So much for the sweeping claim that Israel is an "apartheid state." The election demonstrates that Arab citizens of Israel vote, establish political parties, run for office, and win substantial representation in the country's national parliament. Their elected representatives can challenge government policies and influence decisions affecting the entire country. In 2021, one of the Arab-led parties, Ra'am, even joined Israel's governing coalition.

These are facts that cannot simply be dismissed by those who portray Arab citizens as having no meaningful political rights.

Beyond the numbers, the election highlights an important distinction between Arab citizens of Israel and Palestinians living under the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the West Bank or under Hamas's de facto rule in the Gaza Strip.

The last Palestinian presidential election took place in 2005. The last election for the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) took place in 2006. Hamas won that legislative election, securing 74 of the PLC's 132 seats.

Those elections are now roughly two decades in the past.

The political split between Hamas and the PA's ruling Fatah faction headed by President Mahmoud Abbas, which culminated in Hamas's violent takeover of the Gaza Strip in 2007, left the Palestinians divided between two competing centers of power. The PLC stopped functioning as a national parliament in 2018, when the PA formally dissolved it. No new legislature has been elected since.

Recently, Abbas again postponed PA legislative elections that had been scheduled for November 2026, and set September 11, 2027 as the new date for both legislative and presidential elections.

The result is a political system without a functioning parliament capable of exercising the ordinary legislative and oversight functions expected of such an institution. Even though Abbas's presidential term expired in 2009, he has continued to govern by decree.

The absence of elections has deprived Palestinians for decades of a regular mechanism for replacing their leaders, renewing their political institutions, and holding their governing authorities accountable at the ballot box.

The comparison between those two elections also raises questions about the priorities of those who claim to speak on behalf of the Palestinian people.

For years, international diplomats and governments have discussed Palestinian statehood, political reform, and democratic institutions. Yet Palestinians have repeatedly seen elections postponed, while their leaders continue to exercise power without a renewed electoral mandate.

World

Israel elections: Netanyahu's Likud party remains in the lead as the vote count continues, but there is no clear majority to form a government

Israel Duro

Israel's election at least offers a contrasting example of how political representation can change through participation in a competitive national vote. The 19 seats won by the Arab-led parties will not resolve every difficulty facing Israel's Arab citizens. Their representation nevertheless gives them a parliamentary platform from which to negotiate and scrutinize government policy.

As Arab citizens constitute roughly one-fifth of Israel's population, their 19 seats amount to nearly one-sixth of the Knesset — a substantial share of representation even if it does not exactly match their proportion of the population: two million out of 10 million.

The challenge now is to translate this representation into results for the communities that elected these lawmakers.

The performance of Israeli-Arab leaders should be judged by what they accomplish, including whether they can improve public safety, address social and economic inequalities, and advance the interests of their constituents.

The record turnout for Arab-led parties demonstrates that Israel's parliamentary system provides a route for political participation that Arab citizens are actively using. Their ability to organize, compete, and increase their representation is a meaningful feature of Israel's political life and democracy.

The international community should draw a clear lesson from Israel's latest election results: Arab citizens seeking greater influence can organize and compete for office, while Palestinians living under the Palestinian Authority or Hamas have no freedom or influence over their future.

The Palestinian situation, however, illustrates why elections alone are not enough. For the past two decades, Palestinians have been trapped in a political struggle dominated by Fatah and Hamas, two factions whose records show serious problems with corruption, accountability, and effective governance. Simply holding elections without meaningful alternatives leaves Palestinians choosing between two discredited political establishments rather than producing genuine change.

The international community should therefore support not just elections for the Palestinians, but, even more, genuine political competition, independent candidates, transparency, institutions capable of holding elected leaders accountable, and an end to corruption and glorification of violence and "martyrdom."

Khaled Abu Toameh is an award-winning journalist based in Jerusalem.

• Follow Khaled Abu Toameh on X (formerly Twitter)

© Gatestone Institute

Compounding the political uncertainty, the country is facing difficult economic times, with rampant inflation and a total collapse of the electrical grid, causing blackouts that last several hours across Venezuela. People are angry. They are frustrated. And this translates into discontent in the polls, renewed migration, and spontaneous, daily protests with no specific agenda.

María Corina Machado, the undisputed leader of the Venezuelan opposition, returned to Venezuela this Sunday after nearly a year in exile. Her entry was clandestine, part of an operation her team described as risky and complex. She returned on her ninth attempt, after previous efforts failed for various reasons. Press reports range from planes that had to turn back mid-flight to obstacles and bans on landing or taking off to the breakdown of a boat that was supposed to take her across the Caribbean to her country. A force majeure, which no one has yet been able to definitively identify, was preventing her from returning to Venezuela. Although Secretary Rubio acknowledged on Monday during a call with journalists that several countries had conspired to hinder Machado's return to avoid "getting into trouble"... The natural question is, trouble with whom? The question is rhetorical, of course.

María Corina Machado's arrival in Venezuela sparked an impressive, spontaneous wave of street support. Venezuela was overflowing. She first appeared at a Marian church in Lara state, then set out for Venezuela's capital, Caracas. The distance is about 250 miles, a trip that would normally take about 4.5 hours. Because so many people gathered along the nearly 250-mile highway, the 4-hour trip turned into an 11-hour one. Tens of thousands of Venezuelans spontaneously gathered along the highway that ran through six states so they could see her, even if only for a few seconds, or touch her. The atmosphere throughout Venezuela was one of excitement and joy. The country seemed to be celebrating, with fireworks accompanying María Corina's long-awaited arrival in Caracas at around 11 p.m.

Tens of thousands of people, if not hundreds of thousands, across the entire country. People stood in the street for 10 hours, hoping to witness history being made in real time. Thousands of motorcycles joined Machado's motorcade, along with trucks, buses, and private vehicles.

One argument frequently whispered in the corridors was that María Corina should not return to Venezuela, as she would destabilize a calm country—a nation moving to the rhythm of the "stabilization" imposed by the Americans. Another argument was that María Corina jeopardized the transition and that her presence challenged Marco Rubio’s three-phase process. Both arguments collapsed within the last 24 hours.

Thousands took to the streets, celebrating spontaneously, and there wasn't a single incident. Sunday was a day of peace and celebration throughout Venezuela. At the same time, the feeling over the last two days is that the transition finally has a clear direction and, with María Corina on the ground, is moving in the right direction. It's a matter of perception, but a powerful one, rooted in the opposition leader's return.

María Corina Machado is not a destabilizing force that jeopardizes the transition proposed by the United States. Quite the opposite. Amid the uncertainty, frustration, and hatred Delcy Rodríguez has provoked, María Corina's presence on the ground sends the message that things are under control. That there is leadership that can be trusted and that all frustration should be channeled through her guidance.

The absence of the main opposition leader from the field unsettled Venezuelans because it contradicted the rhetoric that Venezuela has changed, that exiles can return and that the country is moving toward democracy. How can this be true if the main opposition leader cannot be in her own country?

Difficult months lie ahead. The regime, true to its nature, will react aggressively to Machado's stabilizing influence. To undo what has been achieved, it will seek to destabilize the situation. Today, the regime needs Machado on the ground to create chaos; since reality doesn't support that, it will try to create a parallel reality. But, once again, it will be exposed for what it is: Chavismo, in truth, is chaos and violence.

France's "mostly peaceful protests"

The physical damage is extensive. In Paris, shopfronts were smashed (luxury retailers but also many modest shops and private properties), cars and bicycles were torched, barricades of garbage dumpsters and bicycles were burned, and restaurants were gutted by fire. Whole streets were described by officials as "devastated." In Limoges, the 19th-century town hall was destroyed by arson; in Lyon the tourist office was set alight; city halls and public buildings were attacked or defaced, notably in Marseille, the second-largest city in France. Looting targeted hundreds of shops in Paris, Marseille, Lille, Bordeaux, Nice, and Strasbourg.

Authorities attributed the worst violence to "far-left" or "ultra-left" elements joined by opportunistic delinquents. Groups in black, masked and wearing balaclavas, clashed with police who deployed tear gas and water cannons. Yet, everywhere, the instructions and rules of engagement for law enforcement remained clear: above all, no violence. This means that the rioters will prevail over the security forces, who are mainly reduced to mere spectators. Such is the cowardice of the Macron regime. More than 3,000 businesses were damaged, with losses estimated at more than a billion euros. A synagogue on Rue Burnouf in Paris's 19th arrondissement was found vandalized and ransacked, with religious items scattered; reports differed on whether it was deliberate vandalism linked to the riots or an attempted robbery (Torah scrolls were reportedly left untouched.)

World

The European Parliament awards the Sakharov Prize to the ICC amid tensions with US and Israel

Carlos Dominguez

The causes

These events did not arise in a vacuum. France has long refused to confront three interlocking realities that its political class treats as taboos: mass uncontrolled immigration, the growing presence and separatism of Islam, and the unaffordable costs of the EU's "energy transition."

Immigrants and their descendants are disproportionately concentrated in certain banlieues and cities where public services are most strained and where earlier waves of unrest (including 2005) already originated. France's welfare system, housing, education, and security budgets have been under continuous pressure from high inflows, low assimilation rates in segments of the population, and the existence of areas where republican authority is contested. Crime statistics, the dynamics of France's 751 no-go zones, and repeated episodes of youth violence have been documented for years; the October looting and organized attacks proceeded according to established patterns.

The most recent riots are by no means an exception; they are rather another episode in a long series of events, with many more undoubtedly on the way.

What gives these riots their strength is the role played by La France Insoumise (LFI), Jean-Luc Mélenchon's party, which has for years indulged in toxic pro-Islamist tirades with openly antisemitic undertones.

The party seems to know that it will never come to power. It has therefore decided to fully embrace the politics of revolution and disorder, relying on and openly aligning itself with the most extreme elements of France's Muslim population. In many respects, LFI is an openly Islamist party. In the 2022 presidential election, according to polling institutes' estimates, 69% of Muslim voters cast a ballot for Jean-Luc Mélenchon in the first round.

Official statistics and surveys place the French Muslim population at roughly 9–10 percent of the total (around 6–7 million people), up from roughly 1 percent in the 1960s. The Institut national d'études démographiques (INSEE) data show Muslims as the second-largest declared religious group among younger adults, with far higher rates of practice and intergenerational transmission than Catholicism: 91 percent of second-generation immigrants raised in Muslim families retain the faith as adults, versus much lower retention among those from Christian backgrounds. Strong religiosity is markedly higher among Muslims.

Not all Muslims, of course, are Islamist. Approximately 60% of young French Muslims, however, believe that Sharia law takes precedence over the laws of the French Republic, according to data from a 2020 official survey, with similar findings reported in subsequent surveys conducted in late 2025.

In France, antisemitic incidents have risen sharply in recent years, often linked to Islamist networks or radicalized youths; synagogue incidents occur against that backdrop. Islamist influence in neighborhoods, schools, and associations has been repeatedly flagged by security services and interior ministry reports. The political left, particularly La France Insoumise (LFI), has cultivated alliances with Islamist-adjacent or "pro-Palestinian" currents and is regularly accused of legitimizing or instrumentalizing disorder.

Nicolas Sarkozy, in a private remark reported in September 2025, put it bluntly: "The Rassemblement National of Marine Le Pen wants power and will obtain it; LFI does not want power—what it wants is disorder, anarchy, and violence." These riots, and the driving role played by LFI, appear to prove him right. Sustained chaos seems to serve its revolutionary orientation better than ordinary governance.

Immigration, Islam, and LFI are not the only factors involved. Insane energy costs compound the social and fiscal pressure. Fuel prices are high enough to revive Yellow Vest-style anger. The government has responded with releases from strategic diesel reserves, price caps, and targeted aid -- not the needed structural reform. France's nuclear fleet remains a comparative advantage, yet years of green-transition policies, taxes, regulatory costs, and underinvestment have contributed to elevated prices and public resentment. Protesters explicitly cited fuel prices alongside school conditions.

Consequences

The plausible consequences of these riots are straightforward and already visible. Macron will not resign. He is in the final months of his second disastrous term ahead of the 2027 presidential elections next spring. His approval rate is low, but the institutional calendar and political incentives do not favor an early exit. The immediate fiscal outlook continues to worsen. France's public deficit is projected around 5.4 percent of GDP for 2026 (among the eurozone's highest), with debt near 120 percent of GDP. Prime minister Lecornu's 2027 budget aims for roughly 5 percent via some €54 billion in savings and freezes, yet the National Assembly remains fragmented after the 2024 snap elections. The reality is that the French state appears less capable than ever of putting its disastrous finances in order; there is a looming risk of a snowball effect regarding interest on the debt.

Previous budgets have required the 49.3 constitutional tool to bypass a vote (Article 49.3 of the French Constitution is a powerful mechanism that allows the prime minister to force the passage of a bill through the National Assembly without a vote). Markets have pushed French yields much higher. Further unrest and political paralysis make credible consolidation harder, not easier. Interest costs are again rising. France has not run a budget surplus since 1974; the structural drivers — high spending, demographic pressures, and refusal to prioritize growth-oriented reforms — remain intact.

Sarkozy's observation on LFI is being confirmed in real time. The party and its allies benefit from the perception of systemic failure while avoiding the responsibilities of office. Having spent years courting Muslims and engaging in antisemitic tropes with total impunity — often with the complicity of the Left — LFI (La France Insoumise) escalates its behavior further with each passing day.

Meanwhile, France remains locked into its taboos. The demented "energy transition" continues despite the visible cost-of-living backlash. Serious discussion of migration selection, remigration, assimilation requirements, or the cultural and security implications of Islam is still heavily constrained by elite consensus and legal or media norms. Marine Le Pen — a probable, though not certain, winner of the presidential election — has just declared that "Islam is compatible with the Republic." She reportedly intends to lower the retirement age to 62—in a country with an increasingly aging population where, it should be remembered, the state pays out pensions.

The truth is that if France fails to confront its taboos, the October riots will, in retrospect, look like a practice run.

© Gatestone Institute.

On September 28, the United States revoked Mariaca’s visa and barred his immediate family from entering the country. The stated reason was serious: American officials accused Bolivia’s former attorney general of soliciting and accepting bribes to facilitate drug trafficking and help violent criminals evade justice. Mariaca rejected the allegations, calling them political pressure. Two days later, Bolivian police arrested him near the international airport in Santa Cruz. What began as a diplomatic sanction had become a criminal case reaching into the highest levels of the country’s prosecution service.

