American Jews are dealing with the reality of distressing Jew hatred, manifested by sporadic physical attacks and more prevalent verbal confrontations. Worse, it has become mainstreamed in the Democratic Party, with elected officials and prominent nominees unafraid to spew hatred against Jews poorly disguised as anti-Israel “activism.” Some of these Democrats are poor excuse for Jews, such as Bernie Sanders, while others, like Chuck Schumer, are so blinded by ambition that they pretend it doesn’t exist or rationalize its presence by blaming Israel.

Increasingly, this is becoming a viral strain in the Republican Party as well, engendering an insipid debate over who is or isn’t an anti-Semite, and ignoring its true causes. Why, indeed, has Jew hatred exploded in America and become commonplace across the world? Is it because of Gaza, as if Israel should have just accepted the October 7 massacre and the brutalization of its hostages, licked its wounds, and prepared for the promised, next massacre? Is it because the world has suddenly determined that Israel – alone among countries and Jews unique among nationalities – really has no right to exist? Burundi and Bhutan have an undisputed right to exist – but not the Jewish state of Israel?

That doesn’t seem credible, and for the apparently abrupt escalation in Jew hatred we must look elsewhere. As is often the case, history is quite instructive.

The United States was founded upon religious tolerance. Indeed, there were very few Jews living in colonial America (not many more than 1000 Jews lived there during the Revolutionary War), and Jews were treated well – better than well. In President George Washington’s famous letter to the Newport Hebrew Congregation in 1790, using language literally borrowed from Moses Seixas, Washington wrote:

“It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.”

Tolerance? No. Jews are no different than any other group in America and are not “tolerated” but fully accepted.

As such, Jew hatred was largely unknown for almost the first century of the United States. Sure, there were some states that took time eliminating electoral provisions that barred any non-Christians (i.e., Jews) from holding public office, and General Ulysses Grant temporarily banned all Jews from entering the Tennessee territory during the Civil War, but there were few recorded attacks on Jews and Jews lived essentially unimpeded lives.

Could this be attributable to the dearth of Jews in America?

Possibly, but not necessarily. There are plenty of Jew-hating countries in the world today where no Jews live. Jew hatred can flourish without Jews, as long as there are a sufficient number of Gentiles reared with this spiritual and psychological malady.

Even the large influx of German Jews to the United States in the mid-19th century did not provoke any Jew hatred, perhaps because they were generally assimilated, their temples and services reminiscent of churches, their day of rest not Shabbat but Sunday, and their intense desire to blend into American life, which they did quite successfully. In fact, there was far more fear and hatred of Catholics in 19th century America than there was of Jews.

Of the 300,000 Jews who lived in the United States in 1880, more than 200,000 were German Jews. But in the next forty years, more than two million European Jews came to America, such that by 1920, the Jewish population of the United States had increased tenfold, to over 3,500,000 people.

By the early 20th century, Jew hatred had become more common in the United States. Leo Frank was falsely accused of murder, freed, and then lynched. A host of Jewish “defense” organizations arose (they all still exist). Jews were hassled on the teeming city streets. The 1920’s university quotas and job restrictions limiting Jewish opportunities became standard and even persisted into the 1950’s when civil rights laws cracked down on private conduct that had any public nexus.

What changed? Was it the mass influx of Jews that attracted Jew hatred?

No – it was the mass influx of European Gentiles. While two million Jewish immigrants came to America in that period, that number was dwarfed by the more than twenty million Gentiles who came – Poles, Germans, Russians, Italians, Irish, Slavs, and others. These immigrants, arriving from lands where they imbibed Jew hatred with their mother’s milk, brought their Jew hatred with them.

Jew hatred was never indigenous to the United States. It was imported, along with these millions of immigrants. Some of it was religious based – Polish, Irish, Italian Catholics reared on Jew hatred in their native lands – and some of it was sociologically based. Some of these newcomers, the lowest tier on society’s totem pole, simply sought out an ethnic group long despised in their native land, and disparaged them, persecuted them, and harassed them.

In a very short time, this imported Jew hatred spread to the establishment as well, and Jews (and blacks) became conventional targets for discrimination. For Jews it didn’t last or even sting as much because we were successful, skilled at adaptation, ambitious, educated, social climbers, and blessed. Law firms, hospitals, and country clubs didn’t want us? We just made our own, and better ones too. And built businesses. And Hollywood.

In time, and the Holocaust played a role in this as well, Jew hatred receded from American life (although you wouldn’t know it from the billions of dollars spent for many decades combating it) and became unfashionable.

Jew hatred is again fashionable, and not because the culture changed, or Israel became too bellicose, or Netanyahu is unlikeable, or Jews are too successful. The same dynamic that swept America over a century ago has repeated itself in the last thirty years – the large influx of Muslims, especially radical Muslims, who have brought with them the endemic Jew hatred that characterizes their native lands.

Millions of Arabs and Muslims have immigrated to the United States in the last fifty years, many claiming refugee status because of the depraved conditions in their countries of origin. To be sure, not every Arab or Muslim is a rabid Jew hater (any more than all of the twenty million European Christians who came to the US were), and many have become productive citizens, embodying the American ethos. But many have not.

Armed with literal fortunes in money – donated by Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and other Muslim countries – they have poisoned the American bloodstream with their radical ideas, even insisting in some locales on the implementation of Sharia law. They have infiltrated local school boards and endowed university chairs, not surprising then that most Jew hatred in America has emerged on college campuses. Their culture is one of hatred of Jews and Israel, if not America itself. And it did not take long for some of their most radical imports – immigrants or children of immigrants, like Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Zohran Mamdani, and others – to achieve important political positions.

They did it very slyly, cleverly, and surreptitiously. Who would have thought that a radical Muslim NYC mayor could preside next month over the 25th anniversary of the Arab terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001? It is because their PR teams and useful idiots in the media immediately identified the major crisis in US life after 9/11 as “Islamophobia,” statistically insignificant as a social phenomenon but dominant and pervasive as a deflection. What better evidence than the universal hesitation to characterize the attacks of 9/11 as “Arab” or “Muslim”? Instead, it is just a date, 9/11, no perpetrators need be identified, for propriety’s sake.

Not only is “Islamophobia” used as a shield against exposing odious behavior on the part of Muslims, but it also rests on a fundamental hypocrisy. “Islamophobia” is premised on the reasonable idea that all Muslims should not be blamed for the detestable acts of a violent few, or even many. Yet, that same deference is not showed to Jews, who must be held accountable, hounded, beaten, attacked, vilified, and persecuted for the (righteous) acts of the State of Israel.

It is not just that “Islamophobia” is a crock of drivel as a real phenomenon, but rather that it is employed as armor against any criticism of even the most radical Muslims, and in turn is used as a weapon that has intimidated many Americans into silence and acquiescence in the transformation of their country.

Similarly, the infiltration of billions of petrodollars into the university system in the US has changed curricula and radicalized students. When American campuses erupted in anti-Jewish fury on October 8 (!), with spirited defenses of the Hamas massacre and vile accusations of genocide in Gaza even before Israel had responded militarily (!), these campuses had literally been preparing for years for just such a moment. Tents, signs, fences, loudspeakers resolutions had all be readied in advance, and pressure points against vulnerable Jews had already been identified.

And, just like a century ago, the Jew hatred that emigrated to America along with the Arabs and Muslims, slowly spread to other classes as well – including some American blacks and Hispanics (who are disproportionately assaulting Jews in NYC for no discernible reasons) and the old WASP class that has long resented Jewish success.

Undoubtedly, the Jew hatred in Europe over the last several decades has a similar provenance – the large, and until recently, unstoppable incursion of Arabs and Muslims into the UK, France, Belgium, Spain, Germany, and elsewhere. It is no surprise that all those countries, like the USA, has been visited multiple times by Arab mass terror attacks, and no surprise that Jews are repeatedly victimized there. The Jew hatred in Australia and New Zealand follows the same pattern – Muslim immigration that is accompanied by Muslim Jew hatred. But go ahead and blame Israel for it.

Is there a solution to this problem? A century ago, time played the largest factor and Jew hatred receded within several decades because of our prosperity and societal integration, each a divine blessing of sorts. But time may not be our ally here. And the hoary staples of outreach and dialogue will be of limited value when dealing with an entrenched, religious-based hatred, which is not to say it won’t be tried, and when it fails, tried again.

America is changing. Its establishment is reproducing itself far below replacement rates and thus it is becoming ever more distant from the Enlightenment roots that spawned the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution. Hence, the current demand of the Socialists to gut the Constitution, the product of dead, white, European males. Jews, who do have a homeland that will welcome them happily if they so choose, will mostly try to ride out the wave, making deals with the devil when necessary (including turning on Israel), and wondering why the US continues to elect more and more radical Jew haters rather than the pareve Protestants who made the US such a palatable home for so many for so long.

Is it possible that the children of radical Muslim immigrants will over time mainstream and Americanize, what once was the dream of every class of immigrants? It certainly is possible, but the early returns are not good. The children of radical Muslim immigrants are just as radical but they have sufficiently acclimated to American society to perceive how to attract votes, money, and support, how to camouflage the most despicable ideas behind the toothiest and oleaginous smiles.

Immigration changes every nation, and many for the better, the United States among them. But some types of immigration transform in ways that obscure the national purpose and obliterate the founding ethos. That is what has occurred in Europe and is occurring now in the United States.

This is one of the ways in which exiles come to an end.

Photo: Rabbi Steven Pruzansky, courtesy of the Coalition for Jewish Values

The newest kid on Israel’s political block, and this season’s general de jure, is Gadi Eisenkot, former IDF chief of staff and a relatively brief member of the wartime security cabinet. It has long been a tactic of the Israeli left to seek out a former general to lead its election campaigns in order to bolster its credibility on security matters, given its propensity for policies that weaken Israel’s security. And Eisenkot is what President Trump would call – and likely appoint – “right out of central casting,” tough-looking, son of Moroccan immigrants, career army man, and, most sadly, father of a soldier who fell in battle in Gaza. We all honor his service.

Nevertheless, most mature countries have moved away from the “general as president or prime minister” fantasy. The United States has not elected a general as president in almost 75 years (Dwight Eisenhower, in 1952) and only once since then has a general even competed for the presidency (Wesley Clark, in 2004). No other general has served as US president since the 19th century. No English general has served as prime minister in almost two centuries (the first Duke of Wellington). The general who assumes political power is the hallmark of banana republics.

Yet, many Israelis remain enamored with the general-turned-prime-minister model, and to our misfortune. As it turns out, the three greatest strategic blunders in the history of Israel were made by renowned generals who were elected prime minister.

It was PM Yitzchak Rabin, former IDF Chief of Staff acclaimed (rightly or wrongly) as one of the heroes of Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War, who foisted the Oslo Accords on the people of Israel in 1993. He thought that it was a grand idea to import into the heartland of Israel our sworn enemy, one with genocidal ambitions, and give them a governing authority and weapons.

What could possibly go wrong??

What went wrong was a wave of terror that left Israelis dazed and despondent, and thousands of Israelis dead and maimed.

Almost as egregiously, the Oslo Accords essentially announced to the world that the Land of Israel does not belong exclusively to the Jewish people. Since then, we have struggled to prove to the world that we are entitled to any part of the land of Israel. But Rabin was Mr. Security, being a former general, and Israelis bought it.

It was PM Ehud Barak, also a former IDF Chief of Staff, and lionized as “Israel’s most decorated soldier,” who orchestrated the withdrawal of the IDF from Lebanon in 2000 in the dead of night, abandoning our Lebanese allies to their fates and leaving behind enormous stores of IDF weapons. This was in response to the campaign of the “Four Mothers” who mobilized much of society against the IDF remaining in Lebanon and Barak’s strong conviction that the IDF could return to Lebanon at any time to deal with terror.

Well. Instead, the hasty retreat emboldened Hezbollah to conquer southern Lebanon, which it did in due course, and build the elaborate underground terror infrastructure that we are slowly and painfully dismantling.

Additionally, Israel has since been forced to fight several wars in Lebanon, extracting a far greater cost in life than the number of soldiers who were killed annually while the IDF still occupied southern Lebanon in the 1980’s and 1990’s. Barak’s tactical retreat was widely perceived by our enemies as a timorous surrender that has engendered even deadlier conflicts.

The failed Ehud Barak – who later served multiple terms as Defense Minister – was succeeded as prime minister by Ariel Sharon, one of Israel’s greatest generals and a genuine hero of the Yom Kippur War who crossed the Suez Canal into Egypt, turned the tide of war, and forced Egypt to its knees. And his legacy as Prime Minister was the forced expulsion of 9500 Jews in 2005 from Gaza and the northern Shomron and the destruction of two dozen thriving communities.

That folly, twenty-one years ago this week, occasioned the speedy takeover of Gaza by Hamas, the construction of another elaborate terror network through diversion of all the billions of dollars of international aid that flowed into Gaza, constant terror attacks on Israel, multiple rounds of fighting, and all culminating in the catastrophe of October 7.

It is worth noting that all the generals who became prime minister claimed to know better than others what would provide security to Israelis and what would endanger our existence. They also claimed that their withdrawals were all easily reversible and that, if the need arose, the IDF could simply retake the territory surrendered. No harm, no foul.

The opposite, of course, was true; grave harm resulted from multiple fouls, all self-inflicted. And the land that each purported to surrender to our enemies in order to safeguard our security – land originally conquered and held at a high cost in Jewish blood – has mostly been retaken by saner heads (non-generals) responding to reality and not fantasy. That land has been reconquered, and again at a high cost in Jewish blood.

What then qualifies Gadi Eisenkot to serve as prime minister, other than that he has been designated as leader of the ABB (Anyone but Bibi) sect? He could be the exception to the rule but his tenure as Chief of Staff was unremarkable, mainly remembered for Eisenkot’s advocacy of a “small and smart IDF,” an IDF that relied more on technology than on manpower, something that debilitated us on October 7 and thereafter.

He threw the book at Elor Azaria, provoking indecision among soldiers that factored into the deadly terrorist attack last Friday. His brief tenure on the wartime cabinet was also undistinguished, noted for his advocacy for the release of the hostages at any price and opposition to initiatives that actually worked. Apparently, he still supports the establishment of a Palestinian state and has suggested that we learn to live with an Iranian nuclear bomb. He also currently favors the immediate entry of 150,000 Gazans to work in Israel, as if that hasn’t been tried before with devastating results.

It is not often realized that generals might be brilliant tacticians on the battlefield but simultaneously awful geopolitical strategists. Those are completely different skill sets. The affairs of state require the ability to navigate multiple and often conflicting interests, and on both the domestic and international stages. Clichés aside, does Eisenkot have an economic or educational policy, an objective more comprehensive than “Israel must win,” a position on the dictatorial excesses of the Supreme Court, or a desire to do anything other than topple Netanyahu?

The failed Israeli generals-turned-prime-ministers also had tenuous commitments to democracy, and especially to the rights of minorities, as evidenced by Rabin and Sharon’s contemptuous dismissal of their opponents and settlers. After all, generals are used to giving orders and are not always amenable to the give-and-take of democratic governance. Harry Truman, who chose not to run against Eisenhower, predicted that his successor would have a hard time getting things done: “He’ll sit right here and he’ll say do this, do that! And nothing will happen. Poor Ike-it won’t be a bit like the Army.”

If only that would be our problem! Our problem has been not military leaders turned prime ministers getting nothing done but in getting the wrong things done. Our problem has been generals spearheading and bulldozing their (and our) way into strategic calamities that cost us dearly in lives, treasure, international standing, and the fulfillment of our destiny.

A mature society knows better than to expect tough-looking generals to be successful politicians. A Jewish society should know to find leaders who can advance our national, spiritual destiny, until we merit true leaders as we had in days of old.

Photo: Gadi Eisenkot by Elad Malka, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The era of the fabulists is upon us, those who possess an astonishing ability to assert alternate realities and spin fictional tales of accomplishment and conquest. It is hard to decipher what is happening around us. Is the ceasefire real? The Straits of Hormuz are still not fully navigable despite President Trump’s assertion that it is the condition precedent for a cease fire. Can a cease fire last?

Iran’s claims of victory recall – and how appropriate for this time of year? – the 3300 year old Merneptah Stele, in which Egypt’s Pharaoh, humiliated by the pain inflicted upon him by the G-d of Israel whose people were liberated from Egyptian bondage, recorded for posterity that “Israel is laid waste-its seed is no more.” Actually, it was Merneptah whose seed was no more.

It seems clear that everyone is lying.

Trump’s words generally bear a purely incidental relationship to reality. Iran was able to call his bluff because the more outlandish his threats, the less likely he is to carry them out. His increasingly bellicose texts revealed frustration that the Iranians were not bowing to his bullying. But the American interest in this war – certainly legitimate but never identical to Israel’s interests – peaked with the low-risk bombing of multiple Iranian facilities that surely has hampered Iran’s pursuit of weapons of mass destruction, although not ended it.

Iran, the evil, Jew-hating tyranny – an embarrassment to Islam – is devastated perhaps for years to come, despite its claims of victory. Its economy is shot, its proxies are scrambling to survive, it has antagonized its neighbors in the Persian Gulf, its weapons production facilities have been wrecked, and its reputation is in tatters. Despite the trillions of dollars it spent over many decades producing its deadly weapons, Iran can neither protect nor feed its own people. It survives on bluster and ruthlessness, its leaders hiding underground even as their henchmen continue to murder their own citizens.

Israel’s leaders paint the rosiest scenario and avow that the war will continue until all objectives are achieved. Indeed, despite the hatred-fueled denunciations of PM Netanyahu by Israel’s opposition parties, much has been achieved. The threats of Hamas and Hezbollah have not been neutralized but they have been severely diminished, which is not to say that they cannot be reconstituted. Yair Lapid’s wild assertions that Israel’s strategic position in the world is “catastrophic” is classic fabulism. Even by the standards of election year rhetoric, it is beyond hallucinatory. But our enemies do persist and will not disappear anytime soon.

Two dangers loom.

The first danger is the world’s (including the US) temptation to declare the Hamas and Hezbollah problems solved, Gaza to be rehabilitated even with Hamas present, Lebanon rebuilt with Hezbollah still active, and Israel to withdraw precipitously from Gaza and south Lebanon. One can already hear voices – across the world and on Israel’s delusional left – declaring that “now is the time to create a Palestinian state.” We would do well to adopt the Trump mantra of this week that “to the victor go the spoils” as well as to recall the follies of the past: “land for peace” cost us land conquered through the loss of Jewish lives and brought us not peace but a recurrence of aggression from the same places we surrendered.

The fabulists will try to tell us that “this time it will be different.” We should reject that as a non-starter, even at the risk of offending Witkoff, Kushner, and Qatar, as we should also reject a maintenance of the status quo. The lands we conquered should be settled with Jews. Our maps should be adjusted to reflect the new reality, otherwise we will just be repeating the same mistakes of the past.

Nations that allow their territory to be used as launching pads for attacks on Israel should lose that land in perpetuity. That is effective deterrence. No more, “sorry, we won’t do it again, at least not right away.” This will be Netanyahu’s real test, one that no amount of spin will allow him to dissemble and explain away. It is also the smart political move – in Israel, if not in DC or Paris.

The other danger is the US and the world community allowing Iran to retain effective control over the Straits of Hormuz, which seems in part to have happened already. The infusion of cash will buoy the Iranian economy and allow the Iranians to continue to sow trouble across the globe. The problem is that combatting this is not a primary interest of the US or Israel. Neither country uses Gulf oil. Sure, diminished access to the Straits will affect the world’s oil supply and ravage many economies if adjustments are not made. For example, the global price of oil is fixed and uniform and supply shortages in one place affect the price of oil everywhere. But why should that be, any more than there should be a fixed price for bananas or computer chips across the globe?

It is hard to see how Trump will risk American lives in order to reopen the Straits of Hormuz to oil tankers that do not benefit America. Nor should he; hence the empty bluster that led to Trump caving into a cease fire. The unspoken mystery here is where are the Gulf countries – the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, et al, countries that have literally spent hundreds of billions of dollars buying American arms? Why didn’t they bomb Iran, especially after Iran wantonly bombed them?

Despite the protestations of Jew haters in America that the US went to war for Israel, notwithstanding that the bulk of the heavy fighting and weakening of Iran was done by Israel, in retrospect it would seem that the US did the bulk of its fighting for the Arab states of the Persian Gulf. Chew on that, Tucker Carlson, one of today’s leading fabulists. They should be using their own military to open the Straits!

Other fabulists have been strangely silent in recent weeks. Those are the faux moralists who are quick to condemn Israel for alleged violations of the hoax known as international law, which seems to be a set of legal principles designed to ensure that the good guys can never win a war. (When I heard the other day that the Americans had a ready set of targets fully “vetted by lawyers,” I knew that a ceasefire was imminent and victory a pipedream.) I remember when Israel was condemned decades ago for using cluster bombs in Lebanon. Yet, when Iran used them extensively against us in the last few weeks, crickets. Where are the international courts and human rights activists?

Even worse, isn’t it odd that we have heard nothing in the last six weeks about the civilian-to-combatant casualty ratio? By my rough count, Iran killed only Israeli civilians, and not a single fighter. Where are these phony numbers crunchers now? I was a good student in algebra, but I do not even need a calculator to determine that is a ratio of 100% civilians, 0% combatants, the worst in all of recorded history, and yet… crickets. It is a good reminder that we should stop playing that foolish, macabre game, dismiss the algebra aficionados with the contempt and disdain they deserve, and just win wars.

The coming months present Israelis with great opportunities. A resumption of hostilities with Iran involving American forces is increasingly unlikely. It is more likely that Trump will claim that Iran has surrendered and agreed to his demands even if such has not occurred. What we can do is ensure that Iran’s proxies do not survive, and that Iran is unable to hide behind proxies in the future.

Proxy attacks on Israel should result in devastating attacks on Iran’s infrastructure. They should be held accountable for the belligerence of their agents as if they did it themselves. We are quite capable of defanging Hamas and Hezbollah – and if successful, Netanyahu will deserve all the accolades he will receive from fair-minded Israelis. If he does not succeed, well, then the last three years will be just the longest and deadliest of all the cycles of violence over which Netanyahu has presided during his long tenure, and that will be to his discredit.

Nevertheless, we should bear in mind one of the verities of Jewish history. Ultimate victory over all our foes is not ours, and true peace will await the coming of Messiah.

On the banks of the Red Sea, Moshe told our ancestors 3338 years ago (Shemot 14:13) to “stand firm and see G-d’s salvation that He will do for you today, for as you have seen Egypt today, you shall not see them, ever again.” But in fact, we have seen Egypt, many times since, from biblical times to the modern era. We have even fought them repeatedly. What then does the Torah mean?

One of the more recent biblical commentators, Umberto Cassuto, explained that we would never again see Egypt as invincible and intimidating, and all-powerful, an empire so indestructible that we cowered before it and were too paralyzed even to confront them.

That, too, is an outcome of this war that – even now – affords us courage and confidence. The bogeyman of Iran – with its countdown to Israel’s destruction clock in the heart of Tehran, with its furious and revolting rhetoric of hate against Jews, with its goal of Israel’s extermination the very reason for its existence – that Iran has been humiliated and degraded, its leadership dead or discredited, struggling to remain in existence.

That is a divine blessing for which we should give thanks – and that harsh reality should confound even the greatest fabulists among them.

Ambassador Mike Huckabee must have the patience of a saint; it is the only way to explain his serenity during his interview with Tucker Carlson. Huckabee was imperturbable, unflappable. Carlson, by contrast, has the demeanor of a deranged person, with a demonic laugh that erupts at inappropriate times for the oddest reasons. He speaks in spurts and flits from topic to topic without any coherence.

Carlson also has the inflated ego of the narcissist, bent out of shape because PM Netanyahu rejected his entreaties for an interview. Who is Carlson after all but a fired TV host who now has his own podcast like a million other people? Today he has many listeners because hatred sells but that well will eventually run dry. Other haters will compete for his audience, at least until they get real jobs that take up their time.

He is also quite scatterbrained. Huckabee is the US Ambassador to Israel; what connection does he have to Jeffrey Epstein or the Epstein files? None. So why badger Huckabee about them? As Ben Shapiro points out, Carlson is a devotee of the “Just Asking Questions” copout, by which Carlson normalizes nuts and haters of all stripes by interviewing them, asking questions but no follow-ups or challenges, thus allowing them to spew their hatred unconstrained by facts or decency.

Carlson has been forced to apologize for several wild statements, including his declared hatred for Christian Zionists but also for accusing President Herzog for befriending Jeffrey Epstein and visiting the infamous island. Herzog strenuously objected, claiming he never met Epstein even once (it is good to know that there are some Jews who had no dealings with Epstein), and Carlson apologized for his accusation that was entirely baseless and slanderous. So why make it?

It is fair to ask: how friendly was Tucker Carlson with Jeffrey Epstein? How much money did Epstein lend him? How many times did Carlson visit the island and are the reports of their close association true? I have no evidence at all – but I am Just Asking Questions. What a perverse game. It is a devious way of spreading lies without being accountable.

I believe Carlson when he says he is not an anti-Semite. Why would anyone have anything against Semites? What did the Semites ever do to offend anyone? But I do believe he hates Jews and Israel and his use of certain code words and phrases – almost one a minute – betrayed his animus.

Israel is a “police state.” Christians are persecuted. He is “paying” for Israel’s crimes through his tax dollars. Israel committed genocide on his dime and murders children. He is obsessed with Israel’s right to exist, as he is for no other country. The Israeli government “shields child molesters.” Netanyahu’s parents did not speak Hebrew (!). Netanyahu has no claim to the land of Israel because he is not religious. Carlson has no idea what “from the river to the sea” means. The United States went to war in Iraq because of Israel and for Israel, and Netanyahu was the one who talked George Bush into regime change in Iraq. (Alas, for Carlson, Netanyahu was not the Prime Minister of Israel then, nor during the entire Bush Presidency, and wasn’t even in government when Muslim Arabs – not Israelis – attacked America on September 11, 2001.)

There are more Christians in Israel than there are in Qatar (unlike Carlson’s assertion to the contrary) and unlike in Carlson’s patron Qatar, Israeli Christians are full citizens while Christians in Qatar are mostly not.

He did raise three questions for which he could have received better answers, not that his mind is open to answers. He is fanatically obsessed with the Law of Return, something that to him smacks of racism and rabid nationalism. To be fair, he contrasts that with America’s open borders until recently, but why blame Israel because the demographics of the United States and Europe are swiftly changing?

Carlson asked: what is a Jew? And what right do the Jewish people have to the land of Israel? Is Jewishness an ethnicity or a religious affiliation?

To the latter question, Huckabee properly answered “both,” not that Carlson could understand or would accept that. But it needs elaboration, as this is something that perplexes Gentiles. The Jewish people are a religio-nation. We have a dual identity, given to us by G-d. The Torah states (Shemot 6:7): “I will take you to be My people and I will be for you G-d.” We are both an ethnic group and a religion, and in both capacities we were granted a relatively small territory on earth in which we were mandated to build a holy state.

A Jew born of a Jewish mother, or converted according to halakha, is a Jew, a member of both the religion and the nation. We are heirs to the land of Israel through the Bible (as Huckabee pointed out repeatedly) and via international law and organizations (as Huckabee also pointed out repeatedly, to no avail.) In another whopper of an error, Carlson insisted that the Balfour Declaration was not enshrined in international law, apparently unaware that it was adopted by the League of Nations that awarded the mandate over the land of Israel to Britain on that basis.

But Carlson was also extremely mystified by Huckabee’s assertion of our biblical claims to the land of Israel, which, accordingly, should give Israel rights to all the land from the Nile to the Euphrates (we can call that “from the river to the river.”) Huckabee deflected – Israel is not claiming Jordan, Iraq, Syria, etc. – but there is a better answer. The Bible proposes several maps for the land of Israel. G-d delineated one for Avraham – from the river to the river (note that the “River of Egypt” does not necessarily mean the Nile). But at the end of Bamidbar (Chapter 34), the Torah spells out the borders of conquest that adhere more closely to Israel’s current borders, save for a sliver of land in southern Lebanon and east of the Jordan River. The conquest of Yehoshua resulted in still a third map that is different from the other two, and King David’s borders were even larger.

The truth is that the borders of Israel according to the Torah are somewhat fluid, much like the borders of the United States when independence was declared almost two centuries ago. The original thirteen colonies occupied territory mainly along the Atlantic coast but the US extended its borders to the Pacific Ocean and beyond in accordance with the “manifest destiny” it proclaimed. Of course, the only territorial “destiny” that is truly “manifest” is the divine one that bestowed the land of Israel on the people of Israel. And the Euphrates border? Consider that a Messianic vision – except, perhaps, if our neighbors to the east attack us and are defeated.

Carlson was also bewildered by the grant of land to the descendants of Avraham. How can they be defined? He even called for a DNA test, which Huckabee parried by saying that such would exclude righteous converts. He could have added that the Torah prescribes that only descendants of Avraham through Yitzchak share our covenantal mission and rights to the land of Israel (Breisheet 21:12, Nedarim 31a), by implication excluding descendants of Yishmael and Esav.

Asked to prove that Netanyahu is a Jew who shares in the covenant, Huckabee appropriately cited the Mesorah, and movingly portrayed the Jewish connection to the land of Israel through unending residence here, even after the destruction of the Temple; that we face Jerusalem in prayer wherever we are in the world (consider: Muslims praying in Israel literally turn their backs on Jerusalem and face Mecca); our adherence to the Torah and the Hebrew language; and our embrace of the covenant. Carlson was unmoved, if he was even listening.

Thus the Right of Return – vilified by Carlson – assures that the Jewish nation-state can survive. That vexes Carlson, who is untroubled by even more restrictive citizenship criteria in Japan, the Emirates, or his patron Qatar, all US allies, where the average immigrant can never become a citizen no matter how long they live there and even if they are born there. And Carlson fully embraces the classic lie – popularized but not invented by the Nazis – that we Jews are not the descendants of the real Jews of antiquity but imposters. Apparently, according to Carlson, Israel does not have the right to exist as a Jewish state because Jews simply do not exist.

Carlson was particularly angered by Huckabee’s meeting Jonathan Pollard, even terming him the “most dangerous spy in American history.” Really? Worse than Benedict Arnold? He uttered this bit of ignorance with an abundance of confidence, willfully unaware that Pollard was accused of spying for the Soviet Union by Aldrich Ames, to deflect attention from the person who was actually spying for the Soviet Union, whose name happened to be Aldrich Ames, who died last month after serving 32 years in prison.

Carlson also seemed blissfully unaware of the true nature of American aid to Israel. As the ambassador correctly pointed out, all of this money is spent in America and subsidizes the US arms industry. Furthermore, the US return on this investment is more than tenfold annually, in terms of intelligence Israel provides and the promotion of US interests in the region and beyond.

He could have added that the US has spent far more money maintaining bases in Germany and Japan eighty years after World War II, as well as provided Ukraine just in the last few years, than it has ever granted Israel. He clearly believes that any foreign aid is wasted money that should be spent in the US. That is a plausible but unconvincing argument, akin to claiming that his advertisers waste money because I will never patronize their products, so why are they paying him. But others will, and so advertisers assume there will be a return on their investment. The same principle applies to foreign aid to Israel, if not other countries.

Perhaps the most egregious and outrageous of Carlson’s ramblings is his moral equivalence between Hamas and Israel. True, he admittedly hates Hamas, but without admitting it, he hates Israel as well. Hamas slaughters people and Israel slaughters people. Huckabee tried to explain the difference between the assailant and the assaulted, the victimizer and the victim, but unsuccessfully, no fault of the ambassador’s. Carlson pronounced himself, as a Christian, opposed to all wars and violence. Really? Even the Revolutionary War? The Civil War? World War II? Does he not subscribe to the “just war” doctrine of the Christians, or is he an absolutist, a pacifist, who is intolerant of any violence at all?

In any event, Carlson’s abhorrence of violence, “as a Christian,” sounds tone-deaf to Jews considering our history as victims of anti-Jewish Christian violence, forced conversions, blood libels, and the like. The good news is that Jews and Christians have mostly reconciled in the last few decades; the bad news is that Carlson seems intent on reviving the classic Christian religious-based hatred of Jews.

In truth, I haven’t paid much attention to him in years but was urged to watch this interview. Carlson’s manner was maddening. He was tactless, argumentative, frenetic, manic, ignorant, quick to distort Huckabee’s words and repeatedly so, and unable to answer any of Huckabee’s questions. He presents as a tad disturbed.

I did learn two things. Mike Huckabee has exquisite patience and must have been a fine pastor. And Qatar Carlson, I mean Tucker Carlson, should be barred from future visits to Israel as a peddler of Nazi and radical Muslim ideology, an enemy of Jews and Israel, and – it will shortly become clear – the United States as well.

Cover Image: Tucker Carlosn by Gage Skidmore, Accessed via Flickr with CC BY-SA 2.0 Deed

It is high time we reconsider one of the most hackneyed clichés of our era – the one that claims that just because a person criticizes Israel does not mean he hates Jews. In its most concise form, it is the assertion that just because people are anti-Zionist does not mean they are anti-Jewish. It has become the most common defense of every anti-Semite in the world, at least for those who are looking for a defense.

This axiom has become so prevalent and harmful that we need to reformulate it. The truth is that just because people criticize Israel does not mean that they are not anti-Semites.

In fact, I would go as far as to say that anyone who criticizes Israel should be presumed to hate Israel and Jews. In legal terminology, let us call it a rebuttable presumption. We can safely assume that such people are anti-Semites, and if they challenge that conclusion, the burden of proof is on them. They must demonstrate love for Jews, notwithstanding their contempt for the Jewish state. And if they can’t, it speaks for itself.

I would love to hear their explanations.

Part of the double standard, or really lack of any standards at all, pertaining to people’s views on Israel, is the attribution by these haters of their disdain for Israel to Israel’s government, to decisions of PM Netanyahu, or Smotrich, or Ben Gvir, or the bogeyman of their choice. It is not that anyone is above criticism; it is rather that the criticism usually contains some dismissal of Israel’s leadership as if they are unrepresentative of the people who keep electing them, as if the democratically-elected government of Israel is somehow illegitimate and therefore Israel by extension is illegitimate.

I am hard-pressed to think of a comparable example across the world. There are people who despise Trump or Biden or Obama or Putin or Macron or Kim Jung Il and yet do not question the legitimacy of the countries they lead (or led).

Indeed, there is no other country on the planet whose “right to exist” is even a topic of discussion, much less negotiation. Certainly, no other country’s “right to exist” is considered a concession to be wrung from its enemies, if in fact that is even possible.

There are undeniable telltale signs of Jew-hatred masquerading as anti-Zionism. Obviously, the protesters roiling American streets and harassing its Jews don’t just hate Israel and its right to exist, but all Jews.

Consider the following anomaly: the fabricated fear of “Islamophobia” rests on the assumption that all Muslims should not be blamed for acts of terror committed by some Muslims (even if most terror in the world is perpetrated by Muslims and has been for many decades now). And that is a reasonable assumption even if the other Muslims are never asked to denounce and repudiate Islamic terror. We even created a new term – Islamist – to distinguish between the good and bad Muslims.

Curious, then, that the same courtesy is not extended to Jews. Our enemies – that is, these critics – enthusiastically and indiscriminately blame all Jews wherever they are in the world for the alleged crimes of Israel. That is bad enough, patently hypocritical, and worse when we consider that Israel’s alleged crimes are not crimes at all.

Thus, the most execrable of the Jew hater who claims he is only anti-Israel will whitewash the Hamas atrocities of October 7 by claiming that Israel deserved it. In other words, Jews deserve to be slaughtered – but Jews do not deserve the right to defend ourselves. The slightly more refined among these haters will declare that the Hamas massacre, rapes, and kidnapping were wrong, and that Israel has the right to defend itself – but not in the way Israel did. They do not really go into details and are nonplused when asked for alternative means of fighting an urban war against an enemy that in gross violation of international law used (and uses) its own people as human shields and held innocent civilians as hostages. They have no answers but just know that Israel did not do it the right way.

Yes, that is Jew hatred, and we should make no mistake about it.

Another clue as to the Jew hatred of these anti-Zionists is that “international law,” legal farce that it is, only works one way. It is a cudgel against Israel, and only Israel, and never seems to be applied to our enemies. Only Israel can violate international law, a shape-shifting doctrine that impugned every tactic Israel used and tried to rule out anything that could produce victory. And these foes accuse Israel of the very barbarism of which they are guilty – genocide (their fantasy solution to the Jewish problem) and starvation (which they inflicted on our hostages) – and moan about the devastation of Gaza (the bases and tunnels of terror built with billions of dollars of Western and Arab money).

And the most obvious evidence of the falsity of the claim that one can be anti-Zionist without being anti-Jewish is the utter rejection of Jewish nationalism. Zionism did not emerge in the abstract but is rooted in the Bible, which repeatedly addresses the covenant between G-d and the Jewish people that is founded on the Torah and the land of Israel. Any denial of the rights of the Jewish people to the Jewish homeland not only repudiates the Bible but seeks to nullify one of the pillars of Jewish life.

If someone claimed to have no animus towards Jews or the Torah but simply disavows Shabbat, circumcision, Kashrut, acts of kindness, etc., we would not say such a person is just anti-Torah. Such a person is anti-Jewish because they take the essence of Jewishness and render it meaningless. One who says “I love Jews but hate everything Jews stand for” actually hates Jews.

Nevertheless, there is a weak point in this argument, a self-inflicted wound that has caused us endless suffering. One of these haters might retort that he does not hate Jews, only Israel, and use as proof random articles and op-eds in Haaretz, or reports on most of Israel’s news stations, such as Channel 12. We may not like Al-Jazeera or the BBC, and with good reason, but the most anti-Israel invective, the most vulgar vilifications of Israel, are found in Haaretz.

Any anti-Israel, anti-Jewish media outlet could not do better than to simply cite passages from Haaretz and leave it at that. If all Tucker Carlson did was read Haaretz on the air every day, he would have more than enough material to satiate his most rabid listeners and vindicate his hateful views. Indeed, if our detractors just quoted Israel’s former, now-disgraced military prosecutor and her wild accusations against our soldiers, and just played her doctored video, (publicized and narrated by Gai Peleg of Channel 12) they would have enough ammunition to besmirch Israel to their satisfaction.

Does that make Haaretz anti-Zionist and anti-Jewish also? Well, yes, it does, and there is not much we can do about it. It has its audience – those disappointed in an Israel that is Jewish in practice, not just in name; those horrified by an Israel that takes the Torah seriously; those disgusted by Jews who wish to settle all of Israel, from the river to the sea, and see that endeavor as a fulfillment of the prophetic vision of the Bible; and those confounded by Jews who believe that G-d really exists and that the Torah is true. It is really a simple metric: if I read an anti-Israel article in Haaretz in some other newspaper, would I deem it anti-Semitic? If the answer is yes, then that is the reality.

And what about other anti-Zionist Jews, Neturei Karta and their ilk, whose hatred of the State of Israel is based on a misguided reading of Jewish sources? They, too, should be held to the same standard, a rebuttable presumption that they are anti-Jewish as well. One obstacle they would have to overcome is their seeming contempt for any Jews who are not exactly like them, but if they can rebut this presumption by showing their love for Jews but not Israel, I am all ears.

To be sure, one can criticize Israel’s government and its prime minister, its army, its media, and its judiciary, and not be guilty of Jew hatred – but from a place of love, a place from which the legitimacy of the country is not challenged.

Like it or not – and I don’t always like it – PM Netanyahu has found his way to power repeatedly, through free and fair elections. If anything, his waffling and vacillation, his unkept promises, frustrate his base even as they torment his adversaries.

Yet, the great biblical commentator Malbim notes (II Divrei Hayamim 9:8) that “the throne of Israel is G-d’s throne, and Israel’s king is the king ascribed to G-d.” PM Netanyahu may not officially be a “king of Israel,” song notwithstanding, although he has served more years as leader than most kings of ancient Israel and Judea served. But, as we know, people who are anti-America hate the United States regardless of who its leader is, and people who despise a particular leader do not usually then loathe the entire country. That sort of perverse ignominy is reserved for Israel.

We should not accept it and we should no longer be fooled by it. The dichotomy between anti-Israel and anti-Jewish is false. It is false in the media, on the campuses, and in the capitals of the world. If any other country in the world were as relentlessly criticized as was Israel, we would rightly assume that the critic has animus towards that country and its people. Those who claim to love Jews but hate Israel should prove it. My bet is that they cannot. And we who love Israel and Jews should give thanks both for the challenges and privileges of our generation, which – for all the current unpleasantness and the media loudmouths – previous generations would have loved to have.

Count us among the grateful – and those who stand with pride for the gifts with which we have been blessed as well as the opportunities to confound our enemies and bring redemption closer.

And always remember that just because people criticize Israel does not mean that they are not anti-Semites.

Arutz Sheva asked Rabbi Fischer’s good friend Rabbi Steven Pruzansky, שיבל”א, also a frequent and popular columnist on Arutz Sheva, to write an article in Rabbi Fischer’s memory. We have inserted a few details.

The Jewish world suffered a grievous loss with the passing on Monday after a long bout with illness of Rabbi Prof. Dov Fischer, beloved husband and father, Rav of the Young Israel of Orange County (Irvine, CA), attorney and law professor, author, and frequent much-read columnist for Israel National News as well as contributing editor at the American Spectator.

Rav Dov was an individual of great passion, courageous, intrepid, outspoken, keenly intelligent, and with a sublime gift of expression, sometimes profound and serious, sometimes subtly sarcastic and sometimes simply funny. He was a graduate of Columbia University, a musmach of Yeshiva University’s Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary, and earned his law degree at UCLA. For a time, he practiced high stakes litigation with two prominent law firms. He taught Torah in several venues – as a Rav in Jersey City and a Rebbe at Rogosin Yeshiva High School in his youth, and then in California, with a plethora of his shiurim on YouTube.

As a Rav, he was noted for his pastoral sensitivity, his kindness, his enthusiastic commitment to kiruv, and his desire to bring love and observance of Torah to every Jew. A multi-dimensional personality whose days were filled with service to the Jewish people, he at one time also served as National Director of the JDL, as the head of Likud USA, as Vice-President of the Zionist Organization of America, and on the Executive Committee of the Rabbinical Council of America.

In addition to his numerous articles, he wrote two books in the 1980s – “Jews for Nothing,” about the assimilation crisis, and “General Sharon’s War Against Time Magazine.” At the time of his death, he was in the final stages of publishing a commentary on the Chumash.

What was Rav Dov like? He was a born contrarian, as evidenced by his being a Yankee fan in the heart of his native Brooklyn, then the home of the Brooklyn Dodgers, and maintaining his allegiances even on the West Coast. His passion for truth led him to publicly challenge any deviation from Orthodoxy, including Open Orthodoxy, meticulously highlighting every errant innovation and routinely calling on the rabbinic world to speak out and defend the truth of Torah.

His frustration with the tendency of established rabbinic organizations to avoid controversy even to the detriment of Torah, Israel, and the Jewish people led him a decade ago to become one of the founders of the Coalition for Jewish Values, an public policy organization of over 2000 Orthodox rabbis. At his passing, Rav Dov was Vice President of the organization.

His truth was served on a platter of no compromise, although he took great pains to keep his relationships with those with whom he disagreed professional and never personal. As professor at two California law schools, he was voted several times the “most popular professor” by his law students and became a mentor to a generation of aspiring attorneys. Unbeknownst to the general public, Rav Dov was also a mentor and legal advisor to numerous rabbis, helping them negotiate their contracts and navigate issues with synagogue boards, and all pro bono.

Visitors to Israel National News were avid readers of his columns, which combined fierce advocacy for Israel with a remarkable range of sources, anecdotes and allusions. A typical article could contain Torah insights, political analysis, and arcane references to Seinfeld, movies, books, and legal theories. He was quite open about his personal life and medical issues in recent years, which provided his readers with a close personal connection. When his beloved wife Ellen died of a brain tumor, he shared his grief with readers, and when the lung transplant he underwent necessitated constant medical care, he joked with them about how little time he has to write and lecture.

As columnist for the American Spectator, he brought to the American public Jewish ideas and values to which most had theretofore never been exposed. Most assumed that all Jews were liberals because that is how the general media monolithically portrayed Jews. Rav Dov opened them to a new and more accurate understanding of Torah and Judaism and, in the eyes of many, redeeming the Torah from the prevalent misconceptions.

As readers of Arutz Sheva (and the Spectator) knew, Israel was a special passion. Notwithstanding an unsuccessful attempt at Aliyah in the 1980’s (a contractor took his money, and that of his fellow residents in their new Yishuv in the Shomron, and declared bankruptcy, leaving them all impoverished and necessitating his move to California), he retained a lifelong love of Israel and always dreamt of returning.

Rav Dov was a classic Religious Zionist – believing with all his heart and soul in the State of Israel as the fulfillment of the prophetic vision of our return to the land after a long exile. He called out specific Israeli politicians for their poltroonery, their fecklessness, and often their lack of Jewish pride as evinced by the policies they implemented and the dangerous concessions they made – such as the Oslo Accords and the Expulsion of Jews from Gaza.

This candor was atypical of most rabbis of his generation, who preferred to take positions within a broad consensus so as not to antagonize anyone who disagreed – but who also then abdicated even the pretense of leadership. Rav Dov was not afraid of detractors. He confronted them and was always willing to debate them (some of his debates dating back decades can be found on YouTube). In debate he was polite but firm, and his arguments often left his interlocutors grasping for answers, and longing for a commercial break. He was a master orator and teacher, and until just last month, despite his ill health, he was still giving Zoom shiurim to his congregants in Irvine and elsewhere.

Rabbis are not always emotional – but many of our rabbinic colleagues are crushed by this loss. They speak of him as the heart of Klal Yisrael, a Rav of tremendous dedication, mesirut nefesh, possessed of an unmatched generosity of spirit, an intellectual giant, a gift of articulation, with a very sharp, incisive, and infectious sense of humor. He had a soft spot for the underdog, the oppressed, the mistreated, and the disadvantaged. His fervent love of Torah morality did not at all limit his ability to relate to people of all backgrounds, faiths, and disparate belief systems.

It is often an overused cliché to assert that someone is irreplaceable, but Rav Dov is truly irreplaceable. The influence he had on countless Jews, the joy he brought to his teaching of Torah, the shaping of hearts and minds about Israel, Judaism, and the Jewish people, can not be replaced. It can only be emulated – by rabbis of courage, vision, and resolve. His voice has been stilled but Rav Dov left a legacy of lessons, learning, and leadership that will continue to inspire generations to come.

Yehi Zichro Baruch.

Just days after we read in the weekly haftarah, “your demolishers and destroyers shall go forth from you” (Yeshayahu 49:17), as if on cue, a group of rabbis – many of whose leftist credentials are more solid than their Orthodox ones – castigated the State of Israel for its conduct of the war in Gaza and held the government responsible for preventing “mass starvation” in Gaza. It was less a statement of “moral clarity” than a repulsive moral muddle.

Their statement was released – again, with impeccable timing – just days before we read another suitable, and quite relevant, biblical passage, about those who distort the Torah’s message and bring harm on our people. “If there arises in your midst a [false] prophet or dreamer, and he gives you a sign or a wonder, and the sign or the wonder of which he spoke to you comes to pass, saying, “Let us go after other gods” which you have not known “and let us serve them”, you shall not listen to the words of that prophet or to that dreamer of dreams, for Hashem your God tests you to know whether you love Hashem your God with all your heart and with all your soul” (Devarim 13:2-4).

The “signs and wonders” of these modern distorters of Torah are their credentials, organizational affiliations, and popularity with the anti-Torah media. And their message? Love your enemy, a very Christian approach, at least in theory but never in practice, but not Jewish at all. Embracing the libels of our enemies, the fake starvation claims. Assuming – without a shred of evidence – that Gazans are mostly good people whose desire for a bucolic life has been hijacked by Hamas and imperiled by Israel. Add warmed-over leftism, which they substitute for the truth of Torah in many areas of life but have now injected into our fight for survival against a brutal enemy whose war and Jew hatred they are aiding and abetting.

Does Israel – does any country – have an obligation to feed an enemy population in wartime? As columnist Marc Thiessen wrote recently in the Washington Post, “Far from deliberate starvation in Gaza, Israel is doing something no nation has ever done, or even been expected to do: Feed the population of the aggressor force that attacked it while the war is still going on.

“There is no historical precedent for a military providing the level of direct aid to an enemy population that Israel has provided to Gaza,” John Spencer, chair of urban warfare studies at West Point’s Modern War Institute, recently pointed out. The United States did not feed Germany and Japan while the war was going on; we forced their armies to surrender and then fed their populations.”

One will search the Torah and all of Jewish literature in vain for any notion that Jews are obligated to feed our enemy in wartime. Indeed, the book of Devarim – and subsequent works of the Bible – teaches us how to wage war: “you shall besiege the city” (ibid 20:12), which the Vilna Gaon explained to mean, “even to starve, thirst, kill, etc.” (Aderet Eliyahu). This is how wars end. That induces the vanquished to surrender. It defeats the purpose of a siege if we feed our enemies.

So, which of their “deepest Jewish values” are they accessing in calling for nourishing our enemy? None, and that is the problem. It is not a Jewish value, and as Col. Spencer makes clear, it is not even a non-Jewish value. It is a leftist value, which has been mispresented and counterfeited as a Jewish value.

That distortion cannot be allowed to stand. The false prophets and dreamers of the Torah are those “who spoke perversions against God” (ibid 13:6), presenting as authentic something “that was never created and never existed” (Rashi), attributing to God things that He never said (Sforno). Good intentions do not excuse rank heresy and fabrications of Torah. How do we fight our wars? Actually, similar to how other nations have historically fought wars: “until submission” (ibid 20:20), until the enemy is completely subdued and docile. This is how wars end. If these rabbis do not like that, their “grumblings are not against us, but against Hashem” (Sh’mot 16:8) and His Torah.

The rabbis chastise Israel for our “blanket suspicion of the entire population of Gaza – children included – tarnished as future terrorists.” Yes, and on what basis do they assume that this is untrue? That has been Gaza’s history for almost eighty years, and terror emanating from Gaza was a constant from 1948-1967 while it was occupied by Egypt, from 1967-2005 after it was liberated by Israel, and from 2005 until today, when it had self-rule.

Gazans are past terrorists, present terrorists, and future terrorists, and if there is evidence to the contrary – such as Gazans who accepted Israel’s offer of $5M and free passage out of Gaza to anyone providing information leading to the release of any Israel hostage – it should be proffered by these rabbis and other apologists. However, no Gazan accepted Israel’s offer. Many atrocities on October 7 were committed by alleged civilians, and many of our hostages were held for months by alleged civilians.

For what reason, therefore, are we expected to nourish the next generation of terrorists? Granted, the statement of “moral clarity” did not include even one Torah value, but if these “rabbis” were remotely sensible, and even slightly compassionate, they would be encouraging the evacuation of these Gazans to parts of the world that are not infested with terror and where they could have decent lives freed as much as possible from the Jew hatred on which they have been reared for generations. Instead, they willfully falsify the Torah, sentence these Gazans to a future of misery and Israelis to unending terror.

Worst of all, these “rabbis,” most of whom live outside of Israel, and some who arrived in Israel yesterday or the day before, have bolstered our enemies and endangered Jewish lives here and across the world by adopting our enemies’ propaganda and libels. Already, the “rabbis” statement has been picked up by the Arab press, by the European media, and by our global haters. When young Jews are harassed on campus, their tormentors will wave in their faces the declaration of the “rabbis.” It would have been disgraceful to adopt the enemy line if the accusations were true; it is truly contemptible when the accusations are false.

Since human nature never changes, it would not surprise me if there were French rabbis who supported the French military and joined the attacks on Alfred Dreyfus. After all, Dreyfus was convicted (twice), it was dutifully reported in all the newspapers of the day, and newspapers always just fairly report the news that is fit to print, and perhaps they wanted to be seen as good Frenchmen.

“Rabbis Against Israel” is no different than “Rabbis Against Dreyfus.” In each case, the “rabbis” accept the words of our enemies and blame the Jew, or Jews. Same with the repetition of the enemy libel against the settlers of Judea and Samaria. Shameful, and truly the fulfillment of the rabbinic dictum that “he who is merciful to the cruel will eventually be cruel to the merciful” (Kohelet Raba 7:16).

Calling “rabbis” destroyers, false prophets, and dreamers is unpleasant, especially as the month of Elul is upon us. Yet, we are also taught (Berachot 19b), “wherever there is desecration of God’s name, one does not show respect even to the Rabbi.” When “rabbis” can proclaim that “our traumatic history of being victims of persecution” demands compassion and support for our enemies, their cheapening of Jewish suffering deserves no respect. Were Jews ever persecuted because we wantonly slaughtered innocent Gentile civilians? Raped women? Beheaded the elderly? Threw babies in ovens? Is that why we were persecuted, such that those experiences should inform our response to being invaded, massacred, and kidnapped? Such a statement is outrageous, insulting, absurd, and unworthy of anyone who would call himself (never mind, literally, herself) a “rabbi.” Shameful.

The line from shameful to despicable is crossed when we realize that the statement of these “rabbis” made no mention – NONE! – of the only people known to be starving in Gaza – our hostages. These are “rabbis”? It says everything we need to know that their exclusive concern is the wellbeing of our tormentors and their fake claims of starvation and not all our emaciated and tortured brethren being held against their will by a cruel, barbaric, and savage enemy elected to power by the very people they are demanding we feed.

And when the Chillul Hashem (Desecration of God’s Name) is compounded by the danger these rabbis have inflicted on the Jewish people, silence is impossible. Yes, they are “dreamers,” dreaming of a world of peace, brotherhood, and wealth for all, but we are not there, and only fools presume to act upon their dreams in a hostile world. I don’t doubt for a second that these “rabbis” were among the dreamy supporters of Oslo and the Gaza Expulsion, which helped foist these nightmares upon us.

The harm they inflicted on Israel and the Jewish people is incalculable, but here is some advice to these “rabbis.” You feel for the poor Gazans? Go feed them yourselves! Talk is cheap. If you really care, grab some boxes of pitot, and bottles of water, and go to Gaza. Go every day. But don’t go to the distribution centers – more food is in Gaza today than before the war. No, that would be too easy. Go to the encampments, go house to house, go tent to tent. Even better – go from tunnel to tunnel, bring food to our enemies, and maybe give some nourishment to our hostages whose plight – and absolute innocence – you ignore.

Certainly, no harm will befall you, because the Gazans, as you see it, are good and decent people who only want peace and tranquility, and who love everyone, and especially Jews. We will arrange safe passage for you into Gaza. As for getting out, you can rely on your kind hearts, your belief that all people are basically good, and your dreams of a better future. If you are confident in your moral standing, go to Gaza!

It might work, especially because our enemies love Jews who turn on Israel, always have, and unfortunately there is no shortage of them. Sadly, the people who will most notice your attacks on Israel are those who hate us. As for good Jews, and those trying to win a war against a pitiless, inhumane enemy to better protect our future, let us pray that they just ignore you. Enough with “rabbis” so farcically concerned about our souls that they cavalierly jeopardize our bodies.

The good news, as always, is that these types of “rabbis,” leaders, and thinkers have always existed, and we have survived their musings, their foolishness, and the damage they cause. In a world where every Tom, Dick, and Harriet claims to be a rabbi, we just have to choose our spiritual guides with caution and always assess their words through the prism of the Torah, whose divine values are eternal and unchanging.

Photo Credit: Israel Foreign Ministry

The Jewish people are unfortunately no strangers to blood libels. From the Middle Ages until quite recently, Jews were routinely and falsely accused of murdering Christian children for their blood. To say that there was never a shred of evidence is an understatement. The motivations were simply Jew hatred and occasionally the attempt to cover up the crimes of others. So too with today’s blood libels of genocide, starvation, etc.

In truth, the Israeli government does itself no favors by arguing in the alternative, sometimes forcefully declaring that “there is no starvation in Gaza” and other times asserting equally forcefully that “if there is starvation in Gaza, it is all the Hamas’ fault.” Both might be true but taken together are unpersuasive, dramatically affect Israel’s standing in the world, and bolster our worst enemies. “Arguing in the alternative” is a legitimate legal tactic but a public relations nightmare. Which is not to say that truth has any currency in the global marketplace.

It is a question for the ages. The most superficial and disingenuous of our detractors claim that today it is because of the war in Gaza, the (outrageously false) allegations of genocide, starvation, and torture, all of which blithely and maliciously ignores that Hamas attacked us on October 7, 2023, raped, murdered and ravaged our people and homes, holds and tortures the hostages, and still clings to its fantasy of destroying Israel and murdering every Jew in the world.

A good question to ask these detractors – including those nations like France, Britain, Spain, Canada, and others now jumping on the derailed train of Palestinian Arab statehood – is: when Hamas avows to destroy Israel, what part of that do you not understand?

This recognition of something non-existent – should we condemn Britain for shielding the Loch Ness monster? – is both farcical and cynical. It recalls Arafat’s vacuous declaration of statehood in 1988. There was a Palestinian Arab state in Gaza, run by Hamas. They did not use the instruments of statehood to better the lives of their voters but used the billions of dollars provided them by Qatar, Turkey, and Western countries to construct a complex terror infrastructure that can murder Jews and advance Hamas’ desire to obliterate the Jewish state.

For all their sophistication, these nations today reflect the modern face of Jew hatred. They do not hold Israel to a double standard but to impossible standards, standards fabricated only for us. These standards include:

-the unprecedented obligation to feed your enemy during wartime,

-the directive to conduct a war without killing enemy civilians,

-the utter disregard of Hamas’ use of civilians as shields including embedding their terror infrastructure within the civilian population,

-the rejection of the use of what they term “disproportionate” force (the typical way wars are won is by the application of disproportionate force by the eventual victor),

-the refusal to evacuate Gazan refugees to safer habitats (as is their right under international law),

-the distinction made between a government and the people who elected it, and

-the lack of any demand that Hamas surrender, which is often the way a defeated party concedes a lost cause.

Instead, these countries, which deem themselves cultured, refined, and in the vanguard of Western civilization, create impossible standards that no sane country would follow, and then seek to reward our enemy with statehood. And if a Palestinian Arab state would then use its newfound independence to attack Israel, I can hear the world faintly (and cynically) saying “oops.” And if G-d forbid Israel is overrun, they will say “double oops,” and veer to a one-state delusion in which Jews live under Arab rule.

That is genuine, unvarnished hatred of Jews and Israel, regardless of their empty protestations of good will and love of peace. Every time the world cries “starvation” and “genocide,” our leaders would do well not negotiating, explaining, or conceding, but just keep reiterating “free our hostages,” “let Hamas surrender,” and “Europe, admit Gazan refugees.”

We should be saying that over and over, rather than weakening our war effort and strengthening our enemies and their supporters. And if we won the war, and Hamas was utterly defeated in Gaza, the entire dialogue with these countries would change.

Still, what is the source of this relentless hatred? It is not the existence of Israel, because as the Holocaust reminds us, they also hated us when there was no Israel. They hated us when they called us “rootless cosmopolitans,” a danger to civilization, and hate us now that there is a Jewish state, and still call us a danger to civilization. What gives?

A number of reasons present.

First, the Muslim takeover of Europe. Europe as a civilization is dying, besieged by Muslim immigrants with a culture and value system that is unassimilable, condescends to Europe’s self-image as enlightened, and perceives Europe as ripe for Islamizing. Every country now supporting the creation of a Palestinian Arab state has been victimized by mass Islamic terrorist attacks. Their leaders are scurrying to save their societies, but time and numbers are against them. A Britain where for years the most popular boy’s name is Mohammad will not for long be a supporter of Israel or benevolent to its own Jewish population. France, Germany, Spain, and other countries are not far behind.

Second, all these countries that are suddenly advocating for a Palestinian Arab state are governed by leftist parties. France, Spain, Britain, Canada (even Germany, which has a right-leaning government but whose leftist party gives it a majority in the Bundestag) are all ruled by leftist, secular, progressives. Several of those countries had right-wing, pro-Israel governments until recently. Who is not jumping on this tendentious bandwagon? Poland and Hungary (also, neither admit Muslim immigrants), Greece, Italy, and other countries that are ruled by right-wing governments. Canada’s last right-wing government supported Israel, Italy’s last left-wing government was antagonistic. It is as simple as politics.

And make no mistake about it: if Kamala Harris had defeated Donald Trump, the United States would be standing alongside Europe in its effort to carve up and dismantle the Jewish state. Senator Tim Kaine, Hillary Clinton’s running mate, opined recently that the United States committed itself to a Palestinian Arab state in 1947 (!), and has failed to deliver on its promise, obviously oblivious to the Arabs’ rejection of that Partition Plan including the war launched against Israel in 1948 and several times thereafter.

What is it about left-wing, secular, progressive governments that they find such fault with Israel?

The answer is that Israel stands for everything they reject. They reject nationalism and they repudiate religion, and Israel is a Jewish state, indeed the Jewish nation-state. Double whammy. They reject the Bible as a source of anything, they reject truth as a fixed concept, they reject morality as an objective entity. Everything about Israel will bother them. Then, throw in their embrace of the fallacy that Israel is a white, colonialist state – Israel is actually majority non-white as these racial bean counters would see it and anyway, one cannot possibly colonize one’s own land – and this endless, unsatiable enmity persists and grows stronger.

If you ask, what about the dozens of Muslim countries in the world that are founded on their version of religion and nationalism, why doesn’t that bother these progressives? The answer is, see reason one.

This secular progressive ideology afflicts many leftist Israelis as well and they struggle to articulate what right we have to this land. And many of these are the same Jews who – for the first time in Jewish history – have joined the blood libel against their own people and parrot the accusations of genocide and starvation.

Third, Europe is in the last stages of purging itself of any residue of Holocaust guilt. Germany may have been the prime mover of the Holocaust but there is no European country that is not stained with the blood of six million Jews, either through acts of commission or omission. That is why Holocaust imagery is so rampant in discussing the war in Gaza:

Israel is committing “genocide,” the word coined to describe the murder of Jews during the Holocaust; Israel has turned Gaza into a “concentration camp; Israel is intentionally “starving” innocent Gazans, you know, like the Nazis did to the Jews in the ghettos and concentration camps; and any attempt to relocate Gazans out of the war zone in which they live – out of the territory which has now been mostly reduced to rubble – is termed “ethnic cleansing,” you know, like the Nazis did to the Jews.

The Holocaust weighed heavily on European consciences. That burden started to lighten after the Six Day War, and when the Palestinian Arab statehood movement was created shortly thereafter – a way of destroying Israel not through war but through “human rights, self-determination, freedom” and other fine-sounding nostrums – Holocaust guilt swiftly receded. Of course, combining those worthy values with terror and violence, they assumed, would make an unstoppable winning combination.

That is where we are today – we are expected to provide every possible human right to our enemies in order to facilitate their murdering us.

Holocaust guilt is gone, and it is aided by Europe’s unquenchable thirst to see Israelis as Nazis, which not only assuages their guilt but leads many to conclude that we had it coming to us. Thus, they want to believe that Jews would wantonly starve and murder innocent people, which is why Hamas’ blood libel has gained enormous currency across the world, and so rapidly.

Fourth, and probably most importantly, we are living the biblical notion of “a people that dwells alone and is not reckoned among the nations” (Bamidbar 23:9). We are different, a nation apart. As a nation, we too are unassimilable, but we do not spread mayhem and violence across the globe. This hatred of us is irrational because it is self-destructive to the haters, but it is also ultimately inexplicable. It wells up from some unknown source in order to remind us that while we are set apart in order to better mankind, to bring G-d’s truth and morality to all, we nevertheless have our own destiny. Our history has a purpose.

What bothers them most – and they can not articulate it – is that we are experiencing the realization of all the biblical prophecies. The prophets warned frequently about our impending exile and destruction because of our sins but then assured us repeatedly of our eventual return to the land of Israel and Jewish sovereignty thereon.

That is what we are living through today with all the vicissitudes, the wars, the terror, the hatred, the miracles, and the rebirth. This must confound them and give them no rest because it undermines every progressive idea and shatters every secular shibboleth. It should not be surprising that Operation Rising Lion – the swift and miraculous reversal to Iran’s nuclear program designed to destroy us – was quickly followed by accusations against us of genocide and starvation and the desperate need for a Palestinian Arab state. It does not matter which terrorist thugs lead it or what they want to do with it. Its most important feature is that it can function as a brake on the fulfillment of Jewish destiny.

We have so much to offer the world, which in fact is starving. As Amos the prophet intoned (8:11) several millennia ago, “Behold, the days are coming, says the Lord G-d, that I will send a famine in the land, not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of G-d.” Western culture is decadent and Western societies are collapsing, disinclined to reproduce, unwilling to fight for its survival. And so, they hate us and attack us, and find therein some purpose, a cause, however corrupt and venal.

That will be to their everlasting shame. As for us, proud of our heritage and confident in our destiny and the divine promises to us, we should not falter or fumble, hesitate or stumble, but march enthusiastically to our destiny, reclaiming and rebuilding every part of our land, from the river to the sea, imbuing it with holiness and Torah, and awaiting the final redemptive act from Above.

Photo credit: Sticker Opposing Antisemitism in Ealing by Doyle of London, with CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license on Wikimedia Commons

]]> https://coalitionforjewishvalues.org/2025/05/rabbi-steven-pruzansky-in-israel-national-news-the-peoples-republic-of-israel/ Fri, 02 May 2025 12:23:03 +0000 https://coalitionforjewishvalues.org/?p=28649 originally published in Israel National News

Opposition leader Yair Lapid warned last month that “the crazy incitement” he alleges emanates from the government will lead to “political murder,” especially against failed Shin Bet head Ronen Bar. “We are on the way to another disaster. This time it will come from within… Jews will kill Jews.”

Lapid’s threats should be taken seriously, although not for his stated reasons. It is because this pattern of the left inciting, fomenting, and committing acts of violence – and then blaming it on the right-wing – has a fairly long history in Israel.

While the identity of the murderers of pre-state Zionist leader Chaim Arlosoroff (assassinated in June 1933) remains a mystery, the Labor movement was quick to blame the Revisionists for the violence. The three charged were all eventually acquitted, but one of the open theories of some historians is that Arlosoroff was murdered, not by the right, but to eliminate him as a political threat to his Labor Party rivals.

This would not be the first time the Hagana had committed a political assassination, having murdered Haredi spokesman Jacob de Haan in 1924. This technically remains an “unsolved murder,” although Hagana member Avraham Tehomi admitted decades later that he murdered de Haan on orders from above – and felt no guilt about it. We will likely never know the full story.

Fomenting violence and blaming the right-wing reached its apogee in the year preceding the assassination of PM Yitzchak Rabin in 1995. As reported in devastating detail by Shimon Riklin in his recent Channel 14 documentary (a must see, ed.), the Shin Bet repeatedly tried to incite violence from Jews in Judea and Samaria, including setting them up with weapons, choosing “targets,” and then intervening at the last moment. It even dispatched its agent, Avishai Raviv, to infiltrate the “settlers” (he even married, under false pretenses, an unsuspecting woman), instigate violence, and encourage Rabin’s assassination. Raviv infamously held up a poster at a right-wing rally depicting Rabin in an SS uniform, all so that the Labor Party could blame Netanyahu and the Movement to Settle Judea and Samaria (spearheaded by Rabbi Tzvi Yehuda Kook zts”l) for this staged atrocity.

When the head of the Shin Bet’s (“anti”-) Jewish Division was recorded as saying about the youthful settlers that “we arrest these shmokim without any evidence at all,” (a recording that came to light only recently), he was escalating this tactic. Imagine arresting people on no grounds and no evidence, simply because you think the state has granted you such power, when it has not.

The Division Head has since suspended himself, whatever that means, but in a functioning democracy, he would already be behind bars. That is unlikely in the extreme. And, as is well known, the Shin Bet has tortured Jews in order to extract confessions, genuine or not. For this, it pays no price, legal or political.

It is in this context that Lapid’s warnings should be perceived. If he speaks of the threat of imminent violence, it is all to prepare the ground for left-wing violence that can be imputed to the right-wing and then bolstered by a flood of echo chamber reports from the left-wing media. It also renders comically, absurdly hollow, Ronen Bar’s contentions that he is above the law and cannot be fired, fired because he has devoted himself to defending Israel’s democracy. And, having been fired, he announced that he will instead resign, on his own timetable, once he is assured that he can designate or approve of his successor. It is good to be the king, or at least to act like you are the king because the legal establishment is in your corner.

This is the stuff of secret police forces in brutal dictatorships.

The more Israel’s self-appointed guardians of democracy – the secret services, the judicial establishment, and the mainstream media – trumpet their commitment to the people’s well-being and to the survival of Israel as a democracy, the more suspicious we should be of their real motives.

When journalists can be casually arrested, like the editor of the Jerusalem Post or the videographer of Riklin’s Shin Bet documentary, without major protest or backlash, we have entered dangerous territory. No one who espouses the “wrong” views is safe, to which even the Prime Minister can attest. He has been investigated for more than a decade and on trial for almost half a decade.

The weaponization of the legal system against disfavored individuals has long been a staple of autocracies but sadly has become common in putative democracies as well, such as Israel and the United States. Power – its uses and retention – is that seductive, and invariably corrosive. The legal system can always get someone for something and there is little downside in trying and no consequence even if a frivolous prosecution fails.

Beware of those who deign to speak in the name of the people or democracy, especially when they repeatedly lose elections (presumably the voice of the “people” and the instrument of “democracy”). Most dictatorships identified themselves as “People’s Republics,” such as today’s “People’s Republic of China.” For good measure, the world’s most tyrannical dictatorship (North Korea) is self-styled as the “Democratic People’s Republic of Korea,” whereas Algeria reverses its titles (the “People’s Democratic Republic of Algeria”).

Is anyone fooled by this? For sure, people who disdain elections and the rule of law while simultaneously crowing about preserving democracy and the rule of law are hazards to true democracy.

For clarity’s sake, will the media, military, and judicial elites soon rename our country the “People’s Republic of Israel” or the “People’s Democratic Republic of Israel”? Sadly, the elements are all there – a secret police leadership that is beyond control of the politicians, a judicial system that literally composes and enforces its own laws, chooses its members, prosecutes citizens arbitrarily, and is beholden only to the world views and values of the individual judges and prosecutors, and a media that is an organ of the state when the left is in power and a useful tool of the opposition when, as has been the case for most of the last fifteen years, the right-wing heads the government.

Add to this the continuous blandishments that “the prime minister is a danger to the security of the state!” and we see the groundwork being laid for an attempted coup. Can it be averted? It would behoove PM Netanyahu, currently protected by the Shin Bet, to seek protection from another force, much like in the US where the Secret Service is not a branch of the FBI but rather part of Homeland Security (after a long stint as an agency within the Treasury Department).

The good news is that most members of the Shin Bet are dedicated public servants who adhere to the law and strive to protect Jewish life and the land and State of Israel – and succeed overwhelmingly in doing so. And there is a strong but still mostly silent majority of Israelis – also known as voters – who see through the left-wing charade, the judicial hypocrisy, and the media duplicity. They are good people who eschew violence and instead endorse political advocacy, possess good Jewish values, and appreciate the State of Israel and the opportunity of our generation to change the failed political and strategic dynamics of the last thirty years.

They no longer trust these institutions and are no longer enthralled by the tales told by the tendentious holders of prestigious posts. They recognize lies as soon as they are spoken and want to reclaim their rights and privileges as loyal citizens.

The government’s inability to fire appointed officials is bizarre and most anti-democratic, for it renders the public servants answerable to no one. Oddly, both officials slated for dismissal but who refuse to leave (!), Gali Baharav-Miara and Ronen Bar, share the exact same gematria (Hebrew numerology); each of their names equal 508, which is identical to the Hebrew word, cheresh, deaf. They are deaf to true democracy, deaf to the will of the people, and deaf to the needs of the moment. In addition to other acts of incompetence, both are defiantly clinging to power on the wings of a corrupt system. They should both resign, and Bar, having resigned, should leave immediately, for the good of the country.

We are celebrating 77 years of independence and are on the verge of dealing harsh, perhaps even fatal blows, to at least some of the many enemies that surround us. Perhaps the internal struggle – the collapse of important governmental and societal institutions – should concern us even more at this point. Ironically, those potentially plotting a domestic coup are also those who are also afraid of victory, fearful of vanquishing our external enemies, and petrified (unreasonably) about the implications of a truly Jewish state.

They will do anything to stop it. We must do everything to counter them, peacefully, persuasively, but also firmly and insistently, so that the best days of the State of Israel, now 77 years young, are ahead of us, en route to complete redemption.

Photo credit: File:Israel flag.jpg by Tiia Monto, with CC BY-SA 3.0 license on Wikimedia