike at all, who in the command echelon is authorized to approve the strike, with what munitions, and under what conditions. In stark contrast to the way it is presented in the promotional material, when the words “Naza 500 – collateral damage estimated at 500” appear in the approval process, it means that action must be taken to reduce the collateral damage.

There are a variety of ways to do this, such as issuing an evacuation warning, using precision munitions, or canceling the strike entirely. Noting the collateral damage on the target sheet does not signify an intention to kill civilians or commit “genocide”; it is intended, first and foremost, to prevent civilian deaths.

Our enemies, both Hamas and Hezbollah, deliberately place their rockets and headquarters in the heart of civilian areas, in tunnels under Beirut or in high-rise residential buildings in southern Lebanon. Hamas in Gaza does the same, operating in civilian areas and using children as human shields. They do this on the working assumption that if Israel strikes without warning, hundreds of civilians will be killed. That is exactly their goal. But Israel chooses differently: there are hundreds of soldiers and officers in the IDF whose sole role is protecting civilians in enemy territory. That is what they think about from the moment they wake up in the morning.

I would have expected a serious examination of this subject to include the perspective of former IDF personnel, like me, as well as serving soldiers and officers who are familiar with these procedures and could explain the professional meaning of collateral-damage assessments. Based on the promotional materials I have seen, that perspective is absent.

The promo for the film claims that the IDF “never checks the number of civilians killed.”

The truth is that checking the exact number of casualties in enemy territory in real time is a complex and nearly impossible task. This is exactly why the collateral damage assessment process takes into account factors such as the size of the structure and the estimated number of civilians routinely in its vicinity.

. . .According to IDF officials quoted in the Israeli media, the filmmakers did not seek the military’s response before the film was released, and the IDF learned of its claims through the media. The IDF spokesperson later publicly asked to view the full documentary in order to respond to its allegations. If the filmmakers, both of them investigative journalists, have declined to disclose their film or findings to the IDF, that would be contrary to basic journalistic ethics.

Without knowing more about the film’s anonymous sources, it is impossible to know what roles the interviewees held within the system, and whether their accounts, assuming they are authentic, are even relevant to understanding the chain of approvals and actions taken prior to striking a target.

The promotional materials released so far present the story from a very narrow angle: they rely on anonymous sources whose level of involvement, rank, and understanding of the process are unclear, while completely omitting the experts who built these systems with one goal: preserving human life. There are such experts. I was one of them.

The article below by Omer Shem Tov is based on an op-ed he wrote in the Wall Street Journal. It’s not all that germane to the film but I’m throwing in the links here for information.

Shem Tov was a hostage kidnapped on October 7, and recounts the lengths Israel went to not to kill him by accident:

Shem Tov, who was kidnapped on October 7, 2023, from the Nova music festival near the Gaza border, recounted an instance when the mother of one of his captors received a phone call from the IDF warning her of an imminent airstrike.

“Hamas knew where I was and left me to die. Israel didn’t know my location, but it knew where my captor’s mother was and called to make sure she wasn’t killed accidentally,” he wrote. “There I was — kidnapped, starved and tortured by her son — while my army was trying to keep his mother alive.”

He said his captors in Gaza celebrated death and destruction on both sides: “For Hamas, destruction itself could be victory. As long as there was death on either side, Hamas could win.”

Shem Tov said that “Israel desperately wanted me home. But not at any price. There were Palestinian civilians between Israel and me. So Israel dropped leaflets, sent messages, made phone calls and ordered evacuations. It tried to minimize NAZA, or collateral damage.”

. . The freed hostage suggested that Israel “paid a price” for its efforts to reduce civilian casualties: “They gave Hamas time. They exposed Israeli soldiers to greater danger. And they left hostages like me waiting longer.”

“If Israel had cared less about NAZA, perhaps I would have come home sooner,” he added. “Fewer Israeli soldiers might have died. Fewer hostages might have died. But more Palestinians would have.”

Shem Tov wrote that he is troubled by reports about the documentary film, which he notes that he also hasn’t seen in full.

“In Venice, the film received a standing ovation that lasted more than 24 minutes,” he said. “As a former hostage, those minutes felt like a shower of knives. Not because the film shows Palestinian suffering, which is real and deserves to be seen. What hurts is that the film, as it has been reported, doesn’t seem to see me.”

The former captive said that to the filmmakers, “perhaps I am NAZA too. Collateral damage. A Jewish hostage who could have been left to rot in a Hamas tunnel, or murdered alongside my friends at Nova, because fighting to free me, and to protect Israelis from the people who did this, is itself treated as morally suspect.”

The lengths that Israel went to to minimize Palestinian civilian casualties—the dropping of leaflets, the phone calls to civilians in buildings scheduled for bombing, the “knock on the door”—an innocuous bomb dropped whose noise would alert people to evacuate—and the announcement of “safe areas” for evacuation—all this has been announced publicly and not contested, even by the New York Times. And it gives the lie to the idea that the IDF wanted to kill as many Gazans as possible. If they really wanted to perpetrate a genocide, why the delivery of food and polio vaccine to Gaza? Why these warnings? Why no bombing of the West Bank? What army engaged in a war has ever taken these precautions? And now this film, which apparently stimulates huge approbation by Israel- and Jew-haters everywhere.

I never even thought much about anti-semitism before October 7 three years ago, but now that it’s apparently stimulated a huge outpouring of belief in Big Lies, like the Genocide Myth, I have no choice but to conclude that antisemitism is ubiquitous, and simply was repressed until the Hamas attack gave it an excuse to emerge.

No, it’s not all about Netanyahu (Israel will be hated no matter who becomes Prime Minister), and no, it’s not all about Zionism (“Zionist” has become a euphemism for “Jew”). It’s about hatred of Jews, pure and simple. As I’m a nonbelieving Jew and never banged on about antisemitism before October 7, I am confident in these conclusions. You will never find a purveyor of the Genocide Lie who will admit that they’re wrong, but the evidence shows they are wrong. And the makers of NAZA, and those who so fervently applaud that film, also perpetuate the Big Lie.  As does the British Government with its chowderheaded boycott of Jewish products in false hopes that it will bring about the impossible: a “two-state solution.” I agree with Bill Maher that those who spread the Genocide Lie are at the same time spreading antisemitism.

There are but 16 million Jews in the world, with about half of them in Israel, yet that tiny country, the only democracy in the Middle East, and a the only place where women, gays, and ethnic minorities have equal rights, seems to be the focus of the world’s damnation.  The explanation is clear.

The two-state delusion

September 24, 2026 • 9:30 am

As I reported recently, UK foreign secretary Ed Miliband (under Labour) announced that a new government’s policy would (if passed) include imposing sanctions on companies in the West Bank, but only Jewish ones.  I also quoted Miliband at length to show that he deemed this policy essential to effect the one thing he and Labour thought would end the enmity between Israel and Palestine: the vaunted TWO-STATE SOLUTION. A couple of quotes from the Secretary himself.

So Madame Deputy Speaker, there is a deeply painful contrast between our professed commitment to a two state solution, and the reality on the ground in Gaza and the West Bank.

. . . We should always be proud that it was a Labour government that took the historic step of recognising the State of Palestine.

What we seek today is to salvage the only course for peace and security for Israelis and Palestinians – the two state solution.

. . .Ethnic cleansing is defined by the UN as ‘a purposeful policy designed by one ethnic or religious group to remove by violent and terror-inspiring means the civilian population of another ethnic or religious group from certain geographic areas.’

The British government agrees that there is ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in areas of the West Bank – perpetrated by settler terrorists.

To advance the two state solution, we also need viable and effective Palestinian governance.

So I urge the Palestinian Authority to accelerate reform and I urge Israel to lift its withholding of revenues that is financially crippling the provision of essential services in the West Bank.

The set of measures I have announced represents a clear message to the government of Israel, to the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, and to the world that we will not acquiesce in the destruction of the two state solution.

Now anybody who says something like this is a complete chowderhead on several fronts. First, as we see later in this post, neither Israel nor Palestine wants a two-state solution. Palestine has rejected one repeatedly: at least a half-dozen times, and often on favorable terms for Palestine That’s because the powers that be in Palestine want a one state solution: a state that would ostensibly harbor Jews and Palestinians, which is like wanting a state that would harbor both dynamite and matches. Such a state would eventually lead to the expulsion or mass death of Jews, which is what most Palestinians want.

Nor do Jews want such a state. They used to, when several times they offered one to Palestine, but after October 7 they realized that having a state run by promoters of terrorism right next to Israel, whether those terrorists be Hamas, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, or the Palestinian Authority, would simply guarantee more attacks on Israel.  In fact Gaza was, in effect, a Palestinian state, and how well did that work out?

Finally, the “viable and effective Palestinian governance” that Miliband calls for simply does not exist. People have bruited about the Palestinian Authority, but anybody who knows anything about the PA knows that that organization is also a hotbed of terrorism that pays off Palestinians for killing Jews, and is also rejected by Palestinians in both the West Bank and Gaza in favor of the even more terroristic Hamas.

And so a new Pew Poll, as reported in the Times of Israel, shows that neither side thinks that a two-state solution is the solution to coexistence of Palestinians and Israelis. Ed Miliband, and other European countries who will sanction Israel in hopes of effecting that solution, are speaking from their nether orifices.

Click below to read the ToI article:

Quotes:

A large majority of Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem and a majority of Israelis say they do not believe Israel and an independent Palestinian state can coexist peacefully, according to a new Pew survey.

Just 17% of Israelis said they believed a path to peaceful coexistence could be found, compared with 56% who said it could not. Among Palestinians surveyed in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, 21% said coexistence was possible, while 68% said it was not.

The Israeli result is a low point in more than a decade of Pew polling on the issue. The share saying coexistence was possible had already fallen to its lowest level in 2025 and remained roughly unchanged in 2026.

The year 2026 was the first time that more than half of Israeli respondents explicitly said it was impossible.

Among Jewish Israelis, 16% said a two-state solution was possible, while 64% said it was not. Among Arab Israelis, 46% either said they did not know or declined to answer, while 23% said peaceful coexistence was possible and 26% said it was not.

Pew surveyed 1,001 people in Israel and 1,038 Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Israeli interviews were conducted from April 5 to May 6, while Palestinian interviews took place from March 30 to April 28, in Hebrew and Arabic.

The fieldwork coincided with the Iran war, beginning while fighting was still underway and continuing after an initial ceasefire was declared on April 7. Gaza was not included because Pew said it was unable to conduct fieldwork there.

Click below to go to the Pew poll and article:

First, the data. Note that Israeli Arabs don’t really want to answer, perhaps because they fear being demonized if they think peaceful coexistence is possible. Overall, Palestinian adults in the West Bank and East Jerusalem are as pessimistic as are Israeli adults:

Now some wishful thinking:

Why do some Israelis and Palestinians think Israel and an independent Palestinian state can coexist peacefully?

Small shares of the populations in both Israel (17%) and the West Bank and East Jerusalem (21%) say a way can be found for Israel and an independent Palestinian state to coexist peacefully.

When asked why they think so, some Israelis and Palestinians offer similar reasons: Both see peace between two states as the inevitable conclusion to their conflict and acknowledge that a diplomatic peace process would bring about clearly-defined borders and independence from each other.

But there are also some differences in their open-ended responses. Palestinians tend to emphasize the benefits of peace, such as economic prosperity for both peoples, while Israelis explain that peace is possible under certain conditions, like increased trust or political will.

Among those who say peaceful coexistence is possible, an interest in peace is a common sentiment. Some say that they personally want peace or – in the words of one respondent – that “both sides want to live in peace.” And others see peace as an imperative, saying, “we must make an effort.”

In addition, some point to interpersonal relationships between the two sides as evidence that they can coexist. “Just as Arabs and Jews live in harmony in Jaffa, so it is possible between countries,” said one Jewish Israeli woman. And a Palestinian woman expressed similar reasoning, saying, “There are friendships between Arabs and Jews, and peace can be achieved.”

“We need to find the path to peace for the sake of our children and their children.”
Jewish man, 29, Israel

“We tried coexistence before and it was successful.”
Man, 27, West Bank/East Jerusalem

I wonder when that was.

“We complement each other in work, trade and security, so that we may live together.”
Woman, 18, West Bank/East Jerusalem

In the West Bank and East Jerusalem, some recalled periods of trust and cooperation in the past. “We used to coexist and could accept each other,” said one Palestinian man. “Previously, coexistence and peace existed, and peaceful coexistence is possible now, just as it was before,” said another.

Many Palestinians stress the economic benefits peace would bring. Peace is “the way to improve the economic situation of the Palestinians,” one Palestinian woman said. Others mention the economic interdependence between the two peoples: “We work for them, they need Palestinian labor,” said one Palestinian man, adding, “We share the same economy and the same currency that Israel uses.”

Palestinians are more likely than Israelis to explain, in their own words, that peace between two states can be achieved because they see it as a desirable outcome. This is the most common theme in the open-ended responses from people in the West Bank and East Jerusalem who say a two-state solution is possible.

This strikes me as a sentiment along the lines of “If wishes were horses, even beggars could ride.” Just because peace is desirable for some people doesn’t mean that it will come, simply because (in my view, of course), peace was never desirable for most Palestinians, and while it was desirable for many Israelis as well as for me, that desire vaporized on October 7.  So long as Hamas and the Palestinian Authority are in control of the Arabs in Gaza and the West Bank, there will never be peace, as both of those organizations are dedicated to extirpating Israel.  And there is as of yet no viable alternative. UNRWA, for example, has helped teach a generation of Palestinian children to hate Jews and love martyrdom. It is not until those children grow up and their own children are brought up under a different system—not something that seems likely—will there be hope for peace.

The figure below shows the waning confidence in a two-state solution over the past thirteen years. It’s fallen by about two-thirds among Israelis of all stripes!:

Finally, there’s a lot about why Israelis and Palestinians think they cannot coexist. Here are some of many reasons:

Why do most Israelis and Palestinians think peaceful coexistence is not possible?

Most Israelis and Palestinians say a two-state solution is not a viable option. Over half of the people surveyed in Israel (56%) and roughly seven-in-ten in the West Bank and East Jerusalem (68%) cannot see a way for Israel and an independent Palestinian state to coexist peacefully.

When asked to explain their answer, Israelis and Palestinians say coexistence is not possible because their differences are too great to overcome. People on both sides agree that they are enemies with competing belief systems who are fighting over the same land, and some also mention the violence between them, which has culminated in the most recent war. Small shares in both places accuse the other side of rejecting peace.

But there are points of disagreement about why they cannot coexist, in their own words. While Israelis explain that an independent Palestinian state would pose a threat to Israel, many Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem say coexistence is not an option while they live under Israeli control.

One of the top reasons that Israelis and Palestinians alike say peaceful coexistence is not possible is disagreement over the land.

Some think there is not enough land to split. For example, one Palestinian woman said that “Palestine cannot be divided into two states.” Another said that “there cannot be two peoples when there is no room for two peoples.” Israelis express similar sentiments – saying, for example, that “Israel does not have enough territory to divide into two states” or that “there is no land to establish a Palestinian state.”

In both places, there are people who believe they are the only rightful owners of the land. One Jewish Israeli woman said, “This is our land alone,” and another stated that “the Holy Land belongs only to the Jewish people and was given to them by God.” Similarly, some Palestinians say Israel “stole our land” and that “the homeland belongs to the Palestinians.”

They didn’t survey Gazans for obvious reasons, and the “under Israeli control” reason wouldn’t have as much force before October 7, 2023.  I have every reason to think that had Hamas (much less the PA) not controlled Gaza (they were voted in by its residents), the territory would now be a seaside tourist destination. Yes, Israel did maintain control over air, land, and sea crossings into and out of Gaza, but so did Egypt, and nobody blames that country for an “occupation” (Egypt also refused to let Palestinian refugees settle in their land after the October 7 war began). Those restrictions were, of course, largely due to terrorism, and yet Gazans were largely free to work in Israel as well as to use its transportation facilities to leave the area. And with few exceptions they could get treatment in Israeli hospitals.  It’s undeniable that Palestinian terrorism is the main reason that Israel has put restrictions on Gaza and the West Bank, and why Israeli enthusiasm for the West Bank has cooled.