At the center of the case is Sebastián Marset, a suspected Uruguayan drug kingpin captured in Bolivia in March and subsequently transferred to the United States to stand trial. Recordings attributed to Marset circulated before Mariaca’s arrest, including a video in which he describes the prosecutor as his friend. The material also includes a claim that a $500,000 payment allowed him to remain in Bolivia and continue operating. Bolivian authorities accuse Mariaca of leading a network that protected drug trafficking, with charges including criminal organization, money laundering, and trafficking in controlled substances.

Authorities also reported intercepting an ambulance leaving Mariaca’s home carrying approximately $300,000 in cash, allegedly obtained through extortion. If prosecutors establish that criminal networks bought protection inside the agency responsible for investigating them, Bolivia’s problem extends far beyond drugs crossing its borders. It means public authority itself was being sold—and that restoring the rule of law requires pursuing the officials who allegedly made that protection possible.

Faced with allegations this serious, the left has resorted to an old political tactic: cast the United States as the villain and push the alleged corruption into the background. The debate shifts from whether prosecutors protected a drug trafficking network to whether the United States had any right to confront them. It is a convenient way to evade accountability.

The left claims the Mariaca case involves an American violation of Bolivian sovereignty. That is false. But since sovereignty is being invoked, it is worth remembering that the word also means having institutions that cannot be bought. A country whose prosecutors serve criminal interests loses the ability to enforce its own laws, protect its citizens, and govern its territory. Rooting out corruption is an assertion of national independence.

Bolivia has its own reasons to pursue this investigation, beyond Washington’s interest in protecting the United States from the harm caused by transnational drug trafficking networks. Bolivians deserve prosecutors who investigate crimes rather than negotiate protection for those accused of committing them. The patriotic response is to demand that the case reach every official implicated by the evidence.

That is precisely why Bolivians who want their country freed from criminal influence would even have reason to welcome American assistance if their government requests it. When criminal networks operate across borders and buy protection within the state, international cooperation is essential to helping national authorities recover the power those networks have taken from them. Assistance provided at Bolivia’s request would strengthen its sovereignty by helping ensure that Bolivian institutions answer to their citizens rather than to drug traffickers. Paz’s administration has already resumed counternarcotics cooperation with the DEA, including intelligence sharing and support for training and vetting officers. Accepting those tools is a sovereign decision, too.

The limits of the Bolivian state’s authority become particularly visible in the Chapare, the coca-growing region where former President Evo Morales remains protected by his supporters. Morales faces outstanding arrest warrants in separate proceedings: one involving aggravated human trafficking, stemming from an alleged relationship with a minor while he was president, and another involving alleged terrorism and armed uprising connected to antigovernment protests. Authorities have attributed their failure to execute the warrants to the difficulty of entering his stronghold without provoking a confrontation with his supporters. His whereabouts are no mystery; the obstacle is enforcing the law when the accused has a private army preventing it.

Members of coca growers’ unions shielding a former president facing serious criminal charges starkly illustrate the enormous challenges facing Bolivian authorities. In a country where arrest warrants are not enough to bring a former president before a court, holding powerful officials accountable is essential. The Mariaca case presents a decisive test: can Bolivian authorities enforce the law even when it involves the attorney general?

Parts of the left would rather redirect attention toward alleged American interference. That familiar refrain offers no answers about who may have sold protection, who benefited, or how deeply criminal networks penetrated the state. Bolivia cannot afford to let accusations against Washington overshadow allegations against its own officials. These investigations must continue—and reach everyone implicated by the evidence, however powerful.

Some restrictions are already in force. Ireland's prohibition on importing designated settlement goods took effect on September 15, followed by a Dutch ban on the import, purchase and sale of such goods on September 20. Other countries have announced plans or are considering additional restrictions.

These are not all components of one uniform import ban. The measures differ from country to country, and some remain proposals. The restrictions, in addition, do not generally prohibit all Israeli products: they target only goods originating in West Bank settlements where Jews live.

Nevertheless, the direction is clear. As European governments increase economic pressure on Israel, Palestinians working in businesses in the settlements lose their jobs.

According to a report by Israel's Ynet news website, Israeli industry representatives have already reported declining overseas orders and the cancellation of long-term distribution contracts. Industrial zones such as Barkan, Mishor Adumim, and Ariel, where Israeli-owned factories employ Palestinians from surrounding West Bank communities, are particularly vulnerable.

Avraham Novogrotcki, president of the Manufacturers Association of Israel, described the boycott of factories in the Israeli settlements as a measure that primarily harms Palestinian workers and their families.

"The boycott of factories in Judea and Samaria is a cynical measure that first and foremost harms Palestinian workers," Novogrotcki said.

"While various organizations present it as a moral step, in practice those paying the price are thousands of workers and their families who are losing a stable and dignified source of income. Instead of building economic bridges between Israelis and Palestinians, some are choosing to tear them down. Industry creates jobs, stability and hope, while the boycott creates exactly the opposite."

European politicians may see these restrictions as a statement of principle. For a Palestinian father who loses his job, however, the consequences will be measured in lost wages, unpaid bills, and difficulty supporting his family.

For many Palestinians, employment in Israel or Israeli businesses in the West Bank is an important source of income in the Palestinian Authority economy, where opportunities are limited.

The International Labor Organization (ILO) has documented the importance of this employment. In a 2017 report, the ILO said average wages earned by Palestinians working in Israel and Israeli West Bank settlements were more than twice those earned in the Palestinian Authority. It also reported that approximately one-quarter of the total wage income of Palestinians in the West Bank came from employment in Israel and Israeli settlements.

Earlier this year, the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics reported that about 48,000 Palestinians from the West Bank were employed in Israel and Israeli settlements in the first quarter of 2025. The number of workers in Israeli settlements reached 17,600 in the first quarter of 2026.

Do the Canadian and European governments imposing restrictions on Israeli settlements intend to offer these Palestinian workers comparable jobs? Have they established programs to help Palestinian businesses absorb thousands of displaced employees? Have they pledged funds to replace the incomes that may disappear as a result of their policies? Not a bit.

Their public announcements have concentrated on restricting trade from settlements. They have not set out a comprehensive replacement-employment plan for the Palestinians who could be affected.

There is a precedent for what can happen when an Israeli factory employing Palestinians closes due to a boycott.

SodaStream became a target of the international Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement because it operated a factory in the Mishor Adumim industrial zone.

In 2015, the company closed that factory and transferred production to a new plant in southern Israel. The relocation, together with subsequent disputes over work permits, resulted in hundreds of Palestinians losing their jobs.

In 2016, Reuters reported that approximately 500 Palestinian workers had lost their jobs after the factory's relocation. Nabil Basharat, a father of seven, said he had worked for SodaStream for six years and become a department manager. "I used to make $2,000 a month or more and today I have nothing," he said at the time.

Some BDS campaigners advocate economic isolation that goes well beyond the Israeli settlements. Their campaigns often present boycotts as an act of solidarity with Palestinians, yet the experience of Palestinian workers employed by targeted companies demonstrates that economic pressure falls on the very people they claim to support.

There is also a broader question about the relationship between employment and coexistence. In factories where Israelis and Palestinians work together, workers have practical reasons to cooperate: completing production, earning salaries, and keeping their businesses operating. These everyday relationships do not resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but neither should they be dismissed as irrelevant.

Removing economic opportunities can deepen frustration and insecurity, and contribute to radicalization and violence. It is irresponsible to ignore the danger of leaving families without income while offering no realistic alternative.

Terrorist organizations exploit such grievances by portraying economic hardship as further proof that coexistence and cooperation have failed. The result is greater instability, not progress toward peace.

A political declaration from EU governments may win applause at home. A boycott campaign may satisfy European activists. Yet neither pays a Palestinian worker's bills or feeds his children.

The Europeans at the moment have their own problems with hostile minorities. To garner the votes of these "mostly peaceful protesters," many European leaders are apparently content to trample the Palestinians so long as the Jews can be punished for refusing to accept an openly genocidal bloc into their midst, as the Europeans so foolishly have done.

If European leaders genuinely want to improve Palestinian lives, they should measure their policies by their practical results. They should ask whether their restrictions will create new Palestinian jobs, expand Palestinian access to markets, strengthen independent businesses, or improve workers' rights. They should also explain what assistance will be available if factories close and employees are dismissed. Palestinians should not have to pay for Europe's anti-Israel campaigns and policies with their livelihoods.

© Gatestone Institute

Unfortunately, China's initiative looks suspect, and talks should not proceed until Beijing is ready to engage the United States meaningfully.

Washington has already begun "informal and preliminary" discussions with Beijing. President Donald Trump and Xi Jinping reportedly did not discuss the visits during their talks in Washington last month, but "further lower-level discussions" are expected before the two leaders meet again next month on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in China's Shenzhen.

China's proposal raised hopes in American policy circles for a broader agreement with Beijing about these weapons. As CNN reported, "The concept of allowing nuclear site visits could move the needle on the U.S. efforts to engage China on issues related to strategic stability and potentially serve as a building block for a trilateral agreement."

A "trilateral agreement" — a deal among the U.S., China, and Russia — was a goal of the first Trump administration and remains a goal to this day. Trump on October 19 publicly said a meeting among the three countries would be "a very positive thing for the world." He also hinted that such a meeting would occur next month in China.

China, at least up to this year, has also refused to discuss transparency measures and has never publicly confirmed the number of its weapons.

Beijing's secrecy has forced others to guess the size of its arsenal. The Pentagon in a November 2022 report forecast that China would quadruple nukes from about 400 then to 1,500 by 2035.

The 2035 estimate looks far too low. Whatever the number, everyone agrees that the Chinese regime is rapidly building its arsenal. As Adm. Charles Richard, then commander of U.S. Strategic Command, said in 2021, "We are witnessing a strategic breakout by China."

"I don't think I've seen anything more disturbing in my career than the Chinese ongoing expansion of their nuclear force," said then Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall in House testimony in March 2023.

"China is expanding its nuclear arsenal faster than any other country," the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute reported this June.

The Chinese regime appears no longer content with a "minimal deterrent" -- an arsenal only big enough to prevent an attack. With its rapid build-up, it is developing a "war-fighting" capability. With such a capability, threats to launch first strikes would be credible and Beijing would be able to intimidate adversaries. The ability to annihilate the United States could convince Washington not to defend, for instance, Taiwan. China has made these threats both in the last century and this one.

Is an agreement with China a good idea? "There is a near total lack of transparency in China's nuclear forces," noted Peter Huessy of the National Institute for Deterrence Studies and the Gold Institute for International Strategy in comments to Gatestone this month. "If the Trump administration can make progress here, that will help America's security."

Almost everybody would also like to see progress with China limiting nukes. "This is a very dangerous time, and there are very few guardrails in place on the U.S.-China nuclear relationship," Paul Dean, a former acting assistant secretary of state overseeing arms control, told CNN. "We don't need to wait for a crisis to start reducing nuclear risks."

As Dean, now at the Nuclear Threat Initiative, said, "the risks are very real right now."

They are especially real because China has almost certainly detonated fissile material secretly— and then sought to deceive the international community.

Beijing says it stopped testing nuclear weapons in 1996, but it has almost certainly been conducting secret detonations.

"Commercial surveillance satellites between 2020 and 2024 observed China dramatically expanding its nuclear weapons testing site at Lop Nur, to include the apparent drilling of new tunnels for the testing of nuclear devices underground," Richard Fisher of the International Assessment and Strategy Center told this author in late 2025. "In addition to preparing to resume underground nuclear testing, it is also very likely that China has proceeded with 'sub critical' nuclear testing and the testing of components of nuclear weapons that included fissile material that produced very low-yield explosions."

Fisher is not the only analyst who thinks the Chinese have been surreptitiously setting off nuclear devices. Huessy also assesses that both Russia and China have been conducting tests with fissile material for decades.

The U.S. intelligence community concurs. "After consultations with Director Ratcliffe and his team, they have confirmed to me that the CIA assesses that both Russia and China have conducted super-critical nuclear weapons tests in excess of the U.S. zero-yield standard," Tom Cotton, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, stated in comments posted on X in November 2025.

Christopher Yeaw, U.S. assistant secretary of state for Arms Control and Nonproliferation, in a speech in June stated that there was "undeniable evidence" of Chinese yield-producing tests and that China has been "obfuscating nuclear explosions." He said that perhaps in the future China will be testing fissile material in the 100-kiloton range. The Trump administration reports that China detonated fissile material on June 22, 2020 at Lop Nor.

The U.S. charges that China used the "decoupling" technique — detonating a device in an underground chamber instead of solid rock — to disguise and muffle an explosion of fissile material. The U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration conducted a decoupling test to mimic the Chinese effort.

There is concern that, in light of the Chinese deception, Beijing's proposed reciprocal visits are little more than a public relations ploy.

As CNN reported, "skeptics noted that the Chinese may have floated the idea in an effort to create a positive atmosphere or to appear serious on the topic of nuclear arsenals." The skeptics include U.S. officials.

Until China comes clean on its detonations of fissile material, there is no point in talking. Beijing is brazenly lying and therefore refusing to engage with America in good faith.

© Gatestone Institute.

What was Swedish environmental activist Greta Thunberg doing outside the Paul Éluard high school in Saint-Denis, declaring herself “proud” of demonstrators who smash and burn? What was she doing aboard the flotilla bound for Gaza?

Nothing, really. Except globalizing the intifada.

Now she and her companions may find themselves confronting its consequences. The world is paying a high price for the masses who denied or minimized the Oct. 7 massacre, embraced Hamas and the accusation of “genocide,” and turned hatred of Israel into hatred of Western democracy and culture itself.

Young Europeans are right to demand prospects for employment and decent schools. But that has nothing to do with vandalizing a synagogue or waving the Palestinian flag beside Marianne, the symbol of the French Republic.

Yet the Palestinianization of political consciousness has become an integral—and increasingly substitutive—part of European and Western identity. Europe’s leaders have helped bring this about through their contemptuous attitude toward Israel’s defensive war, through sanctions and condemnations, and through repeated invocations of an impossible Palestinian state that, as French President Emmanuel Macron knows perfectly well, has increasingly become a euphemism for the elimination of Israel.

In Milan, it appears that a majority of those arrested are second- or third-generation immigrants. Behind a revolt characterized by looting, arson, stone-throwing, injuries and the destruction of shops and public institutions lies another reality: the imperative of conquest that Islamism does not conceal as one of its goals.

Italian, French and British schoolchildren and young people are being swept up in this violent tide. The smashing, the burning and the ripping up of paving stones are symptoms of a new front that is tearing at the European Union itself.

At the Place d’Italie in Paris, a 65-year-old woman named Sylvie, a supporter of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, waves a Hamas flag. The message is unmistakable: These struggles have merged into a single front.

The road to this moment has been long.

From the 2006 kidnapping, torture and murder of Ilan Halimi in the Paris suburbs to the massacres at “Charlie Hebdo” and the Hyper Cacher supermarket; from the murder of a teacher and three children at a Jewish school in Toulouse to attacks against synagogues; and, in Italy, the harassment of Jews in schools, universities, sports and tourism—the trajectory leads directly to the mindless roar of “From the river to the sea.”

And to destruction.

Europe is burning amid contempt for democracy and for the cause of a country fighting tooth and nail against murderous authoritarian regimes that persecute women and homosexuals, while the atrocities committed against children and young women on Oct. 7 were filmed by the Hamas terrorists themselves.

Antisemitism, cultivated with billions of dollars, serves the interests of powers that, like Greta Thunberg, may have nothing to do with the original conflict but want to appropriate all of it.

As German pastor Martin Niemöller famously warned after the Holocaust, when people remain silent as others are persecuted, eventually there may be no one left to speak for them.

First they came for others. Then they came for the Jews. And eventually, they came for everyone else.

With your complicity.

© JNS

In an extraordinary Truth Social statement addressed to the “Great People of Israel,” Trump offered his complete backing of Netanyahu. He called him a “Great Warrior Prime Minister” who had been “Strong, Brave, and Brilliant” under intense pressure, concluding: “BIBI NETANYAHU WILL NEVER LET YOU DOWN!”

Yet the most consequential passage concerned Iran. Trump warned that unless Tehran rapidly changes course, “we will soon finish the job.” He then explicitly tied continued cooperation against the Islamic Republic to Netanyahu’s political survival: “If Israel has the wrong Leader, which would be anyone other than Bibi, America will have to do this work ourselves, and I am not inclined to do so,” he wrote.

This is more than a conventional political endorsement. Trump is telling Israelis that, in his judgment, Netanyahu is the indispensable partner for confronting the regime in Tehran during the remaining years of his presidency.

The message carries added weight because Israel’s threat level from Iran is at or near an all-time high. The possibility of another major escalation is not theoretical. Israel and the United States have already fought Iran together twice in little more than a year.

During the closing stage of the Twelve-Day War in June 2025, the United States launched Operation Midnight Hammer against Iran’s nuclear infrastructure. American B-2 stealth bombers struck the deeply buried Fordow enrichment facility with massive bunker-busting bombs, while additional attacks targeted Natanz and Isfahan. Fordow was the target that Israel could not reliably destroy on its own. Trump supplied the unique American capability needed to reach it.

Then, on Feb. 28, 2026, American and Israeli aircraft again flew into battle against Iran in parallel operations. Washington called its campaign Operation Epic Fury, while Israel designated its component Operation Roaring Lion. U.S. and Israeli forces attacked Iranian nuclear, ballistic-missile, air-defense, naval and regime targets. The White House described Epic Fury as a campaign conducted “in partnership with regional allies” to eliminate Iran’s nuclear threat and cripple its military capabilities.

Opinion

Kushner Had the Abraham Accords. Boulos Has the Photo Ops. Where Is the Peace?

Robert Williams

In other words, the Netanyahu-Trump partnership has already moved beyond intelligence coordination, diplomatic support and defensive interception. Israeli and American forces have attacked the same enemy during the same campaigns.

Shortly after the announcement, a Senior Israeli official told JNS, “There has never been greater cooperation and coordination between an American wartime President and an Israeli wartime Prime Minister. Trump and Netanyahu are an epic tag team who have achieved unprecedented achievements in war and peace. That has, of course, translated into unprecedented cooperation between our great armed forces.”

Nor does Trump appear to believe the confrontation is over. At an Oct. 13 campaign rally in Alaska, he warned: “Wait till you see what we do to Iran,” adding, “We’ve sort of had it. You know, we’ve had it.”

Days earlier, Trump said that the United States would not resume strikes before the Nov. 3 midterm elections, while leaving open the possibility of renewed military action afterward. Meanwhile, there are media reports that Trump continues to regard post-election escalation as a viable option.

Against that background, Trump’s endorsement is not simply about personal loyalty; it is about who will sit across from him when the next decision on Iran must be made.

The timing nevertheless makes the statement striking. Trump had repeatedly declined opportunities to endorse Netanyahu. In August, he said, “I think it’s most appropriate for me to stay out of Israeli elections, but I may endorse somebody.”

On Oct. 14, asked whether he would back a candidate, he replied, “We haven’t even thought about it,” before adding, “I may be doing something.”

Two days later, when Newsmax asked whether he trusted Netanyahu, Trump answered: “I don’t trust anybody, honestly. In the world of politics, I don’t trust anybody.” He nevertheless described their relationship as “very good” and their cooperation against Iran as successful.

Trump has now moved from studied ambiguity to the strongest endorsement he could plausibly give. The immediate question is how many Israeli votes it will move.

For voters focused primarily on domestic issues, the endorsement may make little difference. Israelis have formed strong opinions about Netanyahu over decades, and one statement—even from an American president—will not erase concerns about the cost of living, military service, judicial reform or the failures surrounding the Hamas massacre of Oct. 7, 2023.

But another group of voters will see the election through a very different lens. For them, Israel’s relationship with Trump is the election’s most important issue, and preventing Iran from recovering its nuclear and ballistic-missile capabilities is an existential necessity. These voters will ask not merely which candidate they prefer, but which Israeli leader is most likely to secure American diplomatic, military and operational support when the next confrontation begins.

On those two questions, Trump has made Netanyahu the clear choice.

The United States remains the only country capable of providing Israel with certain strategic weapons, diplomatic protection and long-range military capabilities. Trump has now said publicly that Netanyahu is the Israeli leader he wants as his partner.

“Israel is America’s model ally, and America is Israel’s indispensable ally. Iran and its proxies are weaker than ever, and the American-Israeli alliance is stronger than ever,” the Senior Israeli official added.

An Israeli government led by Gadi Eisenkot might ultimately establish an effective relationship with Washington, but voters would be taking that on faith. Netanyahu already has a record of planning, coordinating and conducting operations against Iran alongside Trump.

The endorsement could therefore influence undecided right-wing voters, former Likud voters considering other parties and security-minded centrists who may have serious reservations about Netanyahu but regard Iran as the overriding issue. It also confronts potential protest voters with a stark calculation: Is replacing Netanyahu worth risking uncertainty in Israel’s most important foreign relationship at the moment when the Iranian campaign may enter its decisive stage?

If voters believe Israel must finish dismantling Iran’s nuclear threat—and that doing so may require another joint campaign with the United States—then Netanyahu can now argue that changing prime ministers means changing commanders in the middle of an unfinished war.

But the endorsement’s greater significance may still emerge after the ballots are counted. Current coalition arithmetic suggests that neither Netanyahu’s bloc nor the opposition is guaranteed the 61 Knesset seats required to govern. Israel has seen this before.

The third election of the previous political deadlock was held on March 2, 2020. Netanyahu’s right-wing bloc won 58 seats—three short of a majority—while Benny Gantz secured recommendations from 61 lawmakers and received the mandate to form a government.

Gantz and the anti-Netanyahu parties initially moved to take control of the Knesset. They sought to replace Speaker Yuli Edelstein, secure control of parliamentary committees and advance legislation that could have prevented an indicted lawmaker from forming a government. After the High Court ordered a vote on the speakership, Edelstein resigned on March 25 rather than convene it.

As Israeli politics was playing itself out, COVID19 became an epic global crisis. And it transformed Israel’s political landscape. Israel suddenly required unity amidst the uncertainty of a worldwide pandemic, and having a seasoned diplomat like Netanyahu at the helm took on even greater importance.

On March 26, Gantz reversed course and opted to pursue a unity government with a rotation agreement between the two political adversaries. Gantz was elected Knesset speaker with Likud support, splitting his Blue and White alliance. He said that “unusual times” required “unusual decisions,” opening negotiations with Netanyahu rather than continuing the opposition’s attempt to dislodge him.

Netanyahu and Gantz signed their emergency unity agreement on April 20. Their government was sworn in on May 17, with Netanyahu due to serve as prime minister for 18 months before rotating the position to Gantz. Ultimately, the transfer never occurred, as Netanyahu opted for early elections over implementing the rotation. The Knesset dissolved automatically on Dec. 23 after the coalition failed to pass a state budget, triggering a fourth election.

Yet that history, amid a crisis that transcends politics, may provide a model for what follows the present election. Clearly, Trump wants Israeli voters to know that he prefers that Netanyahu remain at the helm. Netanyahu’s most likely and preferred path to remain in office is with a rerun of the members of his current coalition.

While left-wing media project Netanyahu falling far short of a majority, right-wing media are projecting him and his partners as garnering enough votes to install a fresh right-wing coalition. Netanyahu likely hopes that Trump’s endorsement is the final piece that convinces voters that another term is Israel’s best electoral outcome.

Yet, if the result is another stalemate, Trump’s endorsement could make it harder for opposition leaders simply to exclude Netanyahu. With the Iranian threat unresolved and Trump remaining in office for more than two years, a unity or rotation agreement could allow Netanyahu to lead during the Trump years and another candidate—potentially Eisenkot—to take over afterward.

Trump’s endorsement may influence more voters than conventional analysis assumes. More importantly, it could determine how Israel’s leaders negotiate on the morning after.

According to the Senior Israeli official, “We have two years of Trump-Netanyahu to win the war and win the peace.”

© JNS

On September 15, 2020, US President Donald J. Trump hosted the signing of the Abraham Accords. The United Arab Emirates and Bahrain normalized relations with Israel; Morocco followed. Jared Kushner helped translate a strategic opening into diplomatic recognition, trade and security cooperation. Six years later, despite regional wars, those relationships endure. The Abraham Accords produced something more valuable than a ceremony: a measurable change in relations between states. That is the standard by which presidential advisers should be judged.

Kushner had a recognizable professional identity long before marrying Ivanka Trump in 2009. He was active in real estate and had acquired The New York Observer in 2006. He was not a trained diplomat, but his public record was identifiable.

What comparable record did Massad Boulos (Senior Advisor to the President for Arab and African Affairs) possess before his son married Tiffany Trump? He worked in business in Nigeria, maintained Lebanese political connections. None is evidence of experience ending civil wars. In 2024, journalistic investigations also questioned widely repeated descriptions of Boulos as a billionaire lawyer commanding a vast business empire; he and Trump's team disputed the criticism. Yet a more consequential question remains: Why was someone with no established record of resolving international conflicts entrusted with Sudan, Congo and Libya?

Consider Sudan. Its war between Abdel Fattah al-Burhan's regime-aligned Sudan Armed Forces (SAF) and Hemedti's Rapid Support Forces (RSF) has killed and displaced civilians on a staggering scale.

Washington sanctioned both commanders, accused the RSF of genocide and the SAF of committing war crimes, and determined that the regime's forces had used chemical weapons. Boulos has promoted a 90-day humanitarian ceasefire; no durable ceasefire has emerged.

The Sudan conflict also reaches far beyond the country's borders. Iranian-made drones have strengthened the SAF. In March 2026, Washington designated the SAF-allied Sudanese Muslim Brotherhood a Foreign Terrorist Organization due to its violence against civilians and the support it receives from Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Iran's support for Yemen's Houthis has already exposed how militants can threaten Red Sea shipping.

Does Boulos have a strategy to prevent Sudan's Red Sea coastline from becoming another arena of Iranian influence? The United States cannot afford an approach that treats every armed faction as an equally acceptable partner simply because each controls territory. Diplomacy must distinguish between temporary contacts and legitimizing forces that threaten long-term security.

Libya raises an equally serious question about the direction of American diplomacy. Boulos has pursued negotiations aimed at reconciling the rival authorities associated with Khalifa Haftar in eastern Libya and Abdul Hamid Dbeibah in Tripoli.

The reported American proposal envisages a power-sharing arrangement between the Haftar and Dbeibah families, alongside the unification of state institutions and opportunities for American investment in Libya's energy sector.

Washington, however, must confront a more fundamental question: How can a genuine national unity government emerge in Libya when one of the negotiating parties operates within a political environment deeply entangled with armed militias, Muslim Brotherhood-linked networks and hardline Islamist factions?

The influence of these networks in western Libya cannot simply be ignored. Dbeibah's administration has depended on shifting alliances with powerful armed groups, while political figures associated with the Muslim Brotherhood have maintained connections within Libya's fragmented power structure. Their relationships may be complicated and sometimes adversarial, but the underlying problem remains: Who would actually exercise power inside a supposedly unified Libyan government?

Politics

Donald Trump claims he is making progress in peace negotiations while Ukraine launches a massive drone attack on St. Petersburg

Andrés Ignacio Henríquez

Would Washington be helping establish a sovereign state with a unified national army, accountable institutions and civilian authority? Or would it be legitimizing an arrangement in which entrenched political families divide state resources while armed factions and Islamist networks retain influence behind the scenes?

A government of national unity cannot succeed if it merely unites the political elites while leaving the forces that divided the country untouched.

Trump has repeatedly confronted Iran and his administration has formally designated specific Muslim Brotherhood branches accused of supporting terrorism.

How, then, can his own representatives pursue deals that risk preserving the influence of armed Islamist networks while the president promises to confront them?

In Sudan, Yemen and Libya, American national security is too important for strategic ambiguity masquerading as balance.

Trump does not need an envoy whose chief asset is proximity to presidential power. He needs results consistent with his stated strategy: stronger allies, weaker terrorist networks, less Iranian influence and durable peace.

Kushner had the Abraham Accords. What will Boulos leave behind? The photograph should document a victory — not substitute for one.

© Gatestone Institute.

His attempt to thread that needle consisted of, on the one hand, reaffirming his strong, even emotional backing for the Jewish state and noting that while Jews were grieving the third anniversary of the Oct. 7 attacks, they were also under siege from an unprecedented surge of antisemitism. But he balanced that with a denunciation of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who, he claimed, was making it impossible to maintain the U.S.-Israel alliance. He said he hoped that Netanyahu would not be re-elected later this month, thus removing a major obstacle to the presidency for him.

The popular governor is currently cruising toward an easy re-election victory. But most political observers are looking past November and pondering whether his plans to run for president in 2028 will be derailed by what he describes as his “love” for the State of Israel.

A changed party

We won’t know the answer to that for another 12 to 18 months. But given everything happening in American politics in 2026, it’s hard to make a case for optimism for Shapiro or, more importantly, winning back the Democrats for the pro-Israel cause.

In primary after primary conducted by Democrats, a stance such as Shapiro’s or even far more lukewarm affirmations of support was a kiss of death for candidates. It even applied to those like Rep. Dan Goldman (D-N.Y.): an incumbent, reliably liberal and fervently opposed to President Donald Trump.

Even more important is how the party is rallying around the most notorious and prominent opponent of the Jewish state running in 2026—Democratic U.S. Senate nominee in Michigan Dr. Abdul El-Sayed. In the last month, he has received endorsements and even financial support from a host of Democrats, including Jews like Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, Sen. Elissa Slotkin and Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel.

Schumer has also taken the same line about the dispute between Democrats and Israel being about Netanyahu. But for El-Sayed and an entire rising generation of “progressives,” you hear more about the usual litany of blood libels about the Jewish state being guilty of “genocide” than the prime minister.

With El-Sayed still locked in a close race against Republican Mike Rogers, Democrats just rolled out their version of political royalty to help him: former President Barack Obama.

El-Sayed’s obsessive attacks on Israel and its Jewish supporters, as well as demonizing the AIPAC lobby as part of a plot to capture America for a foreign power, haven’t played as well among African-Americans as they do among college-educated liberal whites. And so, Obama campaigned with El-Sayed this week to help shore up that key Democratic constituency for him.

Obama’s intervention on behalf of an openly antisemitic candidate caused little surprise. But it does bring to mind when the breach between Israel and the Democratic Party became a serious problem.

Netanyahu’s domestic political foes, as well as American liberals like Shapiro, have argued for years that it was the prime minister who blew up bipartisan support for Israel. They say it can be primarily traced to the eight years when Obama and Netanyahu were locked in a long-running duel of clashing personalities and policies when the two were leading their respective countries.

That culminated in the unprecedented address Netanyahu gave to a joint meeting of Congress to oppose Obama’s disastrous 2015 nuclear deal with Iran.

Most members of his party were opposed to appeasement of Iran before Obama decided to betray his 2012 re-election promise not to allow Tehran to have a nuclear program. But even though his signature foreign-policy accomplishment would have guaranteed that Iran would eventually get a nuclear weapon rather than preventing it, he was able to make support for the measure a litmus test of loyalty to his party and himself.

Netanyahu was widely bashed for his chutzpah in going to Capitol Hill to make the case against the pact. But he alerted Americans and those in moderate Arab nations to the danger—and to the fact that Israel wouldn’t allow itself to be put in the crosshairs of an Iranian nuclear program that had been preserved by Obama. In doing so, he prepared the way for its reversal by Trump and for the joint military campaigns in 2025 and 2026 by Israel and the United States that destroyed much of Tehran’s nuclear facilities.

Obama broke the pro-Israel consensus

The problem with the thesis blaming all of this on Netanyahu’s Republican partisanship, which was laid out in a recent article in The Atlantic by Franklin Foer, is that it is largely false. Throughout the eight years of the Obama-Netanyahu duel, it was Obama and a party that he was increasingly pushing toward the left on a host of issues that was pressuring Israel to make policy moves its voters had elected the prime minister to oppose in terms of the conflict with the Palestinians.

Obama’s obsession with pressuring Israel to accept a two-state solution was always the main source of tension between Israel and the Democrats. He was determined to force acquiescence to the creation of a Palestinian state in Judea, Samaria and part of Jerusalem, while Hamas’s separate terror state already existed in the Gaza Strip. He had repudiated the promises made by his predecessor, former President George W. Bush, to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in 2004 to help persuade him to withdraw from Gaza. That included America recognizing Israel’s right to retain the areas where Jewish communities existed in Judea and Samaria.

The blowup between Obama and Netanyahu in May 2011, when the latter supposedly insulted the former, is seen as a seminal moment in the breakup between Israel and the Democrats. But few remember that the prime minister’s insistence on defending Jewish rights and Israeli security in Obama’s presence came a day after the president ambushed Netanyahu on the eve of his visit with a speech declaring his intention to pursue negotiations intended to force Israel back to the 1967 armistice lines. That reset American policy to one in which Washington was implicitly endorsing the ethnic cleansing of hundreds of thousands of Jews in the territories to gratify Palestinian ambitions and the division of Jerusalem.

As it turned out, Obama’s efforts to tilt the diplomatic playing field in the direction of the Palestinians produced nothing but a pointless quarrel with Israel, as well as more support at home for Netanyahu from a public that recognized Obama as an unreliable ally. As was true in previous decades and in the years since he left the White House, the Palestinians—both the “moderates” of the Palestinian Authority and the “extremists” of Hamas—had no interest in a two-state solution. Their sole goal was and remains the destruction of Israel, as the support for the Oct. 7 massacre and the genocidal intent of the terrorist organization has demonstrated.

The purpose of dredging up this history is not so much to vindicate Netanyahu as to point out that the criticisms of the prime minister by Democrats like Shapiro—who, as a Pennsylvania state assemblyman in 2008, was an early supporter of Obama and personally reassured me that, if elected, he would be a great ally to Israel—are largely rooted in myths about the events of the last two decades.

After Oct. 7

At every step, it was Democrats like Obama, former President Joe Biden and others who took positions at odds with the overwhelming majority of Israeli voters, both before and after Oct. 7. Whatever critiques can be made about Netanyahu and his case for remaining in charge, few Israelis are opposing him because he fought back robustly against Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran in a war that many Democrats like El-Sayed, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and others now claim was “genocide.” Nor do they want to topple him because a decade ago and more, he held the line against foreign pressure to withdraw from Judea and Samaria, let alone Jerusalem, to create a Palestinian state from which terrorists could have inflicted the same horrors on communities in central Israel as happened to those near Gaza.

Indeed, in the weeks after Oct. 7, Obama’s qualified statement of support for Israel in the wake of the slaughter of 1,200 men, women and children focused as much on its guilt—and that of its American supporters—as being “complicit to some degree” for the war Hamas started because those parties had refused to empower the Palestinians.

Other Democrats preparing to run in 2028 are listening to the chorus of Israel-bashers on the left, who claim their party lost in 2024 because it was insufficiently hostile to the Jewish state. Speaking in South Korea this week, former Vice President Kamala Harris said that Biden was wrong to tolerate Israel’s “horrific conduct” in Gaza during the war, which is to say that he didn’t save Hamas from defeat. This also ignores the fact that the Biden administration actually worked hard to hamstring the Israeli war effort, slow-walking arms deliveries as well as making false claims that efforts to root the terrorists out of crucial strongholds like Rafah would create massive civilian casualties. This pressure on Israel only strengthened Hamas’s resolve to hang on and keep fighting and undermined their own efforts to end the war and release Israeli hostages.

Harris’s statements weren’t just another instance of her second-guessing her old boss and blaming him and others in the administration for her being defeated by Trump. It was an effort to ingratiate herself with the bulk of Democratic voters who are pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel.

That trend is what made the rise of someone like El-Sayed possible. In the eyes of Israel’s Democratic critics, it isn’t just Netanyahu who is guilty of “genocide.” They view the broad consensus among Israelis, which stretches from right to left in opposing a Palestinian state and insisting on disarming Hamas in Gaza, as responsible for “genocide” and view it as an “apartheid” state.

El-Sayed made it clear this week that he regarded Israel as being as great a threat to the United States as an Iranian state that had been at war with America for 47 years.

Moderates are also turning on Israel

The idea that an Israeli prime minister not named Netanyahu could fix relations with a Democratic Party that treats antisemites like El-Sayed as worthy of support is just wishful thinking on the part of people like Shapiro.

That’s because this issue is not just a matter of the positions taken by radicals like El-Sayed and Mamdani or far-left “Squad” members in the U.S. House of Representatives like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), who is also considering a 2028 presidential run.

Democrats like Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.), who are perceived as moderates, are also signaling that the alliance with Israel will undergo a “thorough re-examination” in the coming years. Coons, who is in line to become chairman of the powerful Foreign Relations Committee if the Democrats regain control of the Senate in November, is already planning on proposing discriminatory sanctions on Israelis similar to those already put forward by British Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband.

None of this is because, as Foer claims, Netanyahu cultivated ties with Republicans while neglecting to do the same with Democrats. To the contrary, it was the Democrats who have aligned themselves against Israel’s interests and—under the influence of a base that has swallowed the toxic ideas of critical race theory, intersectionality and settler-colonialism—view the Jewish state and Jews in general as “white” oppressors who must be suppressed. The claim that Netanyahu should have rejected the support of conservative Republicans (who were not under the spell of these ideologies) to placate Democrats is not a serious argument.

Shapiro may hope this will all fade away if Netanyahu is defeated on Oct. 27. But his problem is not just the possibility that Israeli voters will reject his advice. It’s that the same Democratic primary voters who elevated people like El-Sayed, Mamdani and a host of other “progressive” candidates in the last year view those who express “love” for Israel, even if it is qualified with Netanyahu-bashing, as simply beyond the pale.

In the recent past, Shapiro’s combination of political liberalism, largely successful governance and record of electoral success would have put him among the frontrunners in a presidential race. But over the course of the last year, even the most enthusiastic supporter cannot have missed the shift in the opinions of Democrats.

To them, a figure like Gadi Eisenkot, the former Israel Defense Forces chief of staff who is Netanyahu’s principal opponent, is just as much of a “war criminal” deserving of sanctions as the prime minister. No conceivable concessions that Eisenkot could make to the Palestinians will be enough to win back Democratic voters indoctrinated in left-wing ideologies or the officeholders they want to send to Washington to blow up the alliance with the Jewish state.

A liberal failure

The remnants of a once-dominant pro-Israel faction of Democrats prefer to blame Netanyahu. But the responsibility is theirs. It was Democrats like Schumer and Shapiro who abetted the rise of Obama and who looked the other way as he set in motion the train of events that created so much “daylight” between their party and Israel. They were the ones who refused to anathematize members of the “Squad,” like Reps. Ilan Omar (D-Minn.), Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) and AOC when they helped legitimize antisemitism and Israel-bashing. And they are now the ones who, in the hope of appeasing their left-wing critics, are bolstering the candidacies of Jew-haters like El-Sayed.

Democrats who are blasting criticism of El-Sayed’s radicalism and Islamist opposition to Israel’s existence as “Islamophobia” while ignoring or downplaying his bigotry aren’t open to rethinking their opposition to Israel. Nor are they likely to embrace a Democratic presidential candidate who is emotionally committed to the U.S.-Israel alliance but just wants a different prime minister in Jerusalem.

Simply put, Shapiro’s pro-Israel/anti-Netanyahu stand is not likely to satisfy a party base that now regards hostility to the Jewish state, along with opposition to enforcement of immigration laws, as the organizing principle of politics in the second quarter of the 21st century. And it’s likely that neither he nor any other Democrat is going to be able to get past that problem with the sort of nuanced position articulated at his debate. The collapse of the pro-Israel wing of the Democratic Party is a liberal failure of nerve and principle that won’t be undone, regardless of who wins the next election in Israel.

© JNS

The author of the famous "God Is Nonbinary" once again resorted to empty slogans by claiming that "the Bible is silent on the issue of abortion." His opponent at the CNN Town Hall quickly exposed him, without resorting to deep theological analysis or far-fetched citations. Something as fundamental to a Christian as the Ten Commandments already makes clear the Holy Book's stance on this matter:

"I just want to add that the Bible is not silent on abortion. There is the Ten Commandments: 'Thou shall not kill.' And, as Catholics, we take great insult, I guess sometimes, when it’s described that way."

The Democratic candidate's response regarding the Senate seat for Texas in the upcoming midterms was to try to dodge the issue, but he also addressed the issue from a personal perspective, stating that, for him, abortion is not killing a human being: "If I believed that abortion is murder, that it violates the Ten Commandments, then I wouldn't support it."

Talarico, having been exposed, resorted to pro-abortion clichés

Defeated, he tried to change the subject by resorting to pro-abortion talking points, namely, that the most restrictive laws, such as the one currently in effect in Texas, result in "women dying in emergency room parking lots. Therefore, if we truly defend life, I believe we should be concerned about the consequences of this extreme ban on abortion."

Furthermore, Talarico pointed out that there are "certain policy measures," which do not involve banning abortion procedures or the dispensing of the morning-after pill, that can reduce the number of abortions nationwide. Pro-life advocates have long been proposing such initiatives as a complement to legislation to help women who see no other way out than to terminate their pregnancy due to their social or economic circumstances.

Democratic persecution of pro-life initiatives to help mothers: What Talarico is silencing

For example, Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America launched Her PLAN. The organization explains that "every woman deserves real support, not pressure, politics, or empty promises. This is a growing initiative designed to help local communities improve access to the resources a woman needs to follow through on her pro-life decision."

What Talarico failed to mention is that Democratic administrations are targeting pro-life centers that seek to support mothers considering abortion so they can carry their pregnancies to term. Nor did he comment on the activists defending the unborn who have been jailed simply for praying in front of or near an abortion clinic.

President Donald J. Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu played central roles in these developments. Their partnership combined America's diplomatic leverage and military power with Israel's intelligence capabilities and military operations.

The Middle East, nevertheless, remains far from stable. Hamas continues to resist disarmament, Iran remains a major threat, and Hezbollah's armed presence in Lebanon continues to undermine the authority of the Lebanese state. The future of Gaza, including who will govern it and who will control its weapons, stands unresolved.

The question is no longer simply what Washington and Jerusalem have achieved together. It is whether they can turn those achievements into lasting security.

One of the most consequential developments was the US-backed Gaza ceasefire agreement reached in October 2025. The agreement ended the period of large-scale fighting and led to the return of all the remaining living Israeli hostages held by Hamas.

For the families who endured months of uncertainty and suffering, the return of their loved ones was an enormous achievement. It also demonstrated the potential of American diplomatic pressure, regional mediation, and Israeli military pressure to produce results that years of negotiations had failed to secure.

Trump's 20-point plan subsequently provided a framework for a different future for Gaza. It envisioned an end to Hamas's rule, the disarmament of armed factions, a transitional Palestinian administration, an International Stabilization Force (ISF), and reconstruction.

In January 2026, the Board of Peace was formally launched, with Trump as its chairman. Its mandate was to help oversee the transition and create the conditions for Gaza to be governed without the political or military domination of the terrorist group Hamas.

There has been progress in building the institutional framework. The National Committee for the Administration of Gaza has been established, preparations have been made to recruit and train Palestinian police, and the international community has developed a roadmap for disarmament.

The most difficult tasks, however, remain unfinished.

A report submitted by the Board of Peace to the UN Security Council in May acknowledged that negotiations over the implementation roadmap had not been finalized. The proposed ISF was still preparing for deployment, while the disarmament of Hamas and other armed terrorist factions remains a central obstacle.

Hamas has suffered substantial military loses, but as a political and armed force, it has not disappeared. Its continued presence raises a fundamental question: Can Gaza really have a new beginning while the organization that launched the October 7, 2023 massacre retains the ability to obstruct the transition and launch more massacres -- not just of Israelis but of its own citizens and other neighbors?

The answer will determine whether the ceasefire becomes the foundation of a lasting settlement or merely an interval before another round of fighting.

The other historic development was the military confrontation with Iran in June 2025.

Israel, on June 13, 2025, launched Operation Rising Lion, striking Iranian nuclear infrastructure, missile production facilities, air defenses, military headquarters, and senior military commanders. On June 22, the United States struck three Iranian nuclear facilities at Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan.

The operations demonstrated a level of US-Israeli military coordination with massive implications for regional security. They inflicted damage on important elements of Iran's military and nuclear infrastructure and demonstrated that Iran's geographical distance and extensive defensive preparations could not guarantee the protection of its most sensitive facilities.

The main challenge is still to prevent Iran from restoring the capabilities that made it such a serious threat to Israel and other countries in the region. This objective requires sustained intelligence cooperation, effective monitoring, credible deterrence, and a clear response to attempts to rebuild prohibited or threatening capabilities.

The challenge extends beyond Gaza and Iran.

Hezbollah's decision to build an extensive military infrastructure outside the authority of the Lebanese state has contributed to decades of instability along Israel's northern border. Hezbollah's relationship with Iran was what gave the country the means of projecting military power beyond its own territory.

Efforts to strengthen the Lebanese state's authority and dismantle Hezbollah's independent military capabilities -- as well as those of Iran's other terrorist proxies, Hamas and the Houthis -- remain essential to any durable regional settlement.

A Lebanon in which the rightful government exercises unobstructed control over the country's armed forces and territory would be in the interests of both Lebanese citizens and their neighbors.

The same principle applies to Gaza. Civilian institutions cannot function effectively when an armed faction retains the power to threaten and overrule them.

The Trump-Netanyahu partnership has also operated against the background of the Abraham Accords, which established diplomatic relations between Israel and several Arab states during Trump's first administration. These agreements remain an important foundation for the possibility of broader regional cooperation.

Trump and Netanyahu have helped bring about long-sought-after changes in the regional balance of power. Military success and diplomatic breakthroughs, however, are not ends in themselves. Their significance ultimately depends on what follows.

The opportunity is significant, but it is not guaranteed. The achievements of recent months could be weakened, or even reversed, if the remaining challenges are left unresolved.

A ceasefire without disarmament, a transitional administration without operational authority, and military victories without a strategy for the future will leave the region exposed to endless instability.

The task ahead is therefore clear: turn the gains already made into a strategic reality in which Palestinians in Gaza can live under civilian government rather than an armed factional rule; in which Israel's security is strengthened, and in which Iran and its Middle Eastern allies can no longer threaten its own people or the region in any way.

© Gatestone Institute.

Most Democrats laughed and ignored the advice. In that bygone era, not long before The New York Times published its fraudulent “1619 Project,” the impact of the COVID pandemic and the moral panic that characterized the Black Lives Matter summer of 2020, even liberals believed in American exceptionalism. If one of Britain’s two major parties—founded as a socialist faction before becoming the embodiment of neoliberalism under Tony Blair in the 1990s—was lurching to the left, what had that to do with American politics?

Hijacking the Democrats

Fast forward 10 years later, and nobody should be laughing.

The major nations of Western Europe that form the backbone of the NATO alliance are increasingly under the influence of a red-green alliance of Marxists and Islamists who are hostile to the United States and the foundational beliefs of Western civilization that are essential to liberal democratic societies, let alone anti-Israel. In the United States, the Democratic Party appears to be in the process of being hijacked by its left-wing intersectional base, with even its leaders embracing radicals like New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Michigan candidate for Senate Dr. Abdul El-Sayed.

It’s no longer possible to ignore the possibility that what happens in London and Paris could be replicated in New York and Washington. The long-term outcomes and electoral consequences of this shift—also leading to some changes on the political right and about which no one should be sanguine—remain far from clear.

But three things are obvious.

One is that the ties that unite Americans on different sides of the political aisle are fraying to the point where it has become a bifurcated nation locked in a political battle that has taken on aspects of a religious war.

The second is that antisemitism has not only been normalized. It’s gone mainstream.

The third is that events in Europe, especially the impact of mass immigration, are offering a preview of where America could be heading in the not-so-distant future.

The only question is if, unlike a decade ago, Democrats, as well as Republicans, are, even now, ready to face up to what this means for their country and take some of the steps that might avert the same outcome.

Britain lurches left

The fact is that the current British Labour government—now under the leadership of the more left-wing Prime Minister Andy Burnham after he recently replaced the ineffectual, but relatively moderate, Keir Starmer—is in some respects arguably more radical than even Corbyn was during his four-and-a-half years as head of the official opposition.

In particular, it has adopted policies toward Israel to both sanction and demonize the Jewish state. Meanwhile, the Green Party, which in 2015 was still a relatively minor environmentalist faction, has not only grown to the point where some pundits predict it may win as many as 10% of the vote in the next general election. It also recently adopted a resolution declaring its support for the old Soviet antisemitic propaganda smear about Zionism being racism.

Like Labour, it, too, has become even more ideologically left-wing in recent years. Just as important, it demonstrates the not unreasonable conclusion that in Britain, the political benefits of hostility to Jews outweigh the drawbacks, even if the Greens’ current leader, Zach Polanski, comes from a Jewish background.

The explanation for what’s happening can be found in the way hard-core Marxists and leftists have joined forces with Islamists among the large population of immigrants from Muslim countries. The demography of Britain has shifted dramatically in the last generation as Asian and African migrants have been allowed in numbers so large that even immigration opponents didn’t predict them. And that changes how politicians think about a lot of cultural issues, as well as foreign policy in the Middle East.

Corbyn’s crushing defeat in 2019 led to his ouster as head of Labour. Following that shift Labour purged antisemites as Starmer steered the party back to a slightly more centrist position. However, the government he formed in 2024—after a smashing election victory after the British right ineffectually split its votes between the ruling Conservatives and the upstart anti-immigration Reform Party—was anything but moderate. And under Burnham, the same trends that marked Labour under Corbyn are coming back. Indeed, Ed Miliband, Corbyn’s more centrist (and Jewish) predecessor as Labour leader, now regrets not previously being “bold” enough and is channeling his inner Corbyn as he tries to lead Europe toward a boycott of Israel.

French riots

Across the English Channel in France, the situation may be even more dire. The social conflicts and consequences of massive Muslim immigration have been a top issue for French society for decades. But the current wave of riots sweeping across the cities and suburbs of France is new proof of a nation being turned upside down by demographic shifts.

While liberal media coverage of the riots has attempted to explain the problem as merely an argument about funding for education led by students, you don’t have to have a degree from the Sorbonne to look at the images coming out of this turmoil to see that this is a dispute being driven by that same red-green alliance that is shifting political reality elsewhere.

The rioters appear to be mostly younger males whose origins can be traced to the Middle East and North Africa. In many instances, the flags that they have been waving—when not burning down the schools and other institutions they claim are underfunded—are those of Algeria, the Palestinians or Hamas, not the French tricolor. They’re being supported by the major party on the political left, the LFI led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the viciously anti-Israel socialist faction that will contend for power in the next French presidential election scheduled for April 2027.

The French center, led by lame-duck President Emmanuel Macron, has more or less collapsed. The next French election looks to be one in which Mélenchon’s real opponent will be Marine Le Pen, head of the right-wing, anti-immigrant National Rally Party which, though founded by her antisemitic father, is more friendly to Israel and determined to oppose the antisemitic left and its Islamist allies than any of its competitors.

Needless to say the position of both the British and French Jewish communities has been drastically undermined as they find themselves besieged by hate. But the threat to both societies goes far beyond the plight of the Jews to one that calls into question either nation’s ability to maintain its national identity. The same process is also happening elsewhere in a Europe transformed by mass Muslim immigration.

What has all this to do with American politics?

While Corbyn was normalizing antisemitism as the head of British Labour 10 years ago, the notion that the same thing could happen in the United States seemed fanciful to most Americans, especially Democrats. They assumed that their party couldn’t possibly fall into the hands of a radical like him. Indeed, the notion that American politics would be altered by Islamist advocacy seemed far-fetched.

The same Democrats who scoffed at the warnings about the “Corbynization” of their party were equally unconvinced by analogies to the impact of immigration on Europe.

Immigration and political change

Any jeremiads about the impact of massive immigration from the Middle East and Africa that brought millions of Muslims to Western Europe in the 2010s, of whom a large number were refugees created by the Syrian Civil War, seemed disconnected from reality.

Most Americans had never heard of books like French author Michel Houellebecq’s 2015 novel Submission. It fantasized about a Muslim takeover of France, which over the years has become a touchstone for fears about a changing continent. Douglas Murray’s prophetic 2017 book The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam told us what was occurring in real time. But while it was noticed by some conservative intellectuals, it didn’t break through to a larger American audience. Older warnings, such as those coming from JNS columnist Melanie Phillips in her 2006 Londonistan and her 2010 The World Turned Upside Down: The Global Battle over God, Truth, and Power, were dismissed by liberals on both sides of the Atlantic as alarmist and prejudiced.

But the shift inside the Democratic Party was already happening.

Within a couple of years, the conviction that the radicals were marginal cranks who posed no threat to the Democratic establishment began to collapse as they began assuming a larger role within the party.

The ranks of the left-wing “Squad” in the U.S. House of Representatives have expanded beyond its original quartet of Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) and Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), all of whom were first elected in 2018. The Democratic Party has not only fully embraced them and their “progressive” colleagues but has since adopted many of their positions, especially when it comes to Israel.

Mamdani’s election in 2025 could be characterized as a strictly New York affair with little impact on the rest of the nation. But in 2026, as anti-Israel and antisemitic radicals won a slew of Democratic primaries, the future direction of the party seems to be set on a leftward course as it heads toward the 2028 presidential election, with many so-called moderates signaling their desire to distance themselves from Israel and supporting antisemites like El-Sayed.

Liberal crackup

The point here is that as was the case in Europe, the crackup of liberal American politics is a function of ideological fashion and demography. The neoliberal Labour of Tony Blair and his successor, Gordon Brown, governed Britain from the political center from 1997 to 2010; opened it up to mass immigration; and did its best to welcome and appease the left, even as the radicals reviled it. The same was true for Starmer, who was supposed to be a fresh break from Corbyn yet ended up empowering the same radicals he was supposed to restrain.

The gradual lurch left of the Democrats in the last generation has been just as obvious. Under former President Barack Obama, who had campaigned for the presidency in 2008 as a centrist, the party governed from the left, exacerbating the same racial and partisan differences he had derided while running as the “hope and change” candidate. Under former President Joe Biden, who was elected as the supposedly sane and moderate alternative to Donald Trump, the radicalization got even worse, with his open-borders policies that let in millions of illegal immigrants, further inflaming the situation.

Like British and French moderates, Obama and Biden allowed their party to become a safe haven for the “Squad” and Democratic Socialists like Mamdani and other far-left antisemites, such as El-Sayed. In the 1990s, Democratic centrists like President Bill Clinton won elections with “Sister Souljah moments” in which they condemned and anathemized radicals, purging them from their party; now they are embraced. While Minority Leader Chuck Schumer boasted for decades that he would be the shomer or “guardian” of the Jews and Israel in Congress, he now routinely condemns Israel while his party embraces arms cutoffs to the Jewish state during wartime. And he’s now doing all he can to get El-Sayed elected.

Where is this heading? Nothing is set in stone, and it is still theoretically possible for Democrats to wake up and start pushing the antisemites out of their party. Still, in a Democratic Party that has fully embraced the toxic left-wing ideologies that encourage and enable antisemitism, it seems highly unlikely. It’s not a coincidence that the mayors of the largest cities in both the United Kingdom and the United States—Mamdani and London’s Sadiq Khan—are not only left-wing radicals and Muslims, but both commemorated the Oct. 7 anniversary this week by condemning Israel.

The writing is on the wall. Just as left-wing radicals and Islamists have seemingly conquered Britain and are setting France aflame, the same thing is already on its way to happening across the pond. For Americans to avoid this fate, many of them, including liberal Jews, are going to need to adjust their positions on open borders and immigration, as well as draw the line against supporting Jew-haters, even if they are fellow Democrats. If they don’t, we can easily see where this is heading.

© JNS

He was right. Sweden's center-right Sweden Democrats government indeed lost the elections by a razor-thin margin – reportedly just 50,000 votes – corresponding to just three seats in parliament.

The next government will almost certainly be a socialist one. [1]

"Voters who, or whose parents, grew up outside Europe overwhelmingly favoured the Left," Brussels Signal wrote in its analysis of an exit poll by SVT, Sweden's national public broadcaster:

"The Social Democrats received 38 per cent of their votes, the Left Party 21 per cent, the Greens 7 per cent and the Centre Party 4 per cent. Together, these parties accounted for 70 per cent, against 27 per cent for the four parties of the outgoing right-wing bloc."

The tiny socialist majority was won through heavy voter mobilization within immigrant communities, which tipped the balance. Turnout rose around 3 points to 67.5% in the almost exclusively urban districts, where mainly Muslim immigrants live.

"This election has in part been about voter mobilisation, which is unusual in Sweden," noted to Gustav Karreskog Rehbinder, founder of AI analysis firm Vera Policy, which broke down the election results for Reuters.

According to Fredrik Karrholm, a member of the Swedish parliament and the author of Gangster Violence:

"A poll by the respected Novus institute before the election found that of Muslim respondents, around 80 per cent intended to vote for either the Social Democrats or the Left party.

"In some districts with large immigrant populations, the results are striking. For example, in Rosengård Centrum in Malmö, the Social Democrats and Left Party together received, according to the preliminary count, 95.2 per cent of the vote...

"This pattern predates the present government...

"During the last parliamentary term, around 200,000 people were given citizenship under rules that imposed very few demands on applicants – not even a requirement to speak or write Swedish. The majority of those granted citizenship were from outside Europe....

"Immigration to Sweden has not only brought crime, social problems and unemployment – now the government that was successfully starting to solve these problems has been voted out because of immigration itself."

For a brief moment, it had seemed as if Sweden was finally beginning to turn things around. In 2022, Sweden voted in a center-right government that ruled with the parliamentary backing of the Sweden Democrats – a first in Swedish politics. This government sought to implement the most restrictive overhauls of Swedish asylum and immigration policies in Swedish history with crackdowns on asylum and migrant flows, while making it harder for immigrants to acquire permanent residence and Swedish citizenship.

After decades of lawlessness, the center-right government, now voted out, had also sought to crack down on crime by finally openly linking migration to gang violence, parallel societies, and integration failures.

The results were dramatic: In December 2025, Reuters reported:

"The number of shootings in Sweden has more than halved since hitting a peak in 2022, reflecting new policing approaches introduced by the right-wing government, which is readying for parliamentary elections next year. Shooting incidents fell to 147 so far this year, a 63% decrease compared to 2022 when there were 390 shootings and a 49% decrease compared to 2024, according to a Reuters analysis of official figures."

The government also began to scrutinize the detrimental effects of Islam in Sweden, including the launch of a government investigation into the Islamist infiltration of Swedish society. This past spring, the government announced that it would be dropping the entire concept of "Islamophobia."

Sweden, in short, had been on the road to becoming Swedish again – but if the election results lead to a new socialist government, that will no longer happen: The Left Party alone is deeply infiltrated by Islamists and terrorist supporters, with several of its politicians caught celebrating the October 7, 2023 Hamas invasion of Israel, with some handing out candy on the streets to mark their joy at the massacres of Israelis. In addition, several candidates were found to have shared content praising or expressing support for designated terrorist organizations, including Hamas, Hezbollah, the PFLP and Al-Qaeda, while multiple candidates shared classic antisemitic tropes, Holocaust denial and homophobia.

These revelations, all dug up by the Swedish press, forced the Left Party to remove at least 33 of its most extremist candidates, an astounding number.

Many other radicals within the party kept their parliamentary seats, including MPs Ilona Szatmári Waldau and Samuel Gonzalez Westling, who sent open letters of support to Palestinian terrorists held in Israeli prisons for serious offenses, such as ordering suicide bombings and torturing and murdering an Israeli soldier. In October 2025, the party's top leadership, including party leader Nooshi Dadgostar, hosted two visiting Palestinians from the Fatah Revolutionary Council inside the Swedish Parliament. The two guests were known for having publicly praised terrorist acts and spreading Jew-hatred.

If you think any of this harmed the party, you would be wrong: The scandals actually served to boost it: they gained the party six new seats in the election.

There is a name for what just happened in Sweden: Ballot box jihad. It is an Islamist tactic, favored by the Muslim Brotherhood.

"In the Middle East, democracy and elections are various means to one end: the establishment of a decidedly undemocratic form of law — Islamic, or Sharia Law," Raymond Ibrahim wrote about the Egyptian elections in 2012, which, for a brief moment, brought the Muslim Brotherhood to power.

"An Egyptian cleric, Dr. Talat Zahran, proclaimed that it is 'obligatory to cheat at elections, a beautiful thing' -- meaning that voting is a tool, an instrument, the only value of which is to empower Sharia. Another cleric, Hazim Shuman... issued a fatwa that likened voting for Islamist candidates to a 'jihad,' or a holy war, adding that paradise awaits whoever is 'martyred' during the electoral campaign."

The same tactic applies to the Islamist project of nonviolent conquest of the West. The late spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, speaking in Qatar in 2007, said that "Islam will conquer Europe without resorting to the sword or fighting. The conquest will be through da'wah [proselytizing] and ideology."

Ballot box jihad is part of achieving this conquest. Sameh Egyptson, an Egyptian-Swedish academic, writer and expert on political Islam, has been warning about Islamist infiltration of the political system for years. He has recently cautioned, among other things, against clan voting as an erosion of democracy. Clan voting is when extended families and even entire ethnic communities vote collectively as a bloc for the same candidate or party. Although clan voting as such is not illegal in Sweden, two newly elected Muslim candidates from the Left Party are already suspected of electoral fraud, including bribing or unduly influencing voters to vote for them and pre-marking their own names on ballots.

This outcome is possibly what many socialists have been planning all along: To stay in power forever by importing new voters from the Third World.

Sweden is a warning, not only to the rest of Europe but to the Western world at large.

[1] Sweden's new government will likely consist of the Social Democrats (99 seats), Sweden's Communist party, which changed its name to the Left Party (Vänsterpartiet) in 1990 (30 seats), the radical Green Party (22 seats) and the more centrist Center Party (25 seats).

© Gatestone Institute

The choice is hardly out of character for an award whose history has repeatedly shown that its name guarantees nothing about its recipients’ merit. Indeed, this isn’t an aberration for the Norwegian committee. But it’s an especially egregious example of a familiar pattern: an international establishment congratulating itself for advancing peace while rewarding people whose records make a mockery of the concept.

Pillay, who chaired the United Nations Commission of Inquiry that accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza, has become a symbol of the double standards permeating the global system. The woman now being feted in the name of peace presided over a more aptly dubbed “inquisition” whose whole purpose was to brand the Jewish state with a bloody—blood libelous—stain. Like an irremovable tattoo.

The term “genocide” has a specific legal definition, including the requirement to establish intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a protected national, ethnic, racial or religious group. It’s laughable to suggest that Israel’s behavior even remotely fits that description, as it took great pains to avoid civilian casualties and flooded Gaza with humanitarian aid.

That Hamas kept stealing the food and medicine, and prevented anyone other than its goons from entering the hundreds of miles of tunnels, was never of interest to Pillay and her ilk. Nor did they ever note that the population in Gaza has grown in the past three years. Some genocide.

Though her commission’s report wasn’t a judicial verdict, the force of its accusation was unmistakable, and Pillay was gleefully instrumental in promoting the lie for pernicious purposes. Which we now see has paid off, big-time.

This was hardly the first time her commission helped fuel the campaign to portray Israel as uniquely depraved. Pillay, a former U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights (2008-2014), was appointed to her latest post in 2021. That was when the “Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory” was established by the U.N. Human Rights Council to concoct a report to vilify Israel.

And, boy, did she ever come through for her anti-Israel colleagues, producing a mendacious paper on Israeli “crimes” in Gaza. Its allegations reinforced a false narrative depicting Israel not as a country at war with sadistic barbarians—thousands of whom breached the border on Oct. 7, 2023 to rape, maim and slaughter 1,200 innocent Israelis, and abduct 251 others—but as a sexually abusive state.

Nothing new about the turpitude of the U.N.’s endless attempts to demonize Israel. So, Pillay’s having been selected to head the commission wasn’t surprising.

Ditto for her winning an award transformed long ago into a vehicle for leftist virtue-signaling. In his 1895 will, Swedish scientist/businessman Alfred Nobel, inventor of dynamite, bequeathed most of his immense fortune to establishing prizes in science, literature and peace.

The latter was intended to recognize efforts toward fraternity among nations. Its subsequent history, however, has repeatedly exposed the gulf between those ideals and the eponymous committee’s selections. Rather than consistently rewarding meaningful contributions to peace, the prize has served as a platform for globalist ideology involving the inversion of right and wrong.

Pillay epitomizes this moral rot. Her new laureate status is less an honor than a mark of Cain.

To add to this blot, her prize was announced on Oct. 9, two days after Israel marked the third anniversary of the worst atrocities committed against Jews since the Holocaust. The timing highlights the perversity of the prize and its recipient.

© JNS

On September 25, addressing Russian journalists, he said that every proposal for settling the four-and-a-half-year war remained on the table, then attached the condition that empties the offer of content. "We are ready for talks and to wrap them up as soon as possible, but on conditions acceptable for the Russian people," Putin said. Moscow would first assess what served its own interests.

He added that Russia had been prepared to resume talks after its parliamentary elections, that Ukrainian drone attacks on Moscow had changed the calculation, and that Kyiv would have to be "made to feel" Russian retaliation before anything else could be discussed.

US President Donald J. Trump would do well to read that statement as a description of Putin's method. A leader preparing to end a war does not reserve for himself both the calendar of diplomacy and unrestricted freedom of fire. Putin, in a single appearance, claimed both, In doing so, he put negotiation where the Kremlin has always kept it, among the instruments of his war.

The confirmation came within five days. On September 30, Russia launched its heaviest combined attack on Ukraine's energy system in months. Seven people were killed, among them a 14-year-old in Vyshhorod, north of the capital. The Ukrainian military counted 285 drones incoming, along with ballistic missiles. Emergency power cuts were imposed in Kyiv and three surrounding regions for the first time since the spring, and water pressure fell across the city.

The Russian Defense Ministry announced the strikes on Ukraine's energy facilities without embarrassment. On October 3, hours after another drone attack on a Dnipro crossing, in a city of three million people heading into winter, the Russian Foreign Ministry told foreign nationals and diplomatic staff to leave Ukraine and promised that the strikes on Kyiv and other cities would continue systematically. Putin had said earlier in the week that Ukraine was paying the price for its attacks on Russia and would go on paying it. Kyiv's mayor now speaks of a capital that must put itself on a war footing.

Putin's interest in negotiations seems real, but deserves to be taken only for what it buys him. An open negotiation process allows Putin time to ready harsher attacks for the winter. Like Iran's regime, it gives the appearance of cooperation without actual cooperation, and puts Ukraine under pressure to suspend its long-range strikes on refineries and ports that are doing genuine damage to Russia's revenues.

The Kremlin has made the argument in public. On September 17, the day after the US House of Representatives sent Trump legislation targeting Russia's energy and defense industries, and its shadow fleet of tankers, and authorizing tariffs of up to 100% on buyers of Russian oil, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov warned that additional American sanctions would complicate the search for a settlement.

Trump signed the bill on September 18, and three days later, the Kremlin spokesman repeated the warning. Washington was asked to hold its fire for the sake of diplomacy; then, in early October, Russia returned to bombing Kyiv's bridges six times in an apparent attempt to cut the capital city in two and sever its supply routes.

The so-called energy truce also showed how the asymmetry works in practice. On September 14, Trump announced that Ukraine and Russia had each agreed to stop hitting the other's energy targets. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky answered within hours that Ukraine was not convinced that Russia would abide by any agreement and that Kyiv would halt its own strikes once its partners could guarantee that Moscow had stopped attacking Ukraine's electric grid. Moscow never confirmed the arrangement, and 16 days later Ukraine's grid was burning.

None of that should have surprised anyone who had read what three sources close to the Kremlin described in July: Putin rebuked advisers proposing a ceasefire along the existing front, regards capturing the rest of the Donbas as a matter of principle, and is likely to escalate. Peskov's reply at the time was that Russia was ready for a peaceful resolution but had "enough capability to act independently and continue the special military operation." The conjunction "but" did the same work in July as it did on September 25.

None of this argues against talking to Putin. Great powers negotiate with adversaries because they are adversaries, and Trump is well-intended in seeking an end to the war that has become Europe's bloodiest since 1945, drained allied treasuries, killed or wounded roughly 1.4 million Russians and more than half a million Ukrainians, and raised the risk of a widening confrontation. The error would be to read Putin's presence at the negotiating table as a decision to stop the war. In 1994, Russia signed the Budapest Memorandum, assuring Ukraine that if it gave up its nuclear weapons, Russia would not attack it. Ukraine, tragically, kept its part of the bargain.

The Minsk agreements of September 2014 and February 2015 produced ceasefires, monitoring missions and years of communiqués signed under French and German sponsorship. The heavy weapons, however, were never fully withdrawn and the political provisions were never implemented. In February 2022, Putin declared the agreements void, recognized separatist entities within Ukraine and invaded. Eight years of playing at process had cost Putin nothing and had given him time, which is what diplomacy without enforceable consequences reliably gives an aggressor.

A further development calls for serious caution. According to reporting published on October 3, the American-Russian discussions have widened to include a redolent multibillion-dollar sale of the international assets, refineries, oil fields and gas stations of Russia's Lukoil, which are currently under American sanctions. Putin raised the transaction himself at the Kremlin on September 5, in his meeting with US envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, as proof that Russians could again do business with the United States!

The sale would need the approval of both governments; nothing has yet been concluded. The Trump administration says it is negotiating terms that would secure a substantial upfront payment for the United States. So, commercial "normalization" was placed on the table during the same weeks as the bombardment intensified. If sanctions relief, restraint on Ukrainian operations and restored relations with Washington can all be obtained by keeping talks alive, then for Moscow, prolonging talks is the perfect course, and a settlement can remain one meeting away indefinitely.

Trump's record as a negotiator was built on leverage; declarations never seem to have impressed him. Money, however, apparently has, such as Saudi and Qatari "investments" in America and a $400 million presidential "flying palace" jet gifted to him by Qatar.

The Abraham Accords came out of a hard reading of interests. Iran's regime, once it faced American force in place of American concern, behaved differently.

Russian, Iranian, Chinese, North Korean and Palestinian conduct should be rewarded only after sustained changes in behavior. Sanctions relief should follow only after a verified halt in escalation or hostilities. Any restraint asked of Ukraine over Russian refineries should follow only after Russia stops targeting Ukrainian bridges, apartment buildings, hospitals and power plants. The Lukoil transaction can wait until after hostilities have measurably declined. Such a policy is neither hostile to Russia nor favorable to war.

Ceasefires can exist just for press statements that protect no one and for talks that supply one side with time, money and freedom of action to lengthen the fighting. Putin likely counts on Western impatience, on US presidents who want breakthroughs and on publics who want images of the war off their screens. The law Trump signed on September 18 gives him the means to raise the price of delay. The weeks since Putin's statement supply the reason to use it.

Until Russian strikes on Ukraine stop, Putin's offers to talk remain just part of his plan for his war.

© Gatestone Institute

What we also mark is the launch of a war by Hamas whose strategic purpose was to destabilize the Middle East — which was edging towards peaceful co-existence — while filming their October 7th atrocities. Their purpose evidently was to remind the world that they are committed to the total destruction of Israel "by any means necessary."

Make no mistake. It is a war. As in any war, unfortunately, civilians will lose their lives.

As Israel was responding with deadly force against Hamas and its allies, Hamas' collaborators around the world hijacked the word "genocide" to charge that the Israelis are engaged in a methodical and calculated program of extermination. It is beyond irony that the people who were subjected to industrial-scale murder as a formal policy by the Third Reich should now be accused of such a crime. In a world where Jew-hatred thrives as a bacillus, such libels exist.

A generation — holding high Palestinian banners that speak of their ignorance of history, of the roots of conflict, and their refusal to acknowledge Israel's right to exist — now marches on college campuses. These protestors may be able to spell "genocide" but their understanding of that word is defined by the agents of Hamas. These protestors are nothing more than dupes, many of whom would be executed by Hamas in Gaza for being infidels and for their progressive self-identity.

The Holocaust tore apart but strengthened the Jewish soul. Never again will Jews allow their enemies to commit acts of murder and unspeakable violence upon their people and not be targeted for retribution. In the war initiated by Hamas, Israel is within its rights to target the agents, soldiers, and commanders of this terrorist organization. Civilians will, unfortunately, be caught in the violence. And Hamas cynically uses those casualties while they deny food, medical assistance and honest governance to the very population they purport to represent.

The Israelis know their history. Self-defense is within the DNA of every Jew who will confront hatred with the steely resolve required in a world where an error in strategic judgment can lead to disaster. "Never again" is not a slogan. It is a sworn oath to posterity and to future generations of Jews.

© Gatestone Institute.

For three years, the Jewish world has been stunned by the reaction to the Hamas-led Palestinian Arab terror attacks on Israeli communities on Oct. 7, 2023. But it’s time to stop. More to the point, it’s also necessary to cease appealing for sympathy or understanding.

The expectation on the part of most Jews and Israelis, as well as those who are their friends in the days that followed, was that world opinion would swing behind the Jewish state in the aftermath of that horrific orgy of mass murder, torture, rape, kidnapping and wanton destruction. And there was, in fact, some initial sympathy for Israel, even in the media that is so quick to denounce it.

The turn against Israel

Within days, however, that changed. Once it was clear that Israelis were not going to simply accept their victimization and would act to end the threat of more such atrocities, what passes for enlightened liberal opinion, along with some elements on the far right, voiced outrage. That outrage was not aimed at the crimes of the Palestinians. Nor was it a response to the evidence that their leaders and most of the population have meant what they said when they repeatedly rejected an independent state alongside Israel and would settle for nothing less than the destruction of the Jewish state.

Instead, the spectacle of Jews defending themselves and moving to eliminate a threat that no sovereign nation would tolerate on its border was too much for a world that has largely regarded Jewish power of any kind as intolerable. Even before the Israel Defense Forces began their offensive into Gaza to attempt to eliminate Hamas’s ability to make good on their promises to repeat Oct. 7-style massacres, anti-Israel protests began. More importantly, world leaders called for caution and restraint that they would never demand of their own countries under similar circumstances.

The United States was an initial exception to that rule. Yet within weeks, the administration of President Joe Biden, which had supported Israel’s goal of eliminating Hamas, shifted to a more equivocal stance. What ensued was a year-long dance in which the United States sought to pressure the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to stop seeking victory. Washington even demanded that Jerusalem accept an outcome in which the continued hold on power on the part of the Islamist terrorists who had ruled Gaza as an independent Palestinian state in all but name since 2007 was to be tolerated.

Biden’s shift was clearly a reaction to liberal and left-wing opinion in his own Democratic Party. After Oct. 7, Democrats, who had already been turning against Israel over the course of the previous decade under the administration of President Barack Obama, overwhelmingly took the side of the Palestinians against the Israelis.

The same was true around the globe as Western European nations—influenced by both the influx of Muslim immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa, and by Marxist and left-wing parties that reviled Zionism—expressed their horror at the idea of Israel pursuing a war to defeat Hamas.

Disingenuous ‘criticism’

Israel’s foes claim that the revulsion was the product of an unusually harsh and “disproportionate” offensive in Gaza in which its military indiscriminately killed large numbers of civilians, including women and children. The Jewish state was accused of “genocide” and causing mass starvation. Indeed, so ubiquitous were these accusations in mainstream media outlets and popular culture that few liberals or left-wingers dared to question them or consider them debatable.

This critique was—and remains—entirely disingenuous. Israel’s military used more restraint in the difficult conditions of urban warfare and, as impartial military experts testified, killed a far lower percentage of civilians than in any other such confrontation in modern-day history.

Hamas hid behind Palestinian civilians and did everything to expose them to death. They stored weapons in schools and hospitals. They stole food meant for residents that the Israelis moved from one part of the Strip to another to keep them out of the way of airstrikes and other military efforts to bring back men, women and children dragged by Hamas on Oct. 7 into the coastal enclave. With the international aid it had received prior to Oct. 7, Hamas had built a tunnel network under Gaza that might be termed the world’s largest bomb shelter, the size of the New York City subway system. But no civilians (other than the hostages, many of whom were hid there) were allowed into them. They were only for terrorist fighters, their commanders and their supplies.

There was no “genocide” or Gaza famine. There isn’t any such thing going on today. Nonetheless, much of the world believes it.

The atrocities of Oct. 7 were denied, even though Hamas and other Palestinian terrorists had documented them with GoPro cameras and social-media uploads (one infamously called his parents to brag about how many Jews he killed that day). The victims, including raped women and men, were ignored or not believed. Posters of the kidnapped, even of a 9-month-old baby, were torn down on the streets of American and European cities. Mass rallies were held to bolster support for Hamas on the streets of those cities and on college campuses.

The main reason for the lack of sympathy for Israel wasn’t because Netanyahu or members of his cabinet were unlikable or too truculent, or because his government failed to mount an effective public diplomacy campaign (though it should have done better). Nor was it because pro-Israel supporters in the United States were equally ineffective in making the case for the Jewish state or against intransigent Palestinian Arabs and their terrorist leaders.

The deck was stacked against Israel long before Oct. 7. Like the American education system, the corporate media had largely been captured by left-wing ideologues who believed in political activism, not journalism. And it, too, adopted the skewed ideas of critical race theory, intersectionality and settler-colonialism that exacerbated racial tensions among the general population, as well as falsely labeled Israelis and Jews as “white” oppressors and their Palestinian opponents as “people of color.” That meant the former were always in the wrong, no matter what they did, and the latter in the right, no matter how awful their crimes.

They’re not listening

While Israel and its supporters might have done better in their efforts to inform the world about Oct. 7 and the century of Palestinian rejectionism that preceded it, the notion that the global audience or even the bulk of the base of the Democratic Party was open to being educated about any of this was unfounded. The red-green alliance of Marxists and Islamists that are skewing European politics and ideas about Israel and the Jews has also secured a beachhead in America, as the success of antisemitic figures like New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Michigan Democratic U.S. Senate nominee Dr. Abdul El-Sayed demonstrates.

A world that had decided that the Jews and their state were singular villains, and thus guilty of horrible crimes, was certainly influenced by social-media algorithms and biased media. But their receptiveness to the blood libels about genocide and famine in Gaza or to the lie that Israel is an “apartheid” state wasn’t due to the lack of a proactive information task force in the Israeli prime minister’s office or the failure of much of the organized Jewish world. Having been marinated in the toxic doctrines that taught them the Israelis were the bad guys, liberal opinion was already lost to the Jewish state even before the bodies were buried after Oct. 7.

The only sectors of global or American society that remain impervious, or at least less vulnerable, to the onslaught of Hamas propaganda masquerading as progressivism are among those on the right who have already rejected these doctrines. That’s provided that they are not also being seduced by the wave of Jew-hatred on the far right that employs traditional antisemitic tropes.

Once we acknowledge all of this, the question remains: What do we do about it?

The first thing is for the Jews to stop appealing for sympathy that isn’t coming.

It should have been apparent from the outset that centering pro-Israel advocacy on the victimization of Jews on Oct. 7 or on the appalling treatment of the hostages taken that day was a mistake. It only excited antisemites. And, rather than elicit empathy, it seems to have convinced many others to believe that the Palestinians had a good reason to murder the Jews.

A futile quest

In this sense, it was much like Israel’s misguided and failed efforts to trade “land for peace” throughout the previous three decades. That did more to convince world opinion that the Jews were possessors of stolen property, rather than high-minded people who were willing to compromise their rights and even their security to achieve an end to the conflict. But now, the pleas for understanding seem only to have reinforced the growing chorus of those who believe Zionism—the anti-colonial and national liberation movement of the Jews—equals racism.

Unlike the recent past, the real debate about the Middle East isn’t about a two-state solution the Palestinians never wanted. It now centers on whether all of the Jewish state, including the kibbutzim and other communities near the Gaza Strip whose liberal-minded inhabitants were slaughtered along with everyone else on Oct. 7, is stolen land. That goes hand in hand with the idea that its occupants are foreign colonizers in their homeland, where they are the indigenous people who are only getting what they deserve.

Rather than members of the Jewish community wracking their brains trying to solve the puzzle about how to convince those who aren’t listening to hear sound historical arguments, they need to stop centering so much of their efforts on this futile quest.

It’s true that losses in the information world have real consequences, and that the attempts to isolate Israel diplomatically and economically pose a grave danger to it. But if the Jews should have learned anything in the last century when the world stood by as the Holocaust went on for years, it’s that the most important task facing them is to strengthen their state and its ability to defend Jewish life.

As horrible as the catastrophe of Oct. 7 was, in the three years that have followed, Israel’s defeats of Hamas and Hezbollah—plus the fall of a longtime brutal dictator in Syria—and their Iranian paymasters and sponsors have done more to make Jewish lives safer than all of the clever arguments put forward by its most able public information advocates.

That doesn’t give the Israeli government—or Diaspora leaders and groups—a pass for doing so poorly at explaining the situation. And it certainly doesn’t excuse a tech-savvy Jewish state for not being as nimble as it should have been in employing new media and Internet technologies to make their arguments against those spreading blood libels and antisemitism.

Still, delusions should be discarded about the chances that appeals aimed at inspiring sympathy for Jewish victims will move the needle on international or even American public opinion for those who have bought the pro-Hamas narrative hook, line and sinker. As Dara Horn has written, the world may “love dead Jews,” but what that really means for us today is that their abhorrence of Jews with power is undiminished.

A just cause

What Israel and its defenders must exude is strength, confidence in their justice of their cause, and a willingness to be undaunted by the lies and smears spread about them. Rather than seeking to debate or persuade those crying “genocide” primarily to give the world a pass for permitting the actual genocide of European Jewry during the Holocaust, we must dismiss them as hate-mongers unworthy of intellectual refutations.

As much as Jews everywhere must continue to mourn the victims of Oct. 7, as well as the heroic soldiers of the Israel Defense Forces who fell or were wounded in the ongoing effort to defeat terrorists, they should quit waiting for others to join them.

The real lesson of Oct. 7 is no different from that of the thousands of years of Jewish history that preceded it. Weakness and faith in the kindness of those ready to believe that Jews are the cause of whatever it is they fear most or the greatest societal problems they face is a formula for disaster.

Just as in the past, those who think that destroying the Jewish state will be the first step toward the liberation of the world’s oppressed peoples are not persuadable. But they can be defeated.

A proud declaration of Jewish rights and faith is far more likely to inspire friendship and alliances. That’s a lesson that should resonate for Israelis. But it must also be one adopted by Diaspora Jews perplexed by a wave of bigotry and vitriol they never anticipated and struggle to cope with. Unless and until they realize that they must defend themselves first—and worry about what everyone else thinks later—will they find a way to live in a world where Jew-hatred has again become fashionable.

© JNS.

The message was: Go and destroy the Jews. In doing so, you will not win the war, but you will win history. You will destroy Israel; the Islamic umma, dar al-salam, will devour dar al-harb. And this first conquest will precede the destruction of Jewish history and, with it, the entire Judeo-Christian civilization that it generated.

There are two chapters to the history of Oct. 7: the unprecedented events of that day, and the subsequent expansion of antisemitism into the intellectual and moral centers of power in Europe and America.

It is the construction of a collective psychosis, a breach in the moral system built over centuries—in the principle of cause and effect, in the ability to read history and in our concepts of good and justice.

It is this worldwide revolution that we are dealing with when we speak of Oct. 7, in addition to tears, mutilated bodies and war. We should also remember how antisemitism has repeatedly been the harbinger of crises in the civilizations that produced it, including the destruction of Europe in World War II.

The tears and the blood

But we must begin with the tears and blood that hundreds of thousands of Israelis still shed, having lost loved ones in the massacre and in the war.

It is the form, the method and the purpose of the Oct. 7 massacre that we had not seen before, except 80 years ago in Hitler’s Germany and, until 1953, in the Soviet Union.

On Oct. 4, 1943, in Posen, Heinrich Himmler explained to 90 SS leaders that Jewish children also had to be exterminated because he could not, “for moral reasons,” avoid extending to them the death sentence that their parents “deserved”; otherwise, the future of his people and of the world would be threatened by their revenge.

Thus, for “moral reasons,” the Palestinians coldly decided to burn alive, dismember, rape and murder Jewish families in the kibbutzim of southern Israel.

The purpose of their conquering political Islam is a final solution, total destruction, pursued in the name of an ideology and a religion that is intrinsically political as well, without humanitarian objections.

For Hamas, Iran and many other actors now active throughout the world, humanitarianism itself becomes part of the execution. It is the intention that has driven antisemitism through the centuries: to cleanse the earth of Jews, and therefore today, first and foremost, of Israel, and turn it into the kingdom of the chosen ethic—the one pursued by the Hamas charter and demanded by Shi’ite Iran.

On Oct. 7, the Islamist imperative to erase and subjugate revealed itself in its naked form.

JNS

Oct. 7, remembered in Israel and beyond

JNS (Jewish News Syndicate)

A war on seven fronts

Jewish resistance to this turning point in the history of persecution has this time taken the form of the war on seven fronts that Israel has fought since that day.

As the daily news shows, this war has not ended—not against Hamas, not in Judea and Samaria, not in the north against Hezbollah, and certainly not against the greatest puppeteer of hatred against Israel and the Jews, Iran.

Meanwhile, other dangerous fronts are opening, such as Turkey, while Qatar remains the greatest financier of organized hatred in the form of information and culture.

At the same time, large-scale intifadas—the largest in France, with Spain and Britain close behind—are setting Europe ablaze, while New York, through free elections, becomes Mamdani’s city.

And everywhere, Oct. 7 is celebrated as a festival of the genocide of the Jews.

The campaign to erase the Jews

Alongside the bestial massacre, an antisemitic flood of denial immediately developed, one in which Europe, too, is immersed up to its neck.

In this continuation of Oct. 7, the disappearance of the Jews means driving them out of the social world. It means making them disappear from universities and cinema, sporting competitions and literary prizes, politics and soccer championships—terrorizing and humiliating them until they are expelled everywhere.

Erase them.

Terrorize families and children at school. Put students in a position where they cannot attend university. Expel from talk shows every Jewish commentator and every friend of the Jews.

It is a Shoah. The Jew disappears.

This is happening through the success of a vast network of lies, from the word “genocide” to “ethnic cleansing” to “famine,” all the way to the most classic antisemitic formulas, now accepted as commonplace: the blood libel of the slaughter of innocents; the pursuit of money and power; the targeting of children and civilians; the murderous rampage of crazed soldiers thirsting for revenge.

And then there is the image of a monstrous supreme leader, Nazi-fascist and imperialist—a cinematic transfiguration of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, turned into a puppet of public discourse with no relationship to reality.

The inversion of reality

Logic, knowledge, culture and reason—even the principle of cause and effect upon which, since ancient Greece, the examination of facts has been constructed—have been hollowed out through a rejection of our social structure and of liberal democracy.

In its place comes a universalist culture that denies history, apologizes for a distorted and denigrated Western past and kneels before a totalitarian world that persecutes dissidents, women and homosexuals, even to the point of death.

A particular historical conjunction has allowed a Western society gripped by profound moral and intellectual confusion to find a partner ready to forge an unprecedented alliance: militant and supremacist Islam, much of it immigrant, another part still in its countries of origin, which sees messianism as its political rationale.

Palestinism has provided the ideal common cause for this convergence. It has become the magical vessel into which culture, good intentions and human rights can be poured. It has become the battlefield between oppressors and oppressed, between freedom and imperialism, between universalism and racism.

In reverse.

When decent people drive from a stage a mother who wants to testify about the murder of her entire family by Hamas on Oct. 7 because they want to watch “Naza,” telling her, “Go away, you should be ashamed,” they no longer possess any knowledge of reality, nor do they wish to know it.

To them, the woman is a “colonialist,” and the punishment for her guilt “did not happen in a vacuum,” as U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres declared in commenting on Oct. 7, assuming a responsibility equal to that of those who slit throats.

He thus inaugurated the era of the hunt for the Jew, licensed by international legality.

The answer cannot be lamentation

The conclusion, however, cannot be lamentation, nor the tears that we are forced to swallow.

The Jewish people have never had either the time or the desire to shed too many of them, as can be seen from the history of the incredible reconstruction of their homeland, repopulated in the aftermath of the Shoah.

They have work to do.

Who could have been more grief-stricken than the men and women who set to work even as they were already being attacked once again?

It is incredible that in less than 80 years, the only country in the Middle East without oil—so democratic that it suffers internal divisions at every turn, so courageous that it has prevailed on every front after trying to share its tiny land and receiving in return a bite at the jugular—is today full of children and projects.

Its per capita GDP is higher than the GDPs of France, Italy and Britain. Its inventions help the entire world in science, agriculture, technological innovation, medicine and defense.

Its intelligence services save the Western world from terrorism; its rescue teams know how to dig through the ruins of enormous earthquakes. Its joy of life is woven together with a desire for peace that, although repeatedly rejected, is part of the fundamental culture taught in its schools.

Israel knows how to win

And so today, still in the fire of the post-Oct. 7 world, responsibility for every antisemitic accusation must always and only remain with the antisemites.

Faced with every piece of nonsense, every criminal fantasy about Israel and the Jews, those who respect themselves have no choice but to look the enemy and the fool in the eye, without allowing themselves to be influenced by feelings of guilt.

If I explain how the Israeli army fights while trying to safeguard civilian lives even as the enemy systematically uses them as human shields; if I show once again that the ratio of combatant to civilian casualties is 1 to 1.2, the lowest of any urban warfare situation in the world, it must not be to answer Palestinian propaganda.

Nor should it be to convince those who refuse to be convinced.

It does not work.

Antisemitism has endured through the centuries, but the Jews have endured, too.

The difference today lies in the certainty that Israel knows how to win wars.

The entire West can win with Israel, if it still wants to and still can.

That is no small thing. On this third anniversary of Oct. 7, the confrontation is still underway, and it is fierce.

© JNS.

However, this technocratic approach overlooks the phenomenon's essential dimension: the true measure of a functional system lies not in how many people cross the border, but in how many fully assimilate and stop feeling like outsiders in the society that welcomes them.

The collapse of the progressive model in sanctuary cities

The current immigration crisis has laid bare the contradictions of open-border policies and so-called "sanctuary cities."

Cities such as New York, Chicago, and Denver have experienced severe financial and logistical strain while attempting to absorb hundreds of thousands of migrants without an integration plan or requirements for self-sufficiency.

Overburdened public schools, strained healthcare systems, and unlimited fiscal spending show that compassion without order leads to institutional chaos.

Attempting to accommodate massive flows of people without a legal screening process or a clear assimilation process harms both local communities and the immigrants themselves, who are relegated to the informal sector and marginalized from legal economic life.

The historical success of the American integration model was not accidental, but rather the result of an implicit contract between the host nation and the newcomer. On the one hand, the country offered individual freedoms, legal certainty, and economic mobility; on the other, it required adopting its laws, civic culture, and English as the common tongue.

This principle finds solid ethical and philosophical support. The Catechism of the Catholic Church itself, in paragraph 2241, states that the most prosperous nations must welcome the foreigner, but it establishes with equal clarity that the immigrant is obligated to "respect with gratitude the material and spiritual heritage of the host country, obey its laws, and contribute to its burdens."

Assimilation is not a renunciation of one's origins but is, in reality, an explicit commitment to the future of one's adopted homeland.

The danger of balkanization and identity division

In contrast to the traditional model of integration, contemporary progressive ideology has promoted a divisive form of multiculturalism that discourages a sense of national belonging.

By promoting narratives of victimization and fostering ethnic segmentation, it encourages the creation of isolated enclaves where new generations grow up disconnected from civic institutions and the founding values of the Republic.

In the early 20th century, President Theodore Roosevelt warned of the risks of fracturing social cohesion by noting that "there is no place in this country for hyphenated Americanism."

His stance reaffirmed that civic loyalty and patriotism must be indivisible to ensure long-term democratic stability. Learning the language and embracing constitutional principles remain the most decisive factors for upward social mobility among Hispanic families and immigrants in general.

A modern, sovereign immigration system should not aim to provide a constant supply of cheap labor or expand government subsidies. The true triumph of immigration policy occurs when foreigners embrace the country's institutions, respect the rule of law, and find their one true home in the United States.

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Clash between Trump and María Elvira Salazar raises key question: Can GOP afford to lose her seat?

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There is little purpose in retracing Fallaci’s extraordinary career in detail. Anyone familiar with her work already understands her place in the history of Western journalism, and there is no shortage of material available for those who wish to learn more.

It may be enough to recall that, during the Italian Civil War, she served as a teenage courier for the Resistance in a Florence ravaged by Nazi-Fascist occupation and repeated Allied bombing. Then there is her extraordinary work as a war correspondent, a role in which she became the first Italian woman to distinguish herself on such a scale. There were her reports on the condition of women, her fearless interviews with the powerful, and, of course, the famous moment when, sitting in a 1979 interview before Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in Qom, Iran, she tore off the veil she had been required to wear and denounced it as a “medieval rag.”

There was also her love affair with the Greek democracy activist Alekos Panagoulis, which lasted until he died in Athens on May 1, 1976, in a car crash that Fallaci always regarded as an assassination. Finally, after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, came her radical and deeply controversial campaign against Islamist extremism.

Today, it is perhaps this last chapter of Fallaci’s life that is best remembered, certainly in the Jewish world. It is unquestionably the one that has provoked the most controversy over the years. On one side of the argument stood an ignorant and moralizing left; on the other, a right populated by mediocre and unimaginative sycophants who, to extract a couple of usable ideas from any major figure, must first drag that figure down to their level.

Why does Fallaci’s politically incorrect voice—as only someone who speaks honestly about her own convictions can be politically incorrect—continue to reappear in essays and commentary, at least in Italy, and more recently, in debates about immigration after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack?

"Fallaci remains our contemporary because she recognized in the present something that others preferred to ignore"

As a historian, I have often felt uneasy—not so much morally as methodologically—with the essentialism with which Fallaci treated centuries of Islamic history. But a journalist is not a historian. Or perhaps a journalist is a historian of a particular kind. As Fallaci told the American news anchor Mike Wallace, a journalist “is a historian who writes history in the moment that history happens”—a Thucydides or a Polybius, in other words.

Perhaps it is precisely this quality, which necessarily comes with a certain absence of detachment, that makes a journalist’s criticism of the present so clear and powerful. Curiously, we now seem to demand too much objectivity from journalism and too little from historiography; perhaps because genuine objectivity toward the past can disturb the conscience, while the false appearance of objectivity in the present can soothe it.

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The crack-up of the antisemitic right

Jonathan S. Tobin

This is why Fallaci is still relevant today. She possessed a quality that has become exceedingly rare: the ability to look at a phenomenon without first asking what the morally approved position toward it was supposed to be. She saw something, described it and drew a conclusion from it. The conclusion could be brutal, incomplete or historically imprecise. But it was reached without the preliminary sterilization of reality that now seems to have become one of the principal functions of parts of Western journalism and intellectual life.

This is especially true when the subject is Israel, the Arab and Muslim worlds and, after Oct. 7, the peculiar inability of part of the West to look upon a massacre without immediately beginning to search for the victim’s guilt.

The point is not to determine whether Fallaci was right on everything. That would be as foolish as it would be pointless. The more important question is why, 20 years later, some of the things she said continue to echo with such irritating regularity.

They echo when religious fanaticism is renamed “resistance”; antisemitism is linguistically sanitized until it becomes political activism; the murder of civilians suddenly becomes understandable so long as those civilians are Jews; and when a certain faction of the left, no longer capable of distinguishing between the oppressed and the executioner, retreats into formulas, slogans and rituals.

Fallaci remains our contemporary. Not because she predicted the future, but because she recognized in the present something that many others preferred to ignore.

This is what most unsettles someone like me, who comes from the left but has never been able to tolerate its hypocrisies or its grand, self-referential ideologies.

It also frightens a certain part of the contemporary left, which is a world of bourgeois liberals imprisoned in increasingly dusty ideological fixations and students with a great deal of time on their hands. What frightens them is first the prospect of seeing things as they are, and then the far more uncomfortable possibility that Oriana Fallaci may have been right.

Because if she was right—or even might have been right—about some things, then a left entrenched in its own orthodoxy, halfway between a church and a barracks, would see its peculiar kind of faith begin to collapse: the faith of the most obscurantist priest and the most obedient soldier.

© JNS.

It is so effective that it has led people to believe the exact opposite of reality.

But it has achieved something even more troubling: by equating argument, truth and effectiveness, it has brought into play, not justice or tolerance but their opposite: the club as a moral force, or "morality" as a club and a gag. For this very reason, it is a "cause" embraced by the Soviet Union in its time, by Qatar, by China, by Venezuela, by the ayatollahs, by every satrapy there is and by every antisemite, careerist and opportunist.

Opinion

The Quiet Islamic Colonization of America

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All of this is coated, for Western consumption, with the cynical academic jumble of "post-colonialism," "orientalism" and other "-isms"; with a flag originating from the 1916 Arab Revolt against Turkey, by a keffiyeh from Kufa, Iraq; and with an almost inexhaustible flow of money and "arguments" from various "generous" sources.

And its audience, cloaked in the disguises of everything and nothing that is this multiculturalism, which no longer conceals fear, stupidity, and subservience, believes that, to the tune of "cumbayá," destiny can be twisted or thugs can be pacified.

Amid this fabrication, amid that hypocritical and pitiful spectacle, a group of people, the Palestinians, those commonly referred to as "ordinary folk," definitely not those living in mansions in the West Bank (which the press avoids showing for the sake of the narrative), nor those amid luxury abroad, are treated and used by their beloved leaders, their advocates and the entire cohort of revelers (all so upright and humane) as mere necessary elements of that propaganda and of the alibi for the unpunished exercise of the stale antisemitism. Their centrality and importance abruptly vanish as soon as their mention, their actions, or their suffering no longer serve the intended purpose: Then it is acceptable to do to them what the Assads did in Syria and the Jordanian monarchy did in the 1970s; to treat them as second-class beings, as in Lebanon or Kuwait, or deem them unworthy, as the Egyptians do along that border that resembles the hyperbolic suture of an obsessed surgeon.

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Treasury sanctions Palestine Action, an Italian group, and Masar Badil for supporting acts of terrorism

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And between a dance that seeks to connect with the 1960s and a proclamation harking back to the 1930s, that much-touted morality rolls through the streets so often demonstrated… Like that game of marbles that everyone claims to remember and long for, that everyone claims to have played, but that no one plays anymore. "From the river to the sea" is the form in which that propaganda has taught so many Westerners to embrace suicide as if it were the elixir of Justice and Immortality: the engineering of consensus that Edward Bernays spoke of. The cultivation and glorification of credulity and folly